Introduction
Absent from the historiography of Anglicans in Canada, the unprecedented episode of the participation by two Ojibwe-speaking Anishinabek lay delegates in the 1866 meeting of the Electoral Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto garnered a brief flurry of contemporary journalistic coverage across a networked imperial and colonial press. For their part, Chief Henry Buhkwujjenene (1811–1900) and Chief John Maishequonggai (c. 1806–c. 1878), representing the northern Ontario mission stations of Garden River and Manitowaning, respectively, were accustomed to straddling what Ruth Bliss Phillips calls ‘a narrow line between comforting sameness and a titillating otherness’.Footnote 2 In the most vivid reportage, the anonymous satire Sporting Intelligence: The Race for the Mitre (1866) by special correspondent Thomas Charles Patteson (1836–1907), the two delegates were dehumanized, reduced to the status of ‘Indian nags … becoming inoculated with the ways of Anglicans’.Footnote 3 In another more distantly circulated representation, an Indigenous presence at the incipience of Canadian synodality was invested with different rhetorical significance, the unsettling scandal of their voting membership justifying the struggle for self-government in the nascent Anglican Churches of other colonies. Laying bare anxieties about the precarious situation of colonial Anglicanism, the graphic and racializing language characteristic of both accounts, preoccupied with the ‘grotesque’ affectations of the chiefs clad in traditional dress, also belies the immediate, if momentary, importance of Indigenous votes, of subaltern agency, to numerous interests, within and without the Synod. These concerns included branches of the new federal government of Canada; the logging industry; the New England Company; the ailing Bishop John Strachan (1778–1867) of Toronto, and their own precarious Indigenous communities, including the missionaries embedded within them.
Offered in service of spiritual renewal, rather than presuming to interpret the experience and discourse of Indigenous Anglicans, nor simply documenting the first local episode of formal Indigenous involvement in the counsels of Anglicans, this paper introduces, briefly, these key texts, along with the lives of the exoticized churchmen featured in their coverage, unravelling ‘the logic of settler church operations’.Footnote 4 These tasks necessitate elaborating the historical context of the Electoral Synod, parsing the decentring journalistic, the only, representations made of its Indigenous membership, the products of a lively colonial print culture.Footnote 5 Patteson’s text, the most extensive and best informed, recast the event in the specialist vocabulary of thoroughbred horse racing. Through this improbable lens, a more accurate glimpse of the history of the emergence both of Anglican synodality and of Indigenous Anglicanism in Confederation Era Canada, and of their meaning to Anglicans, and others, elsewhere in the British Empire, begins to come into focus. Indigenous membership of the Electoral Synod also evidences a halting and utterly pragmatic attempt at assimilating Indigenous bodies to the Canadian body politic in the Confederation Era by predominantly Tory churchmen in Toronto who, following their leader, Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–1891), recognized the potential of Indigenous enfranchisement, but failed capitalizing on it, the Electoral Synod of 1866 being a true anomaly.
