The child later known as the Reverend Peter Jones (1802-56) was born on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario, in the vicinity of present-day Toronto, on land which his forebears had wrested from the Iroquois Confederacy about a century previously; he was designated Kahkewaquonaby (Eagle or Sacred Feathers) in a naming ceremony held a few days later, the second son of Tuhbenahneequay, a daughter of Mississauga Objibwa band chief Wahbanosay, and Augustus Jones, a land surveyor and farmer of Welsh heritage1, who had come to Upper Canada from New York State with an influx of Loyalist refugees, both white and Iroquois, during the closing phases of the American War of Independence. In the time-dishonoured fashion of the frontier element, Augustus maintained parallel relationships but around the time of his son Peter’s birth, under pressure from the from the ever-advancing mainstream society, he effectively renounced Tuhbenahneequay in favour of Sarah Tekarihogen, whom he had regularly married in 1798; Sarah was a daughter of the chief of the Mohawks. Sacred Feathers received a traditional upbringing from his mother’s people to the age of fourteen and was thereafter invited to live with his father, a hitherto active but remote influence. The independence of the Mississaugas, meanwhile, had effectively collapsed in the carnage and devastation of the War of 1812, as renewed hostilities between the United States and the British raged all around. By 1820, they were settled agriculturalists on three small reserves at the mouths of the Credit River, Twelve Mile Creek and Sixteen Mile Creek, with an aggregate landbase reduced to just two hundred acres. Donald B. Smith’s Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians2 is the uncontested principal text on this subject. As with many operating under similar bicultural and bilingual influences, Peter was destined to function as an intermediary between two races. In 1820, he accepted nominal baptism into the Church of England, more in the hope of social advancement than for any worthier motive. The defining moment of his life, however, came in 1823, when, at the age of twenty-one, Methodist missionaries made an energetic and enthusiastic convert of him. Thereafter, his commitment to initiatives for the assimilation and religious conversion of his fellow tribesmen, perceived as the indispensable means of placing them on an equal footing with the whites, was unconditional. An integral strand of his logic was that such endeavours would raise the Indian in the estimation of the religious public. He was the driving force behind the translation of the Gospels into his native tongue. The essential themes and tragedies of indigenous-white encounters, from one end of the continent to the other, are depressingly consistent and tending to demonstrate that there is something in the psyche of indigenous people, particularly within the context of the cultural stresses and sequence of apocalyptic events to which their communities were repeatedly subjected, rendering them particularly susceptible to the religious manias which formed a periodical but routine feature of life in 19th century North America. Their history throughout the frontier period was punctuated by a series of crisis cults - some identifiably Christian and others revivals of native traditions - effectively triggered by abrupt social collapse, as the dead hand of white settlement moved steadily and inexorably westward. There is a paradox at work, in that whilst clutching frantically at the message of ostensible salvation lying at the heart of the new religion, Peter Jones and others like him were, all the time, one supposes, acutely aware that the intrusions of the white man were precisely what they needed salvation from. The emotionally highly-charged atmosphere at missionary camp-meeting circles, torch-lit at night, foreshadows certain key elements of the Ghost Dance cult of the late 1880s and early 90s: Mississaugas fell to the ground as if dead, some wildly rejoiced, and others cried aloud for mercy. As the young native missionary wrote William Case in the late fall of 1825: “I have indeed, for my part, experienced the greatest blessings since I have been labouring here among my nation; frequently in our meetings, the Lord pours out his Holy Spirit upon us, like as in the ancient days, so that the noise of praise to God is heard afar off.”3 Similar scenes ensued wherever Peter preached; ordained by the Methodists as an exhorter in 1825, he was the beating heart of the Credit Mission, the epicentre of the steady tide of evangelical gains sweeping the Indian communities throughout the latter half of the decade. The process of religious conversion was but one strand of a wider transition, in which the adoption of European methods of agriculture and a settled lifestyle were likewise vital components. Europeanised names, dress codes and literacy followed in the wake of this social revolution; it was essentially the same process which had swept Europe a millenium before. There is, however, a world of difference between Christianity, first encountered as something new and transformative, and, on the other hand, confronted as a stale, state-sponsored instrument of social control, with an almost two-millennial history of division already behind it. In the context of the political climate of the day, the American variety of Methodism to which Peter had aligned himself was deemed particularly subversive and therefore obnoxious to the Canadian political establishment. For Peter and the many sincere converts who had followed him, it came as a severe shock to discover that the Christian religion did not after all exist in one unique form but instead, lurking behind the façade of simplicity, was divided into a bewildering myriad of mutually exclusive denominations, each one contending against the others for supremacy; the process of fragmentation operating even upon the Methodist movement from within. In the light of bitter experience, he tended