Edward Ahenakew (Cree)

Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961) was a Cree Anglican priest, educator, language scholar, author, and political advocate whose work joined university learning with responsibility to Indigenous communities. In 1912 he earned the Licentiate in Theology (LTh) at Emmanuel College, now part of the University of Saskatchewan. He was the first Indigenous Canadian to graduate with a two-year theology licentiate from a Canadian university and the University of Saskatchewan’s first Indigenous graduate. 1

These achievements began a career extending far beyond formal credentials. Ahenakew ministered across Saskatchewan, attempted medical training, contributed to Cree lexicography, and recorded oral narratives. His public Christian commitments and his defence of Cree interests sometimes brought him into difficult relationships with the institutions he served. His life is especially significant for the ways he used education, language, and writing to address the needs of his people.

Family and early education

Ahenakew was born on 11 June 1885 at Ahtahkakoop, or Sandy Lake, in what is now Saskatchewan. His parents, Baptiste Ahenakew and Ellen Ermineskin, raised him in a Christian Cree household. He experienced fragile health in childhood. His mother’s hope that he would enter the ministry became part of the family account of his vocation. 2

He first attended a reserve day school and then a boarding school in Prince Albert. Although the move took him away from home, he became an able student and athlete. After returning to the reserve, he helped his father and subsequently taught at James Smith before undertaking theological studies. 3

His education thus included learning within a Cree community, schooling away from his family, and work as a teacher. Before he became a university graduate, he already knew the practical responsibilities of instruction. That background helps explain why questions about the purpose and conditions of Indigenous schooling recur in his later career.

Theological training and Anglican ministry

Ahenakew studied at Wycliffe College in Toronto before continuing at Emmanuel College in Saskatoon. 3 His LTh of 1912 and the university firsts associated with it remain central achievements in his early life. 1 They should be distinguished from the honorary doctorate he received later in life.

Ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1912, he assisted the Reverend John R. Matheson at Onion Lake. His ministry required extensive travel among northern Saskatchewan communities, using dog teams in winter and canoes in summer. His duties included helping sick people in places where distance made access to medical care difficult. 3

The diocesan historian W. F. Payton records later appointments at Little Pine from 1927 to 1929 and Fort à la Corne from 1935 until retirement in 1955. Ahenakew also took responsibility for church building at Frog Lake, Thunderchild, and Little Pine. He became a canon of St. Alban’s Cathedral in 1933. 4

The influenza epidemic and medical studies

The influenza epidemic of 1918 exposed Ahenakew to devastating illness and death at Onion Lake. Concern for his congregations, together with the example of Dr. Elizabeth Matheson’s medical work, encouraged him to study medicine. He obtained leave from the diocese and enrolled at the University of Alberta. After three years, serious illness prevented him from completing the remaining training. 4

His difficulty was inseparable from poverty. Stan Cuthand’s introduction to Voices of the Plains Cree relates Ahenakew’s account of living on an extremely restricted diet while trying to meet university expenses. Recovery was prolonged; medical qualification remained beyond his reach. 5

The episode reveals the material limits confronting an educated Indigenous man who wanted to expand his service. He returned to ministry without becoming a physician. The aspiration itself, however, grew directly from the health needs he had encountered, rather than from a departure from community responsibilities.

Political advocacy and the future of education

Ahenakew participated in the League of Indians of Canada and became a vice-president in 1932. He helped organize meetings and sought government attention to Indigenous concerns. After a journey to Ottawa in 1933, pressure from his bishop led him to relinquish his League activity. 2

Education was a particular concern. He advocated adequately supported day schools on reserves, where children could remain with their families, and criticized residential schooling for suppressing initiative and disrupting ordinary family life. 2 His position reflected the difference between supporting education and accepting the institutions through which authorities provided it.

Church service gave Ahenakew opportunities to speak, but also imposed limits upon his political independence. His withdrawal from the League should therefore be understood alongside his continuing writing and community work. The incident demonstrates how the authority of a bishop could constrain an Indigenous clergyman’s participation in organized advocacy.

Cree literacy and the dictionary

Ahenakew’s commitment to Cree literacy took several forms. Payton describes the Cree Guide as a regularly issued publication in syllabic writing, circulated by post and produced through stencils and mimeographing. 4 It connected scattered readers through news and religious instruction.

His contribution to A Dictionary of the Cree Language, published in 1938, was another major undertaking. The volume developed the earlier work of Edwin Arthur Watkins through a collaborative revision involving John Alexander Mackay, Richard Faries, Ahenakew, and others. Faries’s preface specifically credits Ahenakew with making the Cree–English section reliable for Plains and Western Cree. 6

The preface also expresses concern that the language should not disappear. Although the project was framed in missionary terms and intended to assist several groups of learners, its lasting value rests on the vocabulary it preserved and organized. Ahenakew brought Cree linguistic knowledge to a substantial reference work, making his scholarship useful beyond his own congregations. 6

Oral history and the voice of Old Keyam

His article “Cree trickster tales” appeared in the Journal of American Folklore in 1929, bringing Cree narrative material to scholarly readers during his lifetime. 2

Ahenakew recorded narratives told by Chief Thunderchild, whose memories included buffalo hunting, warfare, and horse raiding. He also created Old Keyam, a fictional and partly autobiographical speaker through whom he could express contemporary Cree concerns. Jennifer S. Brown’s review distinguishes these two bodies of writing: recollections of an earlier world and a literary voice addressing the pressures of reserve life. 7

