1In the late nineteenth century, missionaries entered the territory that is now northern Canada to establish missions and convert indigenous people to Christianity. While conversion to Christianity was, in theory, their primary aim, the two organizations that operated in the region, the Anglican Church Missionary Society (cms) and the Catholic Oblates of Mary Immaculate (omi), also aimed to change indigenous culture, both economically and socially, in fundamental ways that more closely reflected the dominant understandings of how they believed Christians should live and behave. Central to this strategy of major cultural change was the erection of permanent buildings through mission stations. This thesis, entitled Mission Infrastructure Development in the Canadian North, c.1850-1920, examines how missionaries used buildings to develop a programme of evangelization based on the “convert and civilize” model prevalent among many nineteenth-century missionary organisations. Within this programme, architectural spaces, specifically the mission station, were used as a frontier location where indigenous people and missionaries interacted, providing a location for missionary teaching, a didactic place to demonstrate how Christians lived, and a method of transforming what was viewed as the non-Christian “wilderness” into a Christian “garden” through construction of buildings and control of the natural world.

2The research in this thesis focuses on both the importance and limitations of using built forms as a tool for missionary activity, within arctic and sub-arctic environments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on existing scholarship which recognizes that architecture had specific ramifications within the mission field beyond its practical applications, this study analyses how buildings were used in missionary contexts in attempting to communicate Christian ideology to indigenous people and to change their culture to one that aligned with European norms understood by missionaries as being representative of an ideal Christian society. These strategies were not always successful: the environmental conditions of the territory were unlike that of Western Europe and, as a result, missionaries were forced to adapt their preconceived understanding of how architecture functioned as part of evangelization to suit the realities of the northern field. This study demonstrates how those ideas were modified and discusses the architecture that resulted from those changes as missionaries came to grips with what they wanted to achieve in the built space of the mission station, and what was actually feasible.

7The thesis is divided in three sections, each of which looks at a specific aspect of mission architecture and its use in the Canadian north. Chapters 1 through 3 examine the contextual background of mission and its geographic scope, examining how the Arctic was perceived in the nineteenth century imagination, the initial entry of missionaries into the region and the creation of wider geographic networks of mission where territory was claimed for Christianity through the erection of buildings. Chapters 4 and 5 address three specific structural types: the mission house which was usually the first building constructed at the mission station; the church; and the school, in both its day and residential components. Chapters 6 through 8 focus on specific case studies that illustrate unique aspects of northern mission infrastructure development. Chapter 6 focuses on the decoration of Catholic worship space and its role within the OMI’s wider mission. Chapter 7 examines the use of indigenous architectural forms at two missions in the High Arctic at Hershel Island and Blacklead Island by the cms in the 1890s. Chapter 8 looks at the Klondike Gold Rush and its ramifications on mission architecture and strategy in the southern Yukon. Together, these chapters provide a broad overview of how architecture was used in the region as an integral aspect of evangelization. What this thesis does not do is examine the perspectives of indigenous people within the missionary context. While these perspectives are vital for a full understanding of the contact narrative between northern indigenous people and missionaries, such work is beyond the scope of this study which focuses on how missionaries perceived the northern landscape, indigenous communities, and the role of the built environment in the spread of Christianity.

8The importance of this study derives from its exploration of how architecture shaped the approaches taken towards the conversion of indigenous people to Christianity and the attempts to change their culture by missionaries in the late nineteenth century. In particular, it focuses on how missionaries adapted the dominant understanding of architecture and landscape within the Christian context to the “frontier” environments in which they were working, and where the development of Christian agricultural settlements was not feasible. While this thesis focuses on a regional context, that of northern Canada, the approaches and strategies undertaken there can be seen in other frontier areas across the late nineteenth-century global mission field as missionaries grappled with how to adapt European Christian understandings of space to remote and unfamiliar environments.