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 Early History
Midwest Roots
Early Indian
Ministry
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A desire to serve the Native American people brought the original Jesuits to the Missouri region. A number of the tribes with whom the Jesuits worked were the same tribes, now displaced to the west, that their colonial French brethren had worked with in Wisconsin and Illinois. The Pottawatomie, Miami, Sac, Osage, Kickapoo, and Winnebago were driven west by government policy, and Kansas soon became the major mission site.
The most famous of the early Jesuit missionaries was the Belgian Father Peter DeSmet. Jesuits had limited success among the various tribes of Kansas. Encroachment of whites into Indian territory, especially after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, drove the Indians out, as the government resettled them into the new Indian territory, now called Oklahoma. Rather than following the Indians to Oklahoma, Jesuits gradually began to serve the growing European-American population. By the time of DeSmet's death in the 1870s, the Missouri Province no longer had a Native American ministry.
The Missouri Jesuits resumed ministry among Native American peoples early in the 20th century. The German sponsored Buffalo Mission had founded three missions in the west in the 1880's among the Arapaho and Shoshone at St. Stephen's in Wyoming, and among the Lakota in South Dakota. In 1912, the three missions were transferred to Missouri. Today, Wisconsin Province Jesuits continue to minister on all of these reservations |
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