THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
The ecumenical conferences have now become a permanent institution; they are held every ten years and constitute not only a bond of fraternal unity among the often widely differing missionary bodies, but they also offer in their voluminous reports very valuable material for the study of the theory and history of missions.
III. The Evangelical Missionary Fields. 1. America: The objects of missionary activity in America are (1) the aborigines; (2) the Africans who have been brought there as slaves and their descendants; (3) Asiatic immigrants. The aborigines fall into two main groups: the Eskimos in the northern arctic regions, and the Indians, who, from Alaska and Canada, are spread in numerous tribes over this quarter of the globe. The imported population consists partly of Negroes, who have settled principally in the United States and the West Indies, but are also found in Central America and in Guiana; and partly of Hindu and Chinese coolies who have been introduced as laborers into the West Indies and the colonial possessions in the northern part of South America. The other Asiatics, Chinese and Japanese, are found almost exclusively in the United States and in the western part of Canada. See Home Missions.
The population of Greenland, consisting of about 10,500 Eskimos, is entirely Christianized; this occurred as well through the Danish mission begun
in 1721 by Hans Egede (q.v.) as through
1. The that of the United Brethren, begun by
Arctic MatthseusStachinl733. Since the spe-
Regions. cific mission work has been completed
the United Brethren ceded in 1900 its six stations to the Danish Church and withdrew from this, its second oldest missionary field. In the neighboring Labrador, also inhabited by about 1,500 Eskimos, the United Brethren have worked exclusively since 1771. In six stations they have, with unspeakable patience, collected 1,300 Christians. The third compact Eskimo population, numbering about 1,500— already much intermixed with the Indians, who number about 19,000 — is found in Alaska. The mission here was begun only in 1877 by the Presbyterian Church in the United States under the leadership of Sheldon Jackson (q.v.). There are now ten American missions in operation, including that of the United Brethren, reporting in thirty-one stations about 8,500 Eskimos and Indians under their care. One of the most noteworthy is that of the independent lay missionary, William Duncan; b. at Beverley, Yorkshire, England, April, 1832; determined to be a foreign missionary in Dec, 1853; went to Highbury College for two years, and in 1856 to British Columbia for his life-work among the Tsimshian Indians, living at Metlakahtla (17 m. s.e. of Fort Simpson, of the Hudson's Bay Company, on the border of Alaska). He reduced their language to writing, preached religion in it, and so was the means of Christianizing and civilizing the tribe. The zeal of Bishop William Ridley, who made Metlakahtla the seat of his diocese in 1879, was unfortunately in the direction of vestments and ritual to the amazement and misunderstanding of the simple-minded Indians, and as the bishop and
Duncan could not agree, he sought from Congress " the Annette Islands, in Alexander Archipelago, Southeastern Alaska, as a reservation for the use of the Metlakahtla Indians and such other of the Alaska nations as may join them," and on Aug. 7 1887, he transferred his converts to New Metlakahtla. The official name of the church is " The Christian Church of Metlakahtla." It belongs to no denomination. No part of the Bible has been translated into their language, though the preaching is done in it. There is, however, a translation of the Book of Common Prayer by Bishop Ridley.
British North America has a population of about 120,000 Eskimos and Indians, almost a third of whom are Evangelical Christians, a twelfth part being incorporated in the colonial churches. Although the English, through the Hudson Bay Company, controlled the northeastern part
2. British of the land from 1669, and in 1763 North conquered the southern part or French
America. Canada, it was only in 1820 that John West, a pious chaplain of the Hudson Bay Company, succeeded in starting a mission among the Indians. This mission, taken up by the Church Missionary Society, spread in the course of eighty years from Lake Superior, on the southwest, to the Herschel Islands at the boundary of Alaska, on the northwest, and has now, in forty-one principal stations, divided into ten episcopal dioceses, 15,000 Christian Indians and Eskimos, many of them living in well-ordered and flourishing communities. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the Canadian Methodists and Presbyterians, with their forty stations, are also engaged in this work. In the near future the Christianization of the Indians will have been accomplished in the entire Dominion of Canada. Mission work is also carried on, but with little success, among the Chinese in British Columbia.
The remnant of the aboriginal Indian population, now reduced to about 237,224 (census of 1900) and scattered over a great part of the Union, are a living reproach to the Christian white settlers, who by their shameful conduct have
3. United been the essential cause of the ever- States. recurring failure of Indian missions so
hopefully begun by John Eliot (q.v.) in 1646, and continued with great fidelity by the Mayhew family for five generations (see Mayhew, Jonathan; Mayhew, Experience), by David Brainerd (q.v.), Eleazer Wheelock (q.v.) and his Indian preachers, Sampson Occum and Samuel Kirkland (qq.v.), principally, however, by the United Brethren, under the heroic and devoted David Zeisberger (q.v.). Even in the nineteenth century, when a number of North American denominations again took up the abandoned work amon^ the Indians, the land hunger of the settlers greatly impeded success by the dishonesty and harshness and the unjust wars which it involved. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Christianizing of the Indians has not been crowned with complete success. Only about 95,000 are Evangelical Christians. Much more numerous than the Indian is the Negro population of the United States, which