The American Plutarch

(Note, This is the Inaugural Fulbright Lecture given at Brock University Oct. 2010)

Almost two thousand years ago, the resurrected Christ appointed His disciples to become Apostles, that is, messengers. His commission to them—the Great Commission—as recorded in the Gospel of Mark, reads:

“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

Before Biblical exegesis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars and theologians took these words literally, at face value, which presented something of a problem. The world was not entirely known to the Greco-Roman culture in which Jesus and His disciples lived—the Americas, for example, were not known—so how was the Gospel to be taken to places unknown? The Gospel of Matthew provides perhaps a more understandable version of the Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” But Mark says, to preach the Gospel to the whole creation. The Greek word, “ktisis,” literally means “creature” or “creation.” How does one preach to all creatures, to the whole creation?

Nevertheless, Christ’s messengers over the centuries have done their best to bring the Gospel to all creatures, to the whole creation. To bring the Gospel to the human part of the Creation took centuries, especially since the messengers did not know of the Americas until the end of the fifteenth century. To bring the message to the other part of Creation, Nature, was of course a bit of a problem. But the messengers assumed that by the Creation Christ meant that the messengers must be students of natural history, that is, scientists as well as theologians. The Great Commission therefore required messengers who were willing to travel, explore, discover, and engage in scientific study. Indeed, such was the commitment of the messengers to the Great Commission that their activities on its behalf has had a tremendously powerful influence on exploration, science, discovery, and settlement from the fifteenth century to the present.

I have been honored by the Fulbright Commission and Brock University in being appointed the Visiting Fulbright Research Chair in Transnational Studies at Brock University. Transnational studies involves cultural exchange, that is, the exchange of goods and ideas, peacefully or through violence, between and among two or more peoples. My Fulbright research project, which involves examining missionaries to the indigenous peoples of North America, is a study in the cultural exchange of ideas between two cultures. In this case cultural exchange involved one people, represented by the messengers, who were more aggressive than the other, indigenous people because the former believed that they knew the truth, the reality that explains all the creation over time, a truth that, they assumed, the other, indigenous people, did not know—but the Great Commission required that these people be taught.

Until just recently I was not aware how closely my life was connected to the cultural exchange brought about by the Great Commission. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a city which is also part of the nation of the Creek people. I teach at a college in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Bacone College, which was founded on land provided by the Muskogee Creeks in the 1880s. Messengers came to Oklahoma long ago to bring the Great Commission to the dozens of indigenous tribes that lived in Oklahoma. One of those messengers was Almon Bacone. who was the founder, first faculty member, and first president of Bacone College, which was established in 1880 in Indian Territory. Bacone was a native of New York, a graduate of Rochester Theological Seminary and the University of Rochester, and a teacher of note in Ohio, New Jersey, and New York before moving to Indian Territory in 1876. Bacone was Principal of the Cherokee Male Seminary, Tahlequah, Indian Territory, from 1876 to 1880. Subsequently Bacone was founder and president of Indian University, Indian Territory, until his death in 1896. Indian University, renamed Bacone College in 1910, began on February 9, 1880 in a tiny room of the Cherokee Mission with a faculty of one and a student body composed of three Indian boys. Before the first year had ended the faculty was doubled, and the student body numbered 56. The primary object of Indian University was to prepare native preachers and teachers to become messengers to bring the Great Commission to the Indian tribes of America.

Today, 130 years later, Almon Bacone continues to have a very real presence on the campus. He is buried in a small cemetery plot on the northern end of campus. The memorial erected by his wife, children, students, and friends is inscribed with Almon Bacone’s own words: “A Christian school planted in the midst of a people, becomes one of the most powerful agencies in the work of civilization.”

Bacone clearly meant that people can hardly be ready to receive the message of the Great Commission if they do not have the accoutrements of civilization possessed by the messengers themselves. Bringing the Great Commission to others was no easy challenge for the messengers because it consists of a hard teaching indeed, of a transcendent and eternal God who becomes incarnate, human, who takes a body and becomes imprisoned like the rest of us in time, who lives with men not as a ruler and king but, strangely, as a humble person, an itinerant teacher whose teachings arouse such suspicion that he is arrested and executed in the most heinous manner, the slow torturous death of crucifixion. The teacher taught peace not violence, acceptance not resistance, humility not arrogance, all of which teachings most humans find difficult to accept.

