Wilson, Edward F. (Edward Francis), 1844-1915 : Born at Islington (Parish), England, in 1844 to a prominent Protestant church family of considerable wealth and distinction, Edward Francis (E.F.) Wilson's early education and interests were focussed more to the field of agriculture than to formal academic studies at Oxford, which had long been the family tradition. In 1865, while still a farm pupil at Coleshill, he was persuaded to go to Canada to further his agricultural vocation and interests by visiting representatives of the Protestant Evangelical faith from the Huron Diocese in south-western Ontario. E.F. Wilson had only been in Canada for three days when he decided to abandon farming and undertake a program of religious studies at Huron College, London, Ontario. During this time, he had also become interested in the native Indian peoples, when he spent part of a summer at an Indian reserve. In December 1867, Wilson returned to England, where he was ordained a Deacon. During his six month visit, he married Francis (Fanny) Spooner, the daughter of a Gloucester clergyman, whom he had first met in 1863. In July 1868, Rev. Wilson, now an agent for the English "Church Missionary Society" (C.M.S.), returned to Canada with his wife where he was to carry out the Society's new visionary plan of ecclesiastical expansion based upon the somewhat forward looking (for the time) concept of "cultural synthesis" (as opposed to the then prevalent and more accepted missionary strategy of "cultural replacement") among the native Indian peoples. He began this task first at Sarnia, near the St. Clair Indian Reserve and later (after 1871) at Garden River near Sault Ste Marie. In 1873, after leaving the Church Missionary Society, he founded several assimilationist schools for Indian Children at Sault Ste Marie, the most important of these being the Shingwauk and Wawanosh Residential Schools, where he served as principal until 1893. During his twenty-five year ministry with the native Indian peoples of Ontario, E.F. Wilson was gradually to become a recognized Indian ethnologist and anthropologist, particularly "after 1885, when he began to read serious anthropological and historical writings on the Indian tribes". At this time, he also began a number of cross-continental missionary travels, in Canada and the United States, in connection with his ethnological and anthropological interests. One of the more important of these trips occurred in 1888, when he and his wife travelled some 7000 miles through much of the United States visiting various centres devoted to native Indian education. He was to describe and illustrate, with his own drawings, these travels in the periodicals "Our Forest Children" and its successor "The Canadian Indian". (E.F. Wilson also left some visual records of his other missionary travels in Canada which have been preserved to the present day.) In 1893, probably because of his and his wife's failing health and the severe northern Ontario climate, E.F. Wilson retired from his Indian Missionary work and, with most of his family, moved to the agriculturally prosperous Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. Wilson took up orchard farming, church building and ministering to the Island's white British-Canadian population, becoming a dominant figure on the Island who was known for his Evangelical strictness. Towards the end of his life, continued ill health forced him to live in California for a number of years. He died in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1915. Summary of various passages and/or references pertaining to the life and work of the Rev. Edward Francis Wilson taken from "A Victorian Missionary and Canadian Indian policy / Cultural Synthesis vs Cultural Replacement" - David A. Nock (Professor of Sociology, Lakehead University). - Published for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion / Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1988.
