Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
First Indigenous Priest of the Church of England in Western Canada
April 2 · d. 1875
Henry Budd, born about 1812 near Norway House in Rupert's Land, was the first Indigenous person in North America admitted to holy orders in the Church of England, ordained deacon on 22 December 1850 and priest in 1853. Taken as a boy into the mission school at Red River and baptized there in 1822, he served thirty-five years as schoolmaster, catechist and priest along the Saskatchewan, founding the missions at The Pas and Nepowewin and translating the Psalms into Cree. He died at The Pas on 2 April 1875.
Henry Budd was born a Cree boy in the country north of Lake Winnipeg, about the year 1812, and nobody wrote his father's name down, or his mother's. His father was dead before the story starts. In 1820 a chaplain named John West came through Norway House looking for boys to fill a school he was founding at Red River, and Budd was one of the two he got. The other was the son of a chief called Withewacapo, a boy named John Hope. Two years later, on a Sunday in July 1822, West baptized them both. He wrote in his register that Henry Budd was an Indian boy of about ten who could already read the New Testament and repeat the catechism correctly, and he gave him the name of his own old rector back in England, a man the boy would never meet. His mother was still living. She would still be living eighteen years later.
He was not a boy in a story yet. He was a boy in a school, and then a young man with a job: labourer and clerk for the Hudson's Bay Company, and after his contract was out, a farmer with land of his own near St Andrews. He married Betsy Work in 1836. He took over the day school at the Upper Church in 1837, which is the ordinary sort of turn a life takes, farming to teaching.
Then in June 1840 the missionaries asked him to go north and start something where there was nothing, and he went, his wife and his mother with him. Cumberland House would not do, so he moved down the Saskatchewan to the place the Cree called W'passkwayaw, and built a house that was also the school and also the meeting place, and for two years he did it with no clergyman over him at all. When John Smithurst finally came up in June 1842 to see what had happened, he baptized thirty-nine adults, twenty-seven infants and twenty-two schoolchildren. That is what two quiet years had come to.
Bishop Anderson came in 1850, named the station Devon, took Budd back to Red River and taught him theology himself, and on 22 December ordained him deacon: the first Indian in North America, as the record of the time puts it, admitted to the ministry of the Church of England.
Two years after that he set out to open a station further up the river, at Nepowewin, and he knew before he left that he was not wanted. "I do not know how I may be received by the Indians of Nepowewin," he wrote, and then set down what he had heard: that a chief named Mahnsuk had sent word down that he had better not come, for he would oppose his landing anywhere in the Nepowewin. Budd left his family behind at Cumberland. "I chose to go alone for the first winter," he wrote. He landed on 8 September 1852 and stayed.
What happened there is worth telling carefully, because it is not what a mission story usually does. In September a man named Wulluck told him, at length and courteously, why he would never become a Christian: that if he did, he would have no chance of ever meeting again the relatives and friends who had gone before him to the other world, and that God had made his people different from the white people and given them their own mode of worship. Budd wrote every word of it into the journal he was sending to London, and he did not argue back on the page.
He worked. On 15 June 1853 he wrote a single sentence at Nepowewin: "I have finished the translation of the Psalms this day. The whole of the 150 Psalms are now translated into the Cree." A month later, copying them out in the syllabic characters, he said why he was bothering with syllabics at all: "to get it printed for the old people among the Indians." He had thought about who would be holding the book.
That July he came downriver to Christ Church and was ordained priest, on a Sunday, with James Hunter reading the prayers and the bishop preaching. He wrote out afterwards what had been in his head while he knelt: "The most solemn vows that man can make to God on earth are now upon me: still greater expectations are raised with regard to my usefulness in this land. The Society in England will expect more from me, the eyes of all the clergy in this country will be upon me, and the eyes of my countrymen are daily upon me." There is no complaint anywhere in it. He asked only for prayers, that he might be faithful unto death and at last receive the crown of life.
He buried other people's children with tenderness, and wrote down what they said. A girl called Mary Bell, dying that same July, waved her hand for someone to come nearer and told him, "Now you can be praying: pray now, for I like to hear you."
Then it came to his own house. In September 1864 his son Henry, ordained only weeks before, died of consumption. Within a month his wife died. Three weeks after that his daughter died, aged fourteen. He wrote to London the following June and said the thing plainly: "my dear son Henry, my own beloved wife, and my dear and tender daughter, all taken from me in the short space of six weeks." His first letter, he admitted, had been written "in the midst of tears, of much weakness in body, and depression of spirit." He thanked the Society for its kindness to his son. He said he would try to think of them not as they had been, poorly and sickly and dying, but as glorified spirits. He sent three of his surviving children down to Red River because he could not care for them, and kept one: "a little boy, nine years old; he is to be my companion."
He kept going for another ten years. In May 1867 he came back down to the station he had founded, "coming down a rapid stream all the way," to take charge of Christ Church, and found himself nearly the last man standing in that whole country. "We have all natives now in all the Church Missionary stations in North America, with the exception of Red River itself," he wrote. "I have the whole of the Saskatchewan district to myself now." The next January he described what the work had become, and it is not the sentence anyone expects from a frontier missionary: "My work then for the most part is pastoral, the same as any English parish."
