Date of Award
Winter 3-8-2019
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of arts (BA)
Department
Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
First Advisor
Julie Nicoletta
Second Advisor
Matthew O'Leary
Abstract
This paper applies letters, journals, history interviews, government-company contracts, international treaties, theological works, and images to examine the convergence of Russian Orthodox Christianity and Alaskan Indigenous shamanism cultures to explicate the harmonizing of an Indigenous multicultural Christian faith in nineteenth-century Russian Alaska. Central to this examination is the evaluation of effects of Orthodox Christian missiology on native Alaskans and the Indigenous religio-cultural response to Russian missionaries. Not merely a historical overview of contact between natives and missionaries in Russian Alaska, this paper harmonizes the commonality of cosmology between native Alaskan shamanism and Orthodox Christianity. It analyzes the impacts of comparatively culturally-tolerant Russian evangelism on pre-Christian native beliefs and practices and contrasts with subsequent Western Christian evangelism in Alaska. Analysis of Saint Maximus the Confessor’s theanthropic cosmology is woven into the process of Russian missionary activity. The significance of Saint Maximus as the underlying principle in guiding religio-cultural points of contact between Orthodoxy and native cultures in Alaska serves as an example of cultural tolerance in Christian missions that displays neither religious syncretism nor cultural supplantation by a dominant culture. This is a principle that is all too often ignored by scholars in the West most likely because of their unfamiliarity with Orthodox theanthropic cosmology, which this paper seeks to correct in order to precipitate future academic discussion of European missions among Indigenous cultures.
Recommended Citation
von Houck, Niklaus, "Creating an Indigenous Multicultural Faith: The Russian Orthodox Mission in Alaska and the Centrality of Cosmology" (2019). History Undergraduate Theses. 40.
https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/history_theses/40
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