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‘Inoculated with the Ways of Anglicans’: Representing Indigenous Participation in Canadian Synodality, 1866
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2022
Abstract
The unprecedented participation by two Ojibwe-speaking Anishinabek lay delegates in the 1866 meeting of the Electoral Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto garnered a brief flurry of contemporary journalistic coverage across a networked imperial and colonial press. In the most vivid reportage, the two delegates were dehumanized, reduced to the status of ‘Indian nags … becoming inoculated with the ways of Anglicans’. In another more distantly circulated representation, an Indigenous presence at the incipience of Canadian synodality was invested with different rhetorical significance, the unsettling scandal of their voting membership justifying the struggle for self-government in the nascent Anglican Churches of other colonies, thus laying bare anxieties about the precarious situation of colonial Anglicanism. Rather than presuming to interpret the experience and discourse of Indigenous Anglicans, nor simply documenting the first local episode of formal Indigenous involvement in the counsels of Anglicans in Canada, this paper introduces the Electoral Synod, the neglected texts that covered the event, along with the lives of the exoticized churchmen featured in their coverage.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust
Footnotes
1
Bishop Terry M. Brown, ThD, DD, Huron University College, Western University, Canada. Jonathan S. Lofft, ThD, FRCGS, Trinity College, University of Toronto, Canada.
References
2 Ruth B. Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), p. 177.
3 Tintinnabulum [Thomas Charles Patteson], Sporting Intelligence: The Race for the Mitre (Toronto: n.p., 1866), p. 17.
4 Alan L. Hayes, ‘T.B.R. Westgate: Organizing Indigenous Erasure for the Anglican Church, 1920–1943’, Toronto Journal of Theology 36.1 (Spring 2020), pp. 54-74 (55).
5 For the potential creative ferment and actual influence of print cultures in colonial settings, see Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly, ‘Introduction’, in James J. Connolly, Patrick Collier, Frank Felsenstein, Kenneth R. Hall and Robert G. Hall (eds.), Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), pp. 3-25 (12-13).
6 The official record of the special session is the Journal of the Synod of the United Church of England and Ireland in the Diocese of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1867). See also ‘Special Session of Synod for the Election of a Coadjutor Bishop’, The Church Chronicle (Toronto, Canada) IV.7 (October 1866).
7 Originally published as ‘Sporting Intelligence: Race for the Mitre’, Leader (Toronto, Canada) 18 September 1866; ‘The Race for the Mitre’, Daily Telegraph (Toronto, Canada) 21 September 1866; ‘The Race for the Mitre’, Daily Telegraph (Toronto, Canada) 22 September 1866.
8 For the frequent republishing by special correspondents of their journalism, that ‘transferring their correspondence from the pages of newspapers to books, says something important about the ambiguous position of their writing’, see Catherine Waters, ‘ “Doing the Graphic”: Victorian Special Correspondence’, in Joanne Shattock (ed.), Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 165-81 (181).
9 Thomas Charles Patteson, Reminiscences, F 1191, Thomas Charles Patteson fonds, Series 5, MS49, Archives of Ontario.
10 Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 9.
11 Patteson, Reminiscences, F 1191.
12 For this divergence, see Colin Podmore, ‘Two Streams Mingling: The American Episcopal Church in the Anglican Communion’, Journal of Anglican Studies 9.1 (2011), pp. 12-37. For Gladstone’s key role and Americanization, see Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790–1860 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 103-104, 174-78. For the end of the Royal Supremacy, see Benjamin M. Guyer, ‘ “This Unprecedented Step”: The Royal Supremacy and the 1867 Lambeth Conference’, in Paul Avis and Benjamin M. Guyer (eds.), The Lambeth Conference: Theology, History, Polity, and Purpose (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 53-83. For the development of Canadian ‘synodality’, a useful neologism, see Alan L. Hayes, Anglicans in Canada: Controversies and Identity in Historical Perspective (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 88-92. See also H.R.S. Ryan, ‘The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada: Aspects of Constitutional History’, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XXXIV.1 (April 1992), pp. 4-146, and Spencer Ervin, The Development of the Synodical System in the Anglican Church of Canada (Ambler, PA: Trinity Press, 1969).
