Robert Tomlinson

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Robert Tomlinson (1842-1913) was an Irish medical missionary for the Church of England, known for his work with First Nations people of British Columbia.

Robert Tomlinson was born in 1842 in Ireland. He defied his Catholic parents by converting to the Church of England, prompting his father Thomas Tomlinson to disinherit him. He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin, worked as a livery hand to finance his medical training at Adelaide Hospital, and was ordained by the Church of England. His parish was St. James Anglican Church in Dublin.

In 1867 he moved to British Columbia as a medical missionary. That same year he met his future wife, Alice Woods, who was also from Ireland, in Victoria, B.C..

He served under the Church Missionary Society's Anglican lay minister in charge of the region, William Duncan, who was based at the Tsimshian community he founded, Metlakatla. Despite initial rockiness, Duncan and Tomlinson shared ideals, and Tomlinson supported some of Duncan's controversial catechistic innovations, such as omitting the rite of Holy Communion so as not to stir nascent cannibalistic impulses in his flock.

Tomlinson's first serious duty was taking charge of the Rev. Robert A. Doolan's three-year-old Anglican mission among the Nisga'a people and relocating it from Greenville (Laxgalts'ap) to a newly established community, Kincolith (today known as Gingolx), at the mouth of the Nass River. This became a successful mission on the Metlakatla model. In 1883 he was joined there by the Rev. William Henry Collison.

In 1887, Tomlinson vacillated as to whether he ought to join Duncan in his move with about 800 Tsimshians to form an independent (non-Anglican) mission at "New" Metlakatla, Alaska. Instead, the Tomlinsons joined their fellow missionary A. E. Price in resigning the CMS and moving to the Gitksan village of Kitwanga well up the Skeena River from Metlakatla. In 1888 they formed a new non-sectarian Christian Gitksan village nearby which they called Meanskinisht (a.k.a. Cedarvale).

In 1908 Tomlinson and his son Robert Tomlinson Jr. moved to Metlakatla, Alaska, to assist Duncan but the elder Tomlinson was upset to find what others too were finding at fault in how Duncan ran the community: that too much economic and political power was in Duncan's own hands and that educating the Tsimshians to be independent citizens was not a priority. Tomlinson left to return to Meanskinisht in 1912.

Tomlinson died the following year at Meanskinisht, of hardening of the arteries, at 71 years of age.

His son Robert Tomlinson Jr.'s extensive memoirs, recorded by his wife Roxie Irene Tomlinson onto reel-to-reel tape, were later organized by their own son George Tomlinson (Robert Sr.'s grandson) into a fiction-style narrative of his life and work, written from Robert Jr.'s first-person perspective.

[edit] Bibliography

• Murray, Peter (1985) The Devil and Mr. Duncan. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Press.

• Neylan, Susan (2003) The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

• Tomlinson, George, and Judith Young (1993) Challenge the Wilderness: A Family Saga of Robert and Alice Tomlinson, Pioneer Medical Missionaries. Seattle: Northwest Wilderness Books.