Shawnee Sun

The paper was founded by Baptist missionary Jotham Meeker, who created his own script for Shawnee, an Algonquian language.

This missionary newspaper was intended to give the Shawnee a written language, aid in education and news, and to help convert the tribe to Christianity.

Fluent in the closely related languages of the Pottawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa tribes, he devised an orthographic script using English alphabet characters to phonetically sound like tribal languages and quickly teach them to tribal children.

[1]: 258 In its first issue, its editor Reverend Johnston Lykins wrote in the style of the Genesis creation narratives about the importance of Christianity and conversion.

[3] According to his review of the Shawnee Sun's history in 1933, McMurtrie concluded that it had a limited readership, with perhaps only "two hundred copies to an issue".

[6]: 67 Only two pages of the paper are in historical collections, and both have been translated by George Blanchard, an elder in the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma.