The Alaskan Mission — Herman’s Decades & Veniaminov

Russian Orthodoxy reached Alaska with the fur trade, and two very different men made it stay. Herman, a lay monk who had come with the first mission in 1794, spent his last decades alone on Spruce Island near Kodiak, running a school and an orphanage for Alutiiq children and quarrelling with the trading company over its treatment of them. In 1824 a young married priest, Ioann Veniaminov, arrived at Unalaska and did the work of a linguist. He devised an alphabet for Aleut, translated the Gospel of Matthew and a catechism into it, and wrote an account of the islands and their people that scholars still use. Widowed, he became a monk, was made bishop in 1840 as Innocent, and rose eventually to be Metropolitan of Moscow. What the two of them built proved unexpectedly durable. When Russia sold Alaska in 1867 and the Russians went home, the church stayed, in the hands of Alaska Native clergy and lay readers who kept the services going in their own languages.