The Two Texts
Patteson’s avowedly disrespectful account of the Adjourned Meeting of the Fourteenth Session of the Synod of the Diocese of Toronto to be held for the Election of a Coadjutor Bishop, as it was styled formally, hereafter ‘the special session’, appeared first as a serialized news satire in two successive local daily papers.Footnote 6 After the publication on 18 September, 1866, of only one incendiary instalment in the Toronto Leader, a prestigious morning paper and local Tory outlet, successful protests launched from unknown quarters to proprietor James Beaty (1798–1892) caused the serial to be discontinued abruptly. Undaunted, Patteson pressed on with two further instalments in the pages of successive editions of the upstart, pro-British, and non-sectarian, evening Telegraph, whose ambitious young editor, John Ross Robertson (1841–1918), appreciated satire and was hungry for content.Footnote 7 Subsequently repositioning his work somewhere between literature and journalism in the print culture of the day, within weeks of the conclusion of the special session on 22 September 1866, using the pseudonym Tintinnabulum, Patteson published in pamphlet form a slightly revised version of his complete text.Footnote 8 He boasted that at a price of ten cents a copy, ‘My tract had an immense sale’.Footnote 9
Combining an insider’s knowledge of the turf with his anti-American contempt for what he termed ‘the elective system in the appointment of bishops’, Patteson devised a wickedly elaborate Juvenalian satire of baffling density, greater than 6000 words in length, too entangled to attempt to decode at present. English-born, the scion of a prominent family of jurists and churchmen, and rejecting ‘The Britishness encapsulated in the term “Greater Britain”… as a vehicle for colonial identity’, Patteson’s main object was the repudiation of emerging Anglican synodality in Canada by demonstrating the repugnancy of its innovation to the ordering of the Church of England.Footnote 10 In his own words, ‘I wrote the Leadera skit called “the Race for the Mitre” meant to ridicule the idea of electing bishops.Footnote 11 An ornament of ecclesiological curiosity, the tintinnabulum, or sacring bell, was rung as a warning at key moments in the course of the medieval liturgy, including before the Blessed Sacrament when carried to the sick. As a choice of pseudonym, Tintinnabulum may embody Patteson’s noisy complaint about burgeoning synodality, as well as his opinion of those responsible for advancing its cause, in his diagnosis, in need of strong medicine. More likely, Patteson drew on his Etonian education, evoking satirically the antique Roman usage of a term for the ithyphallic bells summoning men to the public baths.
Similar to the bell, Patteson viewed synods as yet another excess of senseless antiquarianism. By sounding the alarm about their ridiculousness, he hoped to widen an already existing rift along an important fault-line dividing contemporary high churchmanship on the nature of episcopacy. There were, on the one hand, the more venturesome innovations of Tractarians and others who embraced the elective principle, one of several practices usually lumped together, imprecisely, as the ‘synodical movement’, or the ‘synodical system’, and, on the other, an older, Tory sensibility, nostalgic for the Royal Supremacy in the affairs of colonial Churches, abrogated a decade earlier, and hostile to what was acknowledged, even by Bishop Strachan, to be an Americanizing ecclesiology.Footnote 12 Patteson’s subtler critique of deleterious developments along similar lines in horse racing in Canada – levelling any distinction between synod membership and a day at the races as mostly respectable middle class leisure activities – also deserves fuller attention, but elsewhere.Footnote 13 As the flâneur, ‘his restless mind, reflecting on the ordering of the city, its history, and its quotidian present’, Patteson reduced the deliberations, at ‘that point where the imagination and the urban environment intersect’, to events at a racetrack!Footnote 14
It is true the special session, the first election of a bishop in Toronto, carried on despite some unfavourable circumstances, attracting unexpected levels of popular attention. For one, there was the scandalous collapse of the Bank of Upper Canada, the province’s first chartered financial institution, a panicking event announced publicly on 19 September 1866, the opening day of the special session, in which Patteson claimed of the delegates, not inaccurately, ‘that nearly every member of the ring was hit more or less severely by the failure’. Like the Synod itself, the Bank of Upper Canada counted Bishop Strachan among its founders, and the run spurred by its rumoured demise proved an irresistible distraction for many of Toronto’s commercial elite engaged as lay delegates, ‘seen going by Pall Mall into the city before the race had terminated’.Footnote 15 Also of urgent concern throughout the summer of 1866, delaying a regularly scheduled meeting of the Fourteenth Session of the Synod, was the looming Fenian threat. A series of these incursions was a catalyst for the temporary suspension of habeas corpus in Canada, as well as for Confederation itself, and for drawing the new dominion politically closer to Britain. Another lay delegate to the special session, Colonel George Taylor Denison III (1839–1925), representing St Ann’s, Brockton, recalled to a correspondent in 1918 riding back from his duties commanding volunteer cavalry on the frontier, just in order ‘to attend the Synod’.Footnote 16
