Portrait of Emma Crosby.

Emma Crosby came to Lax Kw’alaams with her husband, Rev. Thomas Crosby, in 1874. The year after she arrived in the village, she began inviting girls to live in her home. By living together with the girls, she hoped to model “what a well-ordered Christian home ought to be” and established the Home for Girls. Her interests centred first and foremost on Tsimshian and other Aboriginal girls, whom she—like Christian missionaries generally—felt were in particular danger of degradation. What would become the Crosby Girls’ Home had its roots not in education but in Emma Crosby’s desire to “protect” these girls—in particular, orphans and “outcasts”—from what she considered to be “a life of dissipation and shame.” This portrait show Emma Crosby at about age 70, after she had retired to Vancouver.