Life story collated through various online sources by Yota Dimitriadi. An account of Lucy May Owindia’s life can also be found in Kim Tame’s book ‘Devoted’ and on her website.
Note: Some of the written accounts shared use language and viewpoints characteristic of their historical context and do not align with modern understandings and language.
‘Owindia’ or ‘Owinda‘, ‘the weeping one’, was the name given to a First Nations Indigenous little girl, who was later also baptised as ‘Lucy May’ by Bishop William BOMPAS, her adoptive father. Owindia was kept as her surname when she moved to England. She was the daughter of Accomba and Michel (or Miktell) the hunter, both First Nations people and was born by the banks of the Mackenzie River, in the Canadian Northwest Territories. She was possibly Slavey, a major Dene/Athabaskan‑speaking Indigenous people native to the Mackenzie River drainage and neighbouring areas. The report we have about her early life by her adoptive mother Nina BOMPAS describes Owindia as coming from a camp on the bank of the Mackenzie River, among “Mackenzie River Indians speaking the Slave tongue.”
The Mackenzie River was known between 1825–1827 as the second of three Arctic expeditions led by explorer John Franklin and organised by the Royal Navy. ‘The McKenzie River Valley had obsidian, a very rare and unique resource. By 1856 a reservation was created by the river and ‘nearly thirty tribes and bands from Oregon, Washington, and California including the Molalla, Kalapuyans, Mohawk and Chemlamela tribes. The group became the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon’ (adapted from the website Mackenzie History Highway’.
An important person in Owindia’s life was Charlotte Selina BOMPAS, nee COX, (24 Feb. 1830-21 Jan. 1917), also known as Nina. She was a 19th century English Anglican missionary and writer who spent years in the Canadian Northwest supporting mission work alongside her husband, Bishop William BOMPAS. Nina was the daughter of a London physician and lived the first part of her adult life in Italy enjoying a lively social scene. When she married William, her cousin, the newly appointed Bishop of Athabaska at the time, they moved to the Canadian northwest. Nina undertook medical work in the diocese. She was also a firm believer in homoeopathic remedies.
Nina ‘recorded frontier life with sharp detail, leaving behind vivid accounts of the people, cultures, and hardships she encountered‘ (Dictionary of Canadian Biography). Her writings show genuine compassion and respect for Indigenous individuals, but they also reflect a common 19th century belief that Christian and British ways of life were preferable and should guide Indigenous communities. One such instance is her praise for baby carriers made out of moss “It should not need many hours of argument to convince you that an Indian baby in a moss bag is a far happier and warmer creature than a poor little white baby with its whole outfit of cotton and wool etc for the little Indian’s moss is the cleanest, softest, most absorbent of substances and needs only occasional change to keep the baby as tidy and sweet as the baby should be”.
Working with children was important to her. She offered religious and reading instruction, organised several children’s choirs, and became known for her kindness in taking care of children whose parents were ill or absent. She did not have children of her own and informally adopted two children from the indigenous communities with a plan to raise them as her own. The first, Jenny (Jeannie), died as an infant and the second was Owindia.
Nina wrote of Owindia’s early life in a book published in London by Wells Gardner, Darton and Company in 1886, a year before Owindia’s death. The book has been digitised and you can access it online. It includes a photo of Owindia. The account uses language of its time.
Owindia was initially rescued from death as an infant under dramatic circumstances after a catastrophic family tragedy. According to Nina’s narrative, Owindia’s biological mother was murdered by her father.
Owindia, only 13 months old at the time of the tragedy, was forgotten in the camp and was later on found alone, abandoned and near death, wrapped in a bundle of rags and surrounded by dogs. She was saved by three men who cared for her until they reached the Anglican Mission House at Fort Simpson, where, one of the cousins of Owindia’s mother, Minnehà, looked after the baby for a while. Then, she was cast into the mission’s care as Minnehà had her “own children to look after and provide for, and food at that time was not abundant, and the poor child was very frail and sickly and needed careful nursing and cried for more nourishment than could be provided for, so at last it was decided among the women to make an appeal to me [Nina], and one morning the tiny thing appeared before me in the arms of an Indian girl [Sinclia, Minnehà’s daughter], with the message, ‘I am sick; she I cannot work for the child; you take her’.”
The baby survived and grew into “a strong and active child, full of spirit and intelligence, the marvellous powers of observation…” . In Nina’s journal entry from Fort Norman (June-July 1881) she notes,
“We have with us two Indian children, little “Owinda”, called May since her baptism, the youngest child of Nicktell, who shot his wife some twelve months since and left this poor little one on the river bank for seventeen hours, crying her life away, until she was rescued by some kind-hearted Indians who were passing in their canoe, and brought eventually to the Mission House, looking so pitiful in her starving and well nigh frozen condition that the Indian who saved her said, “She seemed to take hold of my heart.” May is now a bonny two-year-old, bright and thriving, and as full of fun and mischief as a child can be.“
In the same journal extracts in August, Nina wrtes,
“We returned to Fort Norman very leisurely, halting in a charming nook abounding with wild berries. I sat on the bank with my little May, while Mary and the girls made for the woods to pick a supply. I found a number of fossils and some wild flowers.”
