Edward Marsden

Who was Edward Marsden?

The Rev. Edward Marsden was a Canadian-American missionary and member of the Tsimshian nation who became the first Alaska Native to be ordained in the ministry.

He was born May 19, 1869, in Metlakatla, British Columbia, and became from his earliest years a protégé of that utopian Christian community's founder, the charismatic Anglican lay minister William Duncan. Edward's father, Samuel Marsden, had been one of Duncan's first converts and was named after a famed Anglican missionary. Edward's mother was Catherine Kitlahn, Duncan's housekeeper. Duncan tutored young Edward in reading, music, and eventually bookkeeping and business. As a teenager, Marsden was one of the approximately 800 Tsimshians who undertook an epic canoe voyage in 1887 to found Duncan's new, dissident community of "New Metlakatla" on Annette Island in the very southeast of Alaska.

Duncan exercised fierce control over his parishioners' lives and for a while barred the young, ambitious Marsden from leaving the island to pursue higher education. Eventually, the Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson intervened and persuaded Duncan to let Marsden join him in Sitka, Alaska, to attend the industrial school there.