Clah was one among many Tsimshian, Nisga’a, and other First Nations people who proselytized among societies along Canada’s Pacific coast.
CMS records list 358 native lay teachers (men and women) in the North Pacific Mission between 1865 and 1901. Methodist records list 635 native preachers in the same region between 1883 and 1900, as well as native exhorters, stewards, leaders, and assistants. Although it is unclear how many of these Christians actively proselytized, the figures suggest that the nascent churches relied heavily on the support of new Christians to garner support. The CMS missionary William Duncan began his mission to the Tsimshian people in 1857. As in other regions that proved immediately responsive to Christianity, the coming of a new religion had been predicted by prophets. Duncan and the missionaries who followed him were relatively late arrivals on the coast. Fur traders had been active in the region since the late eighteenth century, and in 1831 the first Hudson’s Bay Company trading post was established. Missionaries were not the first or sole point of European contact but interlopers in a well-established trading relationship.
A number of the evangelists on this coast, stretching from Victoria on Vancouver Island to Alaska, have left accounts of their lives. However, the diary of Arthur Wellington Clah—a daily record maintained from his late twenties through old age—overshadows all these writings. It is of great value, not only because it covers such a long period, but because it was maintained on a day-to-day basis. Unlike most autobiographical writings it is not retrospective, nor is it addressed to a church, mission society, or one of their representatives. Clah remained largely independent of such organizations. While new Christians in many regions of the British Empire took it upon themselves to spread new religious understandings, it was unusual for people without institutional support to make and keep written records.
Clah may have been a unique record-keeper, but other aspects of his life were rooted in his own Tsimshian society. Like most new Christians throughout the Empire he received no stipend or support from the communities to which he preached. He combined evangelism with the everyday activities of fishing, hunting, and trading that dominated his existence. His writings suggest he was untroubled by the insider-outsider status that unsettled other new Christian evangelists. Many of his activities frankly aimed at increasing his prestige and status among the Tsimshian. He took pride in operating independently of Euro-Canadian missionaries, insisting that his authority came directly from God:
Since our God father telling in my heart to stapeth [stop] every thing we do. I can told all people to nock [knock] up given [giving] big feast and stop given away all property to our chiefs. I told all people to stop everything wrong [that] makes God angry. I believe our God is strong[,] for Lord Jesus Christ defend out [our] since [sins].
He encouraged communities to scorn slavish dependence on missionaries and to forge their own links with God.
Neither does Clah’s account of his life conform to the conversion narratives commonly found in mission records (see pp. 155-56). He did not experience a sudden transformation from heathen to Christian. It is not even clear at what point he first identified himself as a Christian. The earliest references to Christ and God appear after he experienced a near-catastrophe at sea. He perceived God as a force who could save believers from the natural elements and disease. Later in the diary God also appears as chastising sinners. Punishment might be experienced as ‘bad luck’ resulting in hunger and unemployment, or death from disease. Salvation expressed itself in equally simple terms: ‘He take care my live [life] always Save my soul[,] give all food I use[,] so I feel happy for Him for all Blessing.’ While Pacific Islander evangelists expressed fear of hell, Clah was preoccupied with the here and now. His diary steers clear of the confessional mode common among many missionaries; rarely does he dwell on moral lapses or tribulations to be overcome. His descriptions of his activities and those of the people around him include his own drunkenness, fighting, and sexual temptations. In 1867 he records taking a second wife. In 1869 he kidnaps a relative of a man who had not repaid a debt. Clah rarely seems to suffer moral compunction following these lapses from Christian standards of behaviour.
He judged other people more severely, particularly those who maintained what he called the ‘old fashioned ways’—the status-enhancing activities and rites of passage of the north-west Pacific coast peoples. There was a rather fine line, however, between what Clah considered un-Christian, or bad, behaviour and what he found acceptable. Clah criticized the competitive, status-enhancing activities of chiefs who staged feasts (potlatches) celebrating marriages and inheritance of chiefly positions, yet he hosted many feasts himself. Sometimes he justifies these as Christian feasts, but at other times they are time-honoured Tsimshian celebrations for a newly built house, or success in hunting or trading. In 1876 a Methodist missionary deeply offended Clah by asking him and others to reclaim property they had given away, thus incurring a reciprocal obligation (an integral part of potlatches): ‘We [He] having no right to ask about our property. Because we no promise to take our property back after few days. We give to the poor for we called [call it] present is no right to going to friends house and ask things back. In our law give things back in feast house not to taking back for nothing.' This incident illustrates Clah’s insider status as a Tsimshian, as well as his readiness to criticize non-Christian Tsimshian, missionaries, and other Euro-Canadians. He felt particularly aggrieved that missionaries did not follow their own teachings about the sabbath and demanded money from their congregations.
Clah expressed a keen sense of the injustices perpetrated by the settler government of British Columbia, which, by the 1880s, was impoverishing his people through alienation of Tsimshian land. He railed against both government agents and the missionaries who, he believed, were in league against the ‘poor Indians’. He was also aware of the wider imperial forces arraigned against colonized peoples: ‘... I think everything about our place that whit [white] man taking away from us. It was Queen Victoria gaven [who gave] away to everyone so we losted [lost] our land.’ At the end of the diary for 1881 Clah returns to the theme of land theft, drawing a moral contrast between Britain’s abolition of slavery and its toleration of dispossession: ‘As I want to know what English people wants sell out our land. As I had [heard] some body says Boston people [Americans] not right sell out Black people and I have heard Queen tont [don’t] wanted [want it] so now what is the reason Queen sell our land.’ Clah spent many years trying unsuccessfully to reclaim land that he believed had been taken from him and his wife’s family. While it is tempting to cast him as an early anti-imperial nationalist, he also hankered after the approval and praise of missionaries and other Euro-Canadians in authority, insisting that he be treated as an equal, not a servant or employee. He was deeply offended when a Euro-Canadian patronized him by addressing him in Chinook, the trading jargon, rather than English. He recounted dreams he had in which missionaries came up to him and shook his hand, or in other ways acknowledged him as an equal.
A drive to preach to ‘blind hearts’, people who had not encountered Christianity, is omnipresent in the journals. Clah would preach to anyone who would listen to him, whether fishing, mining, or working in fish canneries.
I don’t want preach amongs[t] our Christianity [Christians] I want preach all pline [blind] friends some stranger amongs[t] us who not interested words of god they wanted to be Christian. Some time I help the friends everywere where were I travel round preach them sometimes in the Name of our lord Jesus Christ some I teach them how to prayer and song.
While he preferred to seek out unconverted people, Clah would also preach and pray with Christians. If offered a house to preach in, he would hold a meeting there; if not, he would hold prayer meetings outside. Occasionally he would preach in a church, although he did not treat church buildings as evidence of religious adherence. His Christianity was mediated by neither priest nor institution, being founded on what he regarded as a direct relationship with God. After his break with William Duncan, he viewed himself as an active competitor of the Anglicans, Methodists, Salvation Army, and other Protestant denominations in British Columbia. While receptive to new religious and technological ideas, he also maintained a steadfast independence in the face of the colonial forces which rapidly followed the introduction of Christianity to his region of the British Empire.