Ben Black Bear, deacon at St. Charles Church in St. Francis, S.Dak., taught at the St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Reservation and was vice-president of the Rosebud (Sicangu) Sioux Tribe and director of the board of Tribal Land Enterprises, of which he is now the chair. Ben and his wife, Arlene, are parents of nine children, ranging in age from 8 to 27.

One day I was sitting there at my desk, trying to translate a passage from the Gospel according to Luke. It was in Chapter 4: Jesus went out into the wilderness and was tempted by the devil. The passage was simple enough to understand as I was reading it. But translating it into Lakota, my first language, one of the three languages spoken by members of the Sioux Nation, was proving to be quite a challenge.

I was preparing a sermon for the 10 a.m. mass at St. Charles Church in St. Francis, S.Dak., where I am a deacon. The parish includes about 400 families, well over 1,000 people, most of whom are members of the Lakota Nation living on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, where I grew up.

Trying to decide whether to translate the passage literally, word for word, or to paraphrase it, trying to make the deeper sense come out in Lakota, was the challenge I faced. If I translated it word for word, in some places it would end up redundant. For example, doing "homage" to the Lord and "adoring" him may both be rendered in Lakota by the same word: cekiye.

Another problem I came up against was trying to translate the word "kingdom," a concept that just does not exist in Lakota. The closest I could come required my using an archaic Lakota word, tokicunze, which carries in it the concept of "agreement" or "understanding" or "promise."

Still another problem is the fact that in Lakota, events are looked upon as either having already happened or not happened, real or unreal; there is no concept of tense or time. So when the devil gives up tempting Jesus and decides to await another opportunity (4:13), I had to use two words to translate "opportunity": watohanl, "at a place when," and kta, which translates as "will" but indicates something that has not yet happened, to express the concept of future time.

There was a time when I thought translating Bible passages would not prove to be such a difficult task. I know better now. Translating is difficult work, even though I gained some skills over the years, thanks to the many priests and brothers on the Rosebud Reservation, most of whom were Jesuits. Fr. Bernard Fagan, SJ, is now associate pastor at St. Isaac Jogues in Rapid City, S.Dak., but some years ago he was teaching at the Jesuit Mission School in St. Francis, and his task was to teach me Latin. At that time, students had their choice of studying either Latin or Spanish starting in seventh grade. When I reached seventh grade, however, there were no Spanish teachers on the faculty, so I started learning Latin.

I must have been very interested in learning any new language, because I took to Latin very fast and studied it for four years. It was a good experience. Lakota is my first language; I remember being able to understand a lot of English when I started first grade, but I could not speak it. Studying Latin not only introduced me to the complexities and challenges of translating but also helped me learn to speak English.

It was this same Fr. Fagan who later introduced me to the world of preaching in my own language, and he did so gradually. One of his many activities was reading and preaching on Sunday Gospel passages in English on KINI, the local radio station. During his weekly program, entitled "Sioux for Christ," I and other Lakota, including my uncle Lloyd One Star and Episcopal lay minister Norman Knox, read the Gospel passages in Lakota.

After doing the readings for some time and also after being ordained a deacon, I started doing both the preaching and reading of the Sunday Gospels in Lakota. For that I relied on the work that Jesuit Fr. Eugene Buechel had done in the 1940s; he had translated into Lakota a good number of the Sunday readings, but he had not done them all. I had to translate those readings Fr. Buechel had not done, and these were my first attempts at such work. I was pretty much on my own.

But I felt justified in using Lakota in my evangelization efforts; just about half of us who speak Lakota consider it to be their primary language and speak it most of the time, and about 80 percent understand it.

"You shall do homage to the Lord your God; him alone shall you adore." Luke 4:8 in the New American Bible.

"Wakantanka Itakan nitawa ecela ohoyala ktelo na hecela latan kte lo." eye. Luke 4:8 translated into Lakota by Ben Black Bear.

The Bible has already been translated into Dakota, the "D" dialect of the Sioux language, spoken by members of the Sisseton, Wahpeton, Mdewakanton, and Wahpekute tribes in eastern South Dakota and Minnesota, and this dialect is very similar to the Nakota, or "N" dialect of Sioux, spoken by members of the Yankton and the Yanktonais tribes, among others. But not enough has been done in Lakota, the language spoken by members of the Lakota Nation, made up of members of the Sicangu, the Oglala, Sans Arc, Two Kettle, Minneconjou, Blackfeet, and Hunkpapa, who live on reservations in western South Dakota.

The three languages, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, share many similarities; speakers of one can generally understand speakers of the others, but there are still enough major differences that it is a struggle for a Lakota speaker to read Dakota or Nakota. This was the impetus behind the work that I have done in translating the Gospels.

After my stint on the radio, I worked with Fr. Paul Manhart, SJ, an ethnographer who had published a Lakota/English dictionary, based on earlier work Fr. Buechel had already done in that area. Fr. Manhart and I spent some time working on a translation of the whole of Luke's Gospel. That experience gave me a great deal of training in how to translate material from one language into another. It also taught me a lot about Luke's Gospel.

I have also taught Lakota at the Sinte Gleska (Spotted Tail) University on the Rosebud Reservation, and among my students were some Jesuits.This was only fair; I had been trained by Jesuits through a deacon training program they had established for the Diocese of Rapid City, and helping them learn Lakota language was a fitting way for me to return the favor.

Right now, most of the pastoral ministry I do as deacon at St. Francis is with Lakota-speaking people, and so my work of translating Bible passages continues. It will probably always have its complexities and challenges, but it will also always give me the joy of knowing that listeners will be "filled with the Holy Spirit."