Hill, H. A. (Henry Aaron) Kenwendeshon (d. 1834)

The eldest son of Mohawk chief, Karonghyonte (David Hill), Hill was a Church of England catechist and a translator. He was born in the early 19th Century and belonged to the wolf clan of the Mohawks near the Grand River in Upper Canada. The name Kenwendeshon meant "longer days," but during this period, the Mohawks were well acquainted with white customs and some had begun to use family names in the manner of their neighbors. Henry Aaron Hill appears to have preferred his English name. When his father died around 1790, Joseph Brant attempted to have Hill become chief of the wolf clan, but the Iroquois custom was that the title passed in the female line. Nevertheless, Hill was later regarded by some as a chief. While visiting the Grand River in 1792, Patrick Campbell is said to have described Hill as a young man "of very agreeable looks and mild manners," who had been "the best scholar" at Harvard. Harvard has no record of his presence there, however. Sometimes, Hill is referred to as a doctor. During the War of 1812, he took part in the ambush of American forces at Beaver Dam on 24 June 1813. In November of the following year, he was a member of the small party that prevented a large American force from crossing the Grand River to attack Burlington Heights from the rear.

In 1816, Hill acted as interpreter at councils of the Six Nations and conducted services at the Mohawk chapel that still stands in Brantford. Hill acted as a reader and interpreter to Ralph Leeming in 1821 and was reportedly a catechist for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. William Hough, the first resident Anglican clergyman at the Grand River was appointed in 1826. Hill was officially designated a catechist for the SPG with an annual salary of 20 pounds in 1827. He continued at that post when the interdenominational New England Company took over the mission in 1827.

A Methodist mission was established on the Grand River in 1822, and they supported Hill's program of translation of the Bible. The American Bible Society discovered in 1823 that Hill, with the support of John Brant (Tekarihogen) was working on translations of Luke and proposed that he complete the translation of all four gospels. Missionary William Case reported that Hill was intoxicated while he worked although some said he was reforming. In spite of Case's concerns, Hill was a diligent worker. His translation of Luke appeared in 1828, and 350 copies were sent to the Methodist mission on the Grand River with fifty more sent to Lower Canada. The Church of England made little use of the translations done by Hill (373).

The American Bible Society's interest also waned and the continued publication of Mohawk scriptures was subsequently undertaken by the Young Men's Bible Society of New York, an auxiliary to the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States. Most of the translations of the New Testament were done by Hill between 1831 and his death of cholera in 1834. They were completed by the Brantford merchant, John Aston Wilkes, Mohawk schoolmaster, William Hess, and Elizabeth Kerr. Hill was also the chief translator of a collection of psalms and hymns which went through separate printings for its Methodist and Anglican users. Although his work as a translator was little recognized in his own time and his translations were often published without his name, he produced the balk of the scriptures and hymns available in the Mohawk language.

Ruggle, Richard E. Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. VI. 1821 - 1835. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1987. 373 - 374.

Other sources:

J.C. Pilling. "Bibliography of the Iroquoian Languages." Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bull, Washington. 6 1888: 82 - 86.

P. Campbell. Travels in North America. Langton and Ganong.

Francis Hall, Travels in Canada, and the United States, in 1816 and 1817. London, 1818.

John West. A Journal of a Mission to the Indians of the British Provinces, of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and the Mohawk, on the Ouse or Grand River, Upper Canada (London, 1827).

R.R. Ruggle, "A house divided against itself: the denominational antagonism of the Grand River missions" (papers presented at the meeting of the Canadian Society of the Church Hist., London, Ont., 1978) 1 - 10.