Paul Ignatius Manhart, S.J. (2 January 1927 – 1 May 2008) was ordained a Jesuit priest of the Roman Catholic Church and served in various capacities on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rapid City. His entire priestly career was dedicated to ministering among the Oglala Lakota Native Americans. Fr. Manhart’s scholarly work in linguistics helped preserve and disseminate the living, native North American Lakota language. He was a firsthand witness and participant in the Wounded Knee incident of 1973.
Early life
Manhart was born in Omaha, Nebraska, 2 January 1927, the third of twelve children of Paul Ignatius Manhart Sr. and Catherine Eleanor Steinauer Manhart. He attended Creighton Preparatory High School from 1941 to 1945. On his 18th birthday 2 January 1945 he entered the Society of Jesus (SJ) at St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Missouri. He earned an A.B. (artium baccalaureus) in English and Latin from St. Louis University. In 1952 while still in Jesuit formation, Manhart was assigned to teach at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. In 1955 he moved to St. Mary's College (Kansas) where he was ordained a Catholic priest 18 June 1958.
Published works
Beginning in 1902, shortly after arriving in the United States from Germany, Fr. Eugene Buechel, S.J. taught Lakota boys English at the St. Francis Mission school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. By the time of his death in 1954, Buechel had collected and translated over 28,000 Lakota words, intended to be aggregated into a dictionary. He preserved hundreds of oral histories, cultural objects, and interpretive information that is displayed at the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum at St. Francis Mission in St. Francis, South Dakota.
Starting in 1955, at the request of Fr. John F. Bryde, principal of Holy Rosary Mission school (now Red Cloud Indian School), Fr. Manhart continued Buechal’s work by compiling, preparing and publishing in 1970 the first edition of Buechel’s Lakota Dictionary. Fr. George P. Casey composed a brief version of Buechel’s A Grammar of Lakota so that it could be included in the dictionary. Five thousand case-bound books were printed, and in 1980, a second print-run of two thousand copies were produced. Buechel's collected Lakota terms were accompanied by their English definitions, pronunciations, parts of speech, examples of usage, and their sources.<ref>Buechel, Fr. Eugene and Manhart S.J., Fr. Paul, Lakota-English Dictionary, 1st ed.: Pine Ridge, South Dakota: Holy Rosary Mission, 1970; 2nd ed.: University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, Nebraska, 2002. p vii ()</ref>
Around the time of the Wounded Knee incident of 1973, Fr. Manhart had borrowed Buechel's original manuscript of Lakota Tales and Texts from the Holy Rosary Mission archives with the intention to publish. As a result of the violent occupation, he and two local men, Benjamin White Butterfly and Ruben Mesteth found their office in shambles and the library shelves stripped of all its books—except the Tales and Texts manuscript. The original Lakota manuscript was rescued from destruction and in June 1978, Fr. Manhart published Lakota Tales and Texts. It wasn't until 1993 that Fr. John Paul, superior of Holy Rosary Mission, asked Fr. Manhart (by then a recognized Lakota linguist) to take a sabbatical to translate and publish Buechel’s original manuscripts. After five additional years of effort, Fr. Manhart in 1998 commissioned Tipi Press to publish the two-volume set Lakota Tales and Texts in translation.
Thirty-two years after its original publication, Fr. Manhart in 2002 completed his revision of the Lakota Dictionary to include English translations of the term usages, a second edition published by the University of Nebraska Press. Containing over thirty thousand entries, the Lakota Dictionary remains the most comprehensive dictionary of the Lakota language to date, serving everyone interested in preserving, speaking, and writing the language. Included the 2002 publication, other Lakota speakers contributed to the expanded edition’s collection of Lakota words; credited in the “Word Sources” section.