How, then, is the Great Commission to be carried out? People of a given culture obviously assume that their customs, institutions, and beliefs are the correct way, the Truth. And if one knows the Truth, is it not incumbent upon oneself, is it not natural and compulsive, to tell others? To impart the Truth to willing people wishing to know and learn requires that the messenger be a teacher, translator, and builder. How often, however, are people of cultures with their own values and traditions, their own Truth, willing to give it up for another truth? Usually the culture spreading its form of truth to another culture is the actor, the mover. And when an active mover confronts resistance, what happens? How important is it to a person to spread his or her truth to another person? If I know and you do not, do I have an obligation—to myself, to you, to a wider culture, to God—to inform you of the truth? And if you resist, how far do I go to force my truth upon you? The key word here is force. How much of the impartation of knowledge, of truth, requires force? When does persuasion become coercion? If another learns the truth, they will be better off: know more, live better, be happier. I am doing them a good turn to teach them the truth.

If such philosophical concerns about the nature of truth and how to impart it to others were not sufficiently daunting to the messenger, there were the more practical concerns of who, exactly, made up the Creation. On the human side, the indigenous people of America were hunters and warriors, sometimes of fiercesome appearance and violent, even deadly, behavior. How, for example, would a messenger bring the message to a Kickapoo warrior? The Kickapoo, originally from the regions of the Great Lakes, had a reputation for their prowess at war. And here, let me digress a bit to tell you a story.

In the early 1830s, physician, scientist, and neophyte missionary Jean Louis Berlandier watched as his friend, an unnamed Kickapoo Indian, lay dying. The two men had met in 1828 when Berlandier, a Frenchman who had joined a Mexican expedition to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, had become ill around the location of the current city of Houston, Texas, and had been forced to break off a journey of investigation of east Texas to return with other sick and disillusioned men, most of them soldiers, toward the town of San Antonio. The Mexicans and the Frenchman Berlandier were not quite sure how they would fare, being sick men trying to live off of the humid Texas landscape, on a journey that would take several weeks. All of a sudden two Kickapoo warriors showed up and offered to accompany them. The Kickapoos were terrible to behold, but their demeanor belied their appearance. They explained to Berlandier in Spanish that one of the warriors was in pursuit of his wife, who had run off with another warrior. They wanted to retrieve the horse she had stolen. On the journey to San Antonio, the Kickapoo provided the men with venison, so helped them to survive. Berlandier, a scientist and student of human and natural history, became interested in these men, and befriended them. Indeed, they were friends for several years, and one of the Kickapoo warriors lived with the Frenchman at his home at Matamoros, Mexico. But various places throughout the world in the early 1830s were visited with cholera, and the Kickapoo succumbed to the disease. The Kickapoo, who had been a great warrior and hunter, who had given off a fierce appearance in his dress, paint, and bearing, who had once, to Berlandier’s consternation, exacted terrible revenge against his estranged wife and her lover, lay dying at the home of his friend Berlandier. By this time the Kickapoo had grown tired of his indigenous religion, which had allowed him to justify murderous vengeance; he had given up those ways where “once offended” by treachery, he believed his soul “to be defiled” and sought “at any cost and at every moment to destroy those who” had injured him. Guilt engendered by a growing knowledge of Christianity and the behavior and teachings of his friend Berlandier convinced the Kickapoo to repent and to embrace the message of the Gospel. How long he believed in Christ’s redemption before he accepted baptism is not recorded; perhaps he had been coming to the belief for some time; perhaps it occurred when he realized the nearness of death. The Kickapoo had been under Berlandier’s care, when Berlandier encouraged his mortally ill friend to be baptized. The Kickapoo consented, and Berlandier sent for a Catholic priest, then watched as his friend “rejoiced at the sight of the priest” who was to administer the sacrament. Berlandier, who was not a proselyte of Christianity, recorded what he observed: a former “savage” of the plains had willingly accepted the sacrament that would cleanse his sins and mark him as Christ’s own.

What happened?  Some missionaries and other commentators before, during, and after this time tended to explain Indian embracement of Christianity as superficial, even inspired by mercenary reasons. The Kickapoo, however, believed that he had nothing to gain from baptism but his eternal soul. Berlandier observed his dying friend to “invoke the Most High” when the priest sprinkled the holy water upon his head. The invocation was “in his own way,” in his own language and according to the beliefs of his youth, “indicating the sky as His place of residence.” The astonishment and change in belief that the Kickapoo experienced was an act of accommodating new beliefs with the old; the new supplants, but does not eradicate, the teachings of youth and experiences of a lifetime. Like many Christians before and since, the Kickapoo embraced Christianity while not completely abandoning his previous indigenous beliefs.

