Merging the Private Past with Public Perception: John Hines’s Missionary Journals and The Red Indians of the Plains

Abstract

By writing the story of his life as a missionary in the Canadian North West twice, 40 years apart and in two different forms, John Hines provides the historian with an opportunity to consider the creative process in history by questioning why Hines’s perception of events varied. In the field journals, Hines wrote for himself and his employers. Forty years later, he faced different considerations. He wrote his autobiography to appeal to a reading audience conditioned to expect a product that conformed to an established genre of missionary biography. A different historical reality had emerged by 1915. Hines redefined events to match the emerged government policy and the anticipated future of Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society. The narrative forms imposed on Hines are more than poetic imagination as they reflect history itself.