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