My interests as a scholar has involved research into explorers and scientists of early America. Yet several years ago, when researching Berlandier in the course of writing a book about him, I came upon this account of his Kickapoo friend’s conversion. I began to ask questions that would lead me to my current Fulbright research. Living in Oklahoma and teaching at a small liberal arts college that is still dedicated to educating the American Indian, I learned of little used documents held in a small corner of the Bacone library called the Indian Room. There I discovered manuscript documents detailing the work of Christian messengers to the Indians of Oklahoma. In particular, I found and studied the manuscript letters and writings of Baptist messengers, such as Robert Hamilton, who ministered to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Kiowa tribes of Indian Territory, current Oklahoma, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

These papers provide accounts of conversion experiences of American Indians to Christianity. But perhaps I should not use the word, conversion. Recent scholarship on the Christian experience of indigenous peoples has questioned whether or not conversion is an accurate, sufficiently descriptive concept of what happens when a person puts aside traditional to embrace new beliefs. Some scholars argue that conversion implies an ethnocentric view that describes the Christian experience of the Western Tradition—but does it describe the experience of indigenous peoples as well? Scholarly emphasis has been upon the synchronistic experience of indigenous religious change. Indeed, religious change from one belief to another is neither static nor isolated, but partakes of experiences over time and in particular places.

At the same time, these manuscripts in the Bacone Room illustrate the problems Indians of particularly western Oklahoma had in adapting to white culture and federal land allotment laws. Baptist missionaries who kept extensive diaries of their interaction with Indians, sent and received correspondence with individual Indians, and submitted detailed reports to missionary organizations, consistently recorded the chagrin, anger, and depression of indigenous individuals who were trying to conform to the beliefs, institutions, and laws of white civilization while being tugged in the different direction of their tribal past. Baptist missionaries reported on the poverty, malnutrition, sicknesses, and passivity brought about by the new way of life of the Indians that afflicted the physical and emotional well-being of the tribes. Were such social and economic problems the stimuli for seeking and questioning that resulted in religious change to Christianity? How exactly did an indigenous person come to renounce traditional tribal beliefs to embrace the religion of white messengers? What individual experiences of loss and suffering, or joy and understanding, resulted in the desire for baptism? How did conversion impact the individual’s sense of self?

One particularly industrious missionary, Robert Hamilton, was tireless in bringing the message to the Indians and in writing accounts of religious change in his diary and letters. Hamilton was a messenger of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, active in western Oklahoma, bringing his message to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, from the 1890s to the 1920s. Hamilton was part of a missionary movement into Indian Territory by Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and other Christians during the latter half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century. Like Christian proselytes during the preceding centuries in America and Europe, these missionaries considered civilization and Christianity to be one in the same. Missionaries generally adopted a patronizing, condescending attitude toward indigenous people at the same time that they exhibited outstanding energy and bravery in the face of overwhelming despair, poverty, conflict, and violence.

Hamilton, who had been ordained a Baptist missionary in 1892, was a man of tremendous drive and devotion, energy and patience, curiosity and courage. He, like other missionaries in Oklahoma before and after statehood, cared for the indigenous people, whom he considered to be like children; he was their missionary father, and indeed the Indians themselves adopted the designations of “children” and “father” when addressing him. Hamilton understood that “the Indians are by nature religious, mystical, ritualistic, reverent,” as he wrote in The Gospel Among the Red Man, a partially autobiographical account of Baptist missionary activities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. “It is one of the evidences of the divine nature of the gospel,” he wrote, “and of the efficiency of the Holy Spirit to ‘guide into all truth,’ that the missionary to a primitive people, with an unskilled interpreter, can get the message to them, and the resultant surprising grasp they have of divine truth.” In the manuscript account, Sketch of Work Among Cheyennes and Arapahos, found in the Bacone Indian Room archives, Hamilton narrated in third person the scene when in 1892 he began to meet with the Cheyennes: “These Indians had only nineteen years before quit the warpath, and were living in the midst of a people, who if they had understood them, might have been a great blessing and help to them, but who viewed them with suspicion, and only visited their camps out of curiosity or to trade with them. For these reasons, they continued to live apart from their white neighbors, practicing the most disgusting of heathen customs in the name of religion.” Hamilton wrote that he “attended an Indian burial, at which a woman cut gashes in her arms and legs for the dead, until the blood ran down to the ground. He saw women, who in their grief for their children, had cut off a joint of their fingers one after another until their hands were but stubs.” More astonishing was the Sun Dance ceremony “at which twenty men stripped of all their clothing, danced continuously for three days and nights without food or water. . . . Others had places cut in their breasts, and a skewer put through under a muscle, and this tied to a rope which was attached to a central pole of the dance lodge. Throwing their weight upon the rope, they would dance until the muscles were torn out.” He also witnessed the Ghost Dance, “where all night long, they formed a large circle, going round and round keeping step to the weird, plaintive music as they sang their Messianic songs. He saw a woman go inside the circle and stand for more than an hour with her hands stretched out toward the north, praying most fervently, while the tears ran down her face, pleading for the coming of the Indian Messiah. Her tone and posture expressed the most intense longing. Finally exhausted, she fell in a swoon.”

