The Christmas Coat

by Katy Beem

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s literary accomplishments have established her as one of South Dakota’s grandest dames of letters. Since the 1972 publication of her first children’s book, Jimmy Yellow Hawk, she has authored over 30 titles, including the First Americans YA series, which retells the creation stories, cultural ways, and displacement of the Sioux, Cheyenne, Nez Perce and other tribes. In 2016’s Sioux Women: Traditionally Sacred, Driving Hawk Sneve recounts the central role her grandmothers and female elders took in sustaining Sioux values and traditions amidst the intractability of colonial expansion. This fall at the South Dakota Festival of Books, South Dakota Historical Society Press (SDHSP) released a paperback edition of Driving Hawk Sneve’s The Christmas Coat: Memories of My Sioux Childhood. Originally published in 2011 by Holiday House, a venerable children’s book press in New York, The Christmas Coat risked going out-of-print when Random House took over Holiday House’s sales and distribution. The close call is our gain – SDHSP’s reprint includes an intimate letter from Driving Hawk Sneve, now 86 years old, elaborating on childhood memories of Okreek and the Rosebud Reservation depicted in The Christmas Coat.

In the book, Driving Hawk Sneve gives a holiday-time snapshot of 1940s life as the tween daughter of Rosebud’s Episcopal priest, James Driving Hawk, and his wife Rose. Trudging the mucky reservation road to a two-room schoolhouse, Virginia longs for a winter coat long enough to shield bare, freezing wrists as “the frigid gale blew sideways across the South Dakota prairie.” Her younger brother Eddie, overshoe sucked off by sleet-snow “gumbo,” pines for cowboy boots. At school, amidst a U.S. map and a portrait of an Indian chief in headdress, Virginia daydreams of the arrival of “Theast boxes” – shipments of used clothing and shoes from New England congregations. Coveting a luxurious rabbit-fur coat unboxed from the “Theast,” Virginia is reminded by mother Rose that “others need it more than we do.” Virginia looks on dolorously as a haughty classmate drapes herself in the lavish wrap.

Images from "The Christmas Coat"

Illustrations by Ellen Beier, courtesy of South Dakota Humanities Council.

Driving Hawk Sneve has written extensively about the hand-in-hand nature of lives interlaced in faith traditions in works like That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota, 1850-1976 (1977) and Completing the Circle (1995). For The Christmas Coat, illustrator Ellen Beier based the book art on photos and descriptions provided by Driving Hawk Sneve, as well as her own research. Save for the color of Virginia’s eyes, (drawn as dark but actually hazel), real-life Virginia says she is very pleased with the results. In a luminous and homey Nativity pageant scene at the guildhall, prayer ties adorn the Christmas tree, boys don headdresses to portray the Wise Men, and baby doll Jesus is swathed in a newborn star quilt. “We were all Native American children of course, but we were about the third generation of Christians,” says Driving Hawk Sneve. “And so, for those first converts, the Bible stories meant a great deal. And they related it to their own experiences of the way things had been for them.” The star quilt, Driving Hawk Sneve says, based on the Bethlehem Star pattern brought by missionaries, reminded Sioux women of the traditional porcupine quillwork pattern of the Rising Star. “The birth of a child was very important, because it meant the continuation of the tribe. So, it’s a very special symbol to us of the way our lives have been over the years and how we’ve managed to adapt Native American traditions and cultures into Christianity.”

Also in the Nativity pageant scene, a portrait of a haloed Jesus hangs behind the Christmas tree. Driving Hawk Sneve’s son, Rev. Paul Sneve, serves Vermillion’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Yanktonai painter Oscar Howe’s striking Indian Christ has adorned the altar since 2007. Does Driving Hawk Sneve recall ever wondering after the religious iconography as a child? “It didn’t matter to me,” she says. “And, of course, it didn’t matter to my father or my parents. I know there are some Native Americans who have problems with Christianity, so they would notice it, ask, ‘Why are we having this white guy telling us what to do?’ kind of thing. And there has been in the past some conflict in that sort of way. But it didn’t make any difference to my family at all because, in fact, the church was very special in our lives.”

Driving Hawk Sneve remembers doing homework at the kitchen table alongside her father as he completed his seminary course. The curriculum, the Ashley house course, was designed specifically for Native American men by Reverend Edward Ashley. A British immigrant, Ashley was appointed in 1885 as “Rural Dean” to Indian Reservations falling within Dakota Territory by Bishop William Hobart Hare. Later named Archdeacon of Niobrara, Ashley supervised Episcopal churches on all the reservations from headquarters in Aberdeen, and, having learned “the Dakota Tongue,” translated The Niobrara Course for Deanery into the Niobrara Woonspe Ookuwe Kin. “We’d have to be very quiet, as our father studied and had to take tests,” recalls Driving Hawk Sneve. “It was difficult for a Native American man to get that kind of an education financially and such a long distance from home. The church provided them with an education and employment – two very difficult things in those days on the reservation, especially during Depression times. My father always was very grateful for that opportunity.”

Her father was mentored in Rosebud by Father Paul H. Barbour and was ordained at the Niobrara Convocation, an important summer event. “The Episcopal Church did this because it was very similar to the annual gatherings the Sioux had for the Sundance,” says Driving Hawk Sneve. “I can remember my grandparents were very pleased and so proud of my father, as we were too. We knew it was very special.”

In a light-hearted scene in The Christmas Coat, Driving Hawk’s father and mother waltz clandestinely to WNAX while her father pretends to wear a corset, compliments of “Theast box,” only to be caught by harrumphing Mrs. Red Buffalo. “She was always very disapproving of things, felt strongly how she thought the minister should act,” laughs Driving Hawk Sneve.

Her mother’s lesson to put others’ needs before her own remains. “Even today when I have a choice about something, I can still hear her in my mind, saying, ‘She needs it more than you do.’ I tried to instill this ideal in my own children and grandchildren. It’s a difficult value for a child to learn.”

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve will be on In the Moment with Lori Walsh Tuesday, Dec. 17, at 11am/10 MT.

Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve reads from The Christmas Coat at “A Christmas Collection: Songs & Stories to Celebrate the Season,” a fundraiser in support of OneHeart, a campus for people transitioning from addiction and homelessness, Dec. 20 and Dec. 21 at the Performing Arts Center in Rapid City. More information at PerformingArtsRC.org/events