The name Keyam conveys an attitude of letting something pass or saying it does not matter. Its irony lies in the seriousness of the matters the speaker raises. Through him, Ahenakew examined losses, frustration, and the conduct of government and church officials. 7

Deanna Reder argues that Old Keyam needs to be read through Cree cultural protocols. Its shifts between Christian affirmations and arguments defending Cree practices do not resolve into a simple, unified position. Her analysis of the discussion of the Sun Dance shows a speaker invoking conscience, religious freedom, and the ceremony’s meaning while also expressing Christian expectations. 8

This interpretive approach allows the tensions within Ahenakew’s writing to remain visible. His texts address the experience of a Cree Christian living under powerful outside institutions. They preserve disagreements and difficult judgments as well as cultural knowledge; reading them solely as folklore would overlook their political and intellectual force. 8

Publication and the surviving record

Much of Ahenakew’s important writing reached a broad readership only after his death. Brendan Frederick R. Edwards’s study of the publishing history describes efforts to obtain publication through Ryerson Press in the 1920s. The need for a subsidy proved an obstacle, and an approach to the Department of Indian Affairs did not secure the necessary support. 9

Ruth Matheson Buck later prepared the manuscripts that became Voices of the Plains Cree, published by McClelland & Stewart in 1973. Edwards documents government support for this later project and Buck’s role in bringing the work into print. 9 Publication finally gave wider circulation to writing that had waited for decades.

The 1995 edition added Cuthand’s introduction. Brown nevertheless cautioned that Buck had selected and recast the material and that the edition did not adequately describe the surviving manuscripts or assess the editorial interventions. 7 The published book therefore requires attention to the different contributions of storyteller, author, translator, and editor.

An archival description at the American Philosophical Society identifies Ahenakew’s 1948 Genealogical sketch of my family. It includes autobiography and accounts of nineteenth-century relatives, conversion, the treaty of 1876, and the events of 1885. 10 Family history provided another means of recording Cree experience. The catalogue is evidence of the manuscript’s scope; it is not a substitute for reading the manuscript itself.

Recognition, final years, and legacy

Emmanuel College awarded Ahenakew an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1947. Cuthand recalls his pleasure in the congratulations of younger theological students and his influence among Indigenous clergy and lay readers. These recollections also convey his humour and the warmth of his personal relationships. 5

He continued teaching after retirement. In July 1961, following work at the Lay Readers School at Emma Lake, he was travelling by train towards Dauphin, Manitoba, when he suffered a stroke. He was taken to hospital at Canora, Saskatchewan, where he died on 12 July, aged seventy-six. 5

Ahenakew’s academic firsts belong to the history of Indigenous university education. 1 His broader legacy lies in the uses he made of that education: ministry, advocacy, language work, and the recording of Cree lives. His surviving writing also challenges an uncomplicated portrait of either cultural preservation or Christian assimilation. It records an Indigenous intellectual working within both Cree relationships and church institutions, with commitments that sometimes supported one another and sometimes produced unresolved tension.

References

1. Indigenous Canadian Academic Milestones: A Timeline; https://indigenius-canada.wishartlab.com/pioneers/ (accessed 7 October 2026).
2. The People and the Text. Edward Ahenakew [Internet]. [date unknown] [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Available from: https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/featured-authors/EdwardAhenakew
3. Crevier C. Ahenakew, Edward (1885–1961). In: The encyclopedia of Saskatchewan [Internet]. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina; 2006 [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Available from: https://esask.uregina.ca/entry/ahenakew_edward_1885-1961.html
4. Payton WF. An historical sketch of the Diocese of Saskatchewan of the Anglican Church of Canada [Internet]. Prince Albert: Anglican Diocese of Saskatchewan; 1974 [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Chapter 21, p. 99–104. Available from: https://anglicanhistory.org/canada/sk/payton1974/21.html
5. Ahenakew E. Voices of the Plains Cree [Internet]. Buck RM, editor. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, University of Regina; 1995 [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Introduction by Stan Cuthand, p. ix–xxii. (Canadian Plains Studies; 28). Available from: https://iportal.usask.ca/docs/VoicesOfThePlainsCree.pdf
6. Watkins EA. A dictionary of the Cree language as spoken by the Indians in the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta [Internet]. Faries R, editor. New revised and enlarged ed. Toronto: General Synod of the Church of England in Canada; 1938 [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Preface, p. v–vii. Available from: https://creeliteracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Watkins-Faries.pdf
7. Brown JS. Review of Voices of the Plains Cree by Edward Ahenakew. Great Plains Q [Internet]. 1997 [cited 2026 Oct 5];17(1):67–68. Available from: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/1958/
8. Reder D. Understanding Cree protocol in the shifting passages of “Old Keyam”. Stud Can Lit [Internet]. 2006 [cited 2026 Oct 5];31(1):50–64. Available from: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/10199
9. Edwards BFR. Ruth Buck and the publication of Edward Ahenakew’s Voices of the Plains Cree. In: Historical perspectives on Canadian publishing [Internet]. Hamilton: McMaster University Library; [date unknown] [cited 2026 Oct 5]. Available from: https://digitalcollections.mcmaster.ca/index.php/hpcanpub/case-study/ruth-buck-and-publication-edward-ahenakew-s-voices-plains-cree
10. American Philosophical Society. Genealogical sketch of my family, 1948 [archival description on the Internet]. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society; [date unknown] [cited 2026 Oct 5]. American Council of Learned Societies collection, Mss.497.3.B63c, item 64. Available from: https://as.amphilsoc.org/repositories/2/archival_objects/15595