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ОглавлениеMetlakatla
Chapter 1
A Beacon of Light
William Duncan and Metlakatla
Thus the surrounding tribes have now a model village before them, acting as a powerful witness for the truth of the Gospel, shaming and correcting, yet still captivating them …
—William Duncan, letter to Church Missionary Society, 1863
A prolonged spell of early May sunshine blessed my first visit to Metlakatla, in the mid-1990s. This was a rare and auspicious sign on British Columbia’s wet north coast, and band employees were enjoying their coffee break on the steps of the administration office, gazing out at the view as they basked in the unaccustomed warmth. People had been taking advantage of the weather to dry a papery black seaweed that they first soaked in clam juice. I’d tried some and it was good: salty and crisp. Eight kilometres away, across the harbour, the citizens of Prince Rupert were shucking raincoats and boots and searching for sunblock.
With only forty-five homes and 130 inhabitants, the Tsimshian First Nations village of Metlakatla was a small and sleepy place. It still is. No road connects it to the wider world. At the time of my visit, a herring roe-on-kelp aquaculture operation lay just offshore, and a dozen gillnetters were tied up snugly at a recently built marina. Each weekday morning, school kids headed to Prince Rupert on the Sisayda Lady, a powerful water taxi owned by the community. The youngsters’ return in the afternoon was about as exciting as things got. (That hasn’t changed, though by 2015 the Tsimshian villages of Metlakatla, Kitkatla and Hartley Bay were also jointly operating a larger, co-owned vessel, the Tsimshian Storm, which linked them to Prince Rupert with regular service and also ran to the outlying port of Oona River.)
Next to the band office, a dilapidated picket fence enclosed two eighty-year-old cypress trees and the toppled gravestone of an Anglican missionary. Nearby stood other stone markers—one in the form of a totem pole, another dated 1884. Looming over them hung a placard, one of those familiar green and gold “place of interest” notices that the government used to scatter all over the province in order to get travellers to stop their cars and absorb a little history. Only here, 760 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, where there were neither highways nor tourists, it looked a little out of place.
The sign’s bald description hardly did justice to Metlakatla’s peculiar heritage. In the 1870s and 1880s, well before Prince Rupert was even a gleam in a railroad baron’s eye, it was a key spot on the north coast: a self-sufficient “model Indian village,” complete with Victorian-style houses, streetlamps, a sawmill, cannery, school, jail, store and one of the largest churches in North America. Metlakatla had its own ships, a uniformed Tsimshian constabulary and a fine brass band.
This unusual nineteenth-century community was the utopian vision of an Anglican lay missionary named William Duncan. By our standards, Duncan was an autocrat—paternalistic, manipulative, even cruel. But by the standards of the day, he was a huge success. He became a celebrity, the subject of several books. Government First Nations affairs departments frequently copied his methods. For a few years, Metlakatla was the world’s most famous example of how Christianity could supposedly transform and elevate First Nations people.
Times changed. Duncan quarrelled with both church and state, and moved his mission to Alaska in 1887. In 1901, the original model village burned to the ground. “It all seems like ancient history now,” band manager Fran Reece had told me earlier. “The story of the original mission was never passed down to us. People here have divided opinions about Duncan.”
Other Metlakatlans were less diplomatic about their past. “I don’t think you’ll find too many Duncan fans here anymore,” said band councillor Carol Beynon. She and fellow councillor Susan Yorke were sitting beside me on the band office steps, both wearing green and black volunteer firefighter jackets. I’d been asking them about the community’s attitudes towards its famous former patron.
“Duncan had a very negative influence on residential school development in BC,” Beynon explained, referring to an education process that separated First Nations children from their families and punished them for following First Nations customs. “The schools were all based on the Metlakatla model. But the perfect little world Duncan created turned out to be not so perfect after all. In the longhouse tradition, there was little abuse. In the schools …” Her voice tapered off, but she didn’t need to finish. We are all familiar with the grotesque catalogue of social and sexual misdeeds that the residential system engendered, its legacy of lost and damaged lives. “Probably the only thing we didn’t lose,” she continued, “was the preparation and gathering of traditional foods.”
“We’re even losing that now,” responded David Nelson, the band’s youth worker, who had joined the conversation. “If Duncan hadn’t come to this community, we’d still be practising our Indian ways. It’s difficult for our young people to revive traditional practices because of how far we have moved away from them. This is because of Duncan.”
Blamed and reviled by many, revered and imitated by others, the missionary’s bequest to succeeding generations was complex and controversial. Anthropologist Philip Drucker claimed that Duncan left a deeper mark on north Pacific First Nations history than any other single person. The story of this strong-willed, energetic man and the two idealistic communities he helped create is one of the most compelling tales the West Coast has to offer.
William Duncan was twenty-four when he was chosen as the Anglican Church Missionary Society’s first emissary to the wilds of British Columbia. Born in 1832 near Beverley in Yorkshire, he abandoned a promising career as a salesman with a local tannery after deciding that what he really wanted to do was missionary work. He applied to the society, was accepted and went off for two years to the teacher-training facility of Highbury College. When the call came in late 1856, he packed up his missionary kit—blacksmithing and carpentry tools, shovels and rakes, medical supplies, prayer books—and set off on the six-month journey around Cape Horn to Fort Victoria.
Duncan may have seemed an improbable candidate for the important new post. In fact, he was fairly representative of the young men England was sending out to bring civilization and Christianity to her colonial subjects. According to the Christian Missionary Intelligencer, the society’s newsletter, someone of “undaunted courage, of well-nigh indomitable determination and will-power, of unlimited faith in God, and of good, sound judgement” was sought, “as the entire management of the mission would practically depend on him alone, without the aid and direction of the society.” Duncan fit the job description well. Although he was never ordained as a priest, he was tough, tireless and brave—a dedicated teacher with a practical background.
