1818 - 1869
George Copway was a controversial author and activist who published most of his work—an autobiography, a travelogue, an ethnographic history, and several political pamphlets—in the middle of the nineteenth century. In just over a decade, he produced a substantial body of writing and briefly attained significant prominence in both academic and popular circles, becoming one of the earliest and most widely known authors to address Indigenous concerns and perspectives in what is now Canada.
In 1840, Copway married Elizabeth Howell, who had immigrated to Toronto from England with her family and whom he met through Methodist acquaintances Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and Captain Howell. Throughout the 1840s, the couple travelled among several missions where Copway taught new converts to pray, sing, read, and write—skills he regarded as essential to political consciousness and Indigenous self-empowerment at a time when illiteracy allowed settler society to manipulate written documents in its favour. [4] In 1845, Copway was elected vice president of the Grand Council of Methodist Ojibwas of Upper Canada. Only a few months later, however, he was accused of embezzlement, jailed twice by the Indian Department, and expelled from the Canadian Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Although, as one scholar has shown, Copway did tend to spend more on good causes than the Church allotted to him, the disciplinary measures taken against him were extreme, especially given that embezzlement was not uncommon among white preachers at the time.[5] His expulsion and ostracism also coincided with the Methodist Church’s increasing conservatism and fragmentation. Debates over slavery, race, and national interests, ultimately about who could belong to and hold power within the institution, gradually undermined Methodism’s earlier claims to multiculturalism. [3]
In the second half of the 1840s, Copway broke with the Church and refashioned himself as a lecturer, writer, and activist. This shift propelled him into the public sphere, launched his literary career, and brought him into contact with North America’s social and political elite, including Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Francis Parkman, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His first major publication, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847), offers an autobiographical account of his life and experiences, describes the changing landscape of his homeland, recounts Ojibwe customs, traditions, and history, and critiques settler exploitation of Indigenous peoples and territories. The book was remarkably successful: it went through multiple editions within a year of its publication [6] and was revised and republished in 1850 as Recollections of a Forest Life. That same year, Copway represented Christian Indians at the World Peace Conference in Germany and attracted attention as he travelled across Europe delivering speeches in traditional Ojibwe clothing. His journeys across Canada, the United States, and Europe not only enabled him to promote his work and cultivate his public profile but also provided material for later books, including his travelogue Running Sketches of Men and Places (1851). Throughout the 1850s, Copway continued to lecture and contributed short pieces to newspapers on both sides of the colonial border. In political pamphlets such as “Organization of a New Indian Territory,” he advocated the creation of a separate sovereign state for Indigenous nations, which he proposed to call Kahgega (“Ever-to-be”), on land northeast of the Missouri River. [7] In 1851, he launched a short-lived newspaper, Copway’s American Indian, wrote an ethnographic tribal history titled Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (1851), and was credited as the author of the epic poem Ojibway Conquest. An Indian agent, Julius Taylor Clark, had allowed Copway to publish the poem under his own name to help raise funds for his proposed sovereign territory.
Despite Copway’s public influence and numerous accomplishments, the final decades of his life—which scholars often describe as tragic, chaotic, and episodic—have tended to overshadow his achievements. Between 1849 and 1850, three of his four children died, and by 1861, he had permanently separated from his wife. Critics also began to question the authorship of his texts, suggesting that Elizabeth Copway was primarily responsible for his literary success and levelling accusations that damaged his reputation, even though borrowing from other published sources—a practice commonly labelled “plagiarism” today—was widespread in his period. With his celebrity fading, Copway likely struggled financially. From 1861 to 1864, he recruited volunteers for the Union Army, and around 1867, he began advertising his services as a medicine man and healer in newspapers.
Scholars have had difficulty tracking Copway’s whereabouts throughout the 1860s, but most agree that by 1868, he had found his way to Lac-des-deux-Montagnes (Oka) in Montreal, Canada, where he lived among the Haudenosaunee and the Algonquin for half a year. There, he announced his intention to convert to Roman Catholicism and changed his name to Joseph-Antoine before passing away suddenly in January of 1869. Although critics tend to focus on the fragmentation and gradual disintegration of both his public and private sense of self by emphasizing, for example, the questionable choices Copway made towards the end of his life and by underscoring the notoriety those choices garnered him it is worth keeping in mind the achievements that Copway, as one of the earliest and most popular Indigenous writers in Canada, was able to accomplish in a relatively short timeframe and in a period where institutions, from the Methodist Church to the printing press, were permeated with prejudice. Copway himself was acutely aware of his politically precarious position as a literate and very vocal Indigenous activist in nineteenth century North America; while he acknowledges, in the preface to his autobiography, that “I am an Indian, and am well aware of the difficulties I have to encounter to win the favorable notice of the white man” (2) he also reminds us that his existence and public presence as an Indigenous activist, spokesperson, and author speak to how “[w]hat was once impossible—or rather thought to be—is,” in fact, “possible,” as his own experiences and his literary legacy testify (7).
Selected Readings:
Copway, George. Life, Letters, and Speeches. Edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald B. Smith, U of Nebraska P, 1997.
---. Running Sketches of Men and Places in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland. J.C. Riker, 1851. https://archive.org/details/runningsketches02copwgoog
---. The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation. Edited by Shelly Hulan, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014.
Works Cited:
Copway, George. The Life, History, and Travels, of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a young Indian chief of the Ojebwa nation, a convert to the Christian faith, and a missionary to his people for twelve years. Weed and Parsons,1847.
https://archive.org/details/lifehistoryandt00copwgoog
Konkle, Maureen. “Traditional History in Ojibwe Writing.” Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. U of North Carolina P, 2004. pp. 151-205.
