St. Innocent and the Birth of a Native Church

St. Innocent (Veniaminov), who arrived at Unalaska in 1824, gave the Aleut people a written language, translated the Gospel and his own catechism Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, evangelized the Tlingit at Sitka, and rose to become Bishop of Kamchatka, Metropolitan of Moscow, and founder of the Orthodox Missionary Society. Alongside him stands St. Jacob (Netsvetov), the first native-born American priest, missionary to the Yup’ik — together they embody the distinctive achievement of the Alaskan mission: a genuinely native clergy and a Church that preserved, rather than erased, the languages of the peoples it baptized.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (North American context)

A Young Priest for Russian America

Ivan Evseyevich Popov was born on August 26, 1797, in the village of Anginskoye in the Irkutsk region of Siberia. Orphaned of his father young, he entered the Irkutsk Theological Seminary in 1807, where the rector renamed him Veniaminov in honor of the recently deceased Bishop Veniamin of Irkutsk. He was ordained deacon in 1817 and priest in 1821 (Innocent of Alaska, OCA; Garrett, St. Innocent: Apostle to America). When the diocese sought a volunteer to serve the remote Unalaska parish in the Aleutians, the young Father John, moved by an old trader’s account of the Aleuts’ eagerness for the faith, accepted — and set out with his family across the breadth of the Russian empire and the Pacific (Garrett, St. Innocent, chs. 1–2).

Unalaska: An Alphabet and the Gospel (1824)

Father John Veniaminov reached Unalaska on July 29, 1824, having left Irkutsk in 1823 (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent). The decade that followed was the most creative of his missionary life. He mastered the Unangan (Aleut) language and its dialects, and, selecting the most widely spoken (the Fox Island/Unalaska dialect), he devised for it an alphabet adapted from Cyrillic — the first written form the language had ever possessed.

With his alphabet in hand he undertook translation. His Aleut catechism and a translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew appeared in 1828, and his most influential original work, the catechetical treatise Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven (Ukazanie puti v Tsarstvie Nebesnoe), was composed in Aleut in the early 1830s and published in 1840; it became one of the most reprinted devotional texts of the Russian Church (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). Veniaminov was also a serious ethnographer and scientist: his Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District (1840) remains a foundational source on Aleut language and culture, and he kept meteorological and natural-historical records of real scholarly value (Garrett, St. Innocent; Black, Russians in Alaska).

The pedagogical principle behind this labor would define the whole Alaskan mission: the faith was to be taught in the people’s own tongue, by a clergy who respected the people’s language as worth committing to writing. This was the opposite of cultural erasure, and it is why Orthodox Christianity took such deep and lasting root in native Alaska.

Sitka and the Tlingit (1834)

In 1834 Veniaminov was transferred to New Archangel (Sitka), the colonial capital, to begin a mission among the Tlingit (Kolosh), a populous and independent people who had resisted both Russian rule and Christian preaching. He approached them as he had the Aleuts — by patient study of their language, customs, and worldview, producing notes on the Tlingit (Kolosh) and Kodiak tongues (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5; OCA, Innocent of Alaska).

His decisive opening came during the smallpox epidemic of 1835–1836, which devastated the Tlingit. Veniaminov promoted vaccination; when the vaccinated survived while the unvaccinated and the shamans’ patients perished, Tlingit hostility gave way to a respect that opened the long, slow work of evangelization among them (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent). Tlingit conversion was never as rapid or as total as among the Aleuts and Alutiiq, but a relationship had been established that would endure.

Innocent’s posture toward the Tlingit is instructive for his whole method. He did not demand that they abandon their identity; he studied their dialect, observed their kinship and ceremonial life with an ethnographer’s care, and refused to make the Gospel a vehicle of Russian cultural conquest. His own writings on the Tlingit and Kodiak tongues, and his reflections on the Aleut character in the Notes, treat the native peoples as subjects worthy of serious study rather than objects of administration — a stance that distinguished the missionaries sharply from the Russian-American Company and that the native communities themselves remembered (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 5; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

Bishop of Kamchatka (1840)

In 1838 Veniaminov sailed to St. Petersburg to report on the mission and to seek support and the printing of his translations. While he was there his wife died; on the counsel of Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow he accepted monastic tonsure, receiving the name Innocent (after St. Innocent of Irkutsk) on November 29, 1840. On December 15, 1840, Archimandrite Innocent was consecrated Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kurile and the Aleutian Islands — the first resident Orthodox bishop in Russian America since the see of Kodiak lapsed with Joasaph’s death in 1799 (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent, chs. 6–7).

As bishop, and from 1850 as archbishop, Innocent governed an immense diocese spanning both shores of the North Pacific. He extended the translation program to the Yakut (Sakha) language after his see expanded into eastern Siberia, took up residence at Yakutsk in 1853, and continued to insist on a Church served in the languages of its peoples (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent).