Into this pagan environment, Hamilton came preaching the Gospel, comparing himself to the Apostle Paul, who likewise made way the teachings of Christianity among a similarly polytheistic and animistic people. Although Hamilton was vain and full of himself, he nevertheless believed wholeheartedly in the Great Commission given by Christ to His disciples. Delivering the Gospel was the sole object to him, and he and his family endured privation and the environmental extremes of western Oklahoma to succeed in this self-appointed goal. The Indians of Oklahoma, like the missionaries that came among them, thought of life as a journey down a well-traveled road, as it were. The Indians knew of many roads to religious enlightenment: the peyote road and the traditional tribal road. Hamilton helped them to discover a new road, the “Jesus Road.” Frequently they were called upon by missionaries and their own people to make a choice among the available roads. The Cheyennes, Hamilton wrote in the manuscript, Recommendations as to the Cheyenne Field, “in the beginning received the missionaries and their message more readily, and came into the Jesus Road more quickly than any of the other tribes.” The Jesus Road, of course, was fraught with peril to the mind and soul; it was a terribly hard road to follow, and many times the Indian man or woman slipped, unable or unwilling to regain the Jesus Road, rather returning to the road of their ancestors.

Hamilton provided many examples of this conflict and confusion over the correct path to happiness and redemption. He heard firsthand accounts from Indian men and women, a few of whom could speak English; for others, Hamilton relied on interpreters. In the manuscript pamphlet Christmas with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the anguish of two women, who had been through much sorrow because of personal loss of family, including their children. He wrote: “One who had lost her son said that when he died, she had been tempted to throw away the Jesus Road, and take up again her old heathen religion, but that now she could see that it was better to trust in Jesus, and that she could see that His way was right, she asked the church to forgive her for her sinful thoughts, and promised to walk in the ‘Road’ more carefully.” In the manuscript Sketch of Work Among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Hamilton described the personal experience of “one old man,” who “told the missionary that in the olden times it was thought an honorable thing to steal from those who were not their friends, and the man who could steal the most horses and cattle, and thus make the best feasts and presents to his people, had the greatest respect. . . . How Jesus had changed his heart from that way of doing[!] Now he had learned to love his enemies, and to do good to all men, and his life bears out his testimony.” In the same manuscript, Hamilton described how some Cheyennes, for example the Ghost Dance prophets, rejected the message brought by the messengers and persecuted those who believed.  Nevertheless, even some Ghost Dancers in time rejected their traditional beliefs to follow the Jesus Road.

The missionaries of western Oklahoma such as Robert Hamilton helped the Indians form an association of converts, called the Blanket Indian Association. They met annually in June during the first years of the twentieth century. At one meeting, held on the land of the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf in western Oklahoma, indigenous peoples of several tribes—the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, and Navajo—met along with Baptist missionaries for a day of testimonial. On this day former Kiowa warriors, leaders of armed bands of men who had raided white settlements and attacked military installations in Texas and Indian Territory, but who had come to embrace peace, spoke of their commitment to the Jesus Road. One of the most notorious of the Kiowa warriors, Big Tree, proclaimed: “I express my gratitude to the Father above for knowing that the Lord Jesus is here. The Almighty created the earth and no part of it has been changed by any other power. God planted his word and work and it has been going on until it reached us. At last it reached me personally. All the Kiowas know what I was—bad—but now I have eated God’s food and been filled. Thirty years ago I was arrested and sent to prison I was so wicked. Lived that way until the Bible came before my face. I didn’t go round or back, but went up to it. My wife first baptised, I follow her, so must you . . . follow missionary teaching, all good. Religion is like throwing away an old garment and getting a new clean garment. I want you head-men to start in this road, it is a good road for all of you; it is the only road which will lead you to the best place we all can think of. Lone Wolf is our only chief, he is a good work-horse, but can’t pull alone, we all must help him; if we would all do this, it would be like traveling with a fast team on a good road. Now this is for the Comanches; tell your leading men to leave off their evil ways and walk in the Jesus road, and then we will get their followers. Today speak out and tell what you will do. Kiowas pushing and fighting every day and we are getting on. The Kiowas are like an engine to a train, it go first and pull, so we start in good, we help you all we can.”