At the helm of the Church Missionary Society in the mid-nineteenth century was an influential figure named Henry Venn. Venn believed that the aim of missionary work was to improve the lives of indigenous people, not just to accumulate large numbers of converts. He expected the society’s agents to help their charges achieve economic self-sufficiency. Industrial and commercial skills were to be imparted as well as the gospel. Then, after First Nations leaders and pastors were installed, missionaries were to move on and conquer fresh territory.
Missionary societies were at the peak of their popularity in England in the 1850s. There was great curiosity about exotic cultures. Bold explorers such as Richard Burton and famed missionary David Livingstone became cultural heroes. Donations poured in to support the societies, and many young people offered their services to the cause. Mission jobs were considered glamorous—a chance for tradesmen and artisans, in particular, to rise in status. Even labourers, who were near the bottom of Victorian England’s rigid social ladder, found opportunities in mission work to break free of the class system.
Duncan’s choice of vocation may well have been prompted by feelings of social inadequacy. He never revealed much about his origins, but thanks to the exhaustive research of Peter Murray, whose The Devil and Mr. Duncan: A History of the Two Metlakatlas is the most authoritative source on the subject, we know that he was born out of wedlock and raised by working-class grandparents. The fatherless boy came under the spell of a Beverley clergyman, Reverend Anthony Carr, who filled him with religious zeal. Duncan’s journals reveal a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: shame about his family origins, contempt for those who lacked his piety, anger at his own shortcomings. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, after listening to a lecture on the Church Missionary Society, the exciting overseas life of an evangelical teacher began increasingly to appeal to him.
William Duncan, shown here at about the age of 40, would lose even more hair later in life, and his bushy beard would turn snow white. Image A-01175 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
A short, stocky figure whose trademark features later in life would be a thick beard and a receding hairline, Duncan arrived at the small Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading post of Fort Victoria in June 1857. A year later, the great Fraser River gold rush would transform the entire region, but in 1857 Victoria was a quiet spot, with a non–First Nations population of only about two hundred. It was the undisputed domain of James Douglas, chief factor of the company and governor of the crown colony of Vancouver Island. Douglas fully expected to decide on the location of Duncan’s mission.
The Anglican church, however, had already chosen a mission site. James Prevost, captain of a Royal Navy sloop based on the West Coast, had been appalled by the lawless scenes he’d observed at Fort Simpson, a Hudson’s Bay post in northern BC. He appealed to the church to establish a presence there. Douglas didn’t really want a mission on the north coast. He feared—rightly, as it turned out—that Duncan might disrupt the profitable fur trade, and told him the area was too dangerous. But the church and navy insisted, and Douglas acquiesced. Until passage became available, Duncan moved in with Reverend Edward Cridge, Fort Victoria’s chaplain. The young missionary spent the summer studying Chinook, the regional trade jargon, and Tsimshian, the north-coast First Nations language.
When he finally reached Fort Simpson in October, more than nine months after leaving England, Duncan found a tidy, fifty-metre-square log palisade, painted white with bright red trim, surmounted by two gun bastions and eight cannons. The Hudson’s Bay Company would provide him with room and board there for the next four years. After running a gauntlet of curious First Nations people, the self-conscious Duncan joined eighteen post employees and their families behind the wooden pickets; outside, a First Nations encampment of more than 2,300 souls occupied about 140 traditional longhouses.
The fort had been built in 1834 between the mouths of the Nass and Skeena rivers, about 850 kilometres northwest of Victoria. It lay in the heartland of the Tsimshian people—avid middlemen in the fur trade—who bought skins from neighbouring bands and sold them at the fort. Entire bands had left their villages and moved their longhouses to Fort Simpson to be close to the action. By the 1850s, it had become one of the largest permanent settlements on the west coast of North America.
Duncan was understandably apprehensive about the task before him. “I feel almost crushed with my sense of position,” he wrote in his journal. “My loneliness, the greatness of the work, which seems ever increasing before me … together with deepening views of my utter weakness: these indeed at times seem ready to overwhelm me, but the Lord is my refuge.”
The new arrival began his duties by conducting church services and school lessons for the fur traders and their children. He engaged as a language tutor a bright young Tsimshian named Clah. The fluency that Duncan eventually achieved with the local language was fundamental to his success; most other missionaries in British Columbia, despite genuine efforts, were unable to master a First Nations tongue. With no alphabet or dictionary to help him, Duncan compiled a list of fifteen hundred common English words and, through a combination of Chinook and charades, he managed to learn their Tsimshian equivalents.
He also visited each longhouse and studied First Nations customs. Tsimshian dwellings were framed with giant posts and beams and smaller rafters, then covered with cedar planks that could be removed and transported between winter and summer habitations. A big lodge might house an extended clan of thirty or more people, with each individual family having its own eating and sleeping areas. Furnishings were minimal, but included cooking utensils, bark mats and bentwood boxes for storing valuables. Tsimshian society was hierarchical and competitive; aristocrats had larger living quarters, and the most imposing structures belonged to important chiefs.
Although clearly impressed with Tsimshian craftsmanship in wood and other natural materials, Duncan managed, simultaneously, to abhor their “garish” house and body decorations. He primly refused to take any pleasure in ceremonial dancing and viewed potlatch habits, where chiefs gained status by giving away goods, as a barbarous waste. He was also horrified, though with more reason, by the casual Tsimshian cruelty to slaves, the endemic drunkenness and prostitution, and the murders that regularly occurred beyond the walls of the fort. “Intoxicating drink,” he felt, was the root problem. Although supposedly illegal as a trade medium, alcohol was widely available—and the cause of much grief—on the coast.