Something more of the perturbed state Patteson ascribed to the special session, its fluctuating membership and the embattled atmosphere, that was not entirely the invention of his own mean-spirited flâneurie, is conveyed by the isolated appearance of the two chiefs in his text, whom he alleged arrived belatedly on the last day of proceedings, and then, only to cast their votes. This was an unfair exaggeration, the result of Patteson taking licence by condensing the chronology of the lengthy proceedings, though, ‘At the same hour’ as the special session was in progress on the evening of its critical third day, a local newspaper noted a well-attended meeting being held simultaneously across the street to raise funds in support of Diocesan Indian Missions where the chiefs were detained. In fact, their party arrived in Toronto fully a week before the commencement of the special session, and there is no evidence to doubt they were really present beginning with the roll call when the pronunciation of their names caused a momentary derailment of the proceedings.Footnote 17 But according to Patteson, by the time they appeared at the Cathedral Church of St James, its cavernous interior then adorned by wrapping galleries he called ‘the grand stand’, many ballots were cast already.Footnote 18 Setting the scene for the start of the competition between the clerical candidates, whom he likened to racehorses of varying merits, Patteson described among the swelling crowds of spectators, and in contrast with the entirely male membership of the special session, ‘A number of ladies’ with ‘much interest in the result. Many of them were surprisingly familiar with the jargon of the ring, and patted the horses with all the enthusiasm of devotees to the sport.’ Patteson’s account continues:
Much curiosity was evinced to take stock of two Indian nags, who with their trainer at their heads, were parading the paddock with a motley crowd at their heels. They were brought here from the west by Chance, and being on the ground were pressed into the Badger’s service, one of whose thick and thin supporters recognized something in them thicker than water! On the whole, they were a blood-like pair, and as they attracted a deal of gape-seed on their showy blankets and Trappings, they must have considerably helped the take at the gate. They reminded one very strongly of the Japanese Ambassadors present some years ago at the Feast of Derbee [sic]; and to tell the truth they seemed to have about as clear a comprehension of what was passing before them. The Babel of the ring startled them a little at first, it being, as a groom from Niagara said, the habit at the Indian Councils they had attended, for only one person to speak at a time. In this and other things they had a rare opportunity to-day of becoming inoculated with the ways of Anglicans.Footnote 19
Patteson’s vitriol, while condescending and opprobrious, was not reserved exclusively for the two unnamed Indigenous delegates; he mocked everyone in attendance, evoking the tired visual tropes of feathered Indian dependence and feminization for these particular faces.Footnote 20 His punning reference to the Revd James Chance (1829–1897), then serving as Anglican missionary at Garden River, is typical of the longer text, while his further description of the Chiefs as ‘a blood-like pair’, attracting profitably the gaze of all, and certainly unaccustomed to the disorderly conduct of the special session, is more ambivalent, even flattering. Though the members of the 1862 Takenouchi Mission sent to Europe at the behest of the Tokugawa shogunate indeed attended the Epsom Derby, an event satirized extensively in Punch, it is the mention of Indian inoculation, the ‘increasingly vexed practice of incorporating pathogenic otherness into Victorian Britain’, that seems most timely, also recalling a history of genocidal colonial violence traceable to Lord Amherst’s use of germ warfare against Indigenous antagonists at the Siege of Fort Pitt in July 1763: ‘You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race’, this infamous quotation probably known to Patteson, a voracious literary consumer.Footnote 21
Evidencing both ‘the fact that the English press was bound into a broader imperial communications network, that linked papers to their counterparts not just in the rest of the UK, but also in the colonies’, and that ‘news of empire was often supplied by settlers, and was tinted by their own particular perspectives on local events’, a second text, this one relating the events of the special session from the antipodean perspective, appeared in January 1867.Footnote 22 Mocking, though not satirical, the second account reported accurately on events in Toronto, but was itself mostly derived from a British source. The anonymous Australian correspondent copied intelligence supplied by an unidentified ‘Canadian correspondent,’ possibly Patteson, within a report emphasizing the novelty of the special session, published on successive days in October 1866 in two important British outlets: the influential evangelical Anglican newspaper the Record, whose editors most typically ‘acted vituperative partisan’, and the high Tory magazine John Bull.Footnote 23 The story cobbled together was in its turn reprinted to cascading effect, including within the pages of the Sydney Freeman’s Journal, an organ of the local Roman Catholic Archdiocese, after an initial appearance in the Sydney Morning Herald:
HOW SOME PROTESTANT BISHOPS ARE ELECTED. –
