The Devil and Mr. Duncan

A.T.J. Cairns was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

This is an outstanding example of a genre at which Canadian authors — unobtrusively, usually with little recognition or celebration — excel: documenting eccentric, significant corners of their country’s history.

Even today remembered by the Indians as both “that old pirate” and “as close to a saint as anyone I’ve known,” William Duncan, an upwardly mobile Yorkshire tannery clerk turned (unordained) Anglican minister, was sent in 1857 by the English Missionary Society to work among the Tsimshian Indians at Fort Simpson in the northwest corner of British Columbia.

He arrived to find the disintegration of Indian society, even here, well underway. the residue of nine local villages clustered — demoralized, diseased, alcoholic — about the local Hudson’s Bay Company trading post.

Although hardly a paragon (he is described as tyrannical, ambitious, manipulative, self-aggrandizing), Duncan also had a deeply compassionate element in his makeup. Unlike so many other whites, he did not see the Indians as subhuman primitives. Appalled at their situation, he quickly learned their language and gained their trust. Though zealous to convert them to Christianity, he was equally anxious to return them to lives of dignity and self-sufficiency. To do this, he realized that they must adapt to the white man’s ways and learn his skills to survive.

To this end he set up the Metlakatla community; not, as it has sometimes been described, as a sort of Christian Utopia (less than half the commune was Christian), but as a self-sufficient native township of skilled tradesmen and fishermen. After acrimonious disputes with the B.C. government, Duncan and 800 others moved to Annette Island, off Alaska. Here, under its 1891 Congressional Charter, the second Metlakatla still thrives, with its town-owned canning factory and fishing fleet supporting a population of 1,300 natives and 200 whites (the old Metlakatla in B.C. still survives as well, a small community of 120) — a rare success story in a dark corner of history.

Peter Murray, a veteran Victoria newsman, tells his story with skilled readability, balanced sympathy, and a thoroughness that is never tedious. It is sad to realize that this valuable book almost certainly will never get the wide recognition — and readership — it deserves.