Kansas’ first journos: Indians?

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.