Rev Edward F. Wilson | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Rev. Edward Francis Wilson (1844-1915) was a clergyman, an educator, an ethnologist, and an author. He studied farming with a land agent. Although Wilson had published a manual of the Ojebway language in the 1870s, until about 1885 he took little interest in native history and ethnology. He came to think that the destruction of native autonomy and the promotion of assimilation might be wrong. In My Wife and I: A Little Journey Among the Indians and A Series on Indian Tribes, both published in the journals Our Forest Children (1887) and The Canadian Indian (1890), which he edited, he praised many positive features of native culture, placing the blame for "the Indian problem" on whites. Edward F. Wilson deserves to be remembered for a number of reasons: for his attempt to implement the native church policy of Venn and the CMS, for the significance of his residential schools, and for his work as an early Canadian ethnologist. Perhaps his lasting contribution, however, is as a pioneer among whites of the concepts of self-government and cultural continuity for native peoples.