The following interesting episode in the election of the Protestant Bishops of Toronto, Canada, appeared in a late number of the Record: — Election of a Bishop in the Protestant Church, Canada. The election of a coadjutor bishop, and successor to the present Bishop of Toronto, says the Record, has just taken place by ballot, in St. James’s Cathedral in that city. The Bishop presided over the ceremony, which, owing to its novel character and the number of tickets taken before a definitive result could be arrived at, excited much interest. At the ninth ballot the Venerable Archdeacon Bethune [Alexander Neil Bethune (1800–1879)], of Toronto was elected by 53 clerical and 47 lay votes, being 50 votes above the highest given for any other of the six persons in nomination, and the Bishop, addressing the delegates, proclaimed the fact. A novel feature of this Synod was the presence among its delegates of two of the “red children of the Forest” — Thuhwutzhene, representative of Garden River, and Mizhekwonghi, delegate from that of Manitowaning. “It was a striking and suggestive sight,” says a Canadian correspondent, “to see those chiefs, adorned with their native emblems, decorated leggings, and wampum belts, advancing in semi-barbaric dignity by the side of the polished denizens of towns, to cast with them, their votes for the election of a bishop in the Church of Christ; and apparently as deeply imbued with the responsibility of their work as their more highly civilised brethren.” — The following query is appended to the paragraph in the Herald: Would not our Australian squatters, princely merchants, and the members of various learned professions, be as able to elect their own bishop as the grotesque red Indian chief and polished denizens of Canadian towns?Footnote 24
Helpfully, or not, Cecilia Morgan points out, ‘ “Grotesque” in this period could mean a number of things – fantastic, unnatural, absurd, bizarre, or quaint – and we can only speculate about the writer’s intentions in describing the traditional dress of the Indigenous lay delegates in this manner: it may have been synonymous with both fantastic and bizarre.’Footnote 25 Disregarding the dignified conduct and deep sense of responsibility identified in the two delegates by the Canadian correspondent, and instead exaggerating their feigned savagery in language typical of the Victorian spectacle of the colonial primitive, the Australian correspondent revealed doubts about the position of Anglican establishment there, questioning whether the innovations of the synodical movement in Canada weren’t bilateral, and couldn’t be mimicked beneficially in colonial Churches elsewhere. From 1829, Sydney Anglicans became connected increasingly to the same movement of revival resourced in cultivating synodality in Toronto, though, as Hilary M. Carey notes, in contrast with rapid progress in Canada, ‘it would take many years’ to achieve this same level of development in Australia. A decade later, in 1877, a general synod was formed, but this was mandated to meet only every five years. Carey continues, ‘The tenacity with which the constitutional connection binding the colonial Churches to Canterbury was asserted was not inconsistent with striving for colonial autonomy, and there were connections between moves for colonial self-rule and that for independent Church management.’Footnote 26
Weaving new ‘patterns of rhetoric at crucial junctures in British colonial and imperial history’ of the characterization of settler relations with Indigenous peoples in the press communities of the two colonies, the Australian text then reappeared, unaltered, in at least one New Zealand newspaper in February 1867.Footnote 27 In this reprinting, the editors of the Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle may appear wilfully blind to local developments, specifically, to the participation of Māori clergy and laity in synods of the neighbouring missionary Diocese of Waiapu. Unlike both the Nelson Diocesan Synod, that beseeched the bishop of London to make their episcopal appointments, and the novel special session in Toronto, the inaugural meeting of the Waiapu Synod held in 1862 included two English and three Māori clerics, along with nineteen Māori lay delegates, and was presided over by Bishop G.A. Selwyn (1809–1878), one of the greatest champions of Anglican synodality. Indeed, the first four Waiapu synods were conducted in the Māori language! With the escalation of the New Zealand Wars (1845–1872), however, the uncritical reprinting of the article by the Pākehā newspaper may have had a more sinister local significance, heaping scorn indiscriminately on any Indigenous identity available, and registering a more specific complaint about the lack of settler colonial influence over Waiapu, a diocese that would gradually be Pākehāsized.Footnote 28
The Two Lay Delegates
As for the two figures at the centre of the intercolonial scrum, Chief Henry Buhkwujjenene and Chief John Maishequonggai, it may be the superabundance of variant forms of the spellings of their names in the record that accounts for the omission of their membership of the special session from otherwise distinguished résumés. Biographical notes compiled in 1943 on Buhkwujjenene in the archives of the Anglican Diocese of Algoma enumerate fully seven variants, explaining simplistically that ‘There is no standard spelling of Ojibway names.’Footnote 29 To this list the research for the present paper contributes 10 more, 17 in all, including examples that appear to be the invention of contemporary writers, intended either to mimic or to ridicule, or that are the result of journalistic laziness. There are almost certainly still more variants to be identified elsewhere, the methodological problem itself being worthy of further consideration.
