Eugene Buechel came to St. Francis Mission from Germany in 1902 as a young Jesuit and spent the remaining fifty-two years of his life on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations as priest, teacher and superior. He came to convert the Lakota and change how they lived, and the mission ran a boarding school to that end. He also listened. Working with Ivan Stars and other Lakota catechists, he wrote down stories, histories and words, until his slips of paper for a Lakota dictionary numbered more than twenty-four thousand.
He collected plants around Rosebud with their Lakota names and uses, and in 1922, at forty-eight, he took up a camera and photographed reservation life for twenty years, a record of people in a hard transition that the Museum of Modern Art exhibited in 1975. Families gave him beadwork, clothing, tools and weapons, some of them older than the reservation itself. In 1947, for his fiftieth year as a Jesuit, a brother of the order, Joseph Schwart, built a small museum to hold the collection.
Buechel died in 1954 with his dictionary unfinished; it was published in 1970 and again in 2002, and some of the later editing has been disputed. The museum at St. Francis holds about two thousand objects and tens of thousands of photographs, and it is one of the few collections of its kind still kept among the people whose families made and used what is in it.
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