Duncan’s journal reveals a high regard for the intelligence and industry of the people he had come to convert, though he soon grew doubtful about his mandate, which was to turn them into farmers, following the example of successful missionaries elsewhere in the world. On the north Pacific coast, where the great coniferous forests stretched to the ocean’s edge and the annual rainfall often exceeded four metres, large-scale agriculture was a fantasy. The Tsimshian had no need to farm, in any case; they had built a rich, stable, complex culture from the abundant resources of land and sea.
The inhabitants of Fort Simpson showed great interest in the intense young missionary, who was unlike any foreign intruder they had yet encountered. They assumed that his role was not unlike that of their own shamans. The Tsimshian were intent on acquiring and converting to their own use the various and singular powers that the white strangers seemed to possess, and they were open to hearing this newcomer’s message.
During his first winter, Duncan restricted his activities to starting a modest school for Tsimshian children and evening classes for adults. He translated hymns, conducted drills and marches, and introduced the concept of writing. He visited the sick and the elderly and tried to dispense a little preventative medical advice. Within the walls of the fort, however, his characteristic stubbornness soon became evident. Duncan refused, for instance, to conduct Sunday services while fort employees were still working. After an angry exchange, factor William Henry McNeill backed down and allowed his men to observe the Sabbath.
By the summer of 1858, Duncan felt comfortable enough with the Tsimshian language to begin sermonizing in the village. He started in the longhouse of Neyahshnawah, the friendliest chief. “My heart quailed greatly,” he confided to his journal. “I knelt down to crave God’s blessing, and afterwards I gave them the address. They were all remarkably attentive.” He repeated the procedure at the house of Legaic, the most powerful chief, who was not so friendly but couldn’t appear to be less hospitable than his rivals. By day’s end, Duncan had delivered simple explanations of the Bible and Christian purpose to nine longhouses and nine hundred individuals. It was the first time that BC’s First Nations people had been preached to in their own tongue.
Over the next two years, Duncan went on teaching and preaching, and gathered a group of fifty or more adherents. In “Bringing the Indians to their Knees,” a Raincoast Chronicles essay, Howard White looks closely at these early days, noting that Duncan’s followers were mostly young and low-born, people on the fringes of Tsimshian society. He was making little serious headway with the chiefs and shamans, several of whom were implacably opposed to him. Others seemed polite and even captivated by Christian ways, says White, but had a blithe and irritating tendency to continue traditional practices. The winter ceremonies of dancing and potlatching were as popular as ever—and so was alcohol.
Duncan had a penchant for sensationalizing the so-called savagery of the Tsimshian in his letters to the missionary society, which were published in the Intelligencer and found a wide audience. In one notorious report, he described a secret society ritual and implied that the Tsimshian were cannibals. He later declared that he knew this was not the case; Hamatsa dancers merely feigned the eating of flesh in a performance designed to induce fear and loathing in onlookers. The misleading impression created by Duncan’s letter dogged First Nations culture for decades (though the spectre of cannibalism did prompt a surge of donations to the society).
In 1860, Duncan visited Nisga’a villages on the Nass River, then spent the summer in Victoria. He discussed with James Douglas a momentous idea he had been mulling over: moving the mission. He had written to his superiors in England, suggesting that “a colony ought to be established in some spot where industry would be taught and rewarded; and where intoxicating drinks would be excluded.” He believed that “no real or permanent good, in my humble opinion, can be effected” at Fort Simpson, but that “we might reasonably expect the Gospel tree to take root” at some other location. Douglas supported the plan and agreed to reserve any necessary lands.
The governor was pleased with Duncan’s progress, and asked for his advice on controlling Victoria’s growing First Nations encampments. Duncan came up with a list of regulations for the rowdy suburbs and recommended that his rules be enforced by First Nations constables, with troublemakers punished or sent away. Douglas ignored his proposals, but Duncan’s ideas were not wasted, as he would adopt a similar style of village governance when he left Fort Simpson. On his return journey north, he had English company for a change; Reverend Lewen Tugwell and his wife had been sent out to assist him.
The next eighteen months were difficult ones for Duncan. He had one notable success—the baptism of the first Tsimshian Christians by Reverend Tugwell—but Fort Simpson’s chronic violence depressed him. His health was sabotaged by a severe bronchial infection, and he barely escaped death in several terrifying confrontations with First Nations opponents. The Tugwells went back home; they were not fit enough to endure the work or the climate. Duncan was left isolated and lonely. For true company he had only his dream of “a model Christian village, reflecting light and radiating heat to all the spiritually dark and dead masses around us.” His dream was alive, however. The location of the new colony had been chosen: twenty-five kilometres south, at an important former winter village site named Metlakatla, or “a passage connecting two bodies of salt water.” The move was set for spring.
In May of 1862, while an advance party was cutting timbers and planting potatoes at Metlakatla, alarming news arrived from Victoria. Another smallpox epidemic was at large on the coast. Using the dreaded plague as a stimulus, Duncan exhorted his followers to quickly dismantle the combined mission and schoolhouse that had been erected at Fort Simpson the previous year and flee. About seventy Tsimshians paddled to their new home, set up camp and began the exhausting work of rebuilding a community.
A week later, the epidemic struck Fort Simpson with a vengeance, and three hundred more natives arrived at Metlakatla. They were accepted only if they agreed to abide by Duncan’s fifteen commandments. A complete change of lifestyle was required: no more shamanism, gambling, potlatching, face-painting, “deviltry” and, of course, drinking. Prospective Metlakatlans had to rest on Sunday, attend church, send their children to school, be industrious, peaceful, clean and “liberal and honest in trade.” They had to “build neat houses” and pay a village tax.
