Sage Sweetwater quills a liturgical scene as witness to a compassionate God and reference that binds the old-world with the new land and the Mennonites future.

WET MOUNTAINS, CO.-Colorado Firebrand Lesbian Novelist, Poet and Storyteller Sage Sweetwater binds the old-world in her lesbian Western novel FROM THE CONVENT TO THE RAWHIDE: THE SAGA OF SADIE CADE, comes a scene as witness to a compassionate God.


"Whether it is traveling to distant villages, knocking on doors, presenting the tenets of the Mormon faith, or riding in a coach pulled by a team of horses carrying a casket on the way to Ten Thousand Village for a Mennonite service and burial, the spiritual journey is routed in search of the perfect hide." (abridged From the Convent to the Rawhide: The Saga of Sadie Cade and Vi Montana - Copyright 2006 Sage Sweetwater)

Sage Sweetwater is familiar with the Mennonite Church and its followers in her county; free land, fruit trees, good soil; Mennonites prefer to remain separate from prairie society. They have a strong commitment to group society.

When writing her lesbian Western pulp fiction dime-store novel, Sage had the movie reels rolling to convince filmmakers that spiritual scenes like this Mennonite service and burial designated a place for its dead, knowledge that they would rest for eternity, their bones becoming a part of the land. Mennonite burial grounds evolved from places of exile, which Sage Sweetwater knows quite well.

Mennonites have set out to recover their old-world place names.  They have a penchant for transplanting village names from their mother colonies.  Sage Sweetwater gives her Mennonite characters the name of Papa Moses, Zea, (pronounced Zay-ah) and Jediah Piltershmitz.

The pioneer generation of Mennonites sense of rootlessness and detachment from place was highlighted by death, for although the soul went heavenward the body remained in this earth.

Etching a birthplace on a Mennonite tombstone could express alienation from the present and attachment to a faraway past.

On some of these antiquated tombstones in Mennonite graveyards, the names appear in an unfamiliar script or alphabet. Some of the words have been scratched with a nail and barely legible.  The handpainted letters and ungrammatical texts are a sign of limited literacy.

The Mennonite survivors usually chose the wording. Pioneer tombstones reflect how the second generation respects old-world Mennonite origins.

Sage was told only a minority of Mennonite immigrants had their place of birth recorded on their tombstones. Their children were born and raised on the prairies. They were buried where they had always lived.  Even today, Mennonites feel even less need to reaffirm their connection to place in this way.

In old-world Mennonite tradition, the relationship between the living and the dead mattered greatly. Generations of Mennonites on Christmas Eve and Ukrainian settlers in western Canada brought into the house a sheaf of wheat, saved from the harvest, whose kernels were believed to contain the souls of the departed; on New Year’s Eve they burned the sheaf in the fields to return the souls to the soil. From this perspective, if by chance the immigrants had brought the first handful of seed grain with them  They enjoyed drinking bottles of beer and braided bread and decorated Easter eggs set out on the tombstone.

The theological rationale behind provody was, and is, the saving of souls from purgatory. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation unleashed by Martin Luther rejected the notion of purgatory or damnation altogether in favour of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Its immigrant heirs in western Canada – among them the Mennonites – dwelt on the salvation of the living. Cemeteries might be places that surviving family members visited privately, but they were not transformed into places of communal ritual and symbolism focused on the dead. As such, they did not serve as a constant reaffirmation and reminder of the immigrant generation and its legacy or as a claim on the land and its history. For its part, despite an agricultural way of life, the thinking of Old Colony Mennonites – arguing that it was enough that God knew where the dead lay – actively worked against a three-way relationship binding the living and the dead through the cemetery to foster a sense of belonging and place.

If Mennonites put anything on their tombstones besides the facts of the deceased, it is apt to be a Bible verse, expressing a religious rather than a regional or secular ethnic identity; sometimes there will be a modest flower or a few stalks of wheat.

Prairie tombstones are rife with wheat stalks, sheaves, stooks, and even swathes awaiting the combine; wheat motifs grace the signage and logos of towns, villages, and municipalities across the region; and wheat forms part of the design of anniversary monuments and popular memorabilia. A commemorative spoon for the prairie Mennonite centennial, for example, featured 'several heads of grain across a Bible representing the agricultural background of the people and their reliance on the biblical record as their guide in life.

One option is to cover the back or front of the tombstone with romanticized and nostalgic images, crying natural abundance and prosperity, that appeal to the emotions through instantly recognizable icons: a log cabin in the bush beside a stream, a buck deer flashing its antlers at the forest's edge, a fish leaping from the lake, fat cattle grazing in the pasture, horse-drawn rack piled with hay, sheaves of wheat or combine in the field and grain elevator in the background. Ironically, such generic scenes are ultimately depersonalizing. Far more unique and assertive are tombstones that feature the deceased's actual farmstead – either engraved onto the stone or laser copied from a real photograph. Some of these pictures are clearly rooted in the past and depict the homestead that was. Others are present oriented and capture the operation when the person died, including details like the television antenna on the house, the van in the driveway, and the dogs barking at the gate. Aerial views most gratifyingly include not only the farm buildings but also the sweep of land owned around them. The type of place and belonging that these images claim is not just rooted in the region and its experience, but makes a very personal claim on a specific piece of land that the deceased and his or her ancestors have now cultivated for a hundred years. Ukrainian personalized tombstones must also be viewed within the context of contemporary events encouraging a sense of self-worth and entitlement as pioneers.



Sage Sweetwater, practicing the Wiccan faith, has truly a sense of self-worth and gives her entitlement as a lesbian pioneer in contemporary society.

Sage Sweetwater derives her Mennonite knowledge from Mennonites in her county and Mennonite studies at the University of Winnipeg.  There is a lesbian and gay Mennonite population.

Copyright 1/25/2008 Ms. Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist