Apostle to the Inuit

I have at times been critical of some of the methods of the earliest missionaries in reaching out to people from different cultures, different languages, different nationalities. I have always appreciated the contribution that they have made in bringing the gospel message, which I believe in its true and purest essence, will elevate the lives of people anywhere in the world. I have felt that overall, however, many "missionaries" have often been too paternalistic to other people, and have too often tried to assimilate others into their own cultural identity in addition to proclaiming the essence of the gospel.

This is no doubt true in many cases, but I realize now and afresh, after having read the Journals of the first Anglican missionary to the Inuit in the Baffin Island region, that it is very wrong to stereotype all missionary activity, or to tar all of their methods with the same brush. Some of these heroes of the faith lived a sacrificial life to God and to their fellow man that their critics know little or nothing about.

I am still am very uncomfortable with the type of "missionary" activity whereby the foreigner comes and sets up his or her compound and continues to live as a "westerner" on a different standard or quality of life than that of the national who struggles for an existence. I am also uncomfortable if the "outsider" allows himself or herself to be put on to a pedestal, and considered, in thought, if not in word and deed, as superior, or, at least, as a notch above the human beings to whom he or she ministers.

As one who has travelled many times to the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, I felt deeply challenged and corrected when I recently read the journals of the first Anglican missionary to the Inuit in the Baffin Island region--Edmund James Peck (1850-1924). His Journals and Ethnographic Notes have been published by the University of Toronto Press in 2006, in a book entitled Apostle to the Inuit which features his years in the Baffin Island region between 1894 and 1905.


Today, there are people who call themselves "apostles" or "sent ones" who sit in plush offices, and take a "top-down" approach to ministry, but never really identify or live among a people whose lifestyle or mindset is different from theirs, and or never really prioritize the interests of others above their own. A true apostle, or "sent one," is one who I believe leaves the comforts of his own culture or nationality, and is willing to lay down his identification with the mindset of his own tradition or mindset, in order to identify fully with a people who live differently, who think differently, and who speak differently than him.

In other words, true cross-cultural ministry is "the culture of the cross." We must be willing to lay down our old lives, our old identity, and our own personal rights, tastes, and preferences, in order to live among and to identify fully with a people who are different, but whose lives are every bit as valuable as our own. It is not about bringing other people into our cultural mindset, or western ways of thinking, or even western forms of worship. It is all about being willing to lay down our lives in order that others might live.

I must confess that my own ministry cannot even hold a candle to that of the first Anglican missionary to the Inuit in the Baffin Island region (see picture above). I go up to live among the Inuit for one to three weeks at a time. Edmund James Peck was separated from his wife and children for up to three years at a time, during which he had mail only once a year (if the annual ship came through), and certainly no phone or e-mail connections of any kind.

I travel into the communities in a modern aircraft. Edmund Peck travelled by dog sled or by boat under the most severe and risky conditions imaginable. I identify with Inuit who are, for the most part, able to have sufficient to eat. He identified with Inuit who were often hungry and even starving.

The above map of the Cumberland Sound area (between Iqaluit and Pangnirtung in the south-east part of Baffin Island) shows ships on the location of two whaling stations where Edmund Peck concentrated most of his activity in the Baffin region. The most northern whaling station is Kekerten Island, and the one further south is Blacklead Island where his ministry was started in Baffin, and principally based.

Edmund James Peck arrived at the whaling station of Blacklead Island along with a medical student by the name of J. C. Parker on August 21, 1894. There was a great deal of starvation the first winter, resulting in incidences such as sled dogs attacking the church, which was made of whalebone and seal hide.

On August 11, 1896, J. C. Parker set out on a fishing trip in a boat with Captain Clisby and four Inuit. They never returned alive, and were later discovered to have all drowned.

By August 22, Mr. Sampson arrived at Blacklead Island on board the Alert, and Peck, alarmed about the health of his wife, returned to England in order to see his wife, follow the Inuit Bibles through the press, and seek medical attention for his worsening throat problem.

He returned to Blacklead Island in 1897, bringing new bibles and a new residence which was converted into a church building because of its size (more than 100 could attend). Again, starvation proved a problem, and often Inuit families were supplied out of the missionaries' own stores.

It is time to acknowledge that many missionaries have received a bad rap from most of the secular world, and even much of the Christian world. We have put too many of them in the same category as the agents of western civilization who exploited the indigenous people, or who abused them, or treated them unjustly.

I freely acknowledge that this has happened, not only with some of the residential schools, but in other ways as well where the missionaries were the agents of the federal government to impose the white man's solutions on them without regarding proper protocol, and treating them as the "host people" of the land. This calls for identificational repentance and interecession on their behalf if there is to be any hope for healing and restoration.

However, it also needs to be acknowledged, as Chief Dan George has stated so unashamedly, "The only ones who came to us with love were the missionaries, and I, for one, will ever return that love."

I had felt that some of the earliest missionaries in the far North did not empower the local, indigenous leaders soon enough to take the leadership on their own turf, but in reading Edmund Peck's Journals, I can see clearly that it was always in his heart to see the leadership rise up from within rather than to stay dependent on the foreign missionary.

In his Journal of November 29, 1903, he wrote, "A day of days. Tooloakjuak, in the presence of a full congregation, was appointed a teacher for his own people...I spoke to those assembled of the necessity of teachers being raised up (D.V.) from their own people, and hoped that others might be found worthy to fill such an office."

In reading over something of the comparative history of both the whalers and missionaries such as Edmund James Peck in Inuit history, I make the following comparisons.

Comparisons Between the Influence of Whalers and Missionaries on the Inuit

Attitudes persist that do not look at the overall influence of the whalers in Canadian Arctic history as particularly harmful, but the missionary is often denigrated and demonized as an evil influence. Again, I don't want to stereotype all whalers, as many of them were good people, just like there have been bad apples among the missionaries. Indeed, the whalers even helped and assisted the missionaries at times, providing them with transportation and even temporary lodging.

In a general, overall sense, however, the whalers were motivated more by greed and the love of money, whereas the missionary, generally, was motivated by a love for God and his fellow man to whom he felt a responsibility to help educationally and physically as well as spiritually.

The Scottish whaler, William Penny, discovered the Cumberland Sound in 1840, and it subsequently became the principal destination for British whalers. Penny finally achieved his goal of establishing a permanent shore station in Cumberland Sound by 1857, when he erected a station houses at Kekerton and Nuvujen (see map below).

By 1857, some 17 years after their initial contact with the whalers in 1840, the 1,000-strong Inuit of Cumberland Sound had been reduced to less than 350. Inuit suffered desperately for their new found ties with the whalers. They were susceptible to the alien diseases of the Europeans and Americans, and viruses ravaged native settlements.

On Monday, June 23, 1902, Edmund Peck wrote in his Journal of a walk he took that morning along the shore a short distance from Blacklead Island, "Found there remains of Eskimo dwellings, also some bones of large whales which had evidently been killed by the Eskimo many years ago; relics of the past, when comparatively speaking these children of the north were a numerous body, but are now, especially in Cumberland Sound, but a few poor souls in the wilderness, none the less precious, however, are they in the eyes of Jesus, who I feel sure loves them with a deep and burning love. Even one poor soul saved in these icy wastes is of more value in the eyes of our King than a world conqueror."

By Tuesday, February 2, 1904, Peck wrote, "Mr. Noble arrived from the Kekerten Station. Bad accounts reached us from this quarter. People have suffered much through scarcity of food. The ice having been driven about by various gales, the men were not able to travel over the ice to catch seals--thus the distress."

Up until 1857, contact by the whalers with Inuit along the Baffin Island coast was largely by chance, due to the irregular movements of the whalers as they battled ice and weather in search of southward migrating whales. With the building of the whaling station houses on Kekerten Island in 1857 for the Arctic Aberdeen Company, however, a permanent base was created for the development of trade and employment with the Inuit. The whaling industry made great use of Inuit knowledge of whales, the local area, and methods of survival in the Arctic. The Inuit, on the other hand, found work in such ways as crewing on whaleboats, transporting blubber from the floe edge back to the harbours, rendering whale oil, and supplying the whalers with fresh meat and fur clothing.

In return, Inuit obtained rifles, telescopes, whaleboats, knives, needles, kettles, cloth and other manufactured items as well as biscuits, tobacco and other dry goods. Yet all was not well with the whaling industry, and trouble loomed beneath the surface. The predominate thought in Europe had changed from Christendom to humanism, in which case industrialism, commercialism and modern technology was increasingly governed by materialistic rather than spiritual values which bring severe damage to the environment in the name of modernization.

Moreover, the Inuit women were abused and used as sexual objects by many of the whalers, who would sire children who were neither fully Inuit, nor fully white, giving them an identity crisis. Moreover, the elders from nearby present-day Pangnirtung report that some Inuit men would even allow their wives to be used sexually by the whalers in exchange for tobacco.

To his credit, William Penny did bring Mathias Warmow, a Moravian missionary, to the station houses at Kekerten (see picture above) in 1857 to counteract the influences of the whalers. Warmow was later moved to comment:

"I am always sorry to see the Esquimaux...imitating the Europeans in all respects. They were undoubtedly better off in their original state...When they begin to copy our mode of life, they are neither properly Europeans or Esquimaux, and will speedily die out, in consequence of the change."

Mathias Warmow's work at Kekerten in 1857-1858 may well have been the first missionary activity in the Arctic. By 1860, whaling firms from New England had also erected a station house at Blacklead Island near the mouth of the Cumberland Sound.

A permanent mission was not built until Edmund Peck arrived at Blacklead in 1894. Unlike Warmow, Peck and his successors had a profound effect on Inuit culture. He devised a system of writing with phonetic symbols for Inuktitut. The Syllabic system of writing that he introduced is still in use today. Most Anglican missions which subsequently developed throughout the Arctic provided education for the Inuit until the government built schools in the 1960's.

In 1871, the explorer Charles Francis Hall estimated that $15,000,000.00 worth of oil and whalebone had been taken from Cumberland Sound since 1840. For nearly 100 years (1820 to 1913), the Bow head whale was hunted to near extinction by European and American whalers.

In his Journal of Friday, April 5, 1901, Edmund Peck wrote of an ailing Inuk who had just died: "This is another physical and moral wreck which the crews of whaling have left behind them. For years such men carried on their deeds of inequity unchecked. After the evil is done, Christian missionaries appear on the scene. But why were they not sent before?"

On September 2 of 1901, the Nova Zembla, a whaling ship from Dundee landed on Blacklead Island, and on September 3, Peck entered in his Journal, "Was sorry to hear that a number of women had been on board the steamer all night, and that there was every reason to believe that practices of an immoral nature had been carried on."

On September 4, he wrote with regret, "Found to my great sorrow that some of the candidates for baptism had been on the steamer the whole of Monday night."

On Monday, March 31, 1902, Peck wrote, "These people have seen so many samples of ungodly white men in the past that we can hardly wonder if they view us with suspicion now, and think we are a curse instead of, what we try to be, a blessing to them."

The Inuit had never overhunted the bowhead whale, but the whalers killed some 18,000 in the Baffin region between 1820 and 1913. Subsequently, the whale population was so decimated that to this day, the Inuit have a stringent quota of only being able to hunt one bowhead per year. Surely the sea and the land is in need of healing.

The pictures below were taken at the Blacklead Island during Peck's ministry in the early 1900's, and are archived at the General Synod Archives of the Anglican Church of Canada, and also at the Avataq Cultural Institute.

The above photography was taken on September 5, 1903, with Edmund Peck in the middle of those standing in the back row, in front of a house on Blacklead Island. The picture was taken by Captain Low of the steamer Neptune from Halifax which had just arrived in Blacklead Island on that day. Captain Low was very favourably disposed to the work of Edmund Peck.

By Sunday, November 1, 1903, Peck wrote in his Journal, "We teach and visit the people almost daily. While visiting we are greatly cheered to see evident tokens of the power of the Gospel. Many of the old customs, which have proved for ages an intolerable yoke to the people are now being shaken off. They tell me with evident sincerity that it is far better to leave the old customs, and to trust in God."


On November 15, 1903, he wrote, "I can without hesitation say that there is in several cases a casting away of idols, and a real desire to know the Lord."

Here Rev. E. J. Peck is pictured with the first three Inuit converts on Blacklead Island--Arane, Immukke, and Nooeyout. On Sunday, November 22, 1903, Peck wrote in his Journal, "Was greatly comforted by the remarks of one of the Christian women who told me with evident sincerity that she prayed both for Mr. Bilby and myself, and the main object of her prayer was that we might be helped to speak with power to the people. She also spoke of the different state of the people who she said listened with deep attention and were really beginning to believe."

Peck helped people not only spiritually, but educationally and physically as well. In the above picture, he is reading to an Inuk man. On Monday, July 11, 1904, he wrote, "Several of them, we trust, do now see that we have not merely come here to preach the Gospel, but also to help them in every possible way."

Here, Peck is on the deck of a ship during one of his travels in the early 1900s. With the apostle Paul, he could say, "In journeys often, in perils of waters...in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea... in weariness and toil, in sleeplessness often, in hunger and dthirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness--besides the other things, what comes upon me daily: my deep concern for all the churches" (II Corinthians 11:26-28).

