For much of two evenings, and for a good part of one afternoon, he preached his own version of Christianity to us — something he had half-discovered, half-invented, in the course of his personal journey to Christ. And if you’ve never been evangelized by a fervent, articulate, creative, born-again native American, I think you’ve missed something interesting. It’s lots different from being evangelized by an Anglo!

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When Friends elsewhere, on the two sides of the FUM personnel-policy dispute, are tearing FUM to pieces, it’s an assault on perhaps the single most important piece of outside support helping to make lasting Quaker communities possible here.

Would that the hotheads in Southeastern YM — and in Iowa and the yearly meetings of East Africa — would think about this!

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A few years after the Civil War, the last three thousand surviving Osages, exhausted by their struggles against the white tide, were relieved of the burden of their remaining lands in Kansas, and removed to the relative safety of Oklahoma. And now the Osages’ tribal elders decreed, after some deliberation, that it was time for the tribe to give up its native religion and learn the “black book”, the Bible.

To help the tribe make this great transition, the elders enlisted Isaac Gibson, a white who had won the Osages’ trust by his hard work as their official Federal Indian agent back in Kansas.

As it happens, Gibson was a Friend, a Gurneyite Quaker. The opening he made for the Gurneyite version of the Gospel was followed up, a generation later, by Gurneyite missionaries Daniel and Hattie Williams. And so it came to pass that a small fraction of the Osage Nation turned, for a time, into Gurneyite Friends themselves.

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