Significant onomastic complications aside, both lay delegates were notable figures. Chief Henry Buhkwujjenene was the second son of the celebrated Chief Shingwaukonse (1773–1854), whose Anglican identity and foundational role in the life of the Garden River First Nation his son would come to represent at the special session is well known. Remembered as the first convert from Garden River to be baptized by pioneering missionary the Revd William McMurray (1810–94) in 1833, Henry, as he was then renamed, in tribute to the formative influence of ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864), became a signatory to the Robinson Huron Treaty in 1850, meeting the Prince of Wales a decade later during the latter’s famous tour of Canada, and receiving his commemorative medal in the course of the royal spectacle. Participating in a rich tradition of Transatlantic Anishinaabe celebrity invented in the 1830s, Buhkwujjenene travelled to England for the first time in 1871 in the company of another Anglican missionary to Garden River, the Revd Edward F. Wilson (1844–1915), a key figure in the creation of the Indian Residential Schools system in Canada. They were appealing for funds in aid of the establishment of what would become the hijacked implementation his father’s vision of a teaching wigwam, following a period as a Residential School, now the Shingwauk Centre at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.Footnote 30
According to Wilson’s published account of the sojourn, Buhkwujjenene cultivated being ‘the main attraction’ at fundraisers, wearing his ‘blanket coat, his feather in his hat, his leggings and moccasins, and the skunk skin on his arm. Very seldom was any attempt made to treat him rudely, though occasionally it was necessary to hurry him through the streets to avoid a crowd collecting. Wide guesses were made at his nationality; one would take him for a New Zealander, another for a native of Japan.’Footnote 31 In the course of a subsequent journey undertaken in 1878, he renewed his acquaintance with the Prince of Wales, enthralling partygoers with traditional aadizookaanag, or sacred story-telling, and relating to guests for the first time the history of the creation of the world by Nanaboozhoo. Buhkwujjenene had also a reputation for conferring Ojibwe names on white friends, both men and women, in Canada and England, including on Wilson, his father, wife, sister and brother.Footnote 32 Evidently, the worldly chief was aware of the power of his feathers strategically to beguile the imperial imagination, leveraging their mystique in the masterly performance of a parody of ritual and authenticity in service of his own cause, and was not, as Kate Flint insists, the hapless victim of sartorial exploitation.Footnote 33
Less edifying, Buhkwujjenene is also identified with decades of bitter, occasionally violent, sectarian animosity among his people at Garden River in the form of an intense rivalry with his formidable older brother, Chief Augustin/Ogista Shingwauk (1800–1890), for official recognition as successor to their distinguished father. At one stage of the conflict, missionary James Chance assaulted two neighbouring Jesuit priests, as he promoted the cause of ‘Buhkwujjenene because of his Anglicanism and opposed Ogista because of his Methodism and support of the Catholics’.Footnote 34 The presence of Buhkwujjenene at the special session, held during an acute stage of the conflict at Garden River, served to bolster his prestige as he pressed, with Diocesan and New England Company support, his ultimately unsuccessful claim to the hereditary chieftainship. Likewise, his high-profile overseas trips with Chance’s successor, Wilson, had value as propaganda. During the tenure of the latter, however, and owing to a dwindling Methodist presence at Garden River, Ogista was reconciled to Anglicanism.Footnote 35
Less celebrated, Chief John Maishequonggai, described blandly in a Diocesan report as ‘a mild and honest old man’, was a leader of the French River Band at Sheguiandah, and a signatory to the Manitoulin Island Treaty, No. 94, of 1862.Footnote 36 The two missions of Garden River and Manitowaning they represented were already in steep decline by 1866, abject failures doomed to be abandoned by the New England Company five years later as their chief benefactor. Nevertheless, the significance of both places to the history of what is described as one of the most ambitious experiments of Canadian Indian policy prior to Confederation is clear.Footnote 37 Bishop Strachan repeatedly visited the Sault and Garden River, regretting his own inability to carve out a fourth diocese from Toronto’s vast territory at the former place, in addition to those of Huron, Ontario and Niagara. While a missionary Diocese of Algoma was separated during the episcopate of Bishop Alexander Neil Bethune in 1873, with the Sault as its see city, only in the twentieth century was its independent synod established.
