In Kansas, few folks have ever heard of the Rev. Emmett Hoffmann, a retired Capuchin Franciscan friar.

But on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeast Montana, he is a living legend.

“He is revered by our tribal elders,” said Haskell Indian Nations University Registrar Manny King, who is Northern Cheyenne and Navajo.

Hoffmann, 78, will be at Haskell this week for a pair of appearances:

• 3 p.m. Monday at the university’s Cultural Center and Museum.
• 3:15 p.m. Tuesday at the Haskell Library.

Both events are open to the public and likely to include Hoffmann signing copies of his biography, “Renegade Priest of the Northern Cheyenne,” by Renee Sanson Flood.

Hoffmann grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. He joined the Capuchin Order of the Catholic Church in 1950 and was soon sent to Nicaragua. In 1954, he was “posted” to the St. Labre Mission on the remote Northern Cheyenne reservation.

“The poverty was extreme; it was worse than anything I’d seen in Nicaragua,” Hoffmann said during a recent telephone interview.

“People were living in tents and one-room shacks covered with tar paper and cardboard,” he said. “In Nicaragua, at least it was fairly warm all year. But in Montana the temperatures are extreme: 40 below zero in the winter, 100 degrees in the summer.”

In retrospect, he said, “I was aghast at the conditions I found.”

Hoffmann expected his stay at St. Labre Mission to last about a year. He’s still there.

“I got involved,” he said. “I listened to the chiefs and to the needs and to the dreams of the people. And then we started doing what we could to make those dreams a reality.”

His aggressiveness often annoyed the establishment. A year after he arrived in Montana, Hoffmann wrote to Leo Dohn Sr., a wealthy New York businessman whose company manufactured costume jewelry and plastic religious items. Dohn later shared his mailing list of Catholic clients.

Hoffmann used the list to launch a multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign that grew to include the purchase of an airplane, construction of a landing strip, a 100-acre campus complex that includes K-12 classrooms, an auditorium, gym and church.

At Hoffmann’s urging, Dohn built a manufacturing plant on the reservation in the early 1960s. It closed in 1976.

Though he retired in 1993, Hoffmann led efforts to build an assisted living facility on the reservation. The $6 million Heritage Center opened in 2002.

“What happened was back in the 1970s, I gathered a number of the younger Cheyennes, got them tape recorders and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to save your elders’ stories,'” Hoffmann said. “So they went out and made all these tapes, but I never had time to listen to them.”

Thirty years later, the tapes were translated from Cheyenne to English.

“I felt like the old chiefs were speaking to me from their graves,” Hoffmann said. “Many of them (on tape) talked about how much they dreaded being sent away to (off-reservation) nursing homes and being sent back as a bag of bones. Many of them died miserable deaths.”

After 50 years fighting poverty on the reservation, Hoffmann has an ample supply of opinions.

He’s no fan of casinos. He mourns the cultural destruction brought by television.

He backed limiting the reservation’s boarding school to students whose families lived more than 40 miles away because too many parents were looking for ways to get out of their parental responsibilities.

Hoffmann said he wasn’t sure which topics he would raise while at Haskell.

“I’ll sort of play it by ear,” he said.