A Life Worth Remembering

Peter Edmund Jones, the first status Indian in Canada to obtain a medical degree, inhabited a fractious borderland both metaphorical and physical. Allan Sherwin’s Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843–1909 describes a man of relative privilege with enormous motivation, energy and intelligence, one who engaged in prodigious struggles on behalf of aboriginal people in Upper Canada, although he was ultimately worn down by the very forces that shaped him.

His grandfather was a Welsh-American surveyor; his grandmother, Tuhbenahneequay, was the daughter of a Mississauga chief. Jones’s father, a Methodist minister, was the first aboriginal ordained in British North America. He raised funds in England to build a vocational school for aboriginal people, which became, unfortunately, one of the first of the infamous residential schools in Canada. He also succeeded in marrying into a well-to-do English family, a feat accomplished, in part, by means of a letter...