In 1820, the Rev. John West, inaugural chaplain of the Hudson’s Bay Company, met a young Cree boy named Sakachewescam in Norway House, Rupert’s Land. The boy was one of the original students at the first colonial school at the Red River Settlement and was baptised with the name Henry Budd. After ventures in agriculture, the HBC, and teaching, the Cree catechist and his family paddled 700 km to establish the first inland Church Missionary Society mission outside of Red River in 1840. On December 22, 1850, Budd became the first Indigenous man to be ordained deacon by the Anglican Church in North America; his 25-year ministry at the Devon Mission [The Pas/ Opaskwayak Cree Nation, MB] and Nepowewin Mission [James Smith First Nation, SK] brought him moderate fame within Anglican circles. As early as 1843, CMS secretary Henry Venn wrote of the “prayers and sympathies of many warm friends […] in behalf of Henry Budd and the infant Church which he has been instrumental in raising.” (Quoted in Brenda Hough, “Prelates and Pioneers: The Anglican Church in Rupert’s Land and English Mission Policy c. 1840.” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society. 33.1, April 1991, p. 61). This paper will explore the complex legacy of this fascinating mid-nineteenth-century Indigenous trail blazer. Budd’s personal and historical impact can be more fully assessed through the interpretative categories of Anglican saint, imperial sellout, and colonial survivor.

The Order of St. Faith’s, also known as the Bishop’s Messengers, operated in the Diocese of Brandon from 1928 -1979. Founded by Marguerite Fowler, the Bishop’s Messengers were women called by God and commissioned by the Bishop of Brandon to minister in the underserved and sparsely populated areas of northwestern Manitoba. From their inception, the Messengers were licensed and commissioned in the Diocese of Brandon to lead services, make home visits, counsel, and “befriend”. In addition to these pastoral ministries, the Bishop’s Messengers ran Sunday Schools, taught school, built churches (literally), and travelled hundreds of kilometers to meet the physical, spiritual, and social needs of people in far-flung communities.

While it has been generally thought that the work of the Bishop’s Messengers paved the way for women’s ordination, this paper will focus on the importance of commissioned lay ministry in rural and northern communities. Over their half-century of service, the Messengers faced difficult conditions with few resources. But their indefatigable spirit shaped the Diocese of Brandon’s unique commitment to celebrating and commissioning lay ministry. Recently, there has been a more concerted effort in the Anglican Church of Canada to train and equip the laity to continue ministry in communities that cannot support or attract ordained clergy. While the model of self-supported, ordered lay ministry may be a thing of the past, the ministry of the Bishop’s Messengers provides valuable lessons on the significance of commissioned and licensed lay ministry for the changing church of the future.

Julian Bilby served in the arctic missions at Blacklead Island and Lake Harbour alongside Edmund Peck. His behaviour led him to be fired by the Church Missionary Society, but that was certainly not the end of his relationship with the CMS, nor the end of his arctic career. This paper will examine the circumstances around Bilby's conflict with the CMS and explore why he continued to work in the arctic missions despite these events.

James Settee was one of the first and longest serving indigenous persons to be employed as an agent of the Church Missionary Society [CMS] in north western British North America during the nineteenth century. Settee’s life and times has been reconstructed through a rich archival record that includes personal letters, journals, and annual reports, official missionary society records and publications, Hudson’s Bay Company post records, and travel accounts. Unlike his better-known contemporary, Henry Budd, Settee retained much of his indigenous identity. This paper focuses on how James Settee's indigeneity shaped his approach to mission and contributed to the formation of a significant Anglican indigenous presence in the prairie west which is only now, more than a century after his death, becoming more fully realized in the emergence of a self-governing indigenous church within the Anglican Church of Canada.