One Comanche named Ninsie told his brothers and sisters: “If you want to take the road straight, put away all bad roads. Our brother Jesus is strong, he is very loving, but if Jesus and God pull you out of the fire, and you hold some of it in your hand, they can’t help you.” Lone Wolf himself, who grew up hearing about his father and grandfather’s violent raids on farms and supply trains, spoke during another meeting of the Indian Blanket Association; his comments were recorded by one of the missionaries: “Some time ago [Lone Wolf said] I went up to visit the unfriendly Osages. I found them doing all the old time things. One of their leaders is here, and I want him to know I am very sorry to see them in the old time roads. (He said this with his eyes full of tears.) The white people see me and think I am educated. My father and my grandfather taught me the warpath, and I never had a chance to learn in school. Just as the children will learn the old roads, if not taught. . . . My father should have taught me, but he did not know the Jesus road. I am man enough to know that it is a good road, and take it.”

One of the most dramatic testimonials given at a meeting of the Blanket Indian Association was by another Kiowa convert, Sanco. “He said,” in the words of one of his hearers, that the experience of embracing Christianity and coming to know the Gospel was “like a stream of living water without sticks or stones or mud in it, ever-flowing, clear as crystal, free to all.” He added: “before the missionaries came they knew nothing about God; the Indians lived in the dark; their minds were covered just like a veil over the face, but now they can see clearly.” Indigenous converts such as Sanco who experienced a religious change frequently spoke of Christianity, the Gospel, and Christ according to allusions toward their natural religion and the natural environment on which they depended.

The accounts of religious change among the Plains Indians of western Oklahoma translated by Indian interpreters and transcribed and recorded by Robert Hamilton were, notwithstanding the time, place, language and events, similar in evocation of feeling and sincerity of mind to the accounts of other religious feelers and thinkers who had their sensations, thoughts, words, and deeds translated and recorded by others. Was the experience of religious change of the Kiowa Sanco any different from the dazzling light that blinded Paul of Tarsus; the child’s voice that responded to Saint Augustine’s agonizing question; the austere, universal presence of the One that so captivated Plotinus and his disciples Porphyry and Julian; the oneness that Siddhartha Gautama experienced in the rushing water of  the river of life; or the fear and awe that Moses knew when standing on holy ground before Yahweh? Common in most of the world’s great testimonies of religious change is the question of who and what exists, followed by the search for being or substance outside of yet connected to oneself, which leads to the discovery of the answer, change in belief and behavior, and finally, acceptance of what is.

My research with the manuscripts in the Bacone Indian Room led me to reconsider other research I have performed over the course of my career, particularly into the work and writings of Protestant ministers of late eighteenth-century New England. These ministers, such as Jeremy Belknap and Jedidiah Morse, were historians and scientists. But I became interested in another of their roles, that is, their work on behalf of the Society for Propagating the Gospel, centered in Boston. Belknap, a graduate of Harvard, and Morse, a graduate of Yale, were theologians and scientists who wholeheartedly embraced Christ’s words of the Great Commission, that they should bring the Gospel to the whole Creation. This they did, journeying, traveling, studying, recording, and writing their observations of natural and human history, all with a goal, through their piety to God and His works, of fulfilling the Great Commission. The two men journeyed to upstate New York in 1796 to visit the Iroquois Indians, to discover whether or not the work of messengers such as the missionary Samuel Kirkland, had succeeded.  Morse, long after the death of Belknap, journeyed west in 1820 and 1821, visiting the indigenous peoples of upstate New York, the Great Lakes, and Upper Canada. Indeed Morse met with the Governor of Upper Canada, Peregrine Maitland, who agreed with Morse that the two civilized peoples on both sides of the Great Lakes should work in conjunction to reach a common goal, “the complete civilization of the Indians.” In written comments after the fact, Morse congratulated himself that the two governments will now work together “to raise the long neglected native tribes, whom the Providence of God has placed under our care, as Christian nations, from their present state of ignorance and wretchedness, to the enjoyment, with us, of all the blessings of civilization, and of our holy religion.” Belknap and Morse were experienced students of human nature who knew that the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity would be a lengthy, arduous process. They despised the methods of Catholic Jesuits and Franciscans, who ingratiated themselves with the Indians by promising salvation by the mere act of sprinkling baptismal water upon people who were otherwise unfit to receive the Gospel message. Rather, Belknap and Morse believed, civilization must precede Christianity, that is, the indigenous peoples must embrace a lifestyle that will make them ready to receive the Gospel. What would this lifestyle entail? Standard prerequisite changes to indigenous culture that all messengers agreed upon were learning to read, embracing a monogamous and chaste lifestyle, rejecting alcoholic beverages, and adopting the pastoral society based on farming the land. Belknap believed that such a pastoral existence would lead to what he called social happiness, which conformed to God’s will. Belknap argued in his many and varied writings published during his lifetime that God provided hints for humans to seek out, discover, and employ, which would result in social happiness. These hints are inherent in natural and human history, so the Christian, the messenger, must be a historian and a scientist to discover these hints and bring them to society to achieve God’s aims. As long as the indigenous peoples refused to look for and act upon God’s hints, they would remain uncivilized, and unprepared to receive the Gospel.