13 For Patteson’s founding in 1881 of the Ontario Jockey Club, by which means he took racing in the Province ‘by the scruff of its tarnished neck and directed it towards respectability’, see Louis E. Cauz, The Plate: A Royal Tradition (Toronto: The Ontario Jockey Club, 1984), p. 58. See also Mike Huggins, Flat Racing and British Society, 1790–1914: A Social and Economic History (London: Frank Cass, 2000).
14 Tony Blackshaw, ‘Flâneurs, Flâneurie, and Psychogeography’, in Tony Blackshaw and Garry Crawford (eds.), The Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies (London: Sage, 2009), pp. 84-85.
15 Tintinnabulum, Sporting Intelligence, p. 11. For the failure of the Bank of Upper Canada, announced at Toronto, 19 September 1866, see Peter Baskerville (ed.), The Bank of Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1987), pp. cxlv, 298-99. See also Robert McGee, Fenianism: The Toronto Reaction, 1858–1868 (Toronto: Lulu Publishing, 2014).
16 G.T. Denison III to [A.H.U.] Colquhoun, 26 January 1918, Scrapbook of Articles by and about T.C. Patteson, G-10 00151, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
17 ‘Election of a Bishop in Canada’, The Mission Field (London, UK), no. CXXXII, 1 December 1866.
18 ‘Indian Missions of the Church of England: Meeting Last Night’, The Globe (Toronto, Canada) 22 September 1866. For the arrival of the two chiefs on 12 September 1866, see ‘City News – Indian Missions’, The Globe (Toronto, Canada) 13 September 1866.
19 Tintinnabulum, Sporting Intelligence, pp. 16-17.
20 Carmen J. Nielson, ‘Caricaturing Colonial Space: Indigenized, Feminized Bodies and Anglo-Canadian Identity, 1873–94’, The Canadian Historical Review 96.4 (December 2015), pp. 473-505. See also Betty Bell, ‘Gender in Native America’, in Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury (eds.), A Companion to American Indian History (London: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 307-20 (313).
21 For the Takenouchi Mission, see Andrew Cobbing, The Japanese Discovery of Victorian Britain: Early Travel Encounters in the Far West (Meiji Japan Series 5; New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 95. See also Amy Matthewson, ‘Satirising Imperial Anxiety in Victorian Britain: Representing Japan in Punch Magazine, 1852–1893’, Contemporary Japan 33.2 (2021), pp. 1-24. The correspondence of Jeffery, Lord Amherst (1717–97) is reproduced as an appendix to Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada, vol. 2 (London: R. Bentley, 1851), p. 305. For inoculation and vaccination as a metonym of the metropole, see Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 99-122.
22 Simon J. Potter, ‘Empire and the English Press, c. 1857–1914’, in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 39-61 (60).
23 ‘Election of a Bishop in Canada’, Record (London, UK) 12 October 1866; ‘Miscellaneous Church Intelligence’, John Bull (London, UK) 13 October 1866. See also ‘The John Bull Reports’, Public Opinion (London, UK) 20 October 1866; ‘Electing a Bishop’, St. Pancras News and Marylebone Journal (London, UK) 27 October 1866; ‘Electing a Bishop’, The Brecon County Times (Brecon, Wales) 27 October 1866. For the reputation of the Record, see Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, quoted in Josef L. Altholz, ‘Alexander Haldane, the Record, and Religious Journalism’, Victorian Periodicals Review 20.1 (Spring 1987), pp. 23-31 (25). For the observation that journalistic ‘coverage of empire was characterized by a striking degree of homogeneity’, see Potter, Empire and the English Press, p. 60.