He died suddenly on 2 April 1875, the Friday of Easter week, and was buried three days later in the churchyard of the church he had built the first version of, under a granite stone. Years afterwards an archdeacon asked an elderly Cree man whether he had been very sorry when Mr Budd was taken away. "Sorry," the man said, "does not express what we felt. My own father died some years ago, but when Mr Budd died, I felt for the first time what it meant to be an orphan." In 1853 Budd had asked God for one thing, that he might be faithful unto death and receive at last the crown of life; and that is the prayer the whole record shows being answered.
You may already know what it is to work where nobody is watching, and to suspect that the watching, when it comes, will be the wrong kind. Budd knew the whole weight of it at once and wrote it down on the day of his ordination: the Society in England expecting more of him, the clergy of the country watching him, his own countrymen watching him daily. He did not ask to be relieved of any of that. He asked for prayers, that he might be faithful unto death. And then he did the small unwatched things, a winter alone at a station where he had been told not to land, a hundred and fifty psalms copied into syllabics so that the old people could read them, a dying girl prayed over because she liked to hear it. Where in your own week is the work that nobody will ever see written up, and what would it look like to do that one faithfully?
The unusual thing about Budd among nineteenth-century missionaries is that we have him in his own hand. The Church Missionary Society required its agents, native and European alike, to send journals and letters to London, and it printed extracts: his Nepowewin journal in the Church Missionary Intelligencer of April and June 1854, his bereavement letter of 27 June 1865 in the same journal for January 1866, and two late letters to English correspondents in Missionary Leaves in 1868. John West's own register and his published journal of 1824 supply the 1822 baptism. Archdeacon J. A. Mackay, who served in the same mission field a generation later, wrote a memoir of him for Leaders of the Canadian Church in 1920. The modern anchor is T. C. B. Boon's article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, built from the Society's manuscripts, and Katherine Pettipas edited his last diary, covering 1870 to 1875, for the Manitoba Record Society in 1974. Behind all of it sit the manuscripts themselves, the Budd correspondence of 1822 to 1873 and the journal of 1850 to 1875, now in the Church Missionary Society archive at the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham.
The transmission is unusually simple: not a manuscript tradition copied and recopied, but one man's own papers kept by the society that employed him. Pettipas reproduced the late diary, in her stated policy, as closely as possible to the original manuscript, correcting grammar only where sense required it. The entries for June, July and August 1871 are missing, and were missing already: they were not among the documents found at his death. That is a gap in the paper, not an editorial suppression, and it should be reported as such.
Where the sources disagree, they disagree on dates. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives 10 June 1853 for his ordination to the priesthood; his own journal heads the entry "July 10: Lord's-day," and 10 July 1853 was a Sunday while 10 June was a Friday. The journal's own itinerary rules June out entirely, since he finished the Psalms at Nepowewin on 15 June and did not reach Cumberland until the 24th. The July date should stand. Likewise the founding of the Nepowewin station belongs to 1852, on the evidence of his own dated entries, not to the 1857 that some later compilations give. His son's year of ordination is genuinely unresolved: one compilation says 1861, while the contemporary notice says he returned from England in 1863 and died in September 1864 just after his ordination.
The superlative attached to him needs care, because it is easy to state wrongly. The older Canadian Book of Common Prayer calendar and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography both attach it to the diaconate of 22 December 1850, when he became the first Indigenous person in North America admitted to the ministry of the Church of England; the 1975 provincial plaque attaches a narrower claim, first native Anglican priest in western Canada, to the priesting of 1853. Both are true of their own event, and collapsing them into a single 1850 ordination is the commonest error in print.
Budd was never canonized, and the Anglican Church of Canada does not work that way. What it has done is keep his day. The older Canadian Book of Common Prayer calendar carries him at 2 April with the entry "Henry Budd, first North American Indian to be ordained to the ministry, 1850," and the calendar of the Book of Alternative Services continues the commemoration at the same date, reading simply "Henry Budd, Priest, 1875." The collect provided for the day addresses him as one who carried the great treasure of Scripture to his people the Cree nation.
There are no relics and there has never been a translation of his body. He was buried on 5 April 1875 in the churchyard at Christ Church, The Pas, under a granite monument, and he is there still. The parish around that grave is active, and church and cemetery together are a designated Manitoba historic site; the standing building is not the church he knew, though woodwork from the earlier one was carried into it. In 1975, the centenary of his death, the province set a plaque at the church recording that for thirty-five years he gave himself to the communities at The Pas, Cedar Lake, Moose Lake, The Pas Mountain, Cumberland House and Nepowewin, and that his translations of Scripture into Cree were used for many years throughout the north. The devotion that has grown up around him is institutional rather than shrine-shaped: the Henry Budd College for Ministry at The Pas, in the Diocese of Brandon, forms First Nations, Métis and other candidates for ministry under his name.
