Reception and Scholarship

The modern study of St. Innocent and the Alaska mission: Paul Garrett’s St. Innocent: Apostle to America, the standard English biography; Michael Oleksa’s Orthodox Alaska and his anthology Alaskan Missionary Spirituality, which read the mission as a theology of mission and present the saint’s own writings; Lydia Black’s Russians in Alaska, the authoritative history of the colonial period; the demographic work of James Gibson and the medical history of Robert Fortuine; and the publication of Innocent’s own Notes and Indication of the Way in English.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

The Standard Biography: Garrett

The indispensable English-language work on the saint is Paul D. Garrett’s St. Innocent: Apostle to America (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), a full scholarly biography drawing on the Russian sources and on the saint’s own voluminous writings, letters, and reports (Garrett, St. Innocent). Most of the detailed English-language accounts of Innocent — the Orthodox Church in America’s liturgical lives, the Boston University History of Missiology entry, the OrthoChristian and Canadian Orthodox History Project lives — rest, directly or indirectly, on Garrett’s research. For any serious study of Innocent, Garrett remains the foundation: it is the work to consult for the precise chronology, for the contents of the Instruction to Missionaries, and for the documentary basis of the well-known episodes of his life.

Oleksa: A Theology of Mission

The most influential interpretive work is that of the Alaskan priest-scholar Michael J. Oleksa. His Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission (SVS Press, 1992) sets Innocent within the whole arc of the Alaska mission — the 1794 Kodiak monks, St. Herman, St. Innocent, St. Jacob Netsvetov — and reads it not as colonial curiosity but as a coherent and instructive theology of mission, marked by inculturation, vernacular worship, and respect for native peoples (Oleksa, Orthodox Alaska; see A Model of Mission). Oleksa’s anthology Alaskan Missionary Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1987; repr. SVS Press, 2010) is equally important: it gathers the primary documents of the mission, including the English text of Innocent’s missionary Instruction and his Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, and is the proper place to read the saint in his own words. Oleksa, himself of long experience among the Alaska Native peoples, also gave particular attention to the native side of the encounter — the Yup’ik, Aleut, and Tlingit reception of Orthodoxy — and to the persistence of Orthodox faith among Alaska Natives into the present.

Oleksa’s larger contribution was interpretive: he reframed the Alaska mission so that it could be read at all as a subject of serious theology rather than as a footnote to colonial history. Where an older scholarship had tended either to dismiss the Russian mission as an arm of the fur-trade empire or to retell it in purely hagiographical terms, Oleksa argued that the mission embodied a distinctive and coherent missiology — one that took the native peoples seriously as bearers of a culture worth addressing in its own terms, that put worship and Scripture into native languages as a matter of principle, and that aimed from the first at an indigenous Church rather than a permanent dependency. In drawing the line from the Kodiak monks through Herman, Innocent, and Netsvetov, he gave the disparate episodes of the mission a single intelligible shape. It is largely through Oleksa’s reading that Innocent has come to be discussed, in the wider study of Christian mission, as an exemplar of inculturation avant la lettre — a figure whose practice anticipated principles that the missiology of the later twentieth century would articulate as ideals.

Black, Gibson, Fortuine: The Secular History

Alongside the church-historical and missiological literature stands a body of secular scholarship indispensable for the honest history of the mission’s colonial setting. Lydia T. Black’s Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867 (University of Alaska Press, 2004) is the authoritative modern synthesis of the entire Russian-American period — the fur trade, the Russian-American Company, the conquest of Sitka, and the relations of the Russians with the Aleut, Sugpiaq, and Tlingit; Black, a leading scholar of the field, was also co-translator of Innocent’s Notes. James R. Gibson’s “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast, 1835–1838” (BC Studies, 1982–83) is the principal demographic study of the epidemic that reshaped the Tlingit mission, supplying the attributed mortality ranges this collection uses (see Smallpox and the Turning). Robert Fortuine’s Chills and Fever (University of Alaska Press, 1989) provides the medical-historical background of epidemic disease among Alaska Natives. Together these works supply the context — colonial, demographic, medical — without which the mission cannot be honestly told, and which the hagiographical sources alone do not provide.

Black’s work in particular performs an indispensable service for the honest study of Innocent, because it refuses to let the mission be read apart from the colonial machinery in which it was embedded. The Russian Orthodox clergy did not arrive in Alaska on their own; they came in the wake — and often in the pay or under the constraints — of the Russian-American Company, the chartered monopoly that governed the colony for the profit of the fur trade and whose treatment of the Aleut ranged from paternalism to coercion and outright violence. To tell Innocent’s story truthfully is to hold two things together: that he was a genuine advocate for the native peoples and a critic of their exploitation, and that he nonetheless operated within, and to a degree depended upon, the colonial order that exploited them. Black’s narrative supplies the unsentimental documentary frame within which that tension can be seen clearly. It is the necessary corrective to any account that would present the mission as if it floated free of the fur trade, the epidemics, and the imperial expansion that carried it to American shores. Read alongside the hagiographical lives, the secular scholarship does not diminish the saint; it makes the real conditions of his sanctity visible.

