Anthropologist

Tribute To A

Missionary

A book about the late Rev.

Father Joseph Roch Deihl,

a Marist missionary, whose name still is revered in Western Samoa, has been published in America by an old friend, Father E. A. Tremblay.

FATHER Tremblay also was a South Seas missionary he served in Tonga. The book is called God’s Redhead —Father Deihl was an auburn-haired lad of 25 when he went to Apia in 1920.

“Joe,” as he was affectionately called, spent 28 years in Samoa, where he was a distinguished missionary-priest, an educationist, an ardent student of anthropology, and a gifted poet.

“I want you to come and see this school,” said Father Deihl to me one day, in Apia, 30 years ago; and he led me into a big room, where there were about 35 boys and girls.

“There—what do you think of them?”

"Best Racial Cross"

They were a fine-looking, bright lot of kids. He showed me some of their work—it was excellent. “These are the best racial cross in the Pacific Islands”, he said, “half- Chinese, half-Polynesian; clever, good-looking, and industrious. We could do with more of them”.

But there were not many more.

It was at that time that the new New Zealand Labour Government deported from Samoa all the Chinese labourers who remained over from the German time, and there were no more Chinese-Samoan unions.

Father Deihl, as an anthro pologist, made a close study of the South Pacific peoples, and he told me that he believed the Polynesian, racially, was about 14 per cent.

Caucasion, 24 per cent. Mongoloid and the balance mostly Negroid.

That, he said, was why the Poly nesian-Chinese cross was so good.

This gifted man, in the late ’forties, developed an organic heart condition; and the Samoans, who loved him very much, subscribed funds to send him to his home town in the US, where he died on October 29, 1948.

Father Tremblay’s little book about God’s Redhead is not only a fine tribute to a friend. It is a valuable addition to the history of missionary services in the Islands.—

Rwr.