This post was written by Julita Braxton, AHMC Cataloger.
The New-York Historical Society Library holds many items created by George Copway, the Ojibwe minister, missionary, translator, lecturer, author, healer, and self-appointed chief. George Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh) was born in 1818 on the mouth of the Trent River in Ontario, Upper Canada, the traditionally reared son of a Mississauga community leader.
Following a childhood conversion to Christianity, he was ordained a minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of Eastern British America, and worked as a missionary amongst Anishinaabe peoples, including those at Rice Lake, Ontario and Credit River, Wisconsin.
By 1847, defrocked and on the heels of an embezzlement conviction, Copway arrived in New York, where he reinvented himself as an authority on indigenous North American history and culture. In that same year, his bestselling The life, history, and travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh was printed, making him the first First Nations author to publish a book.
Celebrated as an author, he went on to produce works of poetry, Native American history, and European travel narratives. An advocate for Christianization and the adaptation of European-American settler life and culture, Copway lectured throughout the eastern United States.
In a letter to the Executive Committee, New-York Historical Society, dated New York, December 28, 1849, Copway describes his proposal to deliver a thirty-minute lecture on the subject of his “plan of concentrating the North West Indian Tribes in a territory.”
Not content with the success of his books and well-received lectures, Copway ventured into the newspaper business. In a letter to Alfred Billings Street, dated New York, June 12, 1851, Copway, seeking financial backing, details his plans to “publish a weekly paper in this city to be devoted entirely to the claims of the North American Indians. The means of their moral and physical elevation, and by this means also give them the passing events of the world as I expect to send several thousand copies into the country where they live gratuitously.”
“It is designed to become a channel of information for the American people and to the Indian Race of all such things as will tend to give them a better idea of each other.” Following a conversion to Roman Catholicism and a later career as a practitioner of the healing arts, George Copway died in Michigan in 1869.
Cataloging of the American Historical Manuscript Collection (AHMC), a group of 12,000 small and unique manuscript collections, is made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, and the Pine Tree Foundation of New York.