Spiritual Warfare on the Arrival of the Gospel

About a year ago, I discovered "new" information in Father Nicholas Point's illustrated journal, Wilderness Kingdom. He describes starting the first Jesuit mission among the Coeur D'Alene tribe in November 1842, exactly 170 years ago. He tells in the attached pages of how "about a dozen years" before the Jesuit mission a Spokane by the name of "Gueri" had come from the Red River mission and shared the Bible and Protestant teachings he had received while there. What is new is Father Point's careful record of an old CD'A elder's testimony about the coming of Garry, the resistance of Chief Stellam, the spiritual warfare that followed and plague, the vision of the elder from heaven to believe in Christ alone, and cast away all idols. Amazing. I am thankful for Father Point's work in noting the man's testimony, despite the Jesuit additions to the gospel that did not build on Garry's foundation. However, this does show us that at least for several years there was a profound effect on the Spokanes and even the Coeur D'Alenes as a fruit of Garry's preaching. This little-documented period of time from 1630-1642 has been at least filled in to some extent now. I will attach a link soon for the PDF file of these scanned pages. Brian

Putting the face with the name

While I do not plan to blog much about our recent exciting discovery of the original document with Spokane Garry's native name in it, I did want to post two links here for reference:

Barry's description of our research:
http://www.sulustu.blogspot.com/2013/06/slough-keetcha.html

Here's the newspaper article recently published about it:

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2013/sep/01/in-the-name-of-history/

Personally, I have felt very happy to server as a link-maker between Doug's original discovery & Slough-keetcha's homecoming to the Spokane nation through Barry Moses' scholarship and articulate voice.

My ultimate desire is that I would be a living bridge of the love of God and the truth of the gospel to Native Americans, through assisting in credible research that points to the once and future awakening power of God's kingdom in the native community, and raises awareness of people like Slough-keetcha who believed in Christ within their native culture, letting the Spirit transform them into a follower of the Jesus Way, beyond nationalism or ethnocentricity.