to view both Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism as ‘inferior, dangerous versions of Christianity’4, more calculated to disrupt his work of evangelization than to advance it. Following the death of Chief John Cameron in October 1828, Peter was selected as a chief of the Credit Indians. In this wholly altered order of things, the qualities which mattered most were sound business sense, in combination with a first-hand knowledge of the Europeans and their customs; Agent James Givins, although somewhat reluctant to endorse this election, a robust effort at political interference having failed, eventually made him the customary presents of a medal and a Union Flag. The Methodists’ financial crisis of 1830 made clear that support for the work of the missions was now urgent. Peter was therefore approached with an invitation to make a fund-raising tour of England, duly accepted and undertaken in 1831-32. Over the course of this and further British tours, in 1837-38 and 1845-46, he solicited charitable donations in aid of a variety of projects for the spiritual and material advancement of his people, lending a frequent and exotic presence to the proceedings of the missionary societies: He is of the middle stature, with large but mild features, of a swarthy complexion, and straight jet-black hair. His native costume consisted of a sort of frock coat, which, with the leggins, were made of tanned deer-skins, coloured yellow; the collar of the coat was edged with small beads, and the seams ornamented with leather fringe. He wore a tippet on his shoulders, ornamented with rows of holes, made by a serrated punch. A worsted sash of different colours was fastened round his waist, to which was attached on the left side the entire skin of a mink, formed into a pouch. His feet were covered with ornamented mockasins (sic). One of the large silver medals was suspended from his neck, which was given by the Government of this country to the recognized Indians Chiefs in British America; on one side it bore a profile of George III., and on the reverse, the British arms.5 Throughout the 1830s, he was acutely aware of the simultaneous plight of the five civilized tribes, then under the threat of compulsory westward removal from their homelands in the south-eastern United States, their prodigious and accelerated programmes of spontaneous assimilation notwithstanding. He steadfastly petitioned the Crown for a grant of title deeds to secure what remained of his own people’s landbase. He was granted an audience for this purpose by King William IV in 1832 and by Queen Victoria in 1838. On both occasions, he was sympathetically received but, as John Shattock had discovered to his lasting regret fully two generations earlier, the control exerted by the Crown over its North American possessions was indirect and largely notional. It is a singular fact that the Rev. Peter Jones was the subject of what are reckoned to be the oldest surviving photographs of a North American Indian, a set of calotypes executed by Messrs David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson of Edinburgh, during his second Scottish sojourn, on 4th August 1845. Later in the same month, on Tuesday, 26th August 1845, he addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at Inverness. The evening of Thursday, 30th October 1845, found him in all his glory, soliciting a packed and enthusiastic house in Glasgow’s Trades’ Hall for subscriptions to the manual labour schools, which he projected to establish at home. The educational theme reflected the latest shift in his preoccupations, intended as a practical measure aimed at furthering his lifetime’s work for the reformation and preservation of the native population, with a view to their entry as full and equal participants in a properly integrated society. An endlessly recurring feature of newspaper reports was that they commented upon the Rev. Peter Jones’s capacity to attract capacity audiences wherever he appeared, with substantial numbers routinely turned away. He was however perceptive enough to attribute this facility not to the power of his sermons but to the general fascination exerted by his native garb. George Henry, otherwise Mangwadaus, exhibited by George Catlin in 1845, identified himself as Peter’s ‘second cousin’ but Smith presents credible evidence that George was in fact Peter’s younger half-brother6, one of the children of Tuhbenahneequay’s subsequent marriage to a Mississauga warrior named Mesquacosy. Peter was ‘horrified’7 by George’s activities as a show Indian but he would doubtless have been the first to concede that his own expedients were not so very different. Peter’s tireless endeavours and travels in foreign climes took a severe toll on his health, eventually consigning him to an early grave. He passed away in the summer of 1856, yet several months short of his fifty-fifth birthday. Five years later, one Glasgow paper was prompted by the posthumous publication of his autobiography to produce the following helpful synopsis: HISTORY OF THE OJEBWAY INDIANS, with Espe- cial Reference to their Conversion to Chris- tianity. By the Rev. PETER JONES, Indian Missionary. London : A. W. Bennett. THERE are many still living in this city who will not have forgotten the arrival here, in the summer of 1839, of the lamented author of this interesting volume. Mr Jones, or, as he was known by his tribe, Kahkewaquouaby (sic) or “sacred waving feathers,” his dedication at baptism having been to the thunder-god or the eagle, was chief of the Chippeway or Ojebway Indians. His father, a land-surveyor, was of Welsh extraction ; his mother was the daughter of an Indian chief ; and he himself was brought up in the manners, customs, and religious services of the tribe in which he was born. In 1823, Kahkewaquouaby (sic), then in his twenty-third year, was brought under a saving knowledge of Divine truth by attending a camp meeting of the Wesleyan Methodists. He discovered the errors and superstitions under which he had been