Asserting confidently that ‘The Devil was once his object of worship’, the Toronto Globe also reported that Buhkwujjenene spoke at length, through an interpreter, to a sizeable audience at the Toronto Indian Missions fundraiser held in conjunction with the third day of the special session on 21 September. Consistently, both men appeared ‘dressed in the distinguishing habilaments of their tribes and adorned with medals commemorative of services rendered by their ancestors to the British Government’. Affirming his sectarian loyalty, in these carefully chosen words, calculated by speaker and missionary translator to flatter and to placate, playing on settler colonial anxieties, Buhkwujjenene also included in his remarks a paraphrase of abolitionist cleric John Newton (1725–1807) in addition to making an oblique reference to what could have been interpreted by his audience to be cannibalism:
I am an Ojibway; I am from the place where the sun sets…It is now thirty-five years since we put away our old religion, and we have thought ourselves very happy since, and now I know that I am much happier than when I first embraced Christianity. We have a good house. My children enjoy peace and happiness. They have a garden and cultivate it, and nearby is the house of God. I am exceedingly happy to state this evening that my Church is attended by a large number of my fellow Indians, and they not only attend Church, but receive the holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. All around where I live there is plenty of whiskey. I and my young men go out every morning to work, and they are now accustomed to eat, not what they used to eat in their heathen state, but the best. I know that I am not what I ought to be, nor are they what I hope they will yet be, as they have not long had Christianity. My Christian brethren – I salute you.
Maishequonggai spoke next, also through the missionary interpreter:
I am an Ojibway Chief. I have a lively remembrance of my condition before I became a Christian. You have already heard my minister, who was sent from this place to instruct me. My male and female friends, we love worship, and pray to the same God. I look upon my minister in the position of messenger from God to me. I trust you, who have already sent me the Gospel, to continue it. I trust to your goodness for this continuance. You have caused the sun to come out of darkness to our people, do not allow the clouds to come upon us once more. (Cheers) I will not go over the statements of our minister regarding the condition of my people. I am very glad you came to see me and I see you. The reason I come in this dress is not to show you how I dress, but to show you how my father dressed. I have better things now which my white friends have given me.Footnote 38
Both statements conformed to the logic of cultural replacement proper to many programmes of the Victorian missionary enterprise in Canada, holding that, along with formal education and the pursuit of agriculture, the adoption of settler dress marked the progress of civilization among Indigenous peoples.Footnote 39 Both chiefs were intercultural brokers, synthesizers, and members of what Patteson, at least, regarded as an ‘inoculated’ Indigenous elite, trading profitably in identities as they engaged in internecine strife, mastering techniques of settler colonial establishment, secular and spiritual, to disruptive effect. Did the humorous mention within another derivative account of the special session published several months later in The Mission Field, the monthly magazine of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, that at the roll call at the beginning of the first day of the special session, ‘the Registrar made one or two abortive attempts to summon them by name…but gave way in despair, and transferred that duty to one of the Indian Missionaries’, amuse the Chiefs and their closest relations, as much as any other readership?Footnote 40
Conclusion