By July, the plague reached Metlakatla. Duncan had managed to secure a shipment of vaccine from Reverend Cridge in Victoria, and he worked frantically to inoculate his flock. By some estimates, the 1862 epidemic killed one-third of the coastal population; Fort Simpson alone saw more than five hundred deaths. But only five Metlakatlans were lost, and the village’s reputation as a holy sanctuary was born. By August, Duncan estimated that six hundred people were living there. The vaccine had proven stronger than the shamans’ medicine; resistance to Duncan’s way of doing things diminished. The Tsimshian spirit had been subdued, if not crushed, by the holocaust of disease. And the word of the tenacious little missionary became law.
By the end of 1862, Duncan and the villagers had erected about thirty houses in Metlakatla, plus a combined church and school that could seat six hundred. Most people spent the winter in bark-covered huts. Duncan convened a village council consisting of himself, the hereditary chiefs and twenty people elected from the community at large. A corps of constables and a group of church elders were also elected. The community was organized into companies, each led by three councillors, two elders and two constables. Company leaders were given eighteen specific instructions to follow; among other responsibilities, they were to visit the sick, consult together, raise money and admonish backsliders.
The firm hand of the schoolteacher is evident in this village plan, yet it seems to have worked. The Tsimshian may have accepted the new social structure because of its vague similarity to the crest or phratry divisions of the coastal bands. It also solved, at least temporarily, one of the largest problems Duncan faced: how to avoid alienating the chiefs. Social rank was of great importance to Tsimshian society. By involving the chiefs, who had lost much authority in the move to Metlakatla, in major decisions, Duncan hoped to avoid their disaffection. Leaders received badges of office, to be worn on special occasions. On New Year’s Day, the proudly emblazoned chiefs led their companies to the main square for speeches and celebration.
Duncan moved quickly to introduce industry and trade to his new realm, to help it become self-sufficient and fulfill the expectations of Henry Venn and the Church Missionary Society. Foremost in his plans were a sawmill, a fish-processing plant and a store. Duncan modelled his approach on self-supporting villages that the society had established in Africa, India and New Zealand, and on an English co-operative village scheme, which never came to much, promoted by the Anglican church as a “practical demonstration of Christian brotherhood and unity.” These experiments, in turn, had been influenced by Moravian Brethren settlements in England, where members had to agree to abide by certain rules—and by the relatively humane design of new British industrial towns like Saltaire.
So that his mission should not be at the mercy of the Hudson’s Bay trading posts, Duncan purchased a fifteen-metre schooner. The Carolena took Metlakatla’s furs, salted and smoked fish, oolichan oil, dried berries, lumber, cedar shingles, mats and First Nations handicrafts directly to Victoria, the most competitive market on the coast, and returned with a wide assortment of manufactured goods. A store was opened, which outbid the Bay for skins and sold merchandise at lower prices. To the chagrin of established traders, Metlakatla soon began to monopolize the regional fur business.
In 1863, Douglas appointed Duncan a magistrate, and the missionary turned his attention to the illegal traffic in alcohol, which continued in his area. Metlakatla’s First Nations constables participated in “sting” operations, first posing as buyers and then arresting the whiskey dealers. Heavy fines were imposed and boats were impounded. Corrupt traders had been the bane of Duncan’s existence for years, and he went a bit overboard in his pursuit of justice, nabbing several likely parties on insufficient evidence. Victoria’s upright citizens were outraged at the prospect of First Nations authorities apprehending and punishing white criminals. Duncan was reprimanded and the charges dropped. Alcohol sales continued.
Duncan had always been strong on law. He was proud of Metlakatla’s lack of crime. The villagers were free to leave or stay, but if they stayed, they obeyed the rules. Metlakatla had a jail as well as a police force, and offenders were disciplined by flogging, incarceration and fines. Bonds might be posted to ensure good behaviour. Persistent transgressors were shamed with a black flag hung outside their door. Corporal punishment for children, both boys and girls, was frequent.
Metlakatla flourished and grew stronger as the 1860s progressed. More missionaries joined Duncan from England. Some soon faltered and returned to familiar terrain or, like Robert Cunningham, left Christian service altogether and metamorphosed into Hudson’s Bay Company traders. Others, like Arthur Doolan, Robert Tomlinson and William Collison, became trusted Duncan aides, later going on to found or supervise miniature versions of Metlakatla at Kincolith on Nass Bay, Masset in Haida Gwaii and Alert Bay to the south. For while Metlakatla was the most complex and autonomous “model Christian village” founded in British Columbia at this time, it was not the only one. Other branches of the church were involved in similar projects even before the 1862 epidemic.
Father Peter Rondeault, for instance, established an early Roman Catholic mission, school and farm at Cowichan in 1858. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate also did pioneering work in BC, founding Catholic “model” villages at Sechelt and North Vancouver, and later at Mission and Williams Lake. First Nations culture was generally allowed freer scope in Oblate villages than at Metlakatla—except in the boarding schools. There, First Nations languages and customs were forbidden; children who reverted to old ways were punished, and those punishments left scars that have lasted to the present day. Other well-known mission villages were founded in the 1870s, including at Hesquiat on the wind-swept west coast of Vancouver Island, by Father Augustin Brabant; at Fort Simpson, by the Methodist missionary Reverend Thomas Crosby; and at St. Eugene in the East Kootenays, by Father Léon Fouquet.