In their report to the Society for Propagating the Gospel, Belknap and Morse provided an extensive apology to explain why it is so difficult for Indians to be civilized and to convert to Christianity. Even in civilized societies people often refuse to give up natural liberties for the sake of creating a good society. Education and polite manners often disgusted Indians and repelled them. Belknap and Morse related an anecdote about an Indian youth who is taken from his tribe and put among whites to be educated, but he is always faced with their comments and actions reinforcing in his mind his difference and inferiority. Yet at the same time he is now different from his own tribe and in their eyes inferior. He is caught between two worlds and cannot quite become part of the former or return to the latter. So he turns to drink in frustration. This two-world phenomenon reveals that in the transfer from one civilization, one set of fundamental assumptions, morals, and customs, to another, from pagan to Christian and vice-versa, those caught in between often struggle. Any person experiences something of this struggle when they try to do something that challenges their heritage and upbringing. Anxiety and uncertainty are often the consequence, which can be responded to by drink; but as an alternative, Belknap and Morse wrote, the response can also be to Christ. For the Indian the struggle was a transition from a life of fewer restrictions to a life of more restrictions. The former, savage life is free insofar as there is no surrender to higher authority, whether that authority be society, government, morality, or God. So one is free to engage in unrestrained passion and vice. However, sin becomes its own master. One can become so ruled by vice, lust, and drink, that this apparent natural freedom is completely lost.  So in the psychology of the transition from one culture to another, any culture will offer attributes where peace and contentment can be found, but to be in abeyance from one to another, neither accepting either, resisting both, is to create uncertainty and anxiety. This anxiety was precisely what the Iroquois Indians of New York were experiencing. For some Indians, the transition and resulting anxiety was too great, so rejected.

No wonder it was so difficult to convert and to civilize the Indians, for conversion to Christianity as well as embracing the pastoral, agricultural way of life are long, difficult processes. Time, coming to know God experientially and through books, was required. The response of the missionary must be patience. To convert and civilize native peoples was such a long term process that it would take many years. But, Belknap and Morse believed, Christians had the responsibility to civilize and convert Indians, and not just because the Great Commission required it, but because providential history showed that the Indians were not unlike ancient Europeans who over time moved from savagery to civilization. Belknap and Morse piously understood the movement of human history over time, the movement toward progress and civilization for all peoples. Progress and civilization required thoughtfulness and reflection, which the process of Christian conversion best engendered in people.

After my years researching the lives and works of messengers such as Berlandier, Hamilton, Belknap, and Morse, a year and a half ago I proposed to the Fulbright Commission that I should bring my attention to messengers who sought to bring the Gospel to the First Nations of Canada. Having focused on Protestant messengers up to this point, I wished to continue my research into those, such as the Anglicans and Methodists, who journeyed to Ontario to bring the message to such indigenous peoples as the Ojibway, Mohawk, and Cree.

As I took up residence in St. Catharines this past August, it made sense that I should focus on the best known messenger from the early years in the forming of Upper Canada, when settlers, many of them Loyalists dislocated by the American Revolution, arrived to the Niagara region. Anglican messenger Robert Addison arrived at Newark, as Niagara on the Lake was then called, in the spring of 1792. Fortunately, the records of St. Mark’s Parish and the Diocese of Niagara for that time still exist; included in these records is a memoir of his life. In it, we learn that Addison “had the blessing of being the son of parents whose circumstances enabled them to give him a liberal education.” He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and excelled in the classics and mathematics, though he was constantly challenged, in the words of one of his mentors, “to overcome the natural indolence and diffidence of his character.”  This intelligent, humble man, lacking in self-confidence, recruited by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, found himself in 1792 in a small village from which he was to minister to the people of the Niagara peninsula and beyond, including the Mohawks living along the Grand River.

