Emma Jane Douse (1849–1926), a Methodist minister's daughter and trained teacher, married the Rev. Thomas Crosby (1840–1914), a pioneer missionary to the British Columbia coast, in 1874. One week later, they started a two-month trip to Fort Simpson (now Port Simpson, near Prince Rupert), the last settlement before the Alaska panhandle, where they remained until 1897. Thomas is well-known as one of the “Founders of B.C.,” and “the most famous Methodist missionary in British Columbia, if not all of Canada.” But Emma appears in the usual accounts merely as his “companion in the wilderness.” In reality, he was an inveterate wanderer who left her alone for weeks and months at a time. Her own work “complemented her husband's work but also, out of necessity, transcended the gender divisions, ensuring that duties otherwise carried out by her husband were kept up in his many absences” (xviii–xix).

Jan Hare, Anishinaabe and a member of the M'Chigeeng First Nation, teaches in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Jean Barman is a well-known historian of British Columbia who also taught at the University of British Columbia. In seeking to broaden approaches to the past, they bring a dual perspective to this study: the role of women missionaries and of aboriginal and aboriginal mixed-race intermediaries in the missionizing process.

What is striking is their use of Emma Crosby's letters to her mother in Ontario. The early chapters typically consist of a short introduction followed by thirty pages of correspondence with explanatory comments. Emma's letters, “lovingly kept across the generations,” have been donated to UBC Special Collections by Helen and Louise Hager, Emma's granddaughter and great-granddaughter, who believe they “are not only part of my family's heritage, they are part of our provincial history” (xvii). Midway through the book, the tone changes: the first half, to paraphrase the title, is about Emma's good intentions; in the second, they are gone awry. Emma's early letters are domestic, confidential, written to calm a mother's fears that her daughter was the only white woman for hundreds of miles. The later letters, written against a background of social and cultural destruction, are grim.

I come to this book as a historian of missionaries in China, some of whom were sent out by the same Methodist church in Toronto, so I was intrigued by the commonalities (that familiar Methodist rhetoric of civilization and Christianization) and the differences. “Isolation” in inland China, inside the compound, surrounded by walls to keep out the curious (and sometimes destructive) people, is a world away from the awesome silence of Port Simpson, a former Hudson's Bay post nestled at the edge of the Pacific.

Yet, whenever I read missionary stories, I am amazed again and again that all around the world—whether it was Protestants and Catholics, whether they were in the New Hebrides, Hawaii, or Nigeria—institutional (or modernist) missionaries went institutional in the same way. The first generation, unable to make converts among the adult males, turned their attention to the children. They started a small school—usually an orphanage for girls since it was easier to get girls than boys—that grew within a generation into an educational system from kindergarten to university; a lean-to dispensary evolved into a medical system of men's and women's hospitals. Missionaries who went native—and many of the first generation did, especially before the high tides of imperialism of the 1880s—each did so in their own idiosyncratic way.

Emma Crosby exemplifies how individual missionaries made the transition from the pioneer days, when the women missionaries and the women aboriginals and mixed-race had a free and easy relationship. In the beginning, when British Columbia was barely a province of Canada, Emma needed them more than they needed her. Thomas was often gone Up and Down the North Pacific Coast by Canoe and Steamer, as the title of his memoirs put it, while she remained in Port Simpson, holding the fort, running the household, preaching in church, teaching school, supervising the girls, unloading the supplies from the monthly steamer, and preparing for winter. Her most prominent supporters were Kate Dudoward and her husband Alfred Dudoward, a mixed-race Tsimshian of chiefly lineage. Their great-great-granddaughter, Caroline Dudoward, a Tsimshian activist, has contributed a moving afterword to the book: “They lived between two worlds as man and wife, interpreters, translators, entrepreneurs, teachers, and hereditary leaders who promoted Tsimshian interests through literacy and the written word of ‘God’ to guide and sustain our daily lives,” she writes. “Too many voices have been silenced. The voices of Aboriginal people need to be heard” (255–57).

As a token of this relationship, Emma gave her first daughter, Jessie, an Indian name, Ash-she-gemk, which means “leg of the moon” or “moonbeam.” Such cross-naming never happened again. Motherhood—Emma had seven girls and one boy, four of whom died in infancy—gave her a new basis for authority within the mission. As Dana Robert has pointed out in American Women in Mission (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996), “the Christian family” was “a sermon more powerful than that given by a preacher … the missionary woman devoted to her family witnessed through deed” (72). It also led inadvertently to the separation of the whites from the aboriginals.

The final chapters trace the evolution of the Crosby Girls' School, which Emma started to train the girls who came to her for protection. Once her children were born, fearful of “contamination,” the Crosbys physically moved the aboriginal girls out of their home into an addition. The Woman's Missionary Society in Toronto took on the Girls' Home as a special project and sent a succession of “matrons,” who were paid employees hired to do a job. Further physical separation occurred when the Crosbys built a new, larger house—for eight children!—and the aboriginal girls moved into their old home. The final, fatal step came in 1893 when the Canadian government undertook to support the “Crosby Home for Aboriginal Girls” as one of its growing chain of residential schools. The government paid its standard rate of $60 per student per year—a measly 14¢ a day. “The shift from care to confinement to incarceration was complete,” the authors state. “The penitentiary nature of the Home reflected the conditions of industrial and residential schools for Aboriginal children” (231).

Emma's story has a resonance with events that have occurred since the book was published. In September 2007, the Canadian government announced that it had reached a financial settlement—“truth and reconciliation”—with the 80,000 living survivors of the residential schools, a $2 billion compensation. Presumably some of them had been students in the Crosby Girls' School, which closed in 1948.