Story of the First Nations Version

Boozhoo Niijii bimadazig, Terry Wildman nindishnakaz.

Ojibwe for: Hello my friends who share this life together with me. My name is Terry Wildman.

I am the Lead Translator, Project Manager, and General Editor for the First Nations Version Project. 

I was born and raised in Michigan. My ancestry includes Ojibwe from Ontario, Canada; Yaqui from Sonora, Mexico; as well as English, German, and Spaniard. As a U.S. Veteran, I completed two years of honorable service in the U.S. Army at the end of the Vietnam era. I am married to Darlene Wildman and have five children, eight grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. My wife and I currently live in Maricopa, Arizona, on the traditional lands of the Maricopa, Tohono O’odham, and Pima.

Christian ministry has been my life for over 40 years, including over 20 years of pastoral service, five years of cross-cultural work among the Hopi, ten years traveling in cross-cultural evangelism with Native Americans, and over five years in Bible translation in partnership with OneBook of Canada. My education has been eclectic and informal, combined with some formal academic classes. We founded Rain Ministries in 2002 as an Arizona non-profit organization while living on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona. I continue to serve as Chief Director. I have also been serving with Native InterVarsity as the Director of Spiritual Growth and Leadership Development since June 2020. I also serve on the Wiconi Family Camp and Powwow Leadership Council.

The seeds for the First Nations Version were planted in me over 20 years ago while living on the Hopi Indian Reservation and serving as a pastor with the American Baptist Sunlight Mission on Second Mesa. We were using the NIV translation in the jail ministry, and all the churches on the reservation also used the NIV. In the meetings in the local jail as we shared Scripture, I noticed that the participants just weren’t connecting. As my wife and I prayed, we wondered if the English translation we were using wasn’t connecting culturally. But we had no answers.

Later, I found a Hopi New Testament translation in storage at the church building, but soon learned that almost no one could read from it. Not much later, I discovered this was true across North America for many tribes. While missionaries were translating the Bible into Native languages, the government, with the help of church organizations, was stripping our Native peoples of their languages through the boarding schools. Adults were not taught to read in their language, and in the boarding schools, children were forbidden to even speak their languages.

After much research on the internet and with different mission organizations, I soon discovered that there was no English translation done specifically for Native people. I began to experiment with rewording portions of Scripture and using them in small groups and in jail ministry with Hopis and Navajos. The response was surprising and encouraging. The men and women began to interact more with Scripture, asking meaningful questions and relating more to what they were reading.

Since my wife and I were recording artists with two music CDs at that time, I decided to record a spoken-word CD, retelling the biblical story in a Native way, as a condensed story from Creation to Christ. We called it The Great Story From the Sacred Book. We submitted it to the Native American Music Awards in 2008 and won the award for Best Spoken Word.

After that, my wife and I began traveling. We shared reworded portions of Scripture at tribal centers, Native churches, powwows, and more. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The CD became one of our best online sellers. As we shared these reworded Scripture portions, we kept getting requests for more. One Native elder told us, “You say it in English the way we think it in our language.” Many kept wanting to know which Bible we were reading from.

Finally, in November 2012, my wife and I attended a meeting on the Torres Martinez Reservation in Southern California to explore reconciliation. Several organizations were involved. I was asked to share some of my Scripture rewordings. I also asked for prayer regarding the need for this kind of translation. After prayer and much encouragement from others, I finally became convinced that I was the one called to do this translation. I put out a request to our supporters, and soon a significant sum came in that would cover me working on it for six months.

Beginning with the Christmas story, we soon self-published a hardcover children’s book, Birth of the Chosen One, illustrated by a man with Native ancestry living in Japan, to raise awareness of the project. On September 3, 2024, a new version of Birth of the Chosen One was published by InterVarsity Press. Since the it has received 6 awards in children’s books categories. 

Then, in 2014, we published When the Great Spirit Walked Among Us, a harmony of the Gospels told in the style of the FNV. Finally, in January of 2015, I settled in to begin the verse-by-verse translation of the New Testament with Matthew. Early in my efforts, on April 1, 2015, we received an email from Wayne Johnson, then CEO of OneBook Canada, a Bible translation organization. He had discovered our FNV Project website from a Google search. After several phone conversations and a meeting together, Rain Ministries entered into a partnership in June 2015 with OneBook to produce the First Nations Version New Testament.

I was encouraged to form a translation council to help guide the process. We formed a council of 12 from different tribal heritages and geographic regions—both elders and young people, men and women. In September and October of that year, leaders from OneBook and Wycliffe Associates gathered our council together for a week in Orlando, Florida, and then two weeks in Calgary, Canada. These gatherings helped us determine the method of translation and establish over 180 key terms used in the New Testament.

It was decided that since I (Terry Wildman) had been developing the translation style for several years, I would do all the initial translation, and then other First Nations volunteers would review and make suggestions. After that a retired consultant, with over 50 years of translation experience, reviewed the text and gave feedback. But the final wording was always the choice of the translation council. 

In the first two years of this project, Rain Ministries produced two paperback books: Gospel of Luke and Ephesians and Walking the Good Road: The Gospels, Acts, and Ephesians. Several ministries have adopted and adapted the use of these for their Native departments: Foursquare Native Ministries, Lutheran Indian Ministries, Montana Indian Ministries, Native InterVarsity, and Cru Nations. The response has been greater than we expected.

On August 31, 2021, the FNV New Testament was released by the publisher InterVarsity Press. Since then it has sold more that 100,000 copies. 

As of July 1, 2022, IV Press agreed to publish the First Nations Version of Psalms and Proverbs. We anticipated a two-year time frame and formed a new translation council to launch the project. The council formally launched the project with an in-person gathering at the InterVarsity Press facility near Chicago on August 15–18, 2022. The translation was finished and turned over to InterVarsity Press for publication in May of 2024. Then on August 5th 2025 it was released. 

More info about the Psalms and Proverbs Project here:
https://firstnationsversion.com/about/fnv-psalms-proverbs/

Many calls to do the entire Old Testament continued to come in both to Rain Ministries and InterVarsity Press. After much prayer and consideration we signed a contract with InterVarsity Press on August 5, 2025 to complete the remainder of the Old Testament. The plan is to publish it in 4 sections. Section One: Genesis through Joshua. Section Two: Judges through Esther. Section Three: Major and Minor Prophets. And the Forth section will be the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, after completing the remainder of the Wisdom Books. One of the greatest challenges we face is translating the meaning of the 2700 names of people and places. But we are up to the task with the help of Hebrew lexicons and Hebrew language consultants. 

We anticipate approximately 2 to 2.5 years to complete each major section, with the exception of the final section—the Wisdom Books—which we estimate will take 1 year to translate and another to publish. Our goal is to have the complete Bible published by or before mid-2035.

As far as we know, this is the first English translation done by Natives for Natives. Our prayer is that it will open Native hearts to Creator Sets Free (Jesus) and that it will be a gift from our Native people to the dominant culture in the U.S. and to the body of Christ in English-speaking nations worldwide.

Miigwech Bizindowiyeg (thank you for listening).