Eugene Buechel

Background

Eugene Buechel was born in 1874 in Fulda, Germany.

Education

He attended St. Louis University in Missouri from 1904 to 1906, when he was ordained to the Jesuit priesthood.

Career

Buechel was a Jesuit teacher with the St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota from 1900 to 1904, where he made his first photographs with an 8 x 10 view camera. He then became a superior with the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota from 1906 to 1916, transferring back to the St. Francis Mission from 1916 to 1923. From 1924 on, he served as a pastor, traveling to isolated Indian communities on the Rosebud Reservation.

A non-Indian authority on the Lakota language, he created 30,000 vocabulary cards that were the first written documents of that language. Buechel was a naturalist who preserved specimens of the flora of the upper plains of South Dakota, making identifications in English, Latin, and Lakota. He was a collector of Sioux artifacts, which he housed in the museum he founded in 1947- what was to become the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum.

Achievements

• PUBLICATIONS Book: Crying for a Vision, Jim Alinder & Don Doll, eds., 1976. Language Books: A Dictionary of the Teton Dakota Sioux Language, Rev. Paul Manhart, 1970; Grammar of Lakota, 1939; A Bible History in the Language of the Teton Sioux, 1923. Catalog: Eugene Buechel, S.J.: Rosebud and Pine Ridge Photographs, 1922-42, David Wing et al, eds., 1974 (Buechel Memorial Lakota Mus.: St. Francis, S.D.).
  
  

Religion

He entered the Society of Jesus in Blyenback, Netherlands, where he remained until 1900.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In a catalog on the artist-priest, David Wing writes that Buechel's "maturity and his distance from the technology of photography may explain the directness of his images. They are not in any aspect about the photographic process, but about his subjects and his relationship to them."

Interests

• Buechel was possibly influenced by August Sander and/or John A. Anderson.