St. Paul’s, Metlakatla’s great church, was constructed of red cedar and could hold 1,200. The building was finished in 1874 and burned to the ground in 1901. Image B-03572 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
But none were quite as elaborate and evolved as Metlakatla. By 1870, Duncan had enough confidence in his helpers to return to England where, as well as raising funds for the mission, he researched several cottage industries that he wished to introduce on his return: weaving, rope-making and the manufacture of shoes, clogs and brushes. He purchased a weaving machine. He also studied music, so that a donated brass band set might be put to good use. Upon arriving back in Metlakatla thirteen months later, he handed out the instruments and told the Tsimshians “to go out in the bushes and blow.” The results, he noted in his journal, were at first pure “bedlam,” but his followers became accomplished musicians, and the village band was a byword up and down the BC coast.
The construction, in 1874, of St. Paul’s Church launched Metlakatla into its golden age. With a vestibule, gallery, belfry and spire, groined arches and solid timber frame, this Gothic cathedral—reportedly the largest church west of Chicago and north of San Francisco—could accommodate twelve hundred. Although it had an organ and a hand-carved pulpit, and sported stained-glass windows and Brussels carpet in the aisles, the interior was otherwise simple. In keeping with Duncan’s belief that ritual or symbol might incite Tsimshian emotions, there were no crosses or altars.
By the late 1870s, Metlakatla could boast soap and textile factories, a tannery, cooperage, guesthouse, fire hall and dog pound. Villagers lived in two-storey single-family residences with enclosed flower gardens; pairs of houses were linked with one-storey common areas. According to White’s “Bringing the Indians to their Knees,” people wore European clothes and dressed “very tastefully.” One visitor was “not sure but that they have the latest fashions.” Residents promenaded after work along a three-metre-wide macadamized sidewalk that ran the length of the village. Oolichan-oil street lamps hung in front of each home. The thirty-man police force had boots and caps, and brass buttons on their uniforms.
Work and worship were the primary village activities, but Duncan made sure that there was leisure time as well. Soccer matches were held on two playing fields; a choir practised regularly, as did, of course, the band. There was a museum and reading room, a bandstand, a printing press and a playground with climbing bars and a merry-go-round. The Tsimshian love of potlatching was redirected towards other forms of communal festivity; Christmas, New Year’s, Victoria Day, birthdays and house-raisings were all marked by celebrations.
Metlakatla became a destination: a state-of-the-art Christian colonial outpost. Rich tourists on round-the-world expeditions were astonished at how well the village mimicked English Victorian religious and social values. Government officials and other missionaries dropped by in order to learn the latest techniques for turning unruly First Nations people into exemplary citizens. Lord Dufferin, Canada’s Governor General, paid a vice-regal visit in 1876. He had high praise, reported the Victoria Daily Colonist, for “the neat Indian maidens, as modest and as well-dressed as any clergyman’s daughter in an English parish.” At about the same time, Bishop George Hills was able to write to his superiors that Metlakatla “has now grown to one thousand people, forming the healthiest and strongest settlement on the coast.”
Magazine and newspaper articles were especially effusive, portraying Duncan as a brilliant, divinely inspired figure who was single-handedly civilizing the First Nations people of the West Coast. In his 1909 book, The Apostle of Alaska, John Arctander called the missionary an extraordinary leader and claimed that he had “fewer faults than any man I ever met.” But all was not quite as well at Metlakatla as these glowing reports led readers to believe. Duncan did have faults. Even if he’d had none, disruptive external forces were also beginning to shake his pedestal.
At the heart of the changes that were about to sweep down on the model village were growing rifts between William Duncan and his superiors. One of these superiors was Bishop Hills, who was based in Victoria and whose diocese comprised the entire province. Hills was not a typical frontier churchman. His tastes, both personal and liturgical, were far from simple and direct. Patrician in manner, the son of an admiral, he was “high church,” and Duncan took an immediate dislike to him.
Hills wanted Duncan to be ordained. Metlakatla had become important, and the bishop felt a clergyman should be in charge. Duncan, somewhat mysteriously, resisted taking holy orders all his life. He did not feel “called,” he said, and worried that ordination would interfere with his secular duties. Hills was also concerned about Duncan’s refusal to offer the Eucharist at his church services. But how, argued the missionary, could you serve communion wine to people who were sworn not to consume alcohol? The austere Metlakatla church, the lack of priestly vestments, the total absence of pomp and pageantry—these things distressed Bishop Hills, for ceremony was at the core of his version of Christianity.
Back in England, the Church Missionary Society was displeased with Duncan as well. Officials there expected him to groom First Nations clergymen. They wanted more of the day-to-day operations of the mission turned over to Tsimshian leaders. Ironically, Duncan’s efforts had produced potential leaders—articulate, capable men such as David Leask and Robert Hewson—but he always seemed to have some excuse for why Metlakatla was not yet ready for independence. Duncan often claimed that he was willing to move on and prepare new ground for God, but this next, supposedly obligatory stage in his career never seemed to arrive.
In 1877, an incident occurred that gave Duncan a convincing reason to stick around. He left the mission in the care of a new arrival, a young minister named James Hall, and went to Victoria. Hall’s passionate, near-hysterical style of preaching, as opposed to Duncan’s low-key approach, resulted in an unexpected wave of religious frenzy. Some congregation members heard divine voices; others saw angels. A group of girls discovered a mystical cross in the woods. Several dozen men set off in canoes to take the news to Fort Simpson. Hall was panic-stricken at this turn of events.
Duncan rushed home and managed, with difficulty, to settle everyone down. It was just as he had predicted: the Tsimshian were too childlike to be left to their own devices. They required more training. They needed him, and he could not leave. The incident revealed the community’s fatal flaw: Duncan needed Metlakatla as much as it needed him. He and his model village were like co-dependants in an unhealthy marriage. He had created this beacon of light and defended it against detractors, and now he was unable to surrender control.
