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Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast
As the wife of the intrepid preacher Thomas Crosby, Emma Crosby opened the Crosby Girls' Home in 1879 in Fort Simpson to ostensibly rescue Aboriginal girls from liquor and prostitution. There is little evidence that her famous husband was much-concerned by her sacrifices-or that she expected him to be.
Exhausted and sick for much of her stay on the coast, Emma Crosby lost two of her children to diphtheria, managed a boarding school for girls and wrote How the Gospel Came to Fort Simpson published by the Methodist Church in Toronto. "Emma Crosby was just as convinced as her husband that their brand of religion was superior to Aboriginal spirituality,"; says historian Jean Barman, "but she was also concerned on the everyday level for the Tsimshian people's well-being and, despite burying four of her eight children at Simpson, worked tirelessly in what she considered to be others' best interests.";
Jean Barman's sixth and seventh titles since 2002 are Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast (UBC Press $85), co-authored with Jan Hare, and Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787-1898 (University of Hawaii Press $45 U.S.), co-authored with Bruce McIntyre Watson. The latter provides an exhaustive directory of individual Hawaiian-born pioneers and labourers on the West Coast from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States. It is based on archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. Among the more noteworthy immigrants from Hawaii, previously known as the Sandwich Islands, was William Kaulehelehe, the unordained Christian missionary sent by his Hawaiian king in the 1840s to serve as "Chaplain to the Hawaiians in the Columbia."; His "Owhyhee Church"; was torn down about 15 years later.
Kaulehelehe was an unrealistically pious teacher who was disheartened to discover he was mostly needed to arbitrate disputes among the Kanakas, many of whom preferred to work or drink on the Sabbath. In 1862, Kaulehelehe came to Fort Victoria where he worked as a Hudson's Bay Company clerk and translator. He was buried in Ross Bay Cemetery in 1874.
"The Hawaiians have repeatedly and daily asked me to see about their trouble of being repeatedly abused by the white people without just cause,"; he once wrote.
Crosby 0-7748-1270-2;
Hawaiians 0-8248-2943-3
[BCBW 2006]
Exhausted and sick for much of her stay on the coast, Emma Crosby lost two of her children to diphtheria, managed a boarding school for girls and wrote How the Gospel Came to Fort Simpson published by the Methodist Church in Toronto. "Emma Crosby was just as convinced as her husband that their brand of religion was superior to Aboriginal spirituality,"; says historian Jean Barman, "but she was also concerned on the everyday level for the Tsimshian people's well-being and, despite burying four of her eight children at Simpson, worked tirelessly in what she considered to be others' best interests.";
Jean Barman's sixth and seventh titles since 2002 are Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast (UBC Press $85), co-authored with Jan Hare, and Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787-1898 (University of Hawaii Press $45 U.S.), co-authored with Bruce McIntyre Watson. The latter provides an exhaustive directory of individual Hawaiian-born pioneers and labourers on the West Coast from 1787 to 1898, the year the Hawaiian Islands were annexed to the United States. It is based on archival work in British Columbia, Oregon, California, and Hawaii. Among the more noteworthy immigrants from Hawaii, previously known as the Sandwich Islands, was William Kaulehelehe, the unordained Christian missionary sent by his Hawaiian king in the 1840s to serve as "Chaplain to the Hawaiians in the Columbia."; His "Owhyhee Church"; was torn down about 15 years later.
Kaulehelehe was an unrealistically pious teacher who was disheartened to discover he was mostly needed to arbitrate disputes among the Kanakas, many of whom preferred to work or drink on the Sabbath. In 1862, Kaulehelehe came to Fort Victoria where he worked as a Hudson's Bay Company clerk and translator. He was buried in Ross Bay Cemetery in 1874.
"The Hawaiians have repeatedly and daily asked me to see about their trouble of being repeatedly abused by the white people without just cause,"; he once wrote.
Crosby 0-7748-1270-2;
Hawaiians 0-8248-2943-3
[BCBW 2006]
Submitted on November 10, 2006 in By David.
