Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1997

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Saint Innocent Remembered
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STORY: In 1741, Russian Navy captain Vitus Bering explored and claimed what is now Alaska. By the end of the century Russian Orthodox missionaries came to convert the region's Indians and Eskimos to the Orthodox faith. Perhaps most revered of the early priests was Jon Veniaminoff. Canonized as Saint Innocent, Veniaminoff developed the first written form of Siberian and Alaska Eskimo languages. Lydia Black is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

BLACK: "He was the first ethnographer of peoples of Alaska. He was the first linguistics student of Alaska's Native languages. He was also an educator and founder of a bicultural educational system in Alaska during the Russian period."

Russian government and Orthodox leaders from Yakutsk, Siberia, were in Alaska recently to help plan a yearlong remembrance of Saint Innocent. Vladimir Toporkov, Minister of the Sakah Republic's Indigenous Peoples Affairs, led the high-ranking delegation.

TOPORKOV (translated): "People of Russia and people of Yakutia still remember Saint Innocent and what he did for these people. We will have a great celebration dedicated to Saint Innocent. Our researchers will study his life and what he did for Native people."

After the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, other Christian missionaries came. Many prohibited the use of indigenous languages and dealt cruel punishments when Native customs were practiced. Lowell Tornquist, a professor of history at Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska, says Veniaminoff's approach was much different.

TORNQUIST: "It seems he was very accepting of local traditions, people, very understanding of them and tried to learn their customs and culture as opposed to trying to implant a new one. I think in many ways he probably felt he learned more than he taught."

Veniaminoff even took the highly unusual step of acknowledging an Aleut shaman as a man of God, something that would have been considered scandalous by other Christian religions.

TORNQUIST: "There's a story about how he was even introduced to a shaman, and in Veniaminoff's discussions with the shaman, felt like the man really was a man of God, and was willing to accept some of his visions and ability to see the future and thought it was really a God-given gift and thought the man was truly a religious person. He was willing to accept that and in fact even wrote a letter to that effect to his bishop."

The legacy of America's Russian past is still visible today in Alaska, where onion-domed churches dot the landscape. In all, there are 87 Orthodox parishes in the state. The original Church of the Holy Ascension of Christ on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska was designed and built by Saint Innocent in 1825.

A major exhibition depicting the life of Veniaminoff will open in Sitka in May and travel throughout Alaska, while in Washington D.C., a separate exhibit will open in the new European Division of the Library of Congress.

For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Debra Damron reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.