This ethnohistorical study examines the emergence of a Church of England, Church Missionary Society (CMS) Native Ministry in the Canadian North West. The intent is twofold. First it will re-evaluate the prevailing misconceptions and inadequate interpretations about the establishment, goals, and impact of Western Canada's first Indian education program. Second, it will analyse the conditions surrounding the decision of the CMS to recruit Native church workers and what motivated these men to participate. Rather than philanthropic evangelical zeal, it is clear that socio-economic and political factors forced the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in Rupert's Land to open its doors to mission activity among peoples whose way of life it intended to protect and maintain for its own purposes. The local HBC played a significant role in the dissemination of Western values, social order, and intellectual tools. It determined who would have access to "higher" learning and the quality they would received. Furthermore, it had no intention of bogging-down its Native labourers and fur gatherers with "civilized" notions that might induce them to neglect or abandon their primary occupations. However, a handful of converted and formally educated Native men emerged from the Red River mission school, where they were primed to partake in the religious and cultural transformations of their respective societies. By the 1850s Native catechists and schoolteachers traversed the boundaries of the Red River settlement, charged with the responsibility of paving the way for European Christian expansion. Until now, these men - their attitudes, activities, goals, and impacts - have been neglected by ethnohistorians interested in Indian-missionary encounters and socio-cultural change. Yet these men, were the forerunners, the buffers, and the middlemen in this process. The case study of one such man, Charles Pratt, indicates that their purpose and loyalties may' very well have been at odds with those of their superiors. Pratt syncretized Indigenous and European spirituality, skills, and ways of life in the best interests of his peoples' survival. This thesis proposes that a closer examination of these spiritual "middlemen," from the perspective of their prospective converts, as opposed to their European superiors, will have a profound impact on our future understanding of Indian responses to Christian missions, and their relative success or failure. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

The present thesis is a study of the women involved in the Anglican mission to the Japanese Canadians between 1903 and 1957. Drawing on a variety of primary source documents housed in the Anglican church archives in Toronto and Vancouver, as well as information gathered in interviews with three former missionaries, the study aims to determine who these women were, what their work consisted of, their reasons for choosing to work among Japanese Canadians, and what effects their efforts had, not specifically on the intended recipients, but on the women themselves. The thesis argues that much of the success of the mission, as measured by the number of Japanese Canadians who utilized its facilities and programmes, is due to the high level of involvement of local women. Until the World War II evacuation of Japanese Canadians from the coast of British Columbia, the mission's main facilities were located in Vancouver. In 1917 a male-dominated governing board took over the work, and attempted to 'professionalize' the mission during the interwar period. Still, of the over fifty middle-class Anglo-Canadian women, the majority were drawn from the local community, and a further seventeen Japanese Canadian women, originally from the mission's clientele, became involved in the work. A number of these women were employed as lay workers, and those who had the requisite training were engaged as professional missionaries, but more than half of the workers worked as volunteers. Work in the mission offered an attractive outlet through which these women channelled their energy, skills, and humanitarian propensities. It allowed Anglo-Canadian women to take on a public role while upholding contemporary notions concerning appropriate behaviour for their sex, "race" and class, while the Japanese Canadian workers gained the acceptance and esteem of their Occidental colleagues, and access to a respectable occupation at a time when they had few options to choose from. Thus by creating and largely maintaining the mission, a number of Anglican women, working within the confines of the maternal feminist ideology, built a sphere for themselves which encouraged their personal growth. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate