William Duncan (missionary)

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William Baines (1832-1918) was an English-born Anglican missionary who founded the Tsimshian communities of Metlakatla, British Columbia, in Canada, and Metlakatla, Alaska, in the United States. Although sometimes referred to as "Father Duncan," he was never ordained.

Duncan was born April 3, 1832, in the hamlet of Bishop Burton, Yorkshire, England, the illegitimate son of a teenaged servant-girl named Maria Duncan. He was raised by her parents, a William Duncan (a tanner) and his wife Elizabeth. Young William later worked with his father as a tanner. Duncan became the only churchgoer in his impoverished family.

In 1854 he joined the Church Missionary Society and attended the CMS-run Highbury College. In 1856 the CMS sent Duncan to the North Pacific Coast of Canada, and in 1857 he arrived at the remote Hudson's Bay Company fort settlement at Lax Kw'alaams, B.C., then known as Fort Simpson or Port Simpson. He missionized among the Tsimshians and learned to speak Tsimshian from Arthur Wellington Clah, a Tsimshian lineage head and HBC employee. In a famous incident, Clah intervened and saved Duncan's life when the village's leading chief, Paul Legaic, threatened Duncan at gunpoint for ringing churchbells on the day of his (Legaic's) daughter's initiation into a secret society. Legaic eventually became a key convert of Duncan's.

Eventually, tired of competing with the dissipated fort atmosphere for Tsimshian souls, as he saw it, Duncan led about 350 Tsimshians to found with him a new utopian Christian community, Metlakatla, on Metlakatla Pass near present-day Prince Rupert, at the southern end of the small peninsula on which Lax Kw'alaams sits. (This village site had already been the great gathering place for all of the Tsimshian "Nine Tribes" of the lower Skeena River before their aggregation at Lax Kw'alaams in 1834 when the fort was established.) Metlakatla, B.C., was established in 1862. When a subsequent smallpox outbreak killed 500 in Lax Kw'alaams but only five in Metlakatla, Duncan had no qualms in convincing his flock that this was divine providence.

In the early 1870s the Rev. William Henry Collison served with Duncan in Metlakatla, and Collison's memoir In the Wake of the War Canoe provides a portrait of the community.

The community grew. In Metlakatla, Duncan exerted his own brand of low-church Anglicanism, which involved a set of rules (see below) for Christian living and, controversially, eschewing the sacrament of communion so as not to whet the cannibalistic appetites of a people who he worried might be beholden to the anthropophagous rites of their "secret societies." (In fact, all of the "man-eating" practices in the secret societies were simulated -- well enough to fool missionaries -- so there was in fact less difference between it and Anglican communion than Duncan perhaps supposed.)

Such doctrinal differences, plus Duncan's insistence on total control over his parishioners' lives, led to a split with the Church of England. Duncan was expelled from the CMS in 1881 and transformed his mission into a nondenominational "Independent Native Church." Eventually, he decided to found a second utopian community on Annette Island, Alaska, on the territory of the Tongass tribe of Tlingit. He obtained permission from the U.S. government -- travelling to testify before Congress himself -- to establish an Indian reservation there (still Alaska's sole Indian reservation) and, in an epic canoe voyage, led approximately 800 Tsimshians from "Old" Metlakatla to "New" Metlakatla, Alaska, in 1887.

The new community was successful, especially economically successful, with a sawmill and other enterprises. Economic self-sufficiency was a core tenet of Duncan's vision for the community.

His split with the Church of England was not amicable and involved (according to one version of events; see Johnson in bibliography) sending a canoe-load of Tsimshians (including Peter Simpson, later a Native-rights activist) back to Old Metlakatla to destroy the old church there, on the grounds that ownership of it should not revert to the CMS. The religious orientation of New Metlakatla became a nondemoninational form of low-church Anglicanism, quite evangelical, and under the strict doctrinal control of Duncan himself. Later, portions of the community, notably under the Rev. Edward Marsden, an educated Tsimshian who had been Duncan's protégé since the Old Metlakatla days and with whom he split bitterly, defected to Presbyterianism, the dominant faith of the surrounding Tlingit communities. Marsden even assisted in the establishment of a rival, Presbyterian Tsimshian community at nearby Port Gravina (1892-1904) and, later, campaigned tirelessly for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to oust Duncan from his position, partly on grounds that Duncan had too much authority in the community and opposed any Native self-betterment through education and individual economic self-sufficiency if it put parishioners out of his personal control.

The Marsden-Duncan feud, as well as the long legal, political, and personal struggle between Duncan and William Ridley, the Anglican bishop in charge of northern British Columbia, intersected, most notoriously, with charges of sexual misconduct against Duncan, charges which have severely tainted his historical reputation, though he was never convicted or punished.

He also managed to make an enemy of the medical missionary Robert Tomlinson, an Anglican who had served under him in B.C. and been an ally in his dissent from the CMS. Tomlinson and his son Robert Tomlinson Jr. served in Metlakatla, Alaska, with Duncan from 1908 to 1912 before leaving for B.C. again out of disenchantment with the way Duncan was running the community.

Duncan died August 30, 1918, in Metlakatla, after a months-long decline associated with a bronchial infection apparently resulting from a fall. The church which he founded, now called the Duncan Memorial Church, is today a branch of the Assemblies of God. Duncan remains an extraordinarily controversial figure in Tsimshian communities today, with many fierce admirers and many fierce detractors.

[edit] William Duncan's Rules at Metlakatla

1. To give up their Ahlied or Indian devilry

2. To cease calling in conjurers when sick

3. To cease gambling

4. To cease giving away their property for display (i.e the potlatch)

5. To cease painting their faces

6. To cease drinking intoxicating liquor

7. To rest on the Sabbath

8. To attend religious instruction

9. To send their children to school

10. To be cleanly

11. To be industrious

12. To be peaceful

13. To be liberal and honest in trade

14. To build neat houses

15. To pay the village tax

[edit] Bibliography

Arctander, John W. (1909) The Apostle of Alaska: The Story of William Duncan of Metlakahtla. New York: Fleming H. Revell Co.

Beynon, William (1941) "The Tsimshians of Metlakatla, Alaska." American Anthropologist (new series), vol. 43, pp. 83-88.

Bowman, Phylis (1983) Metlakahtla -- the Holy City! Chilliwack, B.C.: Sunrise Printing.

Garfield, Viola (1939) "Tsimshian Clan and Society." University of Washington Publications in Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 167-340.

Johnson, Gertrude Mather (1994) "The Life of Peter Simpson." In Haa Kusteeyí, Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories, ed. by Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, pp. 665-676. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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.

Pierce, William Henry (1933) From Potlatch to Pulpit, Being the Autobiography of the Rev. William Henry Pierce. Ed. by J. P. Hicks. Vancouver, B.C.: Vancouver Bindery.

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

Usher, Jean (1974) William Duncan of Metlakatla: A Victorian Missionary in British Columbia. (National Museums of Canada, Publications in History 5.) Ottawa: National Museums of Canada.

Wellcome, Henry S. (1887) The Story of Metlakahtla. London: Saxon.

Wellington Clah, Arthur (1997) "How Tamks Saved William Duncan's Life." Recorded by William Beynon, 1950. In Tsimshian Narratives 2: Trade and Warfare, ed. by George F. MacDonald and John J. Cove, pp. 210-212. Ottawa: Directorate, Canadian Museum of Civilization.