The Saint’s Own Works in English

Modern readers can also meet Innocent directly. His ethnographic masterwork, the *Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District*, was translated by Lydia Black and R. H. Geoghegan and published by the Limestone Press (1984), making the 1840 Zapiski accessible in English (see Ethnographer and Linguist). His catechetical classic, the Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, remains in print in English from St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (see Language and the First Aleut Book). Through these, and through the documents in Oleksa’s anthology, the saint speaks in his own voice — plain, warm, observant, practical — to a degree unusual for a figure of his era.

The survival of so much of Innocent’s own writing is one reason his reception has been unusually well grounded. Many missionary saints are known chiefly through the lives written about them; Innocent can be read in his own hand across a wide range of genres — the ethnographic and linguistic Notes, the catechetical Indication, the missionary Instruction that set out his method for those who came after him, and a large correspondence and many official reports. This documentary richness is what allows the modern study of him to be biographical and critical rather than merely devotional: Garrett could build a full scholarly life precisely because the sources are so abundant, and Oleksa could read a theology of mission out of the Instruction and the Indication because the saint had left so explicit an account of what he was doing and why. The voice that emerges from these texts — curious, exact, humane, free of cant — has done much to shape how Innocent is received today, for it lets readers encounter not a stylized icon of sanctity but a recognizable man at work.

The Shape of His Reception

Two features mark the modern reception of St. Innocent. First, he is increasingly read not merely as a saint to be venerated but as a missiological model whose principles — vernacular, non-coercion, inculturation, indigenous clergy — speak to the contemporary Church’s understanding of how the Gospel should enter a culture (see A Model of Mission). Second, the scholarship has increasingly insisted on telling his story within its colonial frame — alongside the fur trade, the epidemics, and the imperial expansion — rather than abstracted from it, and on attending to the native peoples as agents and not only as objects of the mission. This collection follows that scholarship: it honors the saint while reporting the history, gives contested figures as named ranges, and pins its hagiographical claims to their sources, in keeping with the repository’s methodology.

These two features are connected, and together they mark the maturity of the field. The older treatments tended toward one of two poles: either a hagiography that lifted the saint clear of the messy colonial world he lived in, or a secular history that saw the mission only as an instrument of empire and had little patience for its religious substance. The better recent scholarship refuses both reductions. It takes the saint seriously as a saint and the colony seriously as a colony, and it asks how a genuine missionary holiness operated within — and sometimes against — an imperial and commercial order it could not escape. Equally, it has shifted attention to the native peoples not as a passive field on which the mission acted but as participants who received, reshaped, and carried the faith in their own way: the Aleut who became its readers and clergy, the Yup’ik to whom Netsvetov brought it, the Tlingit whose own reckoning with the Church is part of the story. The persistence of Orthodoxy among Alaska Natives into the twenty-first century — frequently as a chosen marker of native identity rather than a relic of colonial imposition — is itself a fact the historiography must explain, and it is one of the strongest arguments that Innocent’s method of inculturation worked as he intended. The portrait that emerges is neither the burnished icon of the older lives nor the mere colonial functionary of the older critiques, but a truer and more demanding figure: a holy man who did real good for real peoples inside a structure of real exploitation, and whose distinctive achievement was to plant a Church that those peoples could make their own.

References

Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The standard English-language scholarly biography.)
Oleksa, Michael J. Orthodox Alaska: A Theology of Mission. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992. (The interpretive study of the mission.)
Oleksa, Michael J. (ed.). Alaskan Missionary Spirituality. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987 (repr. SVS Press, 2010). (Primary documents, including Innocent’s Instruction and Indication of the Way.)
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. (The authoritative history of the Russian-American period.)
Gibson, James R. “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast, 1835–1838.” BC Studies 56 (Winter 1982–83): 61–81. (The demographic study of the epidemic.)
Fortuine, Robert. Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1989. (The medical history of disease among Alaska Natives.)
Veniaminov, Ivan (St. Innocent). Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District. Trans. Lydia T. Black and R. H. Geoghegan, ed. Richard A. Pierce. Kingston, ON: Limestone Press, 1984.
St. Innocent (Veniaminov). Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven: An Introduction to Christian Life. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press (English edition).