Addison possessed the compulsion, found in many of these Protestant messengers, to reach out, which leads to an awareness of, an empathy toward, others. Addison felt that Christians had a responsibility of stewardship toward others, the unfortunate, including indigenous people. Twice a year, for many years, Addison journeyed to bring the message to the Mohawks along the Grand River. He was convinced that his labors would lead to the probable conclusion “that other tribes might be induced by the example of the Mohawks to profess Christianity.” On every visit to Brantford and the Mohawk Chapel, he baptized about twenty, and only those who “seemed to offer themselves from a persuasion of the truth and value of our holy faith, without which he had no wish to baptize any of them.”

Addison appears to have not been terribly sanguine about his efforts in this regard. Anglicanism taught then, as well as now, that the Christian journey toward redemption is a long journey, and transformation does not occur in an instant. Anglican conversion, indeed, is lifelong, and one rarely finds an Anglican who experiences the blinding light of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus.

Toward the end of Addison’s life, in the 1820s, other Protestant messengers came to Upper Canada preaching a brand of Christianity, Methodism, that afforded the instantaneous change of the religious mystic. One of the leading Methodist messengers was Massachusetts born William Case who, “after years of religious impressions, and a sinful course,” converted in 1803, and became a missionary two years later. The Methodists chose as missionaries those who were aggressively out for conversions, who believed conversion led on the road to a sinless life, and who consequently focused on strict behavior, such as the total abstinence from alcohol. Case was completely dedicated to spending, he wrote, “all my time, my talents & property, yea my life in the service of God.” Case was humble, doubtful of his abilities, but driven by intense spirituality. Case was instrumental in helping to form the independent Methodist Episcopal Church in Canada modeled on its American counterpart. Increasingly devoted to promoting conversions among the indigenous peoples, Case led numerous camp meetings during the 1820s in Upper Canada. He preached to Mohawks at Grand River and the Ojibways at Rice Lake. Case believed that Indians must be civilized as well as converted, so he worked to provide books, including translations of the Bible into Mohawk and Ojibway, to establish schools, and to help the indigenous people learn to live like the English. He wrote: “the Indian character has been but little understood. Let these people possess the advantages of Christian example and instruction and they are as capable of instruction and good impressions as any nation.”

Two Ojibways who heard Case and were converted were Peter Jones and Peter Jacobs, both of whom became missionaries to their own people, and to other Indian tribes of Canada as well. The accounts of the religious transformations of Jones and Jacobs are very similar. Let us focus for a minute on the conversion of Peter Jacobs. He published an account of his religious transformation in 1853. In it, he wrote that in 1824, “I was a heathen, and so were all the tribes of Canada West. When I was a lad, I never heard an Indian pray, as Christians pray, to the Great Being. Our people believed in the existence of a Great Being, the Maker of all things; but we thought that God was so very far away, that no human voice could reach Him; and, indeed, we all believed that God did not meddle with the affairs of the children of men.” Indians did not fear God. They took care of affairs with the tomahawk. His pagan prayers at the time, he wrote, were as follows: “O God, the Sun, I beseech you to hear my prayer, and to direct my steps through the woods in the direction where the deer is feeding, that I may get near him, shoot him, and kill him, and have something to eat thereby.” Then at a camp meeting Jacobs heard Rev. Case preach. Jacobs thought that Case spoke of the white man’s god, not the Indian god, but Case assured him otherwise, so Jacobs set to praying as follows: “O God, be merciful to me, poor Indian boy, great sinner.” Soon, Jacobs recalled, “the word of God had now got hold of my heart, but it made me feel very sick in my heart. I went to bed, and I could not sleep, for my thoughts trouble me very much. Then I would pray the words over and over again, and go more and more sick in my heart. I was very sorry that God could not understand my Ojibway. I thought God could only understand English; and when I was praying, tears came spontaneously from my eyes; and I could not understand this, because I had been taught from infancy never to weep. In this misery I passed three or four weeks. I then met with Peter Jones, who was converted a few months before me, and, to my surprise, I heard him return thanks, at meal, in Ojibway. This was quite enough for me. I now saw that God could understand me in my Ojibway, and therefore went far into the woods, and prayed, in the Ojibway tongue, to God, and say, “O God, I was so ignorant and blind, that I did not know that though couldst understand my Ojibway tongue! Now, O God, I beseech thee to be gracious to me, a sinner! Take away this sickness that I now feel in my heart; for all my sins lay very heavy in my heart! Send now thy Holy Spirit to come work in my heart! Let the blood of Christ be now applied to my heart, that all my sins may depart!” Jacobs continues: “Though I could now pray in this way in my native tongue, yet God did not seem to think it best to hear my prayers at this time, but left me to pass many miserable nights. And I cried out again, ‘O God, I will not let thee alone! I shall trouble thee with my prayers, till thou bless me!’ And at last God heard my prayers, and he took away this heavy sickness of heart; but not till many tears had been shed. And when this sickness was taken away from my heart, then I experienced another feeling, which was joy in the Holy Ghost, which was indeed full of glory. My tongue could not express the joy I then felt. I could say nothing but, ‘Happy, happy!’ When I found this religion of Christ so sweet in the heart of man, I wanted all my people then to know of the great and true God; but they all said, No: that I was wrong; that I had been to the white man’s God, and not the Saviour of the Indians. But I said that God was the Saviour of all the nations of the earth; for I know in my own heart what he has done for me: and what he has done for me, he can do for you. And they began to pray for mercy and the forgiveness of their sins; and they praying in strong faith, many of them were converted; and now at this time there are hundreds that are converted among the North American Indians. I was the first fruits of the Missionary labors in my tribe.”

