page_title: John Henry Keen
section_title: 1880s and 1890s
hierarchical_section_title: John Henry Keen / 1880s and 1890s
caption_attribution_description: English: Skidegate Indian Village of the Haida tribe. Skidegate Inlet, British Columbia, Canada. Français&#160;: Des mâts totémiques à Skidegate, en Colombie-Britannique (Canada).
context_page_description: John Henry Keen was an Anglican missionary in Canada, known for translating scriptures into Haida. While serving as a missionary, he also contributed to Canada's natural history, writing on insects he discovered; he had a species of mouse and bat named after him.
context_section_description: From 1882 to 1889, he was in London, where he was first a curate at Spitalfields and later in Islington. In 1890, he left again for Canada where he was based at the northern end of Graham Island in British Columbia. He lived at a village called Massett where several families would share a longhouse which typically had totem poles outside.
  Whilst in Canada Keen translated the Book of Common Prayer into Haida; he later translated the gospels of Luke and John and the Acts of the Apostles.
  In Masset, Keen took an interest in natural history. In 1891, he published his first paper on local beetles (Some British Columbian Coleoptera) and sent off 46 samples for identification to the British Museum. In 1894 he first described the Northwestern deer mouse, which was named Keen's mouse, or Peromyscus keeni, in his honour. He was also the first to scientifically described a type of brown mouse eared bat. This animal is now called Keen's myotis (Myotis keenii Trouessart). In 1896 he also found the first type specimen of what is now known to be a sub-species of northern saw-whet owl.
  Keen returned on leave in 1898 and his translated prayer book was published in 1899 in London by the Missionary Society. The book went out of print as a result of its intended audience dying out. It is estimated that before the Europeans arrived, there were 10,000 people who spoke Haida. By 1900, there were about 700. There were thought to be only about 30 people in 1999 who spoke the Haida language,
caption: The village of Masset (in 1878)
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