Morgan, Cecilia. “Kahgegagahbowh’s (George Copway’s) Transatlantic
Performance: Running Sketches, 1850.” Cultural & Social History, vol. 9, no. 4, Dec. 2012, pp. 527-548.
Penner, Robert. “The Ojibwe Renaissance: Transnational Evangelicalism and the Making of an Algonquian Intelligentsia, 1812–1867.” American Review of Canadian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 71-92.
Petrone, Penny. “George Copway.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Edited by Eugene Benson and William Toye, 2 nd ed., Oxford UP Canada, 1997. pp. 233-234.
Peyer, Bernd C. “George Copway, Canadian Ojibwa Methodist and Romantic Cosmopolite.” The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America, U of Massachusetts P, 1997. pp. 224-277.
Reder, Deanna. “George Copway’s Autobiography: Land Claims to
Reclaim pimatiziwin.” Âcimisowin as Theoretical Practice: Autobiography as Intellectual Tradition in Canada. UBC, PhD dissertation. 2007. pp.158-176.
---. “Indigenous Autobiography in Canada: Uncovering Intellectual Traditions.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature. Edited by Cynthia Sugars, Oxford UP, 2016. pp. 170-190.
Rex, Cathy. “Survivance and Fluidity: George Copway’s The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1-33.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. “The Literary and Methodist Contexts of George
Copway’s Life, Letters and Speeches,” Edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald B. Smith, U of Nebraska P, 1997. pp. 1-22.
Smith, Donald B. “Kahgegagahbowh: Canada’s First Literary Celebrity in the United States.” Life Letters and Speeches, Edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Donald B. Smith, U of Nebraska P, 1997. pp. 23-60.
---. “Literary Celebrity: George Copway, or Kahgegagahbowh (1818-
1869).” Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada, U of Toronto P, 2013. pp. 164-211.
Walker, Cheryl. Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms, Duke UP, 1997.
Endnotes:
[1] Recently, some scholars have begun referring to Copway by his Anishinaabe name, Kahgegagahbowh. I am using “Copway” rather than Kahgegagahbowh, since this is the name he usually uses in his texts and legal documents and since, for the purposes of literary analysis, “Copway” refers more directly to the textual self he constructs in his autobiography and self-narrated texts.
[2] Copway most often refers to himself as Ojibwa/Ojibway/Ojibwe, but contemporary scholars and members of the Anishinaabe community prefer Anishinaabe, which I use here, unless quoting or paraphrasing Copway or other scholars.
[3] For more information on Methodism’s popularity among Christian Ojibwe communities, see Robert Penner’s article, “The Ojibwe Renaissance: Transnational Evangelicalism and the Making of an Algonquian Intelligentsia, 1812–1867.”
[4] For more on the triangular relationship between Christian conversion, literacy, and political consciousness, see Deanna Reder’s “George Copway’s Autobiography: Land Claims to Reclaim pimatiziwin,” pp. 168-169.
[5] Copway has been impugned both in his time and in our own for his poor financial management skills. Bernd C. Peyer, however, reminds us that, in the nineteenth century, monetary mismanagement was actually quite common among Indigenous preachers and Indian agents alike (242). In Donald B. Smith’s most recent work on Copway, “Literary Celebrity: George Copway, or Kahgegagahbowh (1818-1869),” Smith also qualifies Copway’s misdeeds by reminding us that Canadian authorities treated him with severity (at one point jailing him without actually laying charges), and that his overspending pales in contrast to the Indian Department’s decade-long mistreatment and mismanagement of First Nations monies (183). For a more detailed discussion of Copway’s financial management skills and his reasons for overspending, see Smith’s “Literary Celebrity,” pp.178-184.
[6] Scholars are divided on the number of editions Copway’s Life went through in its first year: six, according to Petrone (233); seven, according to Rex (1), Konkle (191), Walker (87) and Smith (“Kahgegagahbowh” 33).
[7] Copway envisioned “Kahgega” as an English-speaking Christian Anishinaabe territory run by a democratically elected Anglo-American governor and a Native American lieutenant governor. He proposed that it be separate but equal to other American states, and anticipated that it might one day be granted statehood in the American Union. Three governors were won over to his cause and, although his plan was rejected by the federal government in 1849, Copway continued campaigning for it well into the 1850s. For more on Copway’s proposed territory, see Smith’s “Literary Celebrity,” pp. 190-191.
[8] It is difficult to determine the extent to which editors, including Elizabeth Copway, influenced Copway’s writing (Petrone 234), but many scholars are quick to assume that editorial involvement either evinces Copway’s literary shortcomings and his need for assistance (Peyer 238-239; Smith “Kahgegagahbowh” 40) or detracts from Copway’s own authentic voice (Ruoff 19; Walker 85-87). Worth keeping in mind, however, is that no piece of writing ever has a single source or completely coherent authorial voice, that works are often collaborative, and that, as some scholars have recently shown, it was common (also among white writers) for spouses and close family friends to read, comment on, and suggest revisions for an author’s work before publication (Morgan 530-531; Rex 26-27).
George Copway entry by Lara Estlin, July 2020. Lara is a former SFU student who completed her English Honours project on Indigenous authors William Apess (Pequot) and George Copway (Anishinaabe). After completing her BA at Simon Fraser University, she then completed her MA in the Department of English at UBC. She worked as a research assistant for The People and the Text from 2018 to 2020. Entry edits by Margery Fee, April 2024. Margery Fee is Professor Emerita at UBC in the Department of English.
Updated by Eli Davidovici in April 2024. Eli completed his M.Mus. at McGill University in June 2024.
Updated by Kayla MacInnis in November 2025. Kayla is an MA student in English Literature at Simon Fraser University and a research assistant with The People and the Text.
Please contact Deanna Reder at dhr@sfu.ca regarding any comments or corrections.