Missionary Moments and Transatlantic Celebrity: The Anishinaabeg of Upper Canada

NOT ONLY DID THESE travellers lay claim to a more fluid, multi-layered performance of Indigeneity than that of the assimilated convert, they also assessed, commented on, and judged British society, highlighting both its assets and its foibles. While Peter Jones shaped the world of the Ojibwe for a variety of audiences, he also told his Upper Canadian audiences about England, reversing the customary pattern of the period’s travel literature and nascent ethnographies in which the colony was brought to the metropole. “I thought you would be glad to hear my remarks, as an Indian traveller, on the customs and manner of the English people,” he wrote to the Christian Guardian. He found the English generally a “noble, generous minded people — free to act, and free to think — they very much pride themselves in their civil and religious privileges, in their learning, generosity, manufacture, and commerce, and they think that no other nation is equal with them in respect to these things.” Jones found them very “open and friendly … ready to relieve the needs of the poor and needy when properly brought before them.”

He did, though, characterize the English as very fond of “novelties” — no nation, in fact, was as taken with new things. Here, Jones displayed an acute awareness that his appearances in Britain were performances staged and enacted before an audience, part of the theatre of both the missionary and the British colonial worlds. “They will gaze and look upon a foreigner as if he had just dropped down from the moon: and I have often been amused in seeing what a large number of people, a monkey riding upon a dog, will collect in the streets of London where such things may be seen almost everyday.” Jones went on to hint at the tensions he faced. “When my Indian name is announced to attend any public meeting, so great is their curiosity that the place is always sure to be filled; and it would be the same if notice was