Narratives show Alaska's challenges to early church
Alaska's early clergy had to be every bit as tough as other pioneers. Narratives, written by Russian Orthodox missionaries working with Dena'ina Athabascans, offer proof. They may have been meek servants of Christ, but priests still faced freezing, starvation, drowning, pestilence, hostile drunks and swarms of mosquitoes.
"Through Orthodox Eyes," makes the priests' observations available in English for the first time. Using Russian archives, the book includes travel diaries, reports and correspondence spanning nearly a century.
For those interested in the history of the Cook Inlet Basin, the Dena'ina or religion in Alaska, it is a real find.
The accounts reveal historical forces and their often-poignant effects on individuals. In the process they include a wealth of detail about early days from Seldovia to Stony River to Copper Center. The book's geographic hub is Kenai, the parish center that served nearly all Dena'ina for generations, and it includes much about other Kenai Peninsula communities such as Ninilchik and Seldovia.
"Through Orthodox Eyes" begins with narratives by Hegumen Nikolai Militov, the parish's first priest.
He arrived in 1845 and remained, with a brief exception, until his death in 1867. Now the chapel built over his grave serves as a symbol of Kenai's heritage.
One June evening he had this to say about the peninsula's charms: "What a wonderful view! Clean air, diverse vegetation. At such moments one wants to exclaim, 'this is the place to live' and remain here forever. Unfortunately, it is no more than two months in a year that such good weather stays here. The rest of the year, life in Kenai is simply unbearable."
The book continues with five of his successors, ending with Priest Pavel Shadura, who came to Kenai in 1907 and whose descendants still live nearby.
All these priests battled sham-ans and traders who exploited Natives.
They also fought inhuman enemies: disease, poverty and drunkenness.
The work could be dangerous. Hegumen Nikolai nearly fell off a cliff portaging to Prince William Sound across the icy Kenai Mountains in 1863; Father Aleksandr Iaroshevich fled Knik in 1895 after an irate American miner beat him.
It also was Iaroshevich who, after a harrowing kayak trip across Turnagain Arm, cited a Russian proverb: "One who has not been to sea does not know what fear is."
Sacred duties barely left them time to sleep on their trips. Visiting remote villages once a year, if they were lucky, the priests conducted round-the-clock services, baptisms, marriages, eulogies and last rites.
In addition, they gave communion to and heard confession from every individual (as many as 100 a day), inspected facilities, audited finances, held meetings of church organizations, appointed assistants, plus taught Bible classes, hymns and paro-chial school. Their duty lists sometimes makes for dull reading but inspire awe.
Their roles went beyond the church door. They vaccinated Natives against smallpox and often provided the closest thing to medical care; when famine struck they fed families; for decades they offered the only schooling and, in Kenai in 1864, Nikolai ran the Russian America Company trading post for months after its manager abruptly died.
The priests were always spread too thin and scraped to get adequate resources. Support varied. When Hegumen Nikolai's death coincided with Russia's sale of Alaska to the U.S., the parish had no priest for 13 years. Unlucky Shadura served during Russia's Bolshevik Revolution. His pay stopped coming. When he finally got a check it bounced, and the traders cut off his credit.
The book reveals changes in Dena'ina culture as the Euro-American influx began. In one of history's ironies, the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska shifted from being an imposed colonial system to representing the besieged Natives.
Shadura, witnessing the dwindling of Russian influence in Alaska in 1917, voiced this bitter complaint about the racism of the new order:
"During my longtime service in Alaska I had to interact with various official persons and converse with them about the improvement of the Alaskan Natives' life. These officials shared the same opinion that they articulated during our talks: the sooner these dirty and ungrateful nationalities are wiped out from the face of the earth, the better for the nation. They also stressed that the Natives would be replaced by the new vital population, which would ennoble all of Alaska with culture."
One drawback to the book is gaps. Many records are lost, including Hegumen Nikolai's early years at his post when he was introducing Christianity to the region.
Focusing on the farflung Dena'ina rather than one geographic area complicates the book's organization. Although the Kenai missionaries' notes are chronological, the last section of the book is a jumble of reports from the Nushagak and Kusko-kwim parishes that, in the latter period, took charge of the hard-to-reach villages west of Cook Inlet.
Discussion of the Ahtna also is limited. Their region was so isolated missionaries could not reach their villages until the era of roads and aircraft.
The other major group the Kenai parish served, the Sugpiaq of Prince William Sound and the southern tip of the Kenai Pen-insula, are only mentioned in passing. Perhaps a future volume will present missionary narratives about their rich history.
Andrei Znamenski, an associate professor of history at Alabama State University and a resident scholar at the Library of Congress, worked on the translation with numerous Alaska colleagues. He includes a 59-page introduction about the priests, the Natives and their historical context as well as a gallery of old photographs, a glossary and copious notes.
Apparently English is not his first language, and sometimes his phrasing and grammar are odd. Nonetheless, he expresses himself with clarity and shows a strong grasp of his subject matter.
"Through Orthodox Eyes" is the 13th volume in a series of historical translations sponsored by the University of Alaska's Rasm-uson Library.
With its passionate and articulate witness to a bygone era, it is a valuable addition to Alaska history.
Shana Loshbaugh is a writer and former Peninsula Clarion reporter who now lives near Fairbanks.