Rev. Edwin Watkins: Missionary to the Cree: 1852—1857
John S. Long
Extracted from: Pp. 91-117 in Papers of the Sixteenth Algonquian Conference, William Cowan ed. Ottawa: Carleton University
http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/johnlo/John_Long/watkins.htm Date accessed: 10 June 2008.
The Reverend E. A. Watkins was the first missionary stationed permanently to a remote island community on the east coast of James Bay, a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) post known to Europeans as Big River or Fort George. Church Missionary Society journals and correspondence document Watkins’ activities and accomplishments in attempting to introduce new beliefs and regular patterns of worship and formal education among HBC employees and Cree hunters. It is also a story of missionary frustration and failure, of one white man’s maladaptation in a northern Algonquian environment.
Watkins’ most visible and immediate impact was on a dozen or so HBC employees and their families, many of whom were of mixed ancestry, at Fort George, Eastmain and Little Whale River. These included the Spencers, Samuel and Ellen Louttit, Thomas and Mary Wiegand, Robert Watt and his wife Jeane or Jenny (Ritchards), Mary Corcoran, Charles Robertson, William Corston and his wife Margaret (Mackay), Walter Dickson and his wife Maria (Spencer), Henry Ladouceur and his wife Priscilla (Neobud). These cottagers, as they were sometimes called, seemed to Watkins to have sunken morally to the level of their heathen neighbours. The minister helped curtail their swearing and provided regular worship and schooling. John Spencer regularly recorded Watkins’ church services in the Company journal, and noted the “beautiful discourses”, the “wholesome lesson”, and “the unmistakable pleasure of listening to the edifying Sermons of that able preacher the Revd Mr. Watkins.” The minister also reduced the traditional year-end drinking bouts, at least during his brief tenure at Fort George. On Christmas Day 1852, Spencer observed, “Much better for us all that we should be listening to the [word?] of God, than to be passing the day in the manner that I have seen exhibited here — some of us more like madmen than anything else” .