24 ‘How Some Protestant Bishops Are Elected’, Freeman’s Journal (Sydney, Australia) 26 January 1867; ‘Election of a Bishop in the Protestant Church, Canada’, Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Australia) 22 January 1867.
25 Cecilia Morgan, Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), p. 176.
26 Hilary M. Carey, ‘Anglicanism in Australia, c. 1829–1910’, in Rowan Strong (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 338-51 (344-45). For the widening flow of unsettling news between Australia, Canada and New Zealand, in the period, see Kenton Storey, Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire: Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016).
27 ‘Electing a Bishop by Ballot’, Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle (Nelson, New Zealand) 16 February 1867. Sam Hutchinson, Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863–1902 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 4.
28 Allan K. Davidson, ‘Anglicanism in New Zealand and the South Pacific’, in Strong (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, III, pp. 352-65 (359). See also W.P. Morrell, The Anglican Church in New Zealand: A History (Dunedin: Anglican Church of the Province of New Zealand, 1973), pp. 72-85.
29 Buhkwujjenene a Chief of the Ojibways by Rev. Canon F. W. Colloton, 1943 November 12, 2010-046/001(12), Box 1, Folder 12, Shingwauk Project collection, Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre Archives, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. For a near contemporary example of the journalistic invention of ridiculous Indian names, see Christian F. Feest, ‘Pride and Prejudice: The Pocahontas Myth and the Pamunkey’, in James A. Clifton (ed.), The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017), pp. 49-70 (57).
30 For the celebrity of the Ojibwe-speaking Anishinaabe of Upper Canada, see Morgan, Travellers through Empire, pp. 57-97. For this stark assessment of Wilson, see Karl S. Hele, ‘ “I Have Only a Comrade’s Constancy, a Fellow-Soldier’s Frankness, Fidelity, Fraternity…”: Hannah Foulkes Chance, 1851–1871’, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XLIV.2 (Fall 2002), pp. 227-64 (245). See also J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). For Wilson, see David A. Nock, ‘Wilson, Edward Francis’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003– (http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/wilson_edward_francis_14E.html, accessed 1 December 2021) and by the same author A Victorian Missionary and Canadian Indian Policy: Cultural Synthesis vs Cultural Replacement (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1988), but see Wall, ‘ “To Train a Wild Bird”: E.F. Wilson, Hegemony, and Native Industrial Education at the Shingwauk and Wawanosh Residential Schools, 1873–1893’, Left History 9.1 (2002), pp. 7-42. See also Natalie Cross and Thomas Peace, ‘ “My Own Old English Friends”: Networking Anglican Settler Colonialism at the Shingwauk Home, Huron College, and Western University’, Historical Studies in Education 33.1 (Spring 2021), pp. 22-49.
31 Edward F. Wilson, Missionary Work among the Ojebway [sic] Indians (London: SPCK, 1886), pp. 105-106.
32 W.H. New, A History of Canadian Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2nd edn, 2003), p. 13. For Buhkwujjenene as name-giver, see Alexander F. Chamberlain, ‘American Indian Names of White Men and Women’, Journal of American Folklore XII.XLIV (January–March 1899), pp. 24-31 (26-27). For naming and asymmetrical symbolic exchange, see Michael E. Harkin, ‘Ethnographic Deep Play: Boas, McIlwraith, and Fictive Adoption on the Northwest Coast’, in Sergei Kan (ed.), Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 57-79 (65-66). See also Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance through Alliance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
33 Phillips, Trading Identities, p. 177. See also Healing and Reconciliation through Education (Sault Ste. Marie: Singwauk Residential Schools Centre, Algoma University, n.d.), pp. 13-16, 46, https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/srsc/ (last accessed 2 December 2021). Kate Flint, The Transatlantic Indian, 1776–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 220-21.
