Reading further in the book I've been paging through, Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, I came to a part discussing the history of American efforts to assimilate the native populations.

After Alaska was transferred to the United States, the influence of the Orthodox began to wane considerably. With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a variety of problems arose for the Alaska mission. All financial support ended, some Soviet officials began to lay claim to land titles in the state, and when the American mission declared itself administratively independent of the Russian Orthodox Church, they were labeled schismatics by the Moscow Patriarchate. It was only fifty years later that they finally gained their independence, establishing the autocephalous Orthodox Church in America.

There were other problems as well. Mass migration of Eastern Europeans to the east coast of the U.S. meant that Orthodoxy’s center in the country was shifted to the major cities of the East, leaving Alaska out in the cold (no pun intended). But there were bigger problems still for the Orthodox in Alaska, particularly the natives who had converted.

Dr. Sheldon Jackson and Dr. S. Hall Young came to Alaska as Presbyterian missionaries. Dr. Jackson, using his family’s social and political connections in the White House, was appointed the first Territorial Commissioner of Education. The twin goals of his term in this office were the Christianization and assimilation of the native population. Jackson felt that the only way to avoid the catastrophic experience of Indian wars…was to bring Native Americans into the public mainstream much in the same way as public schools were doing with the millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants flooding into Ellis Island about this time (21).

Of course, this was nothing new, as practices such as this had been typical of American expansion into the West as well. It is reflective of the pragmatism of the day. But unlike the Indian Wars in the lower 48, there would be no

military confrontation on the battlefield, [but] the war in Alaska would be fought in the classroom, with the full authority of the federal government backing the monolingual, English-speaking, Protestant missionary-teacher (22).

What Jackson, Young, and the government had not been expecting, however, was that the Aleuts were not like other native Americans.

The main problem with the Aleuts was that they did not fit the expected stereotype. They were already educated, already literate, and already Christian. In fact, they had been teaching other tribes to read, and had sent missionaries to other regions for generations. Articulate enough and politically aware enough to resist Jackson’s educational policies, they soon began to protest (22).

In the end, with all support from Russia cut off due to the Bolsheviks, the assimilationist policies won by default.