Source: Link

STEINHAUER, ROBERT BIRD, interpreter, Methodist minister, and teacher; b. 16 Feb. 1861 at the Whitefish Lake mission (Alta), one of the five sons of the Reverend Henry Bird Steinhauer* and the Cree woman Mamenawatum (Seeseeb, Jessie Joyful); m. c. 1890 Charlotte Pruden, and they had six daughters and five sons, one of whom was adopted; d. 1 July 1941 at the Saddle Lake Reserve, Alta.

Robert Steinhauer grew up at Whitefish Lake, a Cree farming, fishing, and hunting community approximately 80 miles northeast of Fort Edmonton (Edmonton). It was the earliest permanent settlement of First Nations people in what are now Alberta and Saskatchewan. His father, Henry Steinhauer, an Ojibwa (Anishinaabeg) Methodist minister from Upper Canada, had founded the mission, where he taught the Cree how to break land and farm. In less than two decades he had achieved considerable success, and educator George Monro Grant* noted in his travelogue Ocean to ocean (Toronto, 1873) that “the Crees at White-fish Lake are all Christianized and value the school highly. They are beginning to settle down to steady farming-work too, several families not going to the plains now, but raising wheat, barley and potatoes instead.”

Elizabeth Ann Barrett, a professionally trained teacher from Ontario, worked at the mission from 1875 to 1877. She lived with Henry and Jessie and their family of five girls and five boys. Barrett wrote in Missionary Notices of the Methodist Church of Canada in April 1876: “Mr. Steinhauer’s is, indeed, an amiable and God-fearing family. I never saw more dutiful and respectful sons and daughters.” She took a special interest in Robert and his elder brother, Egerton Ryerson*, both gifted students.

In the summer of 1879 Robert, 19, and Egerton, then 21 years old, headed east to enter Cobourg Collegiate Institute in preparation for studying at Victoria College. They walked and paddled across the prairies to the railhead near Winnipeg and then travelled by train through the United States to Ontario. Shortly after their departure, the Whitefish Cree established a satellite community at neighbouring Goodfish Lake, approximately six miles away. A teacher and a minister were needed for the new settlement. As well, the senior Steinhauers eventually found it a financial strain to support two sons who brought no money directly into the family. The brothers matriculated in 1883, but only Robert entered Victoria; Egerton returned home to take up duties at Goodfish. Robert did well at university. Six feet tall, he excelled at running and football, and he was a gifted singer with a deep voice who served as leader of the glee club. His fellow students elected him Senior Stick, or class president, in 1886.

That year, in late summer and early fall, the Methodist Church supported a tour through Ontario and to Montreal for Alberta Cree and Stoney leaders who had remained loyal during the North-West rebellion of 1885 [see Louis Riel*]. James Seenum (Pakan) and Samson (Kanatakasu), both Crees, and Jonas Goodstoney, a Stoney, were accompanied by the Reverend John Chantler McDougall* and Robert Steinhauer, who assisted as interpreter. He was called upon to speak, and a reporter summarized his remarks to the audience at Peterborough, in which the university student described the First Nations as good Christians: “The Indians, he said, have a great respect for God, and do not take His name in vain, as he heard the whites do.” Robert then added that “he was glad he had learned the language of the whites, that he might learn their good qualities, and by God’s help might help in bringing the Indians to a higher knowledge of God.”

Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald* met Robert and the loyal Indigenous leaders when he paid a surprise visit to Metropolitan Church in Toronto during a session of the Methodist General Conference. Robert sang the hymn “Tell it again,” with Seenum accompanying him in Cree. Although Macdonald did not realize it, in Robert Steinhauer he had before him one of his government’s most articulate First Nations critics.

A decade earlier, in 1876, the Whitefish Cree had signed Treaty No.6 at Fort Pitt (Sask.) [see Kamīyistowesit*]. Three years later the great buffalo herds were vanishing from the Canadian plains. The Methodist Cree farmers at Whitefish and Goodfish lakes, who lived in well-built houses, reared domestic animals, hunted, and fished, were able to support themselves, but others were not so fortunate. The prime minister himself reported that many of the Blackfoot and Plains Cree “were reduced to such extremities that they eat mice, their dogs and some of them even their buffalo skins, and they greedily devoured meat raw when given to them.” Despite previous promises and the clause in Treaty No.6 that assured the natives of assistance in the event of general famine, the federal government ignored their distress. Faced with starvation, thousands of Plains people crossed the border into Montana in search of the last buffalo herds.