Budd's own words survive chiefly in the periodicals of the Church Missionary Society, all long in the public domain and transcribed online by Project Canterbury. The Nepowewin journal for 1852 appeared in the Church Missionary Intelligencer for April 1854, pages 92 to 96, and carries the entry of 24 August 1852 with Mahnsuk's warning and the line "I chose to go alone for the first winter," and Wulluck's refusal at the entry of 10 September (anglicanhistory.org/indigenous/budd/CMI_April1854.html); the transcription there reads "netter" for "better" in the warning passage. The continuation in the Intelligencer for June 1854 carries the ordination entry headed "July 10: Lord's-day," the Mary Bell entries of 17 to 23 July 1853, the Psalter entry of 15 June and the syllabics entry of 18 July (anglicanhistory.org/indigenous/budd/CMI_June1854.html). The bereavement letter of 27 June 1865 was printed as "North-West America" in the same journal for January 1866, pages 30 to 32 (anglicanhistory.org/indigenous/budd/CMI_January1866.html). The two late letters, to Miss Lanfear on 20 August 1867 and to Mrs Malaher on 3 January 1868, are in Missionary Leaves (London, 1868), pages 41 to 44 and 95 to 98 (anglicanhistory.org/indigenous/budd/letters1867.html). His 1850 account of assisting Hunter with the Cree translations is in the Colonial Church Chronicle and Missionary Journal, volume IV, January 1851, pages 247 to 252 (anglicanhistory.org/indigenous/budd/mission1851.html).
The baptismal register entry of 21 July 1822 is John West's, printed in his Substance of a Journal (London, 1824), page 16, and quoted in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "Budd, Henry," volume X, by T. C. B. Boon (biographi.ca/en/bio/budd_henry_10E.html), which is also the source for the 1842 baptismal figures and the sequence of postings. The half-stipend policy and the elderly Cree man's tribute both come from J. A. Mackay, "Henry Budd," in Leaders of the Canadian Church, edited by W. B. Heeney, second series (Toronto, 1920), pages 65 to 72 (anglicanhistory.org/canada/bheeney/2/3.html), where Mackay presents the exchange as one he conducted himself. The Cree name, the Swampy Cree identification, the naming after the rector of White Rothing, the editorial policy and the 1871 lacuna are all from the front matter of The Diary of the Reverend Henry Budd, 1870-1875, edited by Katherine Pettipas, Manitoba Record Society Publications volume IV (Winnipeg: Hignell, 1974), scanned at mhs.mb.ca/docs/books/mrs04.pdf; the manuscripts behind everything are the Budd correspondence and journal in the Church Missionary Society archive, Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. Both calendar entries are given verbatim at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_saints_(Anglican_Church_of_Canada), and the 1975 plaque text at gov.mb.ca/chc/hrb/plaques/plaq0152.html. All quotations here are of English originals; no translator is involved.
Two smaller confusions are worth naming. The first is the man he was named for: the Rev. Henry Budd of White Rothing in Essex, an English evangelical who died in 1853, whose memoir and autobiography were published in London in 1855 under exactly the right name and in exactly the right decade, and who is not our subject. The second is his Cree name, glossed everywhere as "Going up the hill" and spelled at least three ways, most reliably as Sakachuwescam; a Society house publication of 1868 gives his native name as "Uncas," which cannot be reconciled with the others and is almost certainly an error made in London. His people at The Pas appear under equally unstable spellings, Wulluck beside Walluck, Mahnsuk beside Mahnusk, in the space of a few lines of the same entry.
The translation credit must be split rather than simplified. Mackay, writing in 1920, gave the Cree Scripture translations to James Hunter, assisted by Budd and by Mrs Hunter, and Budd's own 1850 letter describes himself as assisting Hunter. But the Psalter entry of 15 June 1853 is first person, dated, and written at Nepowewin, far from Hunter, and the syllabics entry three days later is his own decision about his own readers. No printed edition of that Psalter has been located.
Of the family losses of 1864 the contemporary record is precise and limited: the son died of consumption on 7 September, the wife within a month, the daughter three weeks after that. No contemporary source names an epidemic or a disease for the wife or daughter, and the scarlet fever that circulates in modern accounts has no nineteenth-century warrant.
Two matters a present-day reader will raise deserve a plain answer. The first is money. Mackay states it as the Society's settled arrangement: "Under the system of the Church Missionary Society in those days, a native missionary had only half the stipend of a European missionary." Budd worked thirty-five years under that policy, and the surviving record preserves not one word of his own about it. The second is his own childhood: a boy of eight or ten taken from Norway House to Red River, baptized, and given an English surname in place of a Cree name. Modern writing since the 1990s reads that against the later history of Indigenous child removal in Canada, and the pattern-recognition is not baseless, since the education of Indigenous children by the missionary societies was assimilative by intention. The chronology is nevertheless not the same chronology: Budd died five months before Treaty 5 was signed, and about a decade before residential schooling became a state system. His father was dead; his mother was living, and either consented or acquiesced, and travelled north with him and his wife in 1840. We have neither her account of it nor his. The record he left is administrative and pastoral rather than confessional, and it contains no vision, no healing and no deliverance; what it contains is thirty-five years of work, and that silence about himself should be reported rather than filled.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Henry Budd to be a pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.