Unaffected by the Gospel, ethnohistorian Willard Rollings' second book about the Osage, shows how this Native America tribe interacted with Euro-Americans, whose desire for lands on the prairie Plains eventually resulted in the relocation of the tribe to northern Oklahoma. Most tribes that fought the Euro-Americans lost and suffered at the hands of the victors. The Osage managed to avoid violent conflict, thus, Rollings argues, gaining some control over their destiny.
The Osage had little choice but to make peace with the Americans, once the Europeans — the source of the guns the Osage relied upon to rule the Plains — left the continent. With a trade embargo, the United States forced the Osage to cede traditional land. With the help of Protestant missionaries, the U.S. also sought to assimilate and "civilize" the Osage.
Rollings argues that the Osage defeated 52 years of efforts by the Protestants, as well as the Roman Catholic Jesuits who proselytized without U.S. encouragement, to convert to Christianity. They "remained Osage — with their culture and cultural adaptations firmly in their control."
The missionaries failed, Rollings writes, because they were asking the Osage to give up the good life they had developed, to trade "a life of community for one of individualism and loneliness (single-family farming), a life of generosity for one of miserliness." The Osage were able to play off competing interests while maintaining their cultural and spiritual integrity until the late 1900s, when they embraced a new Native American religion: Peyotism.
Rollings' wife, Barbara, a member of the UNLV provost's staff, is a former art student and did the artwork for the book's cover, a print made from a photograph of an Osage chief.
Rollings, himself a Cherokee, also has recently published a book about another Plains tribe, the Comanche, as well as numerous articles about these and other Native Americans. An associate professor at UNLV, Rollings had at least one unusual challenge in the course of writing the book: he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and treatment delayed his writing. Funds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Barrows Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