Robert Steinhauer was well aware of their mistreatment, and in the spring of 1886, while still an undergraduate, he had penned “The Indian question” for Acta Victoriana, his college’s literary journal. The essay discussed the disappointment with the treaty system felt by the western First Nations: “Ever since the treaties were signed, there has been much discontent, and complaints made by him [the ‘Indian’]. He asks those who have taken the ownership of his country to give him his rights, at least the fulfillment of the promises made to him.” Instead of capable and sympathetic government employees, they were forced to deal with “low and unprincipled” agents who were appointed “because they happen to be friends and right-hand supporters of the Government in power; men whose knowledge of what they were intended to teach was so limited that they were rejected in some places.”

In 1887 Robert earned a ba, becoming the first status Indian from what is now Alberta to obtain a university degree. Shortly after leaving Cobourg he married Charlotte Pruden, a woman of First Nations and English heritage, whose father had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Lac La Biche (Alta), and whose grandfather had been John Peter Pruden*. They had a family of six daughters and five sons. Robert went as a missionary to Saddle Lake, 25 miles south of Whitefish Lake, where a number of Cree had relocated after the signing of Treaty No.6. He held the post from 1887 to 1889 and served a wide community, including Cree from neighbouring groups who had also selected land there. Robert returned to Whitefish Lake in 1890 and was the missionary there for two years. He then served at the Red Deer Industrial Institute in 1893, Morley from 1894 to 1903, again at Whitefish Lake from 1903 to 1911, and at Battle River, near Hobbema (Maskwacis), from 1911 to 1919. His last post was at Saddle Lake, where he remained until his death.

During his last two decades Robert tried several times to retire, but the church refused to accept his resignation. The First Nations in western Canada faced great problems in the early 20th century. Between 1901 and 1921 the population of what in 1905 would become the province of Alberta rose from 73,000 to nearly 600,000, mostly because of immigration. In contrast the number of status Indians plummeted from about 18,000 in the 1870s to fewer than 6,000 in the 1920s. The number of tuberculosis victims reached epic proportions, and hundreds of infants succumbed to disease and infection.

Throughout his ministry Robert endeavoured to help his people regain their self-reliance and initiative. In 1896 he set an example by securing his personal independence. He became enfranchised by giving up his position as a ward of the crown under section 86 of the Indian Act of 1876. Enfranchisement brought several immediate advantages, including the right to vote, sign legal contracts, and leave the reserve without being challenged by an Indian agent. According to Ralph Garvin Steinhauer*, the first Indigenous person to serve as lieutenant governor of Alberta (1974–79), and who was related by marriage to Robert’s family, such men included a Saddle Lake agent who only talked to First Nations people through a wicket: “If the agent didn’t like the discussion or if he thought it went on too long, he shut the wicket down in the face of the speaker.”

Residential schools, operated by the churches of several religions and financially supported by the federal government, were believed by many to be an effective means of assimilating Indigenous children. Robert taught at one such institution, the Red Deer Industrial Institute, in 1893–94, its first year of operation. Several members of the Steinhauer family attended this school. Robert’s nephew, James Arthur, son of Steinhauer’s second eldest brother, Arthur, thrived at the school, where he remained for six years before leaving as a skilled carpenter and fervent Methodist. Robert and Charlotte’s daughter Augusta attended Red Deer for ten years and then completed a business course at Alberta College in Edmonton. Her sisters Caroline and Mary Evangeline were at Red Deer between 1911 and 1914 and from 1913 to 1914, respectively; both were then sent to public school. Their brother Henry Walter Jeffrey spent four years at Red Deer, from 1910 to 1914, followed by a period at Alberta College. Robert’s nephew, Henry G. Steinhauer, the 16-year-old son of his eldest brother, Samuel, fled the school in 1894 to return to Whitefish Lake. When Robert’s adopted son, Lawrence, ran away from school in 1931, he did not make him return.

