The Aleut Mission (1824–1834)

The decade at Unalaska: the church of the Holy Ascension that Fr. Ioann Veniaminov built largely with his own hands; the school he opened for Aleut children; the baidarka voyages by which he reached a parish scattered across dozens of islands of stormbound sea; his mastery of the Unangan language and dialects; and the celebrated Akun Island episode of 1828, the old Aleut Smirennikov and his shining visitors — reported here as the tradition attests it, pinned to Veniaminov’s own written account.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Parish of Islands

When Fr. Ioann Veniaminov arrived at Unalaska in the summer of 1824 (see The Voyage to Unalaska), he inherited not a fresh mission field but a partly Christianized one. The Unangan (Aleut) people of the Fox Islands had first been baptized in the 1790s, above all by the lay hunter-catechists of the fur trade and by the hieromonk Makarii (Macarius) of the 1794 Kodiak mission; by the time Veniaminov came, the Aleuts were nominally Orthodox but had had, for years at a stretch, no resident priest (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4; see Orthodoxy Guide: The 1794 Alaska Mission). His task was therefore less first conversion than the deep formation of a people — catechesis, the sacraments, literacy, and the building of a settled church life — among the Unangan of Unalaska and the surrounding islands.

The parish was enormous and watery. It stretched across the Fox Islands and out to the Pribilof Islands (St. Paul and St. George) far to the north, dozens of small settlements scattered over a vast reach of the Bering Sea and North Pacific. To serve it, Veniaminov had to become a seafarer, traveling for weeks at a time among his people across some of the most dangerous waters in the world (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]).

It is worth being honest about the world into which this Christian formation came. The Unangan whom Veniaminov served were a people already broken by the fur trade. Skilled sea-mammal hunters who had occupied the Aleutian chain for thousands of years, they had been the first Alaskan people to feel the full force of Russian contact after the 1740s, and the encounter had been catastrophic: violent subjugation by promyshlenniki (fur hunters), conscription of the men into the sea-otter hunt, and a collapse of population through warfare, disease, and dislocation that is reckoned among the worst suffered by any people of the North (Black, Russians in Alaska, on the conquest of the Aleutians and Unangan depopulation; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4). The Russian-American Company that brought Veniaminov to Unalaska was the corporate successor of the very enterprise that had devastated his flock. He arrived, that is, not as the bearer of a triumphant faith to an untouched people but as a priest to survivors — and much of what is most admirable in his ministry, his defense of the Aleuts and his refusal to despise them, takes its full meaning only against this background.

The Church of the Holy Ascension

Veniaminov’s first great labor was a church. Drawing on the practical genius that had marked him since boyhood (see The Many Crafts), he set about building, on Unalaska, the Church of the Holy Ascension — and he built it, the sources stress, very largely with his own hands, while also teaching the Aleuts the carpentry, joinery, masonry, and metalwork that the work required. Construction began about 1825, and the church was consecrated on 29 June 1826 (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). It replaced an earlier, smaller chapel and gave the Unalaska Aleuts, for the first time, a proper church served by a resident priest.

The building of the Ascension church was itself a work of catechesis. Lacking trained labor, Veniaminov taught the Aleuts the crafts the church required — carpentry, joinery, brickwork, smithing — so that the building rose as a common labor of priest and people, and the skills remained with the community after the scaffolding came down. On a treeless island where timber had to be gathered as driftwood or imported by the Company’s ships, even securing the materials was a feat of improvisation. The result was modest by the standards of a Russian cathedral, but for the Unangan of Unalaska it was the visible center of a new common life, and its furnishings — much of the woodwork shaped by Veniaminov’s own hands — bore the mark of the craftsman-priest (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; see The Many Crafts).

Alongside the church he opened a school. On 24 March 1825 he began instructing Aleut children — the first class numbering twenty-two — in reading, writing, and the faith (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3). This was the seed of his lifelong conviction that a native Christian people must be a literate Christian people, able to read Scripture and pray in its own tongue — a conviction that would shape the whole of his missiology (see The Principles of Mission). The school was not an afterthought to the church but its companion: Veniaminov understood the formation of a Christian people and the formation of a literate people as a single task, and he set about both from his first year on the island. The children he taught would become the readers, singers, and lay leaders on whom a native Church could stand once the foreign priest had moved on — the long-term aim that distinguished his method from a mission content merely to baptize.

The Baidarka Priest

To reach his island parishioners Veniaminov traveled as they did: by baidarka, the Aleut skin kayak, often as a passenger lashed into the hatch of a two- or three-man craft, crossing open water in conditions that killed even experienced hunters. The lives dwell on the danger and discomfort of these voyages — days and weeks in an open boat in cold, fog, and storm — and on the physical toll they took; years of such travel left him with the chronic joint trouble (arthritis) that was among the reasons for his eventual transfer (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca). The image of the bearlike, powerfully built priest folded into an Aleut kayak to carry the sacraments across the Bering Sea is one of the enduring pictures of the Alaska mission.

By traveling among his people rather than waiting for them, and by learning their language and ways at close range, Veniaminov came to know the Unangan as few outsiders ever had. He is on record — in a judgment quoted often in the later literature — finding their moral life superior to that of many a baptized European: he wrote that the more he came to know the so-called “savages,” the more he was convinced that “as far as morality is concerned,” they were “much better than many of the so-called enlightened ones” (Veniaminov, in his Aleut-period writings, quoted in the secondary literature; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4). The remark is characteristic of the man and of a mission method built on respect rather than contempt.