Although Metlakatla appeared outwardly to possess a degree of self-governance, everything important depended on Duncan’s initiative and authority. The Tsimshian village council held lengthy discussions and made community decisions, but Duncan was always there in the background, subtly guiding the meetings so that the decisions made were the ones he wanted. His view of the mission was paternalistic; he could not allow his children to grow up and live their own lives. He couldn’t let go.
At first, Duncan had been keen to translate religious texts so that villagers could worship in their own tongue. But his efforts in that department began to flag; village church services were soon held exclusively in English. Duncan justified this change by saying that since English would surely become dominant on the British Columbia coast, everyone might as well get used to it. But this reliance on the language of the colonizer also increased his level of control.
In 1879, Hills persuaded church authorities to split his domain in three—partly, one can’t help thinking, so that he would no longer have to deal with Duncan. A new diocese of Caledonia, covering northern BC, was formed, with Metlakatla as its headquarters. A new bishop, William Ridley, was appointed and soon arrived, with his wife Jane, to take up residence. Bishop Ridley had a history of health problems and an undistinguished past; he was an odd choice for the wilderness posting. He agreed with Hills on matters ecclesiastical and was horrified that a mere lay missionary should possess such freedom and authority. The scene was set for a rapid escalation of the conflicts simmering between Duncan and the church.
Ridley, backed by the missionary society, began to pressure Duncan to offer Holy Communion and conduct services in Tsimshian. Duncan countered by suggesting a modified Eucharist; his version would include a symbolic communal meal but avoid wine and any reference to consuming Christ’s body. He feared the natives might interpret the sacrament as an endorsement of cannibalism, and the possible consequences alarmed him, especially after the Hall fiasco. The bishop rejected this compromise.
In this 1880s view of Metlakatla, the industrial buildings are on stilts over the beach, the mission house is at the far right beside St. Paul’s Church and the residents’ homes start at the upper left. Image G-04699 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
The society’s officers agreed with Hills and Ridley that an ordained minister must run the mission. Duncan could be moved elsewhere, they thought, or forced into a subordinate role. The missionary tried to negotiate around this impasse by proposing that England cease to fund Metlakatla. It would serve as a lay example of self-sufficiency—a model industrial village, which it already was. This suggestion was also rebuffed.
Realizing that a showdown was probably at hand, the society had sent a letter of dismissal for Bishop Ridley to give Duncan if an understanding could not be reached. Neither party was willing to make concessions, and the fateful letter was delivered in the spring of 1882. Duncan, in a fury, immediately moved out of the mission house. The great campaign for Metlakatla was now reaching its final stages.
When Duncan informed the Tsimshian that he was unemployed, they quickly rallied round him and prepared a house for his use. A small group of disgruntled chiefs and their families, about fifty in all, who saw this latest development as a chance to unseat Duncan, declared their support for Ridley. The bishop, greatly outnumbered, decided that the wise course of action might be to absent himself temporarily. He sailed off to London to explain the situation, leaving an uncomfortable William Collison in theoretical charge.
The villagers decided they would establish an independent Christian church with Duncan and carry on as usual. Metlakatla’s latest project—and a major new business venture—was a cannery, and that kept people busy. But Bishop Ridley went on the attack. On his return to BC, he wrote and circulated a sensational pamphlet accusing Duncan of cruelty, and sexual and financial misconduct. Duncan certainly employed corporal punishment at the mission, but no hint of moral impropriety ever attached itself to him over the course of a long career, and his financial record was brilliant. Ridley’s charges were probably based on little else than his deep dislike for his competitor. Victoria, though, was suitably amazed and entertained by this latest scandal.
Things got worse. While Duncan and the bishop were exchanging insulting letters, the two factions at Metlakatla exchanged threats. A small piece of land, less than a hectare, had been reserved in the name of the missionary society. The mission house stood there but not the church or the school or most of the businesses, which were located on the larger First Nations reserve. No one was certain which reserve Duncan’s store was on, so his followers dismantled and moved it, much to Ridley’s anger. The bishop, in turn, announced that the school, which had been built with society money, would be turned into another church, but he was prevented by Duncan and his supporters from making any changes. Then Ridley got into a punch-up with a group of natives over the ownership of a drum. He sent an urgent message to Victoria suggesting that lawlessness and chaos prevailed in the community and that lives—his, in particular, and that of his wife—were in danger.
The government had no choice but to respond. Ridley was a bishop, after all. No navy ship was available, and a US cutter, the Oliver Wolcott, had to be called in. Several dignitaries, including Indian superintendent Dr. Israel Powell and the head of the provincial police, piled aboard, and the Wolcott raced north to protect Metlakatla’s beleaguered minority. They found the village tense but in no danger of civil war, handed out ten-dollar fines to two First Nations men for assault and left, no doubt shaking their heads over the strange behaviour of clerics. Even though the Wolcott’s services were provided for free, this little escapade cost the province $7,000, a pretty sum in 1883.
The following year, after further incidents and a general state of First Nations unrest on the north coast, the government decided to launch an official enquiry into Metlakatla’s problems. As the core issues concerned property ownership, the hearings quickly focused on the question of First Nations land rights, which BC’s bureaucrats had been infamously unsympathetic to over the years. In their report, the enquiry commissioners reinforced old attitudes, which basically held that First Nations people had no land rights whatsoever. The reserves set aside for them were perfectly adequate, and the Crown, not First Nations people or their missionary advisors, would determine the uses those reserves could be put to.