34 Karl S. Hele, ‘Conflict and Cooperation at Garden River First Nation: Missionaries, Ojibwa, and Government Interactions, 1854–1871’, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XLVII.1 (Spring 2005), pp. 75-117 (91-99).
35 Hele, ‘Conflict and Cooperation’, pp. 83-84. Chief Augustin Shingwauk was buried by the Anglican bishop of Algoma, for which see ‘Death of Augustin Shingwauk’, The Canadian Indian 1.5 (February 1891), pp. 153-54.
36 ‘Report of the Deputation to the Indian Missions on Manitoulin Island’, The Church Chronicle (Toronto, Canada) I.8 (November 1863).
37 Robert J. Surtees, Manitoulin Island Treaties Treaty Research Report (Ottawa: Treaties and Historical Research Centre, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1986), https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028959/1564583230395 (last accessed 2 December 2021). See also Robin Jarvis Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye: Indian Agents, Government Power, and Aboriginal Resistance in Ontario, 1918–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 163-67, and Hele, ‘ “I Have Only a Comrade’s Constancy”’, pp. 236-37. For the abandonment by the New England Company of the Garden River station, see Report of the Proceedings of the New England Company (London: Taylor and Co., 1874), p. 52.
38 The full remarks of both are reproduced in ‘Indian Missions of the Church of England: Meeting Last Night’, The Globe (Toronto, Canada) 22 September 1866. For Buhkwujjenene’s source, see the well-known remark reproduced again in Josiah Bull (ed.), Letters by the Rev. John Newton (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1869), p. 400.
39 Nock, A Victorian Missionary, pp. 1-8.
40 ‘Election of a Bishop in Canada’, The Mission Field (London, UK), no. CXXXII, 1 December 1866.
41 The first attribution of Patteson’s authorship is not in his obituary, for which see ‘Mr. T. C. Patteson Died at Hour of Midnight’, The Globe (Toronto, Canada) 21 September 1907, but see ‘Patteson, Thomas Charles’, in Henry James Morgan (ed.), The Canadian Men and Women of the Time: A Handbook of Canadian Biography (Toronto: William Briggs, 1898), pp. 807-808.
42 A.H. Young, ‘Toronto Episcopal Elections, 1866–1932’, The Canadian Churchman (Toronto, Canada) 6 October 1932; Francis Herbert Cosgrave, ‘Personalities of the Synod During the Past Century’, in Proceedings of a Banquet Held on May 27th, 1952, to Commemorate the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Synod of Toronto (n.p., n.d.), p. 24; Alan L. Hayes, ‘Repairing the Walls: Church Reform and Social Reform, 1867–1939’, in Alan L. Hayes (ed.), By Grace Co-Workers: Building the Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1780–1989 (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre Press, 1989), p. 46.
43 Henry Roper, ‘The Anglican Episcopate in Canada: An Historical Perspective’, Anglican and Episcopal History 57.3 (September 1988), pp. 255-71 (265). For the proliferation of bishops and Canadian national identity, see David A. Nock, ‘Patriotism and Patriarchs: Anglican Archbishops and Canadianization’, Canadian Ethnic Studies XIV.3 (1982), pp. 79-94.
44 Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Anderson, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011), pp. 3-6, 9.
45 C. Peter Williams, The Ideal of the Self-Governing Church: A Study in Victorian Missionary Strategy (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 1. For the belated participation of lay women, see Wendy L. Fletcher-Marsh, ‘The Limitations and Opportunity of Gender: Women and Ecclesiastical Structures in Canadian Anglicanism, 1920–1955’, Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society XXXVII.1 (April 1995), pp. 41-54 (45-46).
46 Tintinnabulum, Sporting Intelligence, p. 5.
47 Buhkwujjenene a Chief of the Ojibways by Rev. Canon F. W. Colloton, 1943 November 12, 2010-046/001(12), Box 1, Folder 12, Shingwauk Project collection, Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre Archives, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.