Although it was in hidden ways, he also faced opposition from the shamans who had a real spiritual power, but were controlling people's lives with fear. Shortly after arriving back on the Kekerten Station on March 1, 1904, Peck wrote in his Journal on March 3:

"As regards their spiritual state, I am sorry to say that it is, taken as a whole, far from encouraging. We toil on during our visits, but the influence of the conjurors during our absence seems almost to drag the people back to their former state of heathen degradation. We ought to have a man stationed at this place. Patient, plodding work through the Holy Spirit's power, would then overcome the forces of evil. Vain is it for us to think that the Eskimo can be won for Christ without using proper means. The more I know these people, the more do I realize the hold their heathen superstitions and beliefs have upon them."

Of course, the summers were always a welcome relief from the bitter cold, although it could still be stormy. The Inuit love the outdoors, and in the above picture, five Inuit are with Rev. Edmund Peck, celebrating the service outside in the early 1900s. The winters were, of course, a different matter. Yet even during his bleakest moments in the natural, Peck always drew his strength from God to soldier on, believing God against all other hope, and He would make a way and see him through.

Writing in his Journal on Monday, December 26, 1904, Peck wrote, "We have now arrived at what one may call the heart of the Arctic winter. And it is marvellous wen one looks back to see so vividly how the hand of our God has held us up, strengthening us in body and soul, and giving us that hold of Him and His power without which we would long before have lost heart and have fainted by the way.

"No words of mine can convey to readers the real nature of experiences we have passed through. Let them, however, sum up the following facts, and they will understand in some little measure what I mean: no vessel or supplies for sixteen months, and everything uncertain as regards the safety of Mr. Greenshield.

"Thirteen long months waiting for news concerning our beloved child, and then the brief but heart piercing news that I could see her no more in the flesh. Over a hundred hungry Eskimo hemmed in on a desert island with heavy drift ice, continual gales, and snowstorms beating down upon us.

"Three traders in our midst with no fuel, a little food, and the anxious care which pressed upon one almost daily in reference to the proper, humane and economical use of the supplies which we fortunately possessed. Last, but not least, the difficulty under such conditions of showing to the people a brave and cheerful spriit, and of leading them on in spiritual matters.

"Who is sufficient for these things? Only the Lord God and not ourselves. He who has helped us in the past will not fail us in the future, but will carry us through all the difficulties which may stretch out before us."

On Friday, January 13, 1905, Peck wrote, "A bitter cold day 35 below zero with rather strong wind in the morning. Everything that could freeze became like blocks of ice, and we found it no easy or pleasant experience to creep out of our fur bags in such a temperature and light the fires. We still do practically all the house work: lighting fires in the morning being about the most trying."

Sometime between Saturday and Monday, February 4 and 6, 1905, he wrote, "Our present critical position is doubtless in God's hands the birth of this Arctic work as a whole. How true it is that the Christian's sorrows are often the birth pangs of his greatest joys and victories."

Here a group of Inuit are gathered around Edmund James Peck for a service during the early 1900s. During those Baffin years of his ministry between 1894 and 1905, Peck did birth an enduring and ongoing work of God which remains very strong among the Inuit of Canada's North until this day. He left the marks of a true apostle by identifying with a people in their pain and misery so that they could rise to a destiny that would be better than their past.

In his Journal near the very end of 1904, on Tuesday, December 27, he wrote, "It was a comfort to hear through other channels that God uses our life to kindle the missionary life and interest in other hearts, and it is an unspeakable joy to know that one is linked to Jesus in these sufferings. For to suffer with and for Him is an honour beyond all price. And to be partakers of His sufferings brings flashes of heavenly light down upon our paths. Neither can we have real, deep, inward contact with God without those keen heart searching lessons which drive us helpless to the Throne of grace."

Between February 4 and 6, 1905, he wrote, "I cannot in a record like this enter into the wonderful manifestations of God's presence which I enjoyed as I knelt down on the ice and claimed in faith, these uttermost parts of the earth for Christ, enough for me to say that all doubt as regards the final victory of our King was swept away. His plans and purposes are settled and sure. He will use this Arctic work to show forth His Power, and will make it not only a blessing to the poor Eskimo, but also a light and stay to many of His beloved people in the home land."

How prophetic these words were! The Inuit are still on a journey of transformation, but their story is one that is gaining increasing interest among the nations, and has become an opportunity for them to share what the Lord has done in their lives.

Lest we forget, it was pioneers like Rev. Edmund James Peck who planted the seeds that are still bearing fruit, and which made the present moving of God's Spirit among the Inuit possible. May we never forget that the Kingdom of God could never have been initiated among the Inuit without the birthing process that those early missionaries like Edmund Peck went through.

"Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus. Then I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, 'Write: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on"' 'Yes,' says the Spirit, 'that they may rest from their labours, and their works follow them'" (Revelation 14, 12, 13).