Where East Meets West: A Landscape of Familiar Strangers, Missionary Alaska, 1794 -- 1898

• Main Author: Krivonosov, Alexander A
• Other Authors: William Pencak, A. G. Roeber, Matthew Restall, Linda Ivanits
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Penn State 2010
• Subjects: History; inuits; Alaska
• Online Access: http://etda.libraries.psu.edu/theses/approved/WorldWideIndex/ETD-2684/index.html

This dissertation examines the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Alaskan religious and cultural landscape. The history of Alaskan Christian missions is unique: Alaska developed as an arbitrary cultural/geographical construct and also one of the few regions where representatives of all three main historical branches of Christianity Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant proselytized simultaneously. Alaska is viewed as a special landscape where dynamic cross-cultural interactions and multi-denominational in the case of Protestant missionary ventures took place. Fierce competition characterized the regional cultural exchange at some times, reciprocity and friendly contacts at others. Those involved were the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church, Jesuit missionaries, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Moravian preachers men and women as well as representatives of the Russian American Company, the Hudsons Bay Companys entrepreneurs and American fur traders. In this geographically remote and environmentally severe region, the Native populations the Aleuts and Athapaskans, Tlingits and Haidas, Tsimsheans and Inuits played an independent and crucial role in cross-cultural conversation. They were active participants in a complex process in which different sides had to alter their cultural attitudes, religious traditions, and ideological values in continuous interaction with each other. Thus, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Alaska was a place where the existing religious and cultural identities of Natives and colonists dynamically interacted in a process of mutual transformation.