"Alaskan Missionary Spirituality"

"Alaskan Missionary Spirituality"

By Father Michael Oleksa

“This is the place that God forgot,” summarized an Aleut mother at the end of a long, friendly conversation about the history of her village. Not only the Lord but missiologists, historians, and anthropologists have neglected of ignored the Aleution and Kodiak archipelagos. Yet it was here that orthodox Christian laymen and missionaries and the indigenous Alaskan peoples crated a unique Aleut culture that blossomed and endured for generations after Alaska became U.S. territory. It was here that the secular business interests of the Russian American Company clashed directly with the evangelistic spiritual goals of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was here that bilingualism and literacy in Native Americans were first trained for positions of leadership within the commercial company and mission. It was here that Alaska’s traditional societies first encountered the modern West, the polyglot Russia met the monolingual United States. And it was here that saints and martyrs walked the earth.

            This story had been ignored by researchers “on the outside” and forgotten by most of those whose ancestors were directly involved “on the inside.” So much of what happened here contradicts and overthrows existing stereotypes of Russia, the Orthodox Church, native Americans, and even American social and educational policy that is astonishing so few investigators have been attracted to the region. There are, on the other hand, serious obstacles. The records of the Aleut achievement are difficult to locate and even more difficult to decipher. Many are inaccessible, stored in Soviet libraries and archives. Dozens of uncataloged crates like in the basement of the Library of Congress. Still more untouched sources sleep in Kodiak, the site of the Alaskan diocesan seminary, and Syossetr, the national headquarters of the Orthodox Church in America. Nearly all are in Russian script, fading on century-old paper. The letters, journals, and reports contained in this book were translated---many for the first time---from such sources. Fire, flood, shipwreck, and the war have destroyed much. And with the passing of each articulate native elder, the rich old tradition is further impoverished. The islands are remote, their population relatively small---and the local people know it. It seems to them, as to Mrs. Sophie Hapoff, an Aleut elder at Unalaska, Veniaminov’s headquarters, that God---and the world---has forgotten.