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Reviewed by:
  • Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast, and: The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast
  • Susan Neylan
Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast. Edited by Jan HareJean Barman. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. Pp. 344, illus., $85
The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast. Mary-Ellen Kelm. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. Pp. 300, illus., $29.95

While books about the Native-missionary encounter in Canada have attracted their fair attention from historians and other scholars, only recently have critical re-evaluations taken into account the less documented roles of missionary women in such endeavours. Good Intentions Gone Awry, edited by Jan Hare and Jean Barman, is a collection of previously unavailable and unpublished letters written by Methodist missionary wife and teacher Emma Crosby. Between 1874 and 1897, Crosby lived in Fort/Port Simpson (Lax Kw’alaams) on the north coast of British Columbia in the heart of Tsimshian territory. While the editors include a few excerpts from mission literature, the core of the book consists of letters Crosby wrote to her mother, Eliza Douse, between 1874 and 1881.

Mary-Ellen Kelm’s book is similarly an edited series of letters penned by another woman in the mission field of bc’s north coast, in the village of Kitamaat at the head of Douglas Channel. Between 1916 and 1919, Englishwoman Margaret Butcher was a missionary nurse, midwife, and teacher at the Elizabeth Long Memorial Home, a residential school for Haisla girls sponsored by the Methodist Church of Canada’s Women’s Missionary Society (wms). Collectively these works offer insight into the daily minutiae of mission life and how missionary imperialism was understood and manifested from the female perspective. Both women were constrained by the [End Page 281] gendered assumptions of their times and largely confined to duties deemed suitable to their sex – primarily the conversion and teaching of women and children. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the kind of colonial discourse revealed by their writings is firmly located at the domestic and educational intersection of Euro-Canadian authority.

The editors have taken distinct approaches in the balance between the letters and their interpretative commentary. Both approaches prove effective for different reasons. Hare and Barman intersperse their analysis throughout the text, introducing and assessing clusters of Crosby’s correspondence chapter by chapter, highlighting stages in mission work. Kelm’s book includes a substantial introduction and conclusion, but beyond explanatory endnotes, the letters themselves are offered uninterrupted by interpretation. This approach serves to emphasize Butcher’s unique voice.

The organization of Emma Crosby’s letters is basically chronological, with divisions based on distinctive phases of her adult life and mission work on the north coast: chapters 1 and 2 cover her courtship and marriage to Thomas Crosby and subsequent arrival at Fort Simpson in 1874. Chapters 3 and 4 explore her work in establishing the mission home, when she took in Aboriginal girls, believing they needed her protection, and came increasingly to rely on those girls and the wider Aboriginal community as her own family grew. Here, by ‘reading across the grain’ (254), the contributions of the Tsimshian themselves to mission life and work is particularly evident. Chapters 5 and 6 trace Emma’s expansion of the Girls’ Home, her role as ‘mother of the mission’ in the face of frequent absences of her husband, and coping with family deaths, including her ‘lifeline’ to the wider world, her mother, and four of her own daughters. A new public persona of Crosby emerges in the correspondence featured in the last chapters, marking the final transition of the Girls’ Home from a place espousing ‘protection’ and then confinement for Aboriginal girls, to one of outright incarceration when the administration of the Home was taken over by the WMS in 1891 and then by the federal government. The personal tone of her earlier writings to her mother shifted in these later letters that were ‘intended for public consumption and were written for strategic purposes being directed towards audiences that lacked any sense of the Tsimshian...

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