The letters that John Niddrie wrote to Robert Steinhauer reveal some of
the travel conditions missionaries faced, as well as Niddrie's opinion on the need for
Aboriginal ministers to open the way for Christianity. In 1928 he wrote:
At the beginning of July I started off on the
yearly official visit to the Missions inland in this Superintendency. We
made the trip by canoe and were always almost a month. The distance
covered was between 6 and 7 hundred miles. The Mission at Little Grand
Rapids, Deer Lake, Pekangecum, and another outlying point were all visited
and a few days spent at each point. Our Church has been . . . sending her
men to make periodical visits to Pekangecum for 25 or 30 or perhaps even
more years, and still every last mother's son of the people are pagan. Not
one at this place has yet been baptized into the Christian Faith.
However, we are sending in a good Christian man as
Missionary teacher this summer and the people seem to be taking a great
interest in him; and we are therefore hoping for great things. It is
simply absurd to think of sending a white man in on the ground floor to
break ground at a place like Pekangecum. In the first place, the people do
not understand one word of English and again a white man has no idea of
the mode of the Indian life at such a place.
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In this excerpt from 1937, we can see the human side of
the missionary. Here Niddrie indulges himself in gossip about his
fellow Methodists and what was always a controversial subject, the Roman
Catholic Church.
It was only a short time after this that Rev. Mr.
Stevens wrote me asking my assistance as Rev. Beaton had threatened at the
next Council Meeting of the church, 'TO PUT SOME CONTROL ON HIM' for
something Stevens had written in 'The Spiritual Light' about the Church of
Rome. I do not know what Beaton would say if he saw some of the screeds I
have written about the church of Rome. Just fancy a half-baked Potentate
like Beaton saying, 'We must not antagonize the R.C.'s. They are
cooperating with us beautifully.' He must be a mutt. There, forgive me
please, but I have little sympathy with a man who would thus express
himself. He knows nothing whatever about the Indian work and has not the
sense to listen to those who have forgotten more than he will ever
know.
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Citation Sources
Niddrie,
John. Edited by John W. Chalmers and John J. Chalmers. Niddrie of the
North-West: Memoirs of a Pioneer Canadian Missionary. Edmonton: University
of Alberta Press, 2000.
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