Duncan, anxious that the Metlakatlans should own their land or at least have substantial control over the village, took his fight to Ottawa. He felt that First Nations people should receive individual title to individual plots of reserve land. He wanted guarantees that federal reserves would not be sold or altered. He disputed the right of the Church Missionary Society to any mission property, arguing that the land had merely been reserved in trust. Now that the majority of villagers wished to form an independent church, the property should be handed over to them. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, who was also superintendent general of Indian affairs, slyly agreed with Duncan but authorized no change in policy. After lobbying by church officials, though, he decided to award the disputed reserve to the missionary society.
This last betrayal started Duncan thinking about moving his operation. A missionary society commission descended on Metlakatla and wrote a report criticizing his leadership. In 1886, disputes arose over Ridley’s attempts to survey church land in Metlakatla, and that fall, in a related trespassing case, BC chief justice Matthew Begbie reiterated that the villagers had no legal rights to the land. The Tsimshian village council finally consented to have Duncan go to Washington, DC, and ask for permission to immigrate. There he met Henry Wellcome, a young pharmaceutical magnate and one of his most influential supporters.
At first, US government officials were oblivious to Duncan’s appeals. The last thing the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted was responsibility for a large group of Canadian First Nations people. Then Wellcome, a human publicity dynamo, went to work. For the next four months, Duncan addressed associations and boards, preached in the best and biggest churches and received countless column inches of newspaper coverage. Wellcome formed a committee of twenty-five prominent men to work behind the scenes. His 1887 book, The Story of Metlakahtla, created a huge, appreciative audience for Duncan’s plans.
Duncan even met President Grover Cleveland, who supported the move but was anxious to avoid an international incident. Eventually, US officials confirmed that if the missionary and his followers would select a site and move of their own accord, the government would recognize them and grant them squatters’ rights after they were settled. Duncan sent a message to Metlakatla, and in March 1887, a Tsimshian party set off by canoe. Within two weeks, the group had decided that uninhabited Annette Island, just over 110 kilometres north, fit their needs.
In August, Duncan, along with thirty tonnes of supplies and a portable sawmill, arrived via northbound steamer at Port Chester, a bay on the west side of the island where New Metlakatla was to be established. An advance guard from the old village was waiting, and US flags flew on improvised poles. Speeches were made on the beach, and the passengers and crew of the steamship joined the villagers in celebration. Over the next two weeks, despite Ridley’s opposition, buildings were dismantled and as much of Metlakatla as possible went on an ocean voyage. An enormous motley flotilla—canoes, rafts, fishing boats and virtually every vessel on the north coast that could be borrowed or chartered—ferried back and forth between the two sites. Eight hundred people travelled north. It was one of the largest human exoduses that Canada had ever known.
A week or so after my visit to the original Metlakatla, I flew to Annette Island to look in on the “new” version. Down at the village longhouse, the descendants of the early émigrés were performing for a group of tourists. The men and women of the Fourth Generation Dancers—clad in red and black button blankets, fringed tunics, beaded moccasins and exotic ermine-skin headgear—launched into a welcoming song. As it ended, they blew eagle down over the heads of their audience, then segued to a salmon dance, where some performers were fish and the rest acted like a human seine net. Metlakatla, which dropped “new” from its name long ago, was busy entertaining a few of the half-million cruise ship passengers who would visit nearby Ketchikan that summer (a figure that had risen to nearly 900,000 by 2014).
Outside, the sunny May weather continued. A “chain gang” was hard at work, clearing away garbage, cleaning and painting. Miscreants had been allowed to work off fines for minor offenses by helping prepare for the tourist season, and community members got a kick out of seeing their wrongdoers do right for a change. Nearby, Tim Gilmartin and his partner were finishing a salmon bakehouse. “Tourism means development, which allows people like us to continue working,” said Gilmartin, a carpenter and former council member and definitely not a miscreant. “It also gives our young people something to do—and perhaps something to look forward to in the future.”
New Metlakatla’s Fourth Generation troupe performs songs and dances for growing numbers of tourists. The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in traditional art forms. Andrew Scott
Metlakatla’s new-found interest in tourism was partly dictated by the economy. Up and down the Alaska coast, traditional forest and fishing industries were depressed—and the situation was unlikely to change much in the immediate future. In fact, the large Louisiana-Pacific sawmill located next to the village would go out of business in 1999, when the federal government ceased logging operations in the Tongass National Forest. In the 2000s, the community would remodel its heritage cannery, formerly used only for cold storage, as a gift shop and retool its fish-packing plant to produce smoked-salmon souvenirs and a variety of specialty Alaskan seafood. Today the village also has a bottled water plant and a gravel quarry. But perched as it is on the ocean’s edge, surrounded by islands and lush, mountain wilderness, Metlakatla feels that its physical assets and First Nations culture can be of much more interest to travellers. And the community can always play its trump card: history.
The village of Metlakatla, Alaska, has moved from a traditional logging- and fishing-based economy to cautiously embrace tourism. The old cannery now packs smoked-salmon souvenirs and other specialty Alaskan seafoods for its gift shop. Andrew Scott
Although this vigorous Tsimshian village of fourteen hundred people is not, geographically speaking, within the scope of this book, I cannot allow William Duncan and the Metlakatlans to disappear from these pages as abruptly as they did from British Columbia. The Alaskan community has its own lengthy history, so a brief overview will have to suffice.
As with the first Metlakatla, the second one also prospered, despite the difficulties of starting over in a wilderness region. An immense church was erected, plus a cannery and a sawmill. Architectural oddities appeared in the landscape, including an octagonal guesthouse and a twelve-sided community hall. Wooden boardwalks led between tree stumps to gingerbread-trimmed houses. The band and police force still had their brass-buttoned uniforms and, in honour of its new country of residence, the community formed a baseball team and celebrated the fourth of July. Today, few signs of the nineteenth-century village remain; only four original houses are left, plus William Duncan’s cottage, which is now the museum.