Owindia was the youngest child at the Mission in Fort Simpson. In Nina’s narrative published in ‘The Net cast in many waters [afterw.] The Net. Ed. by A. Mackenzie, 1881, pages 135-136‘, she describes,
“A visitor at our Mission House at Fort Simpson would be likely to see in the early morning, a small round-faced, black-eyed damsel toddling about, chirping and crowing over a piece of dried fish which she holds in her hand, and devours with intense enjoyment or if at Prayer time she will be sitted on my knee or standing at my chair, behaving with perfect quietness and decorum. In the evening she maybe be seen crouching among the flowers which have been raised for the first time this year at Fort Simpson- she loves to look at them and her eyes sparkle with delight at their bright colours and sweet fragrance. A great delight she is to us growing in sweetness and intelligence every day. I trust that the little life may be spared so that I may be able to present her at the Font for holy baptism in a few weeks’ time when the Bishop returns. The Indian wives are very good in helping me in various ways concerning her. One woman will come and wash all her clothes, another will make some of her tiny moccasins, another will paddle off across the river in her canoe to fetch me bags full of the sweet soft moss, which is indispensable to an Indian baby. There seems to be quite a new link established between myself and the Indian mothers in little Owinda, our last Mission Child “.
Jenny Canuck in her biography about Bishop Bompas published in 1929 writes,
“At St. David’s Cathedral*, at Fort Simpson, a baptismal font was erected by Mrs. Bompas, and remains to the present. It bears the inscription: “In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptized in this church, 1879.””
*The author probably made a mistake as there is a church but not a cathedral at Fort Simpson.
Owindia’s father dreaded that his children would end up with the white settlers but could not stop his daughter taken by the Bishop and Mrs Bompas. Nina moved to England in 1883/1884. Like Willie Wimmera, the Indigenous Australian boy who ended up in Reading, Owindia’s journey to England was long and a passage to a completely different world to what she was used to. Victorian missionary couples often brought Indigenous children home to England to push assimilation through immersion in British culture, display them to supporters to raise funds for missions or presenting the child as proof of missionary “progress”. It may have been intended that Owindia, when she grows up, ‘trained in English manners’, could return home and inspire others to convert.
As such an Anglican boarding school was seen as the best option for Owindia. She was entrusted as a boarder at an orphanage and school run by the sisterhood of All Hallows in Ditchingham as Nina returned to Canada. One of the first sisters in All Hallows, Sister Margaret who professed (took her first religious vows) in June 1881 was from Canada, but died in January 1883, a year before Owindia joined the school. The connection of All Hallows Ditchingham with Anglican communities in Yale, British Columbia in Canada came from the new Bishop of British Columbia, Bishop Acton Sillitoe’s mother in law (mother to his second wife Violet Emily Pelly). In 1884 call was made by the Bishop for sisters from Norfolk to start ‘parochial mission work’ among the indigenous people in Western Canada, establishing an ‘Indian Mission School for girls with 30 pupils’ in 1885 (All Hallows in the West, Michaelmas-tide, 1899).
The school in Norfolk followed strict routines:
“Service of Prime at 6.55 am, 8.30 am drilling, lessons till 11.00 am, a break of bread and water, 3.00 pm – 5.30 pm. lessons and, at 6.00 pm Vespers. The Sisters and staff sought to give the orphans Christmas comforts and other simple entertainments. Funds were low in those days. Full orphans were received for as little as £25 for the year. The orphanage relied on the charity of the local area to provide clothes and funds to keep the place running.” from the History of All Hallows.
Owindia appears to have remained at the school for only about a year before her health deteriorated. At the time, her decline was blamed on the “long exposure in the cold when quite an infant,” (The Net 1887), rather than on far more likely factors: the move to England, the loss of familiar surroundings, the shift from clean northern air to an indoor institutional setting, the abrupt change in diet and daily movement, and the close-quarters environment of a boarding school, all of which could have made her increasingly fragile.
Owindia was sent “to live with Nina’s sister, Miss Emma Sophia Cox, in Salisbury for a further year” (Tame, 2022, page 164). As her health got worse, Emma decided that Owindia would benefit from more specialist support. She reached out to her friend Emilia Vincent, director of the Helena Nursing Home in Reading. It was a place where “ladies suffering from permanent or incurable diseases, who require more care and nursing than they can obtain in their own homes” (Reading Mercury, Saturday 22 September 1888, page 1). Owindia moved there, again displaced, among adults on pallative care or with profound and multiple disabilities. At which point they had diagnosed that she was suffering from ‘phthisis’ (pulmonary tuberculosis) is not documented, but given the 19th century medical conditions, a child in Owindia’s circumstances would typically progress from the first signs of active tuberculosis to death within a span of a few months.
Owindia died at the Helena Nursing Home, 1 Brownlow Road, on 21st March 1887, at the age of eight. She was buried alongside two other women from Helena Home who had died within a few days of her: Esther Elizabeth Rolls, the Home’s oldest domestic help and nurse, and Caroline Bonnett, Emilia’s cousin and business partner. Caroline’s funeral was on 21st March, the same day that Owindia died. Owindia’s funeral took place on 23 March 1887. The plot was purchased by Emilia Vincent, who is also buried in Reading Old.
The Net (1887, pages 89-90) reported of her death again in a way that reflects perceptions and attitudes of the time. The piece should be understood within the historical context in which it was written:
Nina Bompas memorialised Owindia in writings, using her story to promote missionary work. The tone was affectionate, but it also shows the little awareness of the time of disruption caused by removing Indigenous children from their worlds.
Canuck (1929) also writes about Owindia’s death:
“Later the child [Owindia] was sent to London to be educated, but, as one expressed it, “the wee red plant would not flourish in that soil and so she sickened and died.” It is related that the little northern girl, like other of her tribal folk, carried “a compass in the head,” or was possessed of what we call “the homing instinct.” Once, when lost in London, she made her way across the metropolis with unerring accuracy.”
Division 40, Row D, Plot 5