Epidemics, Prophesy, and Self-Christianization: Ahtna Indians Quest for Russian Orthodoxy, 1880s-1930s

DOI: 10.33876/2311-0546/2020-49-1/5-15

Abstract

Historians and anthropologists have extensively researched spiritual encounters between America’s indigenous people and Christian missionaries. One group of scholars, who more often than not are linked to Native American cultural activism, took a strong critical approach and came to view missionary activities as the tool of colonialism. Another group of scholars, who are mostly people with a theological background, on the contrary, treat missionary activities apologetically as the vehicle of social and moral improvement. The third group of researchers, to which I belong, avoids moral assessments of the missionary activities. Dialogues of indigenous people with Christianity were multifaceted and cannot be pigeonholed in some partisan “post-colonial” or “theological” scholarship. Using archival records of Alaska Russian Orthodox Mission and my own field notes of the 1990s, I examine a case of an abortive Russian Orthodox mission to the Ahtna Indians of Alaska. In the 1880s, this Athabaskan-speaking group suddenly took efforts to learn about Russian Orthodoxy, and many of them simultaneously began to actively seek conversion. My paper explores the driving cultural, economic, and psychological motives behind this peculiar case of “self-Christianization”.

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