Novo-Arkhangelsk (1834–1838)

Veniaminov’s transfer in 1834 from the Aleutians to Sitka (Novo-Arkhangelsk), the capital of Russian America, and to a far harder mission field: the Tlingit (Russian: Kolosh), an independent and powerful people who, unlike the Aleuts, had resisted both Russian rule and Christianity. The chapter sets the colonial background — the Tlingit destruction of the Russian fort in 1802 and Baranov’s reconquest in 1804 — and describes Veniaminov’s patient, largely fruitless early approach to a people who kept their distance.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

Transfer to the Colonial Capital

After ten years at Unalaska, Fr. Ioann Veniaminov was transferred to Sitka (Novo-Arkhangelsk; New Archangel), the capital of Russian America, in 1834. The move was proposed by the colonial governor, Ferdinand von Wrangell, and Veniaminov himself had asked for relief from the Aleutian baidarka voyages that had wrecked his joints (see The Aleut Mission). Detailed accounts give his departure from Unalaska in mid-August and his arrival at Sitka on 22 August 1834, with the canonical transfer dated to the autumn (Saint Innocent (Veniaminov), Canadian Orthodox History Project [orthodoxcanada.ca]; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4). [Disputed: sources frame the move variously as “August 1834” (the voyage and arrival, per orthodoxcanada.ca’s 22 August) and “November 1834” (the formal transfer, in some OCA phrasing); these refer to stages of the same move in the autumn of 1834.]

Sitka was a different world from Unalaska. It was the administrative and commercial heart of the Russian-American Company’s empire — a fortified town on Baranof Island, with a governor’s residence, warehouses, a shipyard, and a mixed population of Russians, creoles, and Aleut hunters brought from the islands. And around it, beyond the stockade and unsubdued, lived the people who would be Veniaminov’s new and far more difficult mission: the Tlingit.

The Capital of Russian America

To understand what Veniaminov had come to, one has to picture the Russian-American Company colony as it actually was. The Company was a chartered, state-backed commercial monopoly — modeled loosely on the English and Dutch East India companies — granted by Emperor Paul I in 1799 the exclusive right to exploit the furs, principally sea-otter and fur-seal, of Russia’s North Pacific possessions. By the 1830s its capital, Novo-Arkhangelsk, was a compact and heavily defended company town: a palisaded stockade crowned by the governor’s residence on its rocky knoll (the building later romanticized as “Baranov’s Castle”), batteries of cannon trained outward, barracks, workshops, a foundry, a hospital, a shipyard that built and refitted the Company’s vessels, and the parish church Veniaminov served (Black, Russians in Alaska, on the structure and life of the colony; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4). It was a place run not by the Crown directly but by a commercial board, with the governor (glavnyi pravitel’, chief manager) wielding nearly absolute civil authority; the clergy were on the Company’s payroll and served, in effect, at the pleasure of an institution whose first business was profit.

The colony’s population was small — at most a few hundred Russians and a larger body of creoles (Russian-native people of mixed descent, a recognized social estate in Russian America) and resident Aleut and Sugpiaq hunters relocated from the islands to work the sea-otter grounds of the Alexander Archipelago. It depended for its very survival on outside supply: the long sea route around Cape Horn or across Siberia, the company’s contracts with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and — crucially — trade with the surrounding Tlingit, who supplied the colony with fish, game, and potatoes and whom the company could not afford to alienate utterly. This commercial dependence cut both ways. It made the Russians wary of provoking the Tlingit, but it also meant that the colony lived perpetually inside the reach of a people it had not subdued (Black, Russians in Alaska; Gibson, “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast,” on the trade relationship).

The Tlingit (Kolosh)

The Russians called them the Kolosh (Koloshi). The Tlingit of the Northwest Coast were nothing like the Aleuts. Where the Unangan had been drawn, through the fur trade and a generation of mission work, into the Orthodox fold, the Tlingit were a numerous, wealthy, militarily formidable, and fiercely independent people who had never been conquered and who held to their own religion and clan order. They lived alongside the Russians at Sitka on their own terms, trading with the colony but keeping it at arm’s length, and they regarded Christianity with indifference or hostility (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4; Black, Russians in Alaska, on Tlingit independence; Gibson, “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast,” on the near-absence of early conversions).

The difference was rooted in the structure of Tlingit society itself. The Tlingit were not a scattered band of hunters but a settled, hierarchical, and prosperous maritime people whose wealth came from the extraordinary abundance of the Northwest Coast — salmon runs, halibut, sea mammals, shellfish, berries, and the great cedar and spruce forests that gave them their plank houses, oceangoing canoes, carved house-posts, and ceremonial regalia. Their society was organized into two great exogamous moieties, conventionally rendered Raven and Eagle (Wolf), each subdivided into numerous clans (naa) and house-groups that held names, crests, songs, and territory as inheritable property. Rank, lineage, and the public display and redistribution of wealth — most famously in the potlatch — were central to their social order. Leadership lay with clan and house chiefs whose authority rested on birth, wealth, and prestige rather than on any centralized state; there was no single Tlingit polity for the Russians to conquer or convert, but a network of proud, autonomous kwáans (regional groupings) each capable of war (Black, Russians in Alaska, on Tlingit society; standard Tlingit ethnography).

Their religion was equally integral to this order and equally resistant to displacement. Tlingit spiritual life centered on a world of living spirits in animals, places, and the dead, mediated by the shaman (íxt’), a powerful figure who cured illness, foretold events, and contended with witchcraft through inherited spirit-helpers. To abandon this for the religion of the people who had stormed Sitka would have meant repudiating the clan order, the ancestors, and the sources of a chief’s prestige all at once. It is no accident that the Tlingit, of all the peoples of Russian America, held out longest against the Church — and that, when the opening finally came, it came through the shamans’ visible failure in a catastrophe their power could not touch (see Smallpox and the Turning).

