Until he was about nine, Henry Bird Steinhauer was an Ojibwe—born around 1820, in the area of Lake Simcoe, and probably named Sowengisik. In 1828, he was baptized into the Christian faith, and his life changed. Impressed by his quick mind, Methodist missionary William Case arranged for Steinhauer to receive a Western education and religious instruction. From the perspective of the missionaries, who saw in him someone well positioned to aid them in their quest to Christianize and civilize Native "savages," Steinhauer was a rousng success, serving initially as a missionary assistant, a teacher, and a translator of Christian texts into Ojibwa and Cree. In 1855, he traveled to London to be ordained and was then posted to Alberta. There, he founded a mission at Whitefish Lake, which would become his life's work.

But Steinhauer did not forget his Aboriginal roots. He was troubled by what he described as the "blighting and benighting" presence of white settlers in the Northwest and by the fact that Aboriginal peoples were under pressure to surrender their independence and their land. Although he never renounced his Christian faith, in 1875 he severed his official connections to the Missionary Society and increasingly asserted his Aboriginal identity, acting as a political advisor to the peoples in and around Whitefish Lake. The Praying Man—the first full-length biography of Steinhauer—explores the tensions inherent in the life of someone who owes allegiance to two cultures, one of which seeks to dominate the other.