But Metlakatla also brought old problems to its new location. Duncan, sadly, grew more and more intransigent as he got older. With the help of Henry Wellcome and several US investors, he organized the colony’s financial and business affairs as a private company, over which he had complete and rigid control. He was inflexible about education, refusing to provide any kind of advanced or vocational training. In 1908, more than one hundred villagers complained about Duncan’s policies and petitioned for a government school. Five years later, one was authorized.
As it had been in BC, the community once again became divided. Many individuals had been with Duncan from the beginning and remained his staunch supporters. Others felt it was time the village ran its own affairs. Conflicts grew common once more; this time they were usually between Duncan and the government teacher or various Tsimshian leaders like Edward Marsden, who had received an education in the eastern US, and Benjamin Haldane. When the missionary seized control of the village water supply and closed off the wharf, people began to wonder if perhaps he was suffering from a form of dementia.
Despite the urgent pleas of the Metlakatla village council, US officials were loath to remove Duncan. “This old man is a good man,” wrote interior secretary Franklin Lane, “and has led a life of great usefulness, and I don’t believe in taking harsh measures with him excepting as a very last resort.” Finally, in 1915, Lane wrenched control from Duncan by deciding that the government—which had set Annette Island aside as a First Nations reserve in 1891, “subject to such restrictions as may be prescribed from time to time”—could, if it wished, manage the island’s facilities on behalf of its inhabitants. Today, those inhabitants manage their own affairs, but still operate under the terms of the 1891 agreement; they are the only First Nations group in Alaska not to have concluded a land-claims agreement, and Annette Island is the state’s only First Nations reserve.
This old postcard reveals William Duncan’s stubborn, unyielding personality as he stands in front of his cottage at Metlakatla, Alaska, a few years before his death in 1918 at age 86. Author’s Collection
Duncan continued to live at Metlakatla, embittered and broken in spirit. He had become a truly tragic figure: his self-sacrifice, endless labour, innovative methods and unselfish, humanitarian goals were, in the end, sabotaged by a stubborn, unyielding personality. He told Henry Wellcome, who would spend the next two decades defending the missionary’s reputation, that he and his supporters were being treated “much worse” in the US than they had been in BC. He died in the village in 1918, aged eighty-six, and was given an elaborate funeral.
Duncan is buried in front of his church, and many Metlakatlans continue to revere him. His old cottage has been preserved almost exactly the way he left it. Above the narrow bed, his hats and black suits still hang on the wall. His huge old Bible is on the table, his books stacked along the shelves. Part of the cottage was a clinic, and bottles of saccharated pepsin, Break-Up-A-Cold tablets and C & W worm syrup line the cabinets. Since Duncan’s death, however, his church has been joined by seven others, including Evangelical, Presbyterian and Mormon houses of worship. The community is no longer solely Christian, either. Traditional ways are slowly returning.
At a 1987 potlatch celebrating the centennial of the move to Annette Island, neighbouring First Nations groups gave the Metlakatlans a number of traditional songs and dances to replace the ones they had lost as a result of Duncan’s zeal. Now, First Nations performers entertain tourists. New totem poles adorn the townsite, and a number of eager Tsimshian artists and sculptors have gone on to professional careers after taking specialized courses at the Metlakatla high school.
Secular problems like alcohol abuse and petty crime have crept back into Metlakatla’s social life, but they haven’t destroyed the fabric of the community or its friendly, open atmosphere. Even the members of the work crew I saw cleaning up garbage to settle their debts to society seemed happy. Back at the band council offices at the end of the day, they were laughing and joking as they wiped the sweat from their brows and punched out their time cards. William Duncan, I can’t help but feel, would have approved.
In what way, one may ask, was Metlakatla a utopian community? Duncan’s followers, after all, had no sense of utopia, especially in the early days. Most of them were there to flee a plague. It was only with reluctance that they allowed themselves to come under the missionary’s control. Duncan took advantage of an extreme situation to persuade—or perhaps “coerce” is the better word—an unwilling group to adopt a way of life that many disagreed with and some were adamantly opposed to. With the scourge of smallpox hovering over them, community members perhaps felt they had little choice in the matter.
But William Duncan had a clear utopian vision. And in time his vision was shared by a number of his followers. His vision was deeply Christian, of course. It did not reflect the dissenter tradition that inspired groups like the Doukhobors. Duncan, after all, was Church of England. He was not doctrinaire, however, as many of his actions—his persistent avoidance of ordination, for example, and his readiness, when the situation called for it, to abandon Anglicanism and form an independent church—proved.
Although Duncan’s utopian dream may have emerged from his own deep spiritual fervour, he was a practical man and able to adapt his vision to the circumstances he encountered on the ground. He wanted to “captivate” the ungodly and “radiate heat” to them, but he realized that he could not do it by himself. He would need disciplined, obedient followers—and plenty of them—to support and help carry out his goals. Duncan was an opportunist. One wonders if Metlakatla would have achieved even a fraction of its success were it not for the timing of the smallpox epidemic, which provided him with a steady workforce of five hundred or more, rather than a few dozen itinerant disciples.
The fractured relationship between leader and followers caused the initial breakdown of the community. Similar collapses occurred with other utopian efforts. Later in this book, for instance, we will see parallels between Metlakatla and the Finnish settlement of Sointula on Malcolm Island—and, of course, with the Brother XII cult. In the early stages, when a spirit of openness was fundamental to getting a community up and running, there was a certain unanimity of vision. But as time passed, the leader turned dictatorial, and the followers either left or became very passive. What was once guidance became law. Dissent was forbidden. The leader’s views were sacrosanct.