brought up, and having undergone a careful course of study of the doctrines and precepts of the Christian religion, and otherwise fitted himself to discharge the duties which he believed to be incumbent upon him, he became a missionary to his own and other Indian tribes, and succeeded by the Divine blessing in effecting among them a most remarkable reformation. In 1831 he visited England to vindicate the territorial rights of his countrymen, and had the honour of being presented in his Indian dress to William and Adelaide in Windsor Castle ; and in 1837 he again returned, with Mrs Jones, in connection with the Indian schools in Canada, delivering lectures and addresses in the chief towns of Ireland and Scotland. In this city he breakfasted with “the great Dr Chalmers,” who, he says, “possessed, as great men do, a child-like simplicity ;” and in Leith he addressed a crowded meeting, Provost Reach in the chair. He died in 1856, after a life spent in thorough devotion to the cause of “the great (sic) Spirit,” and with the full assurance that he had many souls among the Indian tribes which would be given to him as a cause of rejoicing in the day of the consummation of all things.    The present volume, which has prefixed to it a tenderly written memoir of the author by his respected widow, is full of graphic pictures and most interesting details of Indian life, manners, customs, religious feasts and sacrifices, wars, amusements, &c. One chapter is devoted to a disquisition on the origin of the Indian tribes, another to their religion, a third to their language, and a fourth to their present state and future prospects as a people. On all these and co-relative subjects Mr Jones writes with fullness and freedom, and occasionally in a style eloquent and impressive. The value of the work is greatly enhanced by a variety of illustrative engravings ; among others, portraits of chiefs, weapons of war, instruments used in witchcraft, domestic implements, and idols.8 An artefact which the Rev. Peter Jones collected and routinely displayed as evidencing his people’s supposed former depravity, a rattle with its head carved into an effigy of the Thunderbird deity, is illustrated in Richard Green’s Voices of Thunder - A Case Study of Great Lakes Dewclaw Rattles.9 Thereafter, the final years of Peter Jones’s life were played out in disillusionment and anticlimax, as the strain of striving, over many years, to bridge two incompatible cultures impacted severely on his health. The long sought-after title deeds to the Credit settlement never came. Instead, in 1846, the government unveiled its latest Indian policy, proposing to remove the Ojibwa to a ‘homeland’ on the Bruce Peninsula. It argued that the resulting concentration of Indians would make it possible to establish a manual labour school at Owen Sound. A further inducement was the offer of title deeds. However, predictably, the land offered was, for agricultural purposes, virtually worthless.10 The situation was only resolved when their former enemies, the Iroquois, offered the Mississaugas a fertile tract in the south-western corner of the Six Nations Reserve. New Credit was settled in 1847, only for the inhabitants to fall prey to the renewed harassment and depredations of white settlers. Peter was too unwell to take up his post as superintendent of Mount Elgin Industrial School. In his absence, the institution which he had laboured long and hard to establish fell under exclusively white control and likewise proved an utter disappointment. Peter had arrived at the same tragic realisation that others of his kind had already made and would continue to make, over the course of generations; that the ostensible offer of participation as equal partners in the social order, which the Indians could avail themselves of simply by metamorphosing into a race of self-supporting Christian farmers, was, and ever had been, a mirage, a deception. The Rev. Peter Jones died at home, at Echo Villa, near Brantford, surrounded by his family, in the early hours of 29th June 1856. Rev. Peter Jones (Sacred Feathers) on Wiki Footnotes: 1 Donald B. Smith is uncharacteristically deficient on this point. Despite acknowledging assistance from six of Augustus Jones’s descendents, he identifies Augustus’s father only as ‘a Welsh emigrant who had settled on the Hudson River in New York’. According to the Bristol Mirror, 21st May 1831, and the Bristol Mercury, 24th, Peter Jones’s ‘great-grandfather and grandfather’ were the original migrants; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 28th, renders this ‘great-grandfather and grandmother’. 2 Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press, 1987 3 Smith, p. 70. See also p. 96; a witness is quoted as describing a campground of Credit and Grape Island Indians ‘singing, some praying, and others lying about the ground as if dead.’ The rigid dichotomy between believers who will be saved from the approaching cataclysm and unbelievers who will be damned (Smith, p. 84) is a further shared feature. 4 Smith, p. 97. For a specific instance of Peter Jones’s implacable aversion to Roman Catholicism, see also p. 217, where he is quoted as stating: ‘I have never discovered any real difference between the Roman Catholic Indian and the pagan, except the wearing of crosses.’ 5 Bristol Mirror, 21st May 1831 6 Smith, p. 187. Born in 1811, Mangwadaus / George Henry was originally called Pemikishigon. 7 Smith, p. 188; also caption to illustration no. 23, following p. 226 8 Caledonian Mercury, 3rd August 1861. The reference to 1839 ought to be treated with caution, 1838 is presumably what was intended. Peter and his wife Eliza passed through New York City on their way home during late October 1838; Smith, p. 171 9 Oxford: Spellicans Press, 2017, pp. 35 & 39 10 True to form, the Canadian government took the Bruce Pensinsula from the Indians living there just a few years later, in 1854, after it had been overrun by squatters. Smith, p. 225

The Diamond’s Ace - Scotland and the Native Americans