And so Peter Jacobs became another in a long line of messengers following the dictates of the Great Commission. To be sure Jacobs and his fellow messenger Peter Jones were hardly silent about the abuses that white Christians had committed against the indigenous peoples. These abuses occurred long after their respective deaths, into the twentieth century and beyond. During my past ten years at Bacone College, I have heard Indian students, professors, staff, and alumni at continue to lament their victimization at the hands of white society.  Some Indians, both in the United States and Canada, condemn white government and society with attempted genocide. So, yes, there continues to be a cloudy future of race relations ahead based on a checkered past of intimidation and violence. But as I have tried to convey today, there is another side as well. The messengers of the Great Commission had their share of sin, of course, and they often made mistakes. But as I continue my research I find among the Protestant messengers more a force of love rather than hate that motivated and drove them.

Christianity as an experience of religious change has been an ecumenical force in world history because the religious seeker finds in the scriptures, teachings, traditions, music, liturgy, and the experience of the holy their own questions and answers and their own search and discovery notwithstanding the place or time. The indigenous peoples of America discovered in the words of the messenger explanations for human behavior, for mistakes and doubts, for unhappiness and suffering. Even the most fierce warriors sought to be embraced in overwhelming love. The closest experiences to such love that tribal beliefs offered were the promises of happiness in the next life, or the benevolence of the Great Spirit, or the means by which nature nourished, clothed, and sheltered them. Indians such as the Kiowa Sanco adapted the natural theology inherent in Christianity to his own experiences of delight and satisfaction when finding a pure stream of bright, crystal water, or when coming from out of the darkness of a spring thunderstorm into the broad horizon of the plains covered by the ubiquitous rays of the sun. Not only did Christianity emphasize the importance of natural history in the scheme of redemption, but one’s personal physical and spiritual experiences were known to God, who watched to see whether or not these peripatetic people would keep to the Jesus Road, eschewing all other roads as being distractions of ignorance, hubris, and idleness.

Missionaries to North American tribes were struck by how eager the indigenous people were to learn of this new religious road that they could take out of the shadows of darkness and doubt into the light of understanding. These religious converts understood what Jesus meant when he told Nicodemus that one must be born again from the mother’s womb. There was no other way, no other road. As one messenger put it: “The evidence of a genuine work of grace in the hearts of these children of the plains are so marked and varied that no one can doubt the reality of their conversion”–or, should we say, the reality of their change from one religious belief to another belief that offered similar conceptions of a universal deity that defied understanding, of rituals of blessing and healing, but which offered something more, a clear path undertaken originally by a man whom the Indians knew simply as Jesus. By forging a road through life and time amid distractions, temptations, suffering, and death, Jesus showed, by means of his example and by the examples of his messengers, that his road was one for all people. Christian Indians believed that by taking the Jesus Road they shared Jesus’s experience, even if they did live on the fringes of white settlement, hunting the dwindling numbers of beasts and living in mud huts or skin dwellings, impoverished but proud, willing to humble themselves to others, to the Other, for the sake of love.

For more on the Baptist missionaries of Oklahoma, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, newly republished in January 2026 and available on Amazon at Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years: Lawson, Dr. Russell Matthew: 9780977244805: Amazon.com: Books