Beyond Judgment: Exploring the Man, His Legacy, and Metlakatla’s Story

As I continue researching the history of Metlakatla and the work of the Metlakatla Heritage Foundation, I find myself returning again and again to one question:

How do we tell the story of William Duncan honestly?

Not as a saint.

Not as a villain.

But as a man.

William Duncan was born in England and came to the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century as a missionary. He was a product of his time, his upbringing, his religious convictions, and his own understanding of what he believed was right. Like every human being who has ever lived, he carried both strengths and weaknesses.

He was not perfect.

He made mistakes. He made decisions that have been questioned and criticized by historians and by people who have examined the complicated history of missionary activity among Indigenous peoples. His relationship with church authorities became deeply contentious, and his approach to governing the communities he helped establish could be highly controlling. These parts of his story deserve to be studied, not hidden.

But there is another part of the story that deserves equal care.

William Duncan helped establish a community that became deeply significant in Tsimshian history. The original Metlakatla developed schools, homes, businesses, industries, religious institutions, and systems of community organization. When Duncan and approximately 800 Tsimshians eventually came to Annette Island in 1887, they were not simply following a missionary. They were participating in the creation of a new community and a new chapter in their own history.

That distinction matters.

Metlakatla’s history is not simply William Duncan’s history.

The people who lived here, worked here, raised families here, fished these waters, built these buildings, attended these schools, maintained these institutions, and carried this community forward are the people whose story ultimately matters most.

Duncan was one part of that story.

A significant part, certainly.

But he was not the whole story.

When we reduce him to either a hero or a villain, we actually lose something important. We lose the opportunity to understand history as it really was—complicated, human, imperfect, and shaped by many people.

I believe we can acknowledge the harm and the controversy without pretending that nothing good came from his work.

And we can acknowledge the accomplishments without excusing the failures.

Those two truths can exist at the same time.

That is not an attempt to rewrite history.

It is an attempt to understand it.

For me, this is especially important because I am not studying William Duncan from a distant classroom or simply reading about him in an old book. I live in Metlakatla. I walk among the buildings, the streets, the shoreline, and the places connected to the history he helped shape. The legacy is not abstract. It is part of the physical and cultural landscape around us.

The Library of Congress, for example, still preserves photographs of Duncan in Metlakatla, including an image of him standing in front of the town library. Other historical records preserve the voices and perspectives of the period, including The Metlakahtlan, the newspaper Duncan edited in Alaska.

Those records should not be used simply to prove that Duncan was good or bad.

They should be used to help us understand.

And perhaps that is the responsibility of those of us working to preserve Metlakatla’s history today:

Not to protect people from uncomfortable history, but to protect history from becoming one-dimensional.

We should be willing to tell the difficult stories.

We should also be willing to tell the stories of perseverance, ingenuity, community, faith, work, survival, and accomplishment.

We should remember that the people of Metlakatla were never merely characters in someone else’s story. They were—and remain—the people who built, shaped, endured, adapted, and carried this community forward.

William Duncan was a man.

He had convictions.

He had accomplishments.

He had shortcomings.

He made decisions that had consequences.

And he left a complicated legacy.

But the history of Metlakatla ultimately belongs to the people who have lived it.

Our responsibility now is not to glorify the past or condemn it.

Our responsibility is to understand it, preserve it, and tell it honestly enough that future generations can make their own judgments.

That, to me, is what historical preservation should mean.