Conflict with the Russian-American Company

St. Herman, alone among the survivors of the 1794 Valaam mission, made the protection of the Alutiiq and Aleut peoples against the abuses of the Russian-American Company the substance of his vocation. This file traces the documented conflict: the missionaries’ written complaints to Russia, the 1800 confrontation with Alexander Baranov over the natives’ oath of allegiance and the year-long confinement that followed, Herman’s self-description as the “humble servant and nurse” of the local peoples, and his service during the epidemic of 1819.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (glorified by the OCA and ROCOR, 1970)

The Mission as Advocate, Not Trader

From its arrival on Kodiak in September 1794, the Valaam mission found itself at odds with the commercial colony it had come to serve. The monks regarded the protection of their converts as inseparable from the preaching of the Gospel, and they could not reconcile the Company’s conscription and exploitation of the Alutiiq fur-hunters with the Christian faith they professed to be planting (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, Orthodox Christians in North America 1794–1994, ch. 1; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, chs. on the Kodiak mission). The conflict was structural, not personal: the Church understood itself as the conscience of Russian America, while the Russian-American Company — chartered in 1799 and managed by Alexander Andreyevich Baranov — understood the natives as a labor force whose value lay in the sea-otter pelts they could be made to deliver.

Of the original party, the monk Herman became the most tenacious and enduring advocate of the native peoples. He held no priestly office — by his own choice he had refused ordination and the rank of archimandrite (see New Valaam) — yet for more than four decades he stood, in his own words, as the servant and protector of the Alutiiq against the demands of the colony. Baranov, for his part, regarded the monk as a meddler; the colonial manager is reported to have dismissed Herman in correspondence as a “hack writer and chatterer,” a characterization preserved in the Company’s own records (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Korsun and Black, Herman: A Wilderness Saint).

The Missionaries’ Complaints to Russia

The first instrument of the mission’s resistance was the written complaint. The monks did not merely protest locally; they appealed over the head of the colonial administration to the imperial Church and, through it, to the state. Already under Archimandrite Joasaph the mission had documented the colony’s failure to provide the promised church and the harsh conditions of the settlement, and had reported the Company’s treatment of the natives to St. Petersburg (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1).

After Joasaph’s death in the 1799 wreck of the Phoenix, the surviving monks continued the appeals. The collective grievance reached its sharpest expression in a letter of complaint sent to the Most Holy Synod in St. Petersburg in 1801, in which the missionaries laid out the Company’s obstruction of their work and its abuse of the indigenous peoples (Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1; OCA, Chronology of the Life of St. Herman of Alaska, entry for 1801). These letters are the documentary backbone of the conflict: they establish that the missionaries’ opposition to the Company was contemporaneous, written, and directed at the highest ecclesiastical and civil authorities — not a later hagiographic embellishment. Herman himself was among those who wrote on behalf of the native peoples, and his petitions to the colonial administration survive as the most personal witness to this advocacy (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; Korsun and Black, Herman: A Wilderness Saint).

The 1800 Confrontation and the Oath of Allegiance

The crisis of 1800–1801 is the best-documented episode of the conflict and the one that most clearly reveals what was at stake. The dispute turned on the legal status of the native Alaskans within the Russian Empire. The missionaries sought to have the Alutiiq and Aleut peoples received as subjects of the Tsar — citizens of the empire, entitled to its protection — and to that end they proposed to administer to them the oath of allegiance to the emperor, the same juridical act by which any imperial subject was bound to the crown and, reciprocally, brought under its law (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska).

Baranov understood precisely the threat this posed to the Company’s labor regime. If the natives were imperial subjects, they could not be conscripted and exploited as a subject population outside the law; the Company’s economic model depended on their remaining, in effect, a controlled and non-citizen workforce. He therefore refused to permit the indigenous peoples to pledge allegiance to the emperor as the monks were urging them to do (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska).

In 1800 a letter from Baranov was delivered to the mission’s steward, Father Herman, forbidding the monks any contact with the indigenous people (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; OCA, Chronology, entry for 1800). A heated exchange with Baranov followed. The colonial manager threatened the monks with force, and the mission was placed under what amounted to house arrest: the monks withdrew to their compound, and for over a year it was not possible to hold public services in the local church, nor were the monks and the people permitted contact with one another (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1). It was this confinement that provoked the 1801 letter of complaint to the Synod described above.

The episode set the enduring pattern of Russian America: the Church standing as advocate of the native peoples against the commercial colony. It is also a reminder that the conflict was not a matter of temperament but of a genuine clash of orders — the sacramental community the monks were forming against the extractive enterprise the Company was running.

