John Henry Keen
Anglican missionary linguist and naturalist
John Henry Keen (1851–1950) was an Anglican missionary in Canada, known for translating scriptures into Haida. While serving as a missionary, he also contributed to Canada's natural history, writing on insects he discovered; he had a species of mouse and bat named after him.
Early years and ordination
John Henry Keen was born in England in 1851; he graduated from a Bible college in Islington in 1873. In 1874 he was sent by the Bishop of London as a missionary at Moose Fort in Ontario. He was ordained by John Horden, Bishop of Moosonee in 1877.
1880s and 1890s
From 1882 to 1889, he was in London, where he was first a curate at Spitalfields and later in Islington. In 1890, he left again for Canada where he was based at the northern end of Graham Island in British Columbia. He lived at a village called Massett where several families would share a longhouse which typically had totem poles outside.
Whilst in Canada Keen translated the Book of Common Prayer into Haida; he later translated the gospels of Luke and John and the Acts of the Apostles.
In Masset, Keen took an interest in natural history.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Henry Keen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.