It's sometimes hard to come up with creative titles for these more historical and analytical posts I sometime write. But that's an aside, so let me get back into it. I’ve been reading through the book, Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, and posting a bit about the “Christianizing” of Alaska, the efforts of both Orthodox missionaries from the 1820s and on, and later Presbyterian missionaries from the 1920s (read Post 1 and Post 2). As with most history, it’s difficult to get an unbiased view of the work there. If you read what I posted, it’s easy to praise the work of the Orthodox there, and to be sympathetic to the victimization of the native population.

But we need to be fair to the work of the American missionaries as well. Certainly today I don’t think we would approve of their methodology; but they, as we are, were a product of their time. It’s always easy to condemn things in the past, but to be fair I think we need to somewhat gracious. The book I’ve been reading is certainly anti-American in its approach. This is what it says:

Alaskan history, like all history, is written from a particular point of view. Seen from the perspective of the dominant Anglo-American culture, the Aleuts are an insignificant minority inhabiting a remote and inhospitable region. They retain characteristics of an alien and ‘un-American’ culture, which informed visitors to the state think should have been abandoned long ago. The history of the Russian colonial period is simply stated. The Russians (being, as everyone knows, inherently wicked and brutal people) invaded Alaska, devastated the fur seal, sea otter, and Aleut populations in a century-long massacre that ended only because the fur market profits fell abruptly or the fur seals were extinct. The Aleuts, according to this version, were exploited, demoralized, enslaved and decimated. Liberty and justice for all arrived in 1867, after which the real history of the territory began…The natives contributed virtually nothing. They were victims or spectators in the real history of Alaska (23).

Often it’s easy to make judgment calls on historical issues such as this. With this information, it’s very easy to write off the American efforts as completely unhelpful. That’s a big stretch, and an unfair call. Certainly, the forced assimilation of native populations in the U.S. has led to a lot of problems---alcoholism, drug addiction, violent crime, suicide, and domestic violence---and an ever bigger sociological problem, that of lack of identity. Rightly so, these problems are now recognized by most as the result of policies that could have been designed and implemented in more helpful ways.

Still, it is hard to believe that missionaries like Jackson and Hall came to Alaska with entirely wrong motives. I am sure that their intent was to honor God and serve both their church and their country as best as they could. But they were a product of their time, and because humanity is sinful, they got things wrong, just as we do today. The purpose of history is not to focus on what was wrong, and whom harm was done to, but to take those lessons and figure out how we can make things better today.

We can learn a lot from the missionary approach of the original Orthodox missionaries. And to be sure, we have. Mission strategies today are much more in line with that particular approach. We can also learn from the problems with the American approach in how we treat indigenous groups. Finally, native people groups themselves, I think, can learn from studying these accounts of history how to preserve (or perhaps recapture) their identity in the face of opposition that requires them to adopt dependency-based identities.

The fact also remains that Aleut culture and identity suffered under American assimilationist policies, and while new churches were started, it can hardly be stated that the gospel flourished. The fact also remains, though, that Aleut culture had originally flourished with the arrival and missionary work of the Orthodox missionaries, and the presence of Orthodoxy still remains today.

Within a generation their condition was considerably improved because without being forced to abandon their traditional culture, without any radical overthrow of their world view, without loss of their language and self-esteem, they were at the same time becoming productive members of a new society, a culture in which they themselves soon came to play an important and determining role (25).

But that is history now. All that remains is not to point fingers and pass judgments, but to know the history, learn the lessons, and move on.

For me, however, looking at the history but also looking to the future, I think we need to pray for the gospel to spread and for workers to be raised up in a state that once had earnest and devoted missionaries, but is now one of the most spiritually-needy areas of North America. And we can take the lessons we've learned from the past and apply them to whatever work is to be done there now.