Metropolitan of Moscow and the Missionary Society (1868)

On the death of Metropolitan Filaret, the aged and nearly blind Innocent was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow in late 1867, taking up the office in 1868 — an extraordinary ascent for a parish priest from the Aleutians to the senior see of the Russian Church (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 9). True to his life’s work, in 1870 he founded the Orthodox Missionary Society (the Russian Imperial Orthodox Missionary Society), a body to coordinate and fund the Church’s missions throughout the empire and abroad — the institutional fruit of his conviction that mission is constitutive of the Church (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent). That same year, 1870, the American work he had founded was organized as a distinct diocese.

St. Innocent reposed in Moscow on March 31, 1879 (April 12, New Style) and was buried at the Holy Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra. Nearly a century later, on October 6, 1977, the Russian Orthodox Church — acting on the official request of the Orthodox Church in America — glorified him as a saint, under the title St. Innocent, Equal-to-the-Apostles and Enlightener of the Aleuts, Apostle to America (OCA, Innocent of Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent).

St. Jacob (Netsvetov): The First Native-Born Priest

If St. Innocent gave the native peoples a written language, the surest proof that the mission had become truly native is St. Jacob (Netsvetov). He was born in 1802 on Atka Island in the Aleutians, the son of Yegor Vasilyevich Netsvetov, a Russian from Tobolsk, and Maria Alekseyevna, an Aleut of Atka — making Jacob a Creole (the Russian-America term for those of mixed Russian and native parentage) (OCA, St. Jacob Netsvetov; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska). He studied at the Irkutsk Seminary and, on March 4, 1828, was ordained to the priesthood by Archbishop Michael — the first priest of native Alaskan (Creole) descent, ordained the same year St. Innocent’s first Aleut books appeared (OCA, St. Jacob Netsvetov; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

Father Jacob returned to Atka, where for sixteen years he served his far-flung island parish, built and staffed a school, and — collaborating in the same enterprise as Veniaminov — labored on an alphabet and translations for the Atkan-Aleut dialect (OCA, St. Jacob Netsvetov). Then, on December 30, 1844, St. Innocent appointed him to head the new Kvikhpak (Yukon) Mission to the peoples of the Yukon–Kuskokwim delta. Establishing his base at the Yup’ik village of Ikogmiute, Father Jacob spent his remaining missionary years among the Yup’ik (Eskimo) and Athabascan peoples; he is remembered for baptizing 1,320 people in that delta country and is honored as their evangelizer (OCA, St. Jacob Netsvetov; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

He died on July 26, 1864, while serving at St. Michael’s, and was buried at the Holy Trinity Church in Sitka. In March 1994 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America glorified him as St. Jacob, Enlightener of the Peoples of Alaska — the first saint to have been born in the Americas (commemorated July 26) (OCA, St. Jacob Netsvetov; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America).

A Genuinely Native Church

The careers of Innocent and Jacob together accomplished something rare in the missionary history of the Americas: the formation of a native clergy and the preservation of native languages through the very work of the Church. Veniaminov and Netsvetov reduced Aleut, Tlingit, Yup’ik, and Yakut to writing, translated Scripture and services into them, and trained Creole and native catechists, readers, and priests to carry the work (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. on the native clergy; Garrett, St. Innocent).

The consequence outlasted Russian rule entirely. When the United States purchased Alaska in 1867 and Russian clergy largely withdrew, it was the native and Creole clergy, lay readers, and the deeply Orthodox village communities who kept the faith alive — so that Orthodoxy remains, to this day, the ancestral Christianity of many Alutiiq, Aleut, Yup’ik, and Tlingit communities, and the liturgical and written use of those languages owes a permanent debt to the alphabets and translations of the nineteenth-century mission (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America). The Orthodox Church in America, which canonized St. Jacob and petitioned for St. Innocent’s glorification, traces in these two men the moment its mission became, in the fullest sense, American.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979.
Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America, 1794–1994. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995.
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004.
Veniaminov, Ivan (St. Innocent). Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District (1840). Trans. L. Black and R. Geoghegan, ed. R. Pierce. Kingston, ON / Fairbanks, AK: Limestone Press, 1984.
Orthodox Church in America. “Innocent of Alaska” / “St. Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow.” oca.org (used to locate dates of arrival 1824, consecration December 15, 1840, the 1870 Missionary Society, repose 1879, and the October 6, 1977 glorification).
Orthodox Church in America. “Repose of Saint Jacob (Netsvetov), Enlightener of the Peoples of Alaska.” oca.org (used to locate the 1828 ordination, the Kvikhpak mission, the figure of 1,320 baptisms, and the death in 1864; 1994 glorification cross-checked against Stokoe and Kishkovsky).