“The Humble Servant and Nurse of These Peoples”

The spirit in which Herman conducted this advocacy is captured in his own words, preserved in his petitions on behalf of the Alutiiq. Writing to the colonial administration to plead for the native peoples, he described himself not as their patron from above but as their lowliest attendant:

“I, the most humble servant of these people, and their nurse, stand before you on their behalf, and write this petition with tears of blood: be a father and protector to us.” (Herman, petition to the colonial administration, as quoted in orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; cf. Korsun and Black, Herman: A Wilderness Saint)

The Russian word rendered “nurse” here is nyanka — a nanny or nursemaid, the woman who tends and raises a child. The maternal image is deliberate and characteristic: Herman cast himself in the most lowly and self-effacing role he could name, the servant who feeds and shields the helpless, and he asked the powerful not for favors but for the duties of a father. [Disputed: the exact wording and the precise addressee of this petition vary across transmissions. The phrasing “I am the lowliest servant and nurse (nyanka) of these peoples” is the form in which the self-description is most often quoted; it derives from Herman’s surviving petitions as summarized in the Valaam Life and reproduced in modern lives (orthodoxcanada.ca; Korsun and Black, Herman: A Wilderness Saint). The English renderings differ in detail because they translate from the Russian text of the Life and its underlying documents rather than from a single fixed original.] The saying is therefore not a free-floating bon mot but a compressed statement of his whole posture toward the conflict with the Company: he opposed the powerful by making himself the servant of the powerless.

The Epidemic of 1819

The depth of Herman’s commitment to the native peoples was proved not only in confrontation but in pestilence. In 1819 an epidemic — most likely an influenza introduced to Sitka by an American trading ship and carried thence to Kodiak — swept the Alutiiq settlements with catastrophic mortality (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; OCA, Chronology, entry for 1819). An eyewitness recalled the horror of the dying villages, where, in one preserved description, “mothers over whose bodies, cold in death, crawled a hungry child, crying and searching in vain for its food” (eyewitness account quoted in orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska).

What is attested of Herman’s conduct in the catastrophe is recorded in the Valaam Life, drawing on the testimony of Semyon Yanovsky, who was then chief manager of the colonies (see Yanovsky Correspondence). According to that witness, “during the whole time the terrible disease lasted — an entire month, with a gradual decline — Fr. Herman, not sparing himself, tirelessly visited the sick, begged them to be patient, to pray, and to bring forth repentance, and he would prepare them for death” (1867 Valaam Life, via Little Russian Philokalia vol. 3, St. Herman Press; cf. orthochristian.com, The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska). The tradition further holds — on Yanovsky’s report — that Herman was the only Russian to go among the dying Alutiiq to tend and console them, at great risk to himself (orthodoxcanada.ca, Saint Herman of Alaska; Stokoe and Kishkovsky, ch. 1).

As with all such accounts, the historian’s claim must be measured against its attestation: these are the things the Life reports, on the authority of an eyewitness whose own conversion dates to that very year, rather than facts independently documented in the colonial archive. But the convergence is strong. The Company’s own records confirm the epidemic; Yanovsky’s letters, the primary written witness, confirm Herman’s service; and the whole episode coheres with the documented advocacy of the previous two decades. In the epidemic of 1819, the monk who had called himself the nurse of the native peoples did the work of a nurse in fact.

References

Stokoe, Mark, and Leonid Kishkovsky. Orthodox Christians in North America, 1794–1994. Syosset, NY: Orthodox Christian Publications Center, 1995. Chapter 1, “The Alaskan Mission (1794–1870).”
Oleksa, Michael. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
Korsun, Sergei, and Lydia Black (trans./ed.). Herman: A Wilderness Saint — From Sarov, Russia, to Kodiak, Alaska. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2012.
The Life of Our Holy Father Saint Herman of Alaska (the 1867 Valaam Life), reprinted in Little Russian Philokalia, vol. 3: St. Herman of Alaska. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Herman Press. Online edition: orthochristian.com/47984.html.
Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint Herman of Alaska.” orthodoxcanada.ca (used to locate the 1800 oath-of-allegiance confrontation, the house arrest, the 1801 complaint, the “nurse” petition, and the 1819 epidemic; primary claims traced to the Valaam Life and to Oleksa and Black).
Orthodox Church in America. “Chronology of the Life of St. Herman of Alaska.” oca.org (used to locate the 1800, 1801, and 1819 dates).