The Alaskan Mission (1794)
In brief
In 1794 a small band of monks from Valaam monastery in Russia reached Kodiak Island, off the coast of Alaska — then Russian territory — to preach the Gospel to its native peoples. Their arrival is the beginning of Orthodox Christianity in the New World. From this mission come the first canonized saints of American Orthodoxy: among them St. Herman of Alaska, the humble monk who stayed to shield the Alaskan natives from exploitation, and later St. Innocent, called "the apostle to America," who gave whole peoples the Scriptures in their own tongue.
The monks who crossed an ocean
By the late eighteenth century Russian fur traders had pushed across the Bering Sea into Alaska, and where the traders went the Church followed. At the request of the merchants and with the blessing of the Russian church, a mission of about ten monks — most of them from the northern monastery of Valaam, led by the Archimandrite Joasaph — set out from St. Petersburg in December 1793. By tradition they covered some 7,300 miles in 293 days, reaching Kodiak Island on September 24, 1794.
They found a hard field: a scattered native population, a brutal fur trade, and traders who resented any interference with their profits. Yet the monks baptized thousands of Alaskans in the first years, and they did something that would mark American Orthodoxy from the start — they took the side of the native peoples against the company that employed them, defending the Aleuts and Alutiiq from mistreatment. The mission's power lay less in numbers than in this witness of love.
St. Herman and the first American saints
The best-remembered of the monks is St. Herman (c. 1756-1837), a simple lay monk who never became a priest. He settled on Spruce Island, which he called "New Valaam," raised orphans, kept a school, tended a garden, and became the natives' protector and friend; he is remembered for urging those around him to love God above all else, from this very day and hour. He died in 1837, and in 1970 he was glorified as the first saint of North America — the first canonization ever celebrated on American soil — with his feast kept in December (his repose) and August (his glorification).
He was not alone. St. Juvenaly, one of the original mission, was killed while preaching on the mainland in 1796 and is honored as the protomartyr of America. St. Peter the Aleut, a young native convert, is venerated as a martyr on the strength of an account that he was tortured and killed for refusing to renounce his Orthodox faith. And a generation later came St. Innocent (Veniaminov), a married priest who arrived in the Aleutians in 1824: he mastered the Aleut language, devised an alphabet for it, translated the Scriptures and services, and rose in the end to be Metropolitan of Moscow before his repose in 1879. He was canonized in 1977 and is called "the apostle to America."
What the mission left behind
The Alaskan mission planted Orthodoxy so deeply among the native peoples that it remains, to this day, the living faith of many Aleut, Alutiiq, Yupik, and Tlingit communities, who worship in their own languages in village churches older than most American cities. St. Innocent's method — to carry the Gospel in the people's own tongue rather than to impose a foreign one — became a hallmark of Orthodox mission.
Everything that followed in American Orthodoxy grew from this seed. The Alaskan diocese moved south to San Francisco and then New York, gathering immigrants of many nations, and became in time the Orthodox Church in America. When Orthodox Christians in the United States look for their origin, they look to a handful of monks on a cold island in 1794 (the wider story).