After Work - Missionaries Among Miners, Migrants & Blackfoot

Missionaries Among Miners, Migrants & Blackfoot is an unexpectedly intriguing historical record of religious life in Southern Alberta during the time of Father Lacombe.  Through meticulous and thorough work, the editors have made available to the modern reader the diaries and letters of the Van Tighem brothers from the time of 1875 – 1917.  Born Belgian during hard times, Leonard was a priest who felt the call to be a missionary in western Canada, and Victor was a lay-brother who lived for 43 years on the Blackfoot/Peigan reserve.  Due to the foresight of their families, many letters from the brothers were preserved.  However, the core of this book is formed the codices or missionary diaries written by Leonard during his missions in Macleod, Lethbridge, Strathmore, Langdon and Taber.

Although an irregular keeper of the codices required by his Oblate order, Leonard nevertheless paints a picture of hardships and accomplishments through the mundane records of who visited whom; how, when and how much money was raised for what project; weather conditions, agricultural hurdles and the growth of towns; the coming of nuns and the establishment of schools; and, the flow of religious artifacts from Belgium to the deprived West.  What surprised me was the number of travellers who threaded through a relatively isolated, barely developed locale.  Also, Leonard travelled frequently to towns throughout southern Alberta, attended annual retreats as far north as St. Albert, returned to Belgium and was invited to Rome.  His successes in establishing churches and congregations in so many towns obviously earned him considerable success.  A most obvious contrast with his brother is seen as the reader transitions to Victor’s personal diaries and letters, in which he often comments that he has been left alone at the mission on the reserve.  A lay brother, his role as assistant rather than enactor shaped his life of loneliness on the wide prairie peopled by the Blackfoot, who took little cognizance of him.

In the best tradition of history books, Missionaries Among Miners, Migrants & Blackfoot painlessly helped me become more oriented in my own time and culture.  The book is published by the University of Calgary and a circulating copy is available at the Calgary Public Library.