This sort of notice appeared ritually in the newspapers of the settler society on the northern plains sometime in April — I quote from the Griggs County Courier Democrat, 29 April 1909:
The pasque flower or prairie crocus, the first flower of spring, is showing its head above ground.
Now from the Hope Pioneer, 27 April 1939:
The first flower to appear in spring on the prairie is the pasque-flower, commonly known as crocus. . . . The general blooming of the pasque-flower begins about the middle of April.
Given the season of appearance, the settlers called this native anemone the pasque, associating it with the Passion and Easter.
In 1916 a new PhD in botany arrived in Bismarck to take up duties as curator of the state historical museum. He took an interest in ethnobotany, the native use of native plants, doing fieldwork among the Arikara, and also, it appears to me, receiving Dakota lore by way of Rev. Aaron McGaffey Beede at Standing Rock. In 1921 Gilmore published his slender book, Prairie Smoke, a collection of lore and plantways, in which he taps indigenous tradition as to prairie crocus — hoksni cekpa in Dakota, which may have meant twin flower, because the lavender blossoms came in clusters, or perhaps navel flower, because the buds looked like a baby’s navel.
All such ethnological work wants reading with a couple of grains of salt and a tolerance for patronizing rhetoric, as Gilmore recounts the “pretty little stories” given by Dakota people around hoksni cekpa. He relates that when a Dakota elder found the first flower of spring, he would sit with it, fill his pipe, raise it in the four directions, smoke, and then reflect on the course of his life. After that, he would carry a blossom to his grandchildren, singing a ritual song, in which the first flower exhorts others to emerge without fear. I believe Beede brought the translation of this song to Gilmore.
Down at Yankton, a Benedictine, the Rev. Ignatius Forster, chaplin to the Sacred Heart Convent, read Gilmore’s narrative and was taken with it. He thereupon composed his own rif on the Dakota song, which he intended, it appears to me, for use among the sisters. His ballad retains the Dakota scenario of the emergence of the pasque and its encouragement to other flowers — but concludes with what seems a gratuitous stanza exhorting everyone to “work unto the grave.”
It’s dissonant, and disrespectful of Dakota tradition, but I suppose you have to consider it in the Benedictine context of a life of service. When I sing Forster’s spring anthem, I leave off the work stanzas and let the more poetic parts stand. Also, since there is appropriation all over this episode of literary history, I have appropriated a sacred tune to which to sing it. So, here are a couple of stanzas of hope, for the season.
Lovely Pasque flower, Herald of Spring,
Proclaiming the hour, Gladly to sing.
Gently thou greetest the winter son;
Boldly thou peepest if snow is gone.
Callest thy playmates who still do sleep:
Arise, lo, spring waits! No longer weep.
Slowly they waken, Lowly they sigh,
Wasn’t that beckon Pasque Flower’s cry?
