Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
Decrying "the mutual insularity of religious and secular historical work" in Canada and elsewhere editor Barry Ferguson describes the essays in this volume as attempts at building a "bridge" between the two. Seventeen short, single- author chapters attempt to assess "some of the actual roles and designs" of the Anglican Church and its diverse institutions and personnel in the Canadian prairie and northern West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ferguson's introductory essay demonstrates why "church history has hardly been absorbed into the mainstream of Canadian historiography" and also provides an overview of the other essays. L. G. Thomas describes Anglican dependence upon external support from English missionary societies and how WWI was a watershed. A secular bias as an obstacle to integrating Anglican church sources into the writing of western Canadian history is noted by Frits Pannekoek while important archival sources documenting Anglican work in western Canada are described by Wilma MacDonald and by Keith Stotyn. Bishop Robert Machray's important role in the founding of the University of Manitoba is impressively excavated by Laurence F. Wilmot. Critical perspectives on Anglican parishes and schools as agencies of explicit social control are offered by Robert Coutts and by George van der Goes Ladd. The subordinate status of the Anglican Church to civil officials in Manitoba's early years is surveyed by F. A. Peake and Christopher Hackett and explains why Anglicans came to support a secular school system in 1890s Manitoba. John S. Long notes a syncretism of Christian and Native beliefs among certain Cree while Kerry Abel reports on Bishop William C. Bompas' aggressive ethnocentric evangelism in the Mackenzie district. Ken Coates describes varying Anglican efforts to get government assistance for Native education and in support of Native land-claims settlement in the Yukon. Other contributors deal insightfully with the "Fellowship of Maple Leaf Teachers," the caravan mission outreach program, and women missionaries who served as the "bishop's messengers." This well produced, very reasonably priced volume provides many insights as well as enticing suggestions for important future historical investigations. It thus substantiates Ferguson's claim that "The history of the Anglican church leads to challenging, significant insights into the general history of western Canada." A larger work synthesizing the labors and experiences of church people in western Canada is needed. Ferenc Morton Szasz's Protestant Clergy in the Great Plains and Mountain West, 1865-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988) provides a fine example!
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:1 (Winter 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.