Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian Invasion (1673–1906); a Cultural Victory

Abstract

In this, his second book on the Osage Indians, Willard Hughes Rollings persuasively presents an unambiguous thesis: the Osage people rejected the nineteenth-century attempts of both Protestant and Catholic missionaries to convert them to Christianity. They were able to do so because their cultural and spiritual lifeways were robust and flexible. In early chapters, Rollings describes how the expansive Osages seized control of the territory between the Missouri and Red rivers, maintained primary settlements in southwest Missouri and northeast Oklahoma, and managed to avoid conflict with the Spanish and French. After 1803, he notes, United States authority brought special challenges to the Osage, among them Christian missionaries, who, emboldened by the revival fires of the Second Great Awakening, wanted to share the gospel with them. The chapters recounting the arrival and work of Calvinist missionaries from the United Foreign Mission Society (1821–1839) and Jesuit missionaries from the Roman Catholic Church (1827–1870), and the Osage reception of and response to the different versions of the Christian message are exceptionally insightful. According to Rollings, the harsh doctrines and stark worship services of the Protestants had no appeal for the Osage, although the worship practices of the Catholics had more in common with their own spiritual beliefs and customs.