FORT YATES - At Church of the Cross in Selfridge and St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Fort Yates, the Rev. John Floberg is creating lecterns out of red cedar eagles and Jerusalem crosses. He's collected more cedar for altars and offering plates. His mother's hardanger altar linen is stitched with the sacred colors of the four directions.

Floberg's latest find is a delicate silver incense holder that jingles like a wind chime, which will hold sage, cedar or sweetgrass for smudging during worship at St. Luke's.

Floberg's title is Canon for Multicultural and Central Area Ministry for the Episcopal Diocese of North Dakota. He directs training for lay and ordained ministers, works with the Sudanese in Moorhead and deals with fund-raising for the reservations. He and his wife, Sloane, an ordained Episcopal deacon, and their three boys moved to Bismarck in 2005 after living on Standing Rock for 16 years.

A whole generation on the reservation, from their early 20s to about age 40, has been lost to the church, Floberg says, adding that 90 to 95 percent of people on the reservation are unchurched.

The No. 1 spiritual issue, he says, is unforgiveness, the result of a complicated history of guilt and anger; the reservation's No. 1 social problem is unresolved grief, which drives addictions and other ills.

Standing Rock, Floberg said, is a 300-year ministry.

"That's how long it took for Norwegians to change from Vikings to Christians," he said.

The Episcopal Church, along with the Catholic Church and the Congregationalists, now the United Church of Christ, have the longest presence on the reservation, more than 100 years, Floberg said.

However, none puts in enough resources to provide clergy for individual congregations, so clergy struggle to cover their bases, he said.

The Episcopal Church has been focusing on developing native priests and deacons, with some success. Standing Rock now has nine ordained people on the reservation, but because ordained people are spread so thin, Floberg goes against conventional wisdom:

"Clergy say they want revival," he said. "I don't want revival. I'm not prepared for revival." What he means by that is that it's easy to pick people up and bus them to church, but to truly integrate them into "churched" people is a long and arduous process.

Over the years, Floberg has seen individual ministries come in for a year or two, and then they're gone. When ministries leave, everything they started is abandoned.

New ministries coming to Standing Rock will take at least three years to earn the people's trust, Floberg says.

"They're always expecting you to go away," he said.

In June, at age 66, Delores Walters of Fort Yates was ordained an Episcopal deacon.

Walters was born in Wakpala, S.D., and left the reservation at age 10. Walters and her husband raised six children and moved all over the U.S. for her husband's work until the need for medical care brought them back to Fort Yates in 1999.

When she returned to the reservation, she watched Deacon Virginia Luger visit people in the hospital: "I want to do that," she said she thought. "I wanted to show (Native people), we can do this, too."

Some say to her that Christianity is the white man's religion.

"Do you have your own religion?" she asks them in return, pointedly. "Do you practice it? There is good and bad everywhere."

Everyone looks to the Spirit, but people have different names for that person, like "tunkasila," the Great Spirit or Grandfather, she said.

She was warned when she and her husband moved back to the reservation. "There are gangs here," she was told, "it's a rough and tough place.

"I feel safer here than in Bismarck," Walters said. "Don't be afraid. All you have to do is talk to a person, and they will talk back."

People ask her why she came back.

"This is my home. These are my roots," Walters said. "I'm here to stay and I'm not moving. When they move me to (bury me at) St. Elizabeth's in Wakpala, that will be my last move."

Cedric Goodhouse's father, the Rev. Innocent Goodhouse, was an Episcopal priest. Goodhouse, of Fort Yates, was brought up in the Episcopal Church and remembers making rounds with his father, praying with people, helping out in the church in Cannon Ball.

Goodhouse is no longer active in the Christian church. About 1977, he said, he began to practice his Native traditions.

Goodhouse remembers his father's reaction to his son's "newfound Indianness:" "I've always been an Indian first," Innocent Goodhouse told him.

In 1980, only after Goodhouse stopped drinking, his father connected him to the people who would teach him about Native spiritual traditions. He spent hours with those elders, listening and learning.

And it was his mother and father that gave him the sacred pipe, he said. Though they have both died, "I still listen to them, feel their spirits."

Learning Native traditions is a holistic process, a mixture of spiritual and physical. "It was a lot of work," he said. "I cut a lot of wood, hauled a lot of rocks, hauled a lot of water."

To create the sweat lodge, the four-day sundance fire, almost every ceremony, requires a lot of physical work, he said. And every season has something you need to do. This time of year is wopila season, to give thanks, he said.

Though Goodhouse no longer practices Christianity, he did take something from it - not being scared to pray.

"There's one God and many ways of knowing God," he said.

Though Goodhouse doesn't put himself out front, many people have come to him and his wife, Sissy, to learn traditional ways.

"They maybe bring something, coffee, tobacco. After about half an hour, the questions start coming out," he said.

Goodhouse sees Christian missionaries come to the reservation, "faith-strong, to the lion's den, so to speak," he said. "But when they leave, they don't look back, don't care what kind of tracks they're leaving, or if they're leaving any. They're temporary."

Revivals, tent meetings, come in waves.

People come in their vans and buses to work with people, but when the day ends, they go into the gym, close the doors, sometimes lock them, Goodhouse said, lock themselves away from the people, and have their worship time.

As a certified addiction counselor, Goodhouse believes the addicted need to replace their addictions with something just as strong: Spirituality has that kind of strength, he said. Like his father, Goodhouse will pray at people's houses at all hours, at any time when they need him.

"I don't see that type of commitment from churches," he said. They have their services at the appointed time, then go home. His father would always be there, stay late to listen.

"Just about anybody can do ministry," Goodhouse said. "If I had a van, I could pick up everybody. I'd have a houseful every day."

But where, he said, is the help to get people into treatment, into counseling? With 80 percent unemployment, where is the job training?

On the reservation, ministry needs to go beyond the pulpit. People need to come out of their comfort zone, he said.

"If you're going into the lion's den, don't stand outside the cage," Goodhouse said. "Jump in."

(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@bismarcktribune.com.)