In 1888, Stumbling Bear, a Kiowa Christian convert, told Southern Methodist missionary J.J. Methvin, “Not all of the ways of the white man better than all of the Indian ways. Some Indian ways best” (88). Tash Smith demonstrates that between the founding of the Indian Mission Conference (1844) of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South until the reunion of northern and southern Methodism (1939), Stumbling Bear and other Native Americans of what became Oklahoma appropriated Southern Methodism in “Indian ways” (e.g., through translators, local preachers and house churches, singing conventions, and camp meetings). They did this even as they collectively and individually contended with the assimilationist pressures of the federal government, settlers, and the denomination. Indian Southern Methodists “created their own religious space” (192) and thereby found “a third alternative between complete acceptance and outright rejection of white society” (193).

Tash Smith's book reminds me of two others: Bonnie Sue Lewis's Creating Christian Indians: Native Clergy in the Presbyterian Church (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004) and Angela Tarango's Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). Smith's joins these two as a well-focused, clearly written, and solidly supported analysis of the complicated cross-cultural dynamics between a particular protestant denomination and its American Indian converts.