Eugene Stock

An Anglican missionary society's account of their claimed success in converting First Nations people in British Columbia during the 1860s-70s, or as one of the instigators put it, "bringing the Gospel to the poor heathens". This is an unpleasant and tendentious summary of cultural aggression redeemed only by its inclusion of some historical and ethnographic details.

The irony is that the missionary project aimed principally to save native peoples from the ravages of white traders, sailors and goldrush prospectors, who had introduced alcoholism, prostitution and smallpox to the coastal peoples in the previous decades.

Unmentioned in this nearly contemporaneous account is that not all the white contemporaries of the founder, William Duncan, particularly his missionary peers of varying beliefs, supported this project. He was excluded from mainstream Anglicanism in 1881, after which he led some 800 native followers to found a new town with the same name in Alaska. The autocratic aspects of Duncan's character and activities evoke Conrad's Heart of Darkness.… (más)