The relationship was shadowed by recent war. The Russians had first established themselves on Baranof Island in 1799, building Redoubt St. Michael a few miles north of the later town site, at what is now called Old Sitka, in the territory of the Sitka (Sheet’ká) Tlingit. In 1802 the Tlingit had risen against the Russian intrusion and destroyed the Russian fort at Old Sitka (Redoubt St. Michael), killing much of its garrison and the Aleut hunters working under it, and seizing a great store of furs — a sweeping and deliberate expulsion of the colony from their land. In 1804, the chief manager Aleksandr Baranov returned with ships, cannon, and a large force of Aleut allies, supported by the naval sloop Neva under Yuri Lisyanskii then circumnavigating the globe, and retook the site by force in the Battle of Sitka. After a bombardment and an assault the Tlingit had repulsed at heavy Russian cost, the Tlingit abandoned their fort in a disciplined night withdrawal (remembered in their own tradition as the “Survival March”) and ceded the immediate ground; Baranov founded Novo-Arkhangelsk on the conquered site (Black, Russians in Alaska, on the 1802–04 conflict; standard Russian-American history). The capital in which Veniaminov now lived had thus been built, a generation earlier, by the violent dispossession of the very people he had come to evangelize — a fact the honest history of the mission cannot set aside, and which goes far to explain why the Tlingit kept their distance.

The peace that followed was uneasy and never amounted to submission. The Tlingit returned to live around the colony — eventually in a “Kolosh village” pressed against the very stockade — but they did so as an unconquered nation, well armed (often with British and American trade muskets obtained from the maritime fur traders who competed with the Russians), and entirely capable of cutting off the colony’s food or storming it again if provoked. The Russians, for their part, kept their cannon trained on the Tlingit town and lived behind their palisade in a posture of permanent, wary coexistence. This was the standoff into which Veniaminov walked: not a mission field opened by conquest, as among the Aleuts, but a guarded frontier between two peoples who traded, watched, and did not trust one another (Black, Russians in Alaska; Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4).

A Patient and Fruitless Beginning

Veniaminov approached the Tlingit as he had approached the Aleuts: by trying to understand them. He studied their language and customs and compiled notes on the Tlingit (Kolosh) tongue, producing word-lists and a Russian-Tlingit glossary, as he had for the Aleuts (Garrett, St. Innocent, ch. 4; Repose of St. Innocent, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]). He observed their society with the same ethnographic seriousness that marked his Aleut work, and the linguistic fruit of this effort fed into his Notes on the Kolushchan and Kodiak Tongues — the first serious attempt to describe a language utterly unrelated to the Eskimo-Aleut family he had already mastered (see Ethnographer and Linguist).

This was the method that had worked in the Aleutians, and Veniaminov did not abandon it merely because the soil was harder. He refused, on principle, to use the coercive instruments available to a colonial chaplain — the threat, the bribe, the leverage of the Company’s power over a dependent people (see The Principles of Mission). He would not baptize on any terms but conviction, and conviction the Tlingit did not yet have. His own later reflection, set down in his Notes, makes clear that he understood why: a people who had kept their independence, their wealth, and their religious leaders intact had every worldly reason to keep the Russians’ God at a distance, and no reason to embrace him. The respect this implies — a recognition that the Tlingit were a coherent and self-sufficient society rather than a vacuum waiting to be filled — is exactly what set Veniaminov apart from the ordinary colonial cleric, and it is why the long, barren waiting of these years is part of his missionary achievement rather than a blank in it.

But the results, at first, were almost nil. The Tlingit had no intention of abandoning their religion or submitting to the Church of the people who had stormed their land. Conversions in the early Sitka years could be counted on one’s fingers; one modern estimate is that before 1830 the Russians had baptized no more than about twenty Tlingit in all (Gibson, “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast,” 1982–83). Veniaminov built and served the church for the Russian and creole townspeople, ministered to the Aleut hunters resident at Sitka, and waited. For the Tlingit themselves he could, for the time being, do little but study them, respect them, and remain — a presence rather than a converter.

What broke the impasse was not preaching but catastrophe. Between 1835 and 1838 a smallpox epidemic swept the Northwest Coast, devastating the unvaccinated Tlingit while sparing the vaccinated Russians and Aleuts, and shaking Tlingit confidence in their own shamans. That epidemic — and the sober, contested question of what it did and did not do to Tlingit attitudes toward Orthodoxy — is the subject of the next chapter (see Smallpox and the Turning).

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The 1834 transfer to Sitka at Wrangell’s suggestion; the Tlingit mission field; the study of Tlingit language and customs; the meagerness of early conversions.)
Saint Innocent (Veniaminov). Canadian Orthodox History Project (orthodoxcanada.ca). (Departure from Unalaska and arrival at Sitka 22 August 1834; the arthritis that prompted the move.)
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. (Tlingit independence; the 1802 destruction of the Russian fort and Baranov’s 1804 reconquest; the founding of Novo-Arkhangelsk.)
Gibson, James R. “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast, 1835–1838.” BC Studies 56 (Winter 1982–83): 61–81. (The near-absence of Tlingit conversions before 1830 — “no more than about twenty”; the colonial setting.)
Repose of Saint Innocent, Metropolitan of Moscow. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, March 31. (Veniaminov’s study of the Kolosh/Tlingit language at Sitka.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (Veniaminov’s non-coercive method and his respect for native society as a coherent order.)