Among the Unangan

The respect was earned by close attention. The baidarka in which Veniaminov traveled was no improvised craft but the supreme achievement of Unangan maritime technology — a light, fast, decked skin kayak of driftwood frame and sea-lion hide, shaped over generations to the worst seas on earth and handled by hunters whose seamanship the Russians themselves acknowledged to be unmatched. To entrust himself to it, lashed into the hatch and wholly dependent on his Aleut companions, was for the priest a daily lesson in the competence of the people he had come to serve. Veniaminov set himself to study their way of life with a naturalist’s care — their hunting, their kinship and customs, their old beliefs, their language and the islands themselves — and the great fruit of that study, the Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District, would become a foundational ethnographic work on the Aleut people (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4; see Ethnographer and Linguist).

This sympathetic study was not separable from his theology. Where many colonizers saw in the Aleuts only “savages” to be remade in a European image, Veniaminov saw a people whose endurance, generosity, and patience were themselves a kind of natural Christianity awaiting its fulfillment — and he found, to his own evident surprise, that their morality often shamed that of the baptized Europeans of the colony. The Gospel he preached did not require the Unangan to cease being Unangan; it met them in their own tongue and on their own islands. That posture — affirmation rather than erasure of the native culture — is the deepest thread running through the Aleutian decade and the foundation of the missiology he would later articulate (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska, ch. 4; see The Principles of Mission).

The Akun Island Episode (1828)

The most celebrated single story of Veniaminov’s Aleutian years is the Akun Island episode, and it belongs to the genre of hagiographical attestation rather than ordinary history; it is given here as the tradition reports it, pinned to its source. In 1828, on a pastoral visit to Akun Island in the eastern Aleutians, Veniaminov found the islanders gathered on the shore in their best clothing, awaiting him by name — though he had sent no word and they had no ordinary means of knowing he was coming (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki [orthodoxwiki.org]; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3).

They explained that an old man among them, Ivan Smirennikov, baptized decades earlier (the tradition says by the hieromonk Makarii), had for some thirty years been visited almost daily by two bright, shining figures who instructed him in the Christian faith, answered his questions, and had foretold the priest’s arrival. The people regarded the figures as Smirennikov’s guardian spirits. Veniaminov questioned the old man closely and, when invited to meet the two figures himself, declined — reasoning, the tradition records, that he was unworthy, and that beings who for thirty years had taught nothing but the true Faith were unlikely to be demons. He recorded the testimony in writing, had it attested by Smirennikov and by his interpreter Ivan Pan’kov, and sent the account to Bishop Michael of Irkutsk (Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3). [Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, this account is reported as what the tradition attests, on the basis of Veniaminov’s own contemporary written report; it is not adjudicated here as historical fact.]

The detail of Veniaminov’s response is what the tradition has most prized. A lesser man might have rushed to claim the marvel or, alternatively, to denounce it as superstition; Veniaminov did neither. He interrogated the old man’s testimony against the content of the Faith — asking what the shining figures taught, and finding it orthodox — and only then formed a cautious judgment, declining the offered meeting on the grounds of his own unworthiness. His instinct was to test, to document, and to refer the matter upward to his bishop rather than to pronounce upon it himself. The care he took to have the account attested by Smirennikov and by the interpreter Pan’kov, and to commit it to writing for Bishop Michael, is precisely why the episode survives in a form that can be pinned to a contemporary source rather than to later legend (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Innocent of Alaska, OrthodoxWiki).

Whatever one makes of the episode, it captures the texture of the Aleutian mission: a partly Christianized people of deep, if unschooled, piety; a priest who took their spiritual experience seriously enough to investigate and record it rather than dismiss it; and the close working partnership with Aleut collaborators like Ivan Pan’kov, the very man who would help Veniaminov give the Unangan language its first alphabet (see Language and the First Aleut Book).

The Close of the Decade

By 1834, after ten years on Unalaska, Veniaminov had accomplished what no one before him had: he had given the eastern Aleutians a settled church, a school, a written language, the first books in that language, and a model of mission that joined catechesis to literacy and respect for the native people. The decade had also cost him. The endless baidarka travel had broken his health, leaving the chronic joint disease that would trouble him for the rest of his life, and the work had stretched him across a parish no single priest could adequately serve. In 1834 he was transferred to Novo-Arkhangelsk (Sitka) to take up the mission to the Tlingit (see Novo-Arkhangelsk), beginning the next phase of an apostolate that would carry him, in time, to the episcopate and at last to the see of Moscow. But it was on Unalaska that the method was forged, and the Aleut mission remained, in the memory of the Church, the heart of his work as a missionary (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 3; Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), orthodoxcanada.ca).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The Unalaska decade: the Ascension church; the school; the baidarka travels; the Akun episode and the Smirennikov testimony.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (Ascension church begun c. 1825 and consecrated 29 June 1826; school opened 24 March 1825 with 22 children; the kayak travels and the arthritis they caused.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The prior Christianization of the Aleuts; Veniaminov’s respect for Unangan culture and morality.)
Innocent of Alaska and Akun Island. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org). (The Akun Island episode of 1828 and the Smirennikov account, with the attestation by Ivan Pan’kov.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (The Unalaska ministry in summary.)