The subsequent recasting, even canonizing, of Patteson’s satire as a mere curiosity, the embarrassing token of a tumultuous era in Diocesan politics, by a process of banalizing clerical repetition, its author’s true identity long an open secret within a relatively small community of readers and writers, is a tribute to Patteson, if not his quixotic purpose of discrediting the elective system, already firmly anchored by the weight of both provincial statute and ecclesiastical canon by the time he went to press.Footnote 41 ‘Very different from the Synod Journal’s decorous account of the long drawn out proceedings’, recalled the Diocesan historiographer in 1932. Twenty years later, anticipating Lennon-McCartney’s banker with a motor car, the Provost of Trinity College dismissed Patteson’s exertions as ‘very strange’. More recently, the offhand mention by Alan Hayes of ‘A cheeky newspaper reporter’ who had the temerity to liken the special session to a horse race, passes over too easily this challenging writer, still mostly unrecognized, whose text has never received adequate attention, despite representing the only noticeable crack in the façade of the edifice of synodical government, as well as embodying one of the only sources for the earliest Indigenous participation in Anglican synodality in Canada.Footnote 42 That this Wild West show avant le mot of the special session, the very moment of the local adoption and performance of a decentring elective regime, definitively taking Canadian Anglicans into ‘the brawling world of North American Democracy’, garnered attention across a networked imperial and settler colonial press is hardly surprising, though its reinterpretation by Anglicans, and others, in Australia and New Zealand, reveals anxieties about the ecclesiology of colonial Churches.Footnote 43 As cultural transmitters, the many newspapers within the pages of which these representations of Indigenous affairs appeared, in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all contributed to some extent to forwarding colonialism’s civilizing mission. Their coverage softened colonialism’s gaze, though, demonstrating considerable ambivalence, even admiration, in representing Indigenous people in their coverage.Footnote 44
Indigenous participation in the special session should not be mistaken for Anglican inclusivity, however, and at the next electoral meeting of the Toronto Synod in 1879 there was no Indigenous representation, lay or clerical. The absence of the chiefs from Diocesan historiography amplifies the singularity of the events of 1866. The spectacular gambit of their membership was anomalous, fleeting and totally pragmatic, premised narrowly upon the contemporary strategic importance of charismatic individuals as fundraisers and voting members, barely reflecting an evangelical commitment to ‘effective native agency’, though this was not absent from Bishop Strachan’s policy, and was affirmed inconsistently in other Anglican Churches. Rather, diocesan synods in Canada long continued bastions of settler privilege, proliferating westward alongside other church-run institutions, including Indian Residential Schools. With rare exceptions, until the twentieth century, Indigenous participation was mostly absent from Canadian synods, especially from those dioceses without representation from reserves, the situation of Toronto after 1873. Patteson noted with surprise the interest of women in the special session, but women’s participation in synodality began as late as 1946 at the diocesan level, and then only at the insistence of national authorities, and the franchise was extended in 1918.Footnote 45
There are limited sources for a fuller glimpse of the lives of either of the Indigenous lay delegates. In the case of Chief John Maishequonggai, not even the knowledge of his most important dates is certain, nor can any image of him be identified. Nor are there any sources for their frank impressions of the experience of their membership of the special session. Patteson cast them as supporters of the unsuccessful candidacy of the Revd Thomas Brock Fuller (1810–84) of Toronto, whom Patteson named the Badger, a grey horse ‘of some substance’, backed by ‘Probably the cleverest party’, but raced ‘in the well-known Orange colors of his sporting owner’, revealing partisan leanings at a time of sectarian violence.Footnote 46 Their reasons for this support, if indeed the Evangelical Fuller was their candidate, along with their response to the election of Bishop Bethune, transgendered unflatteringly by Patteson as ‘Cobourg Lass (aged)’, are uncertain. Both remained churchmen the rest of their lives, and Chief Henry Buhkwujjenene, of whom there are numerous caricatures, engravings and photographs, recalled fondly a meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, while admitting his preference for home: ‘I shall always love the English, they were so good to me…’, but ‘No, I would rather be with my own people at Garden River. There are fish in the river, game in the bush, lots of wood for fuel, land to make a garden, hay for the cattle, berries on the rocks and sugar in the maple tree – all free.’Footnote 47
