Edward Marsden

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.

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.

There he became Jackson's own protégé, earning high marks, learning to preach, and gradually shifting from Duncan's low-church Anglicanism towards conversion to Presbyterianism.

Jackson arranged for Marsden to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and then Marietta College in Ohio, making him the first Alaska Native to receive higher education in the "lower 48."

After Duncan's death in 1918, Marsden was involved in the transition to new leadership, becoming a partner in running the Metlakatla Commercial Company, the community's economic engine.