Robert knew that residential schools offered many children their only chance for an education, but he was concerned about the quality of the schooling they provided, considering it inferior to that which he had received at provincial public schools and at Victoria College. Around 1908 he urged First Nations families to boycott the Red Deer institution. He reversed his position after the new principal, the Reverend Arthur Barner, introduced reforms. After the First World War the industrial school was moved from Red Deer to Edmonton. The Edmonton Journal reported on the school’s opening in 1924, including the statements of Charles Stewart, who was the federal minister of the interior, superintendent general of Indian Affairs, and a former premier of Alberta. Stewart declared that Canada belonged to Indigenous people “by right of heritage” and that it was the “white man’s duty to educate them to help them to be assimilated into the life of the country which necessitated a great change in the red man’s mode of living.” The minister assured the crowd, which included Robert Steinhauer, who was translating at the event, that “residential schools will be built just as fast as the government can find the money and the churches will take on the task of teaching.”

Robert held a broad-minded view of Christianity. He was a strong supporter of church union in 1925 [see Samuel Dwight Chown*; Clarence Dunlop Mackinnon*], when Methodists, Congregationalists, and most Presbyterians joined to form the United Church of Canada, and he believed that there should be just one Christian church. At Saddle Lake, however, Robert’s work for Christian unity faced challenges. There were traditionalists who were anxious to retain their non-Christian beliefs despite his efforts to convert them, and there was competition for students from a nearby boarding school run by Roman Catholics. As well, work among Canada’s Indigenous peoples was becoming less of a priority for the Methodist Church, which gradually shifted its financial resources to rapidly expanding missions in China and Japan [see George Cochran*]. Robert had to struggle to secure authorization for even small expenditures. At Whitefish and Goodfish lakes, where he had served from 1903 to 1911, he lived in a poorly built manse. Albert Richard Aldridge, another Methodist missionary, commented after a visit in 1906: “Mr. Steinhauer’s family does not seem healthy since he has lived in that house – he lost a child lately, I hear.” Yet the church refused until 1919 to grant him permission to build a new house. A concession was made only after Robert threatened to resign.

After the war Robert supported a new political organization, the League of Indians of Canada, founded in 1918 by Mohawk activist Frederick Ogilvie Loft*. The league sought to improve the standard of education offered to the First Nations by the Canadian government. In 1921 Loft claimed that “scarcely five per cent of the adult population of a vast majority of reservations in Canada is competent to write a coherent intelligible letter.” The league held its first conference on the Six Nations territory on the Grand River in December 1918. Annual meetings followed, and Robert acted as the chief interpreter at the 1922 Alberta conference in Hobbema. His youngest brother, Augustine, was elected president of the Alberta branch of the league in 1931.

Robert used his talent for singing, which he had demonstrated at university and before Prime Minister Macdonald, in his church services. During his time at Hobbema he bought a piano in Edmonton, and he loved to sing and play sacred songs and hymns. Together with his brother Egerton he worked on a Cree hymn-book that appeared in 1920. Like his father, Henry, Robert was a skilled linguist who, according to Aldridge, could read “from the English Bible translating into Cree as he proceeds.”

Early in 1937 Robert received an unexpected letter from Richard Davidson, principal of Emmanuel College, which, through its program of theology, was associated with Victoria University (as his alma matter had been called since federating with the University of Toronto in 1890). To mark Victoria’s centenary, the Senate offered him a doctorate of divinity: “For as your father was one of the first students a hundred years ago you will be one of the first graduates of the new century of Victoria’s life.” On the evening of 27 April the 76-year-old Steinhauer received an honorary dd from Victoria, the first Indigenous person in Canada to obtain such a degree.

Robert Steinhauer died four years later. Hundreds of Indigenous church members and non-Indigenous neighbours and friends attended the funeral at Saddle Lake. Their beloved missionary had served as an ordained Christian minister for over half a century. In 1951 a one-room day school for students in grades one to eight was opened at the Saddle Lake Reserve. The school was named for Robert Bird Steinhauer.

Donald B. Smith