Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast

by Jan Hare, Jean Barman

Unlike most missionary scholarship that focuses on male missionaries, "Good Intentions Gone Awry" chronicles the experiences of a missionary wife. It presents the letters of Emma Crosby, wife of the well-known Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby, who came to Fort Simpson, near present-day Prince Rupert, in 1874 to set up a mission among the Tsimshian people.

Emma Crosby's letters to family and friends in Ontario shed light on a critical era and bear witness to the contribution of missionary wives. They mirror the hardships and isolation she faced as well as her assumptions about the supremacy of Euro-Canadian society and of Christianity. The authors critically represent Emma's sincere convictions towards mission work and the running of the Crosby Girl's Home (later to become a residential school), while at the same time exposing them as a product of the times in which she lived. They also examine the roles of Native and mixed-race intermediaries who made possible the feats attributed to Thomas Crosby as a heroic missionary persevering on his own against tremendous odds.

344 pages, Paperback

First published July 18, 2006

Reviews

[Sandra Oldfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's not an area of study I care about, missionary work, but I am so pleased these letters from Emma allow the story to be told from a woman's point of view.

[TheTyee.ca]

Like an unwelcome memory of youthful stupidity, the residential-schools scandal keeps coming back to haunt us. But what do we really know about how the residential schools came to be? For most of us, only that First Nations kids were stuffed into them for generations and once inside were...
Read more...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/08/08/Mo...

[Jacqueline Worboys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough and fascinating account of early missionary life on the coast of northwest BC near Prince Rupert as seen through the eyes of Emma Crosby in letters to her mom.
It helps bring a little understanding to the relationships between aboriginals and non-aboriginals that occurred over a century ago in BC.