Much of the social, gender and childhood history of British overseas missionaries has focused on Nonconformists (Manktelow, 2013; Cleall, 2012; Hall, 2002; Morrison, 2024) to the neglect of Anglicans. This paper will focus on the missionary experience of William Charles Cotton (1813-1879), chaplain to George Augustus Selwyn (1809-1878), first Anglican bishop of New Zealand, at St John’s College in the Waimate and Auckland in the 1840s. Despite the existence of rich caches of letters and journals in England and Australia, only one desktop-published biography exists, and a short family entry in the Oxford DNB. (Smith, Arthur. William Charles Cotton: priest, missionary and beemaster. A troubled life (Birkenhead, Countryvise, 2006). Anthony Howe, “William Cotton, 1786-1866: merchant and philanthropist”, (includes William Charles Cotton), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Cotton’s life-story permits study of the themes of piety, emotion and relationships in the life of a single man in a missionary community. Born into a wealthy mercantile family, he was educated at Eton College, then Christ Church, Oxford. Blighted in love from 1846, he never married, therefore not fulfilling the early Victorian domestic ideal. Despite concerns about his mental instability, he was apparently welcomed in the mission community for his good nature, willingness to help, and practical skills and had good relationships with Māori. In contrast to the narrative of colonial contexts causing insanity, the mission community benefited his mental health, whereas in England he later died in Tuke’s Asylum. An often-controversial figure, he is now best known for his skills as a beekeeper. Yet he was a key player in the crucial missionary endeavour of establishing the Anglican hierarchy in New Zealand. This paper also permits greater understanding of the family and personal dynamics underpinning Selwyn’s early ministry.

This paper will explore the role church histories play in the cultural erasure of Indigenous cultures through missionary endeavors and the effects this has had on church narratives. Using the case study of the Women’s Auxiliaries (WAs) in the Diocese of Kootenay, we will explore how individual church histories have erased the WAs in their histories, how the work of these WAs were used to erase Indigenous cultures through funding and supplying residential schools, and how these erasures, limit the corporate response of individual churches and the Anglican church of Canada to the recommendations of the TRC.

This paper will examine the work of these WAs and how this work is yet to be visible within the national reconciliation movement in Canada due to the gendered nature of their contributions. The master narratives within reconciliation discourse privilege Church leaders and others who benefited from the labour of children and women’s groups to enact financial and material contributions within contractual arrangements made with the department of Indian Affairs. This collaborative operation of a system of cultural genocide across multiple Inuit and First Nations ensured that the National Church of England promulgations of an Anglophone Christian national identity occurred at the locus of the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual erasure. Our work with, and documents from the Diocese of the Kootenay Archive, the National Synod Archive, and research from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation indicate that Anglican run residential schools disrupted the cultural and linguistic transmission of countless Indigenous groups.

This paper takes as its starting point the formation of a mission at the Six Nations of the Grand River in the 1820s, largely funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, then by the New England Company. Robert Lugger was the first NEC missionary. His journal of 1827 tells a complicated story: of a development strategy by the colonial and British government, a canal and navigation company at the Grand River, and planned extensive settlement. This paper looks at how the NEC envisioned their role at the Grand River and among the Six Nations from a variety of perspectives. From the developing narrative of "Whig" reform, replete with Responsible Government interrupting and forming radical change in the Bagot Commission (1842-4), at the same time new policies were being formed by the Aborigines Protection Society following the 1837 Buxton Report to the British House of Commons. Even more intricate were the rivalries with an existing Methodist Mission at Salt Springs. This paper analyzes the disconnect between settlement envisioned in the 1840s against promises made in the 1820s and 1830s, particularly on the lucrative land sales of the Six Nations, and the direction of the mission against the new policies of Reserved Lands in the 1840s. Finally, Lugger's journal will be seen as a kind of unconscious conduit of all of these ideas set forth in apparent harmony in 1827. I will attempt to answer the question of "what happened in late-colonial and early national Indigenous politics of mission".

As Heidi Bohaker explains, historic European-authored sources of information about Indigenous peoples can be more accurately viewed as “constructions of European imaginations and discursive practices” (p. 99). This includes the historic journals, travelogues, and letters of Anglican missionaries in the northwestern portion Anishinaabewaki (Anishinaabe territory)—which colonists first named Rupert’s Land and later became Treaty #3 territory in 1873. In this presentation, I work with a combination of church archival materials, government records, and personal family records to trace my family’s encounters spanning back seven generations with the Islington Mission at White Dog (now eponymously called Wabaseemoong), founded by the Anglican church in 1848. These encounters occurred with my Anishinaabe, Métis, and English ancestors. This inquiry emerged from a desire to understand the role of the Anglican church as a force of both colonization and material opportunity in my family’s history and mobility. I analyze these records through a lens of survivance, which is both theoretical and embodied, as the descendant of the people described in these records. Drawing from a large body of work on Indigenous histories in Rupert’s Land and Treaty #3, I explore what these records show about the imaginations of the Anglican authors, the role of Anishinaabemowin language skills in fostering relationships, and the impossibility of determining Indigenous peoples’ thoughts, feelings and motivations based on colonial archives. Citation: Bohaker, H. (2014). Indigenous histories and archival media in the early modern Great Lakes.