Kansas City News Blog

For a minute, this looked like a thrilling journalistic discovery: two surviving pages of the Shawnee Sun, which had a sporadic run between 1835 and 1844, making it the first periodical published in Kansas (before Kansas was even Kansas) and -- wow -- the first in the United States written entirely in an American Indian language!

As I stared at the two pages of the Sun reproduced in the newest edition of Kansas History (a quarterly journal published by the Kansas State Historical Society), I imagined some century-and-a-half-old, muck-raking, ass-kicking alternative paper in which prairie tribes warned each other about buffalo killers, smallpox epidemics and lying treaty signers.

Such illusions scattered as soon as I started reading James K. Beatty's article. As it turns out, of course, the Sun was nothing but a tool for missionaries trying to bring the Natives to Jesus. 

Beatty's article, "Interpreting the Shawnee Sun: Literacy and Cultural Persistence in Indian Country, 1833-1841," is still interesting, even if Kansas History isn't exactly light reading. A Cliff's Notes version: In 1833, a Baptist missionary named Jotham Meeker hauled his printing press across the Mississippi River. Armed with "a sincere desire to translate Native languages into script," Meeker came up with a writing system -- an "esoteric orthography," Beatty calls it.

Helping Beatty decode the old writing was George Blanchard, an elder of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma. This was the first time anyone had actually translated the newspaper into English. What they discovered (to my dismay):

Although some historians have viewed the Sun as a tribal newspaper, Blanchard's translation reveals that the November 1841 issue does not report the secular happenings of life on the Shawnee reservation. Instead, the Sun is a highly didactic publication, aimed at transforming American Indian culture and instilling Baptist theology within the predominately non-Christian Shawnee community.

Shit. Those two surviving pages? According to Blanchard's translation, it's all churchy stuff. That first big block of text after the intro:

A message from the Shawnee-speaking God.
A long time ago there were many Shawnee Indians, but not now. At that time they were living in the dark. They were trying hard and finally they were too weak because they didn't know their God. Now part of the Good Book is written in their language. ... Shawnees will get strength and happiness when they possess the Good Book. If they walk away from it, they will immediately lose their spirit.

There's also stuff like "a person who hates sermons hates his own spirit" and "there are two different paths to follow. One way leads to the big rock place. One way to the bad snake place. Jesus teaches how go to the big rock place." Among the "no good" things the bad snake teaches? "He teaches how to race horses. That's no good. He teaches how to go to dance. That's no good."

And just in case there's any doubt that all this was taking place in Kansas: The snake "teaches women how to abort their children. That's no good."

Beatty notes that some historians have pointed out that nineteenth-century missionaries "were intoxicated with the potential of print." The Shawnees, Beatty writes, "recognized the missionaries' devotion to letters, journals, and -- most of all -- their holy book. The Shawnee phrase for 'Christian' found in the Sun -- hiwekitiwe elane -- translates literally as 'someone that can write' or 'paper man.'"

There's a lot more to Beatty's article, but for our purposes, there ends this little episode in prairie newspaper history. Speaking as a modern-day Kansas journo, I'll just say to all the Shawnees out there: Sorry about those paper men.