The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast (review)

Margaret Butcher was employed from 1916 to 1919 by the Methodist Women’s Missionary Society as a teacher and then matron at the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home, a residential home for First Nations children (mainly girls) located in a Haisla village, Kitamaat, on the north coast of British Columbia. Butcher seems to skid across the surface of things in her chatty epistles to her female relatives and friends (although these letters probably had a wider circulation). Despite the blandness of the tone, we learn through Butcher’s off-hand observations, rather than any thick description of Haisla and colonial society, about life in a residential home and the racialized interpersonal relations in this isolated village.

The book begins with an introduction by Mary-Ellen Kelm in which she tells what little is known of Margaret Butcher, as well as the historical and anthropological background to Haisla society and colonial interventions on the coast. The letters follow, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions, before Kelm presents her interpretation of Butcher’s role as a missionary imperialist.

What struck me in reading these letters is the isolation of Butcher and her female co-workers. Not only were they cut off from the towns and company of their compatriots, but within the Kitimaat village they barely ventured outside the Home. From early morning till night they laboured alongside the children, who, as Kelm points out, did much of the work around the Home. Occasionally Butcher took an afternoon off to walk in the woods she loved, but generally if she had any free time she took to her bed to sleep or write letters. Transport into and out of Kitimaat was erratic, and she incessantly worried about when the next mail might arrive with news from the outside world, while trying to time her own letter writing to the expected appearance of the next steamer.

Life in the Home was extremely regimented for staff and children. Perhaps the most shocking revelation of these letters is Butcher’s record of the girls’ periods, as she handed out ‘bags’ to them, presumably with cloths to wear during their monthly bleeding. By these means she knew if the girls became pregnant. These children had no privacy at all.

In her concluding chapter Kelm dwells on the racialized and gendered world in which Butcher lived. But while Kelm takes Butcher at her word – the Haisla are ‘savages’ and ‘dirty,’ she is glad to report when the old people die because with them go the old ways – it seems to me that Butcher’s attitudes are more ambivalent than her statements suggest. She enjoys the children’s company and is thrilled when they express affection and concern for her. The Haisla, while described as savages, are ‘decent and respectable’ in their own domain. Butcher appreciates the quickness and intelligence of some of her charges, and even the good qualities of the old people, whose passing she believed represented progress. Butcher is certainly a product of her time, influenced by its prejudices and ideologies, but basic humanity and empathy still come through her letters.

Kelm argues persuasively that Butcher’s world was also strongly gendered, and that she did not challenge its boundaries. Yet what is striking is her enjoyment of (white) male company and her willingness to rise to the challenges of living in an all-female institution where the women had to take on tasks usually regarded as male activities. Butcher is no wilting violet, but an assertive, canny, and socially adept, independent woman. Like so many of the women who took to the mission field, Butcher recognized that it gave her independence from the restrictions of family life. As she wryly stated after coping with a whooping cough epidemic and then the Spanish flu, which killed too many of her charges, she had eschewed marriage and children to become mother of thirty of them.

While these letters do not challenge...