PENNEFATHER, RICHARD THEODORE, office-holder; b. c. 1830, son of Edward Pennefather, a judge, and Suzan Darby; m. 18 Jan. 1851 Ariana Margaretta Shore in Fredericton; d. 27 Sept. 1865 in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

Richard Theodore Pennefather was the offspring of an Anglo-Irish family of soldiers and clerics. From 1848 to 1854 he was the private secretary of Sir Edmund Walker Head, lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, and then came with him, still as private secretary, to the Province of Canada, when Head was made its governor general in 1854. A rather introverted, genteel young man, Pennefather was trusted by Head but never liked or understood by him. “He is young – about 21 – well-informed and a gentleman,” wrote Head shortly after his arrival in Canada, “but I cannot say that he is particularly agreeable to me as he is so shy and reserved.” Pennefather did not enhance his reputation with Head by marrying a young lady who, though respectable enough, was not considered at all pretty by the governor general. In September 1860, during the visit of the Prince of Wales to North America, Pennefather attracted a great deal of attention by falling into the river at Detroit as the royal vessel left the dock. The picture that results from all this is that of a fairly serious, aloof young man with a penchant for making faux pas.

In February 1856, Pennefather became the governor general’s civil secretary and superintendent-general of Indian affairs in the Province of Canada. During his tenure the Indian Department was still in a state of change and the administrative confusions of the early 1840s had not yet disappeared. Relations with First Nations in Lower and Upper Canada had been administered separately after 1830, but in 1841 the Indigenous people in the Province of Canada were placed under the authority of the governor general. In 1842, with the appointment of a royal commission to investigate the Indian Department, there had begun a wholesale change in its organization. Relations with First Nations in the Province of Canada were then placed under the civil secretary who was ex officio superintendent-general; in Canada West superintendents and agents became directly responsible to the governor general through the civil secretary, but in Canada East responsibility for policy regarding Indigenous people, although nominally in the charge of the civil secretary, remained the concern of the military secretary (it was to him that Duncan Campbell Napier, the chief Indian affairs official in Canada East in the 1840s and 1850s, reported). Questions of jurisdiction were further complicated by the fact that British officials had been making it clear from as early as the 1820s that they hoped Canadian authorities would eventually assume the running of the Indian Department. The “little England” sentiment of the 1840s and 1850s strengthened this feeling; by the end of the 1850s, Britain informed Canada that the transfer must occur.

Pennefather, as superintendent-general, was the official head of the Indian Department, but its day-to-day affairs were largely in the hands of superintendents and agents, especially in Upper Canada. At the beginning of his service Pennefather was fortunately served by dedicated officials, notably Napier in Canada East and Thomas Gummersall Anderson* in Canada West. They were, however, to resign in 1857 and 1858 respectively.

Pennefather’s most notable contribution to Canada was his chairmanship of a three-man commission that conducted an inquiry from 1856 to 1858 into the Indian Department’s operations. The 1858 report aimed to improve and accelerate the policy of First Nations’ assimilation and modernize the administrative structure used to implement it. It provided a complete picture of the department and of the province’s Indigenous communities through the use of an enormous number of statistics. It was noted with surprise that efforts to “civilize” Indigenous people were ineffective almost 30 years after the policy had been adopted. The department was poorly organized and funded and the Indigenous response to efforts aimed at assimilation was not what was hoped for. Consequently, in the late 1850s, the situation was not what the administration wanted [see George Ironside]. The report recommended a more efficient management of Indigenous children’s education, with the goal of better isolating them from their parents and traditional culture. The commission also urged compassionate and effective treatment for Indigenous people’s social ills. Feeling that institutional confusion was still responsible for many of their problems, it urged the establishment of a centralized Indian Department with its own permanent head. This step was finally taken by the Canadian government in 1862, two years after the relinquishing of imperial control.

The transfer to Canadian authority in 1860 meant that Pennefather reverted to his position as Head’s private secretary. He left Canada in 1861 when Head’s term of office expired, and went to Ceylon, where he was executive councillor and auditor-general from 1862 until his death in 1865.

Douglas Leighton