Posted by Leo
on 7/16/2009, 8:11 am, in reply to "Russian Orthodox Museum in Alaska to Close in August, 2009"
Greetings, George; Christ is in our midst!
If I may, the museum is actually connected with The OCA's Diocese of Alaska, not ROCOR.
Additionally, it might be more precise to say that Russian missionaries formally established the first lasting presence of Orthodoxy in North America (and actually, The Americas). Arguably, the Norse intermittent colonists on the Atlantic coast of what is now Canada, as well as the permanent ones on the southern coasts of Greenland (late 900s-early 1400s AD*), were Orthodox at least at first. And it seems they had one or more clergy and a chapel here, several in Greenland, and even a mostly-non-resident bishop, though I don't know how late the first one was appointed. ("Diocese of Greenland and Vinland in partibus infidelium," IIRC.) Also, there are persistent rumors that North American soil was visited by roving Irish monks during the first Christian millennium. Be either of those as they may, a Brit established a short-lived colony of Greek semi-slaves in Florida in the 1760s, and it was recently discovered they may have had a priest with them; but AFAIK when they were freed by the British Crown it seems they assimilated into the St. Augustine-area community of non-Greeks. Also there was temporarily a Greek-founded multi-ethnic, multilingual parish in New Orleans.
The timing gets even more interesting because the Indigenous (lay) Aleutian Islanders were already Orthodox when the Valaam Mission arrived at Kodiak (which is not in the Aleutian Is.) on Sept. 24 (OS), 1794, having been converted during the previous hundred years or so by roving lay Russian fur hunters or promyshlenniki; this is why IMHO it's better to say 1794 marks the "formal" and "permanent" origin of Orthodoxy here.
Actual immigrants here from Russia didn't start arriving until the late 1800s, like everyone else. During Russian rule in Alaska there were lay business employees here temporarily, mostly fur hunters (actually 'overseers' of the Indigenous, Orthodox, Russian-citizen fur hunters: nasty situation the missionaries tried to improve, almost at the cost of St. Herman's life!); AFAIK they all cleared out when the U.S. purchased Russia's rights there in 1867.
In any case, I would like to have seen the museum in Anchorage; it's too bad the economy has hit its donations.
Sincerely,
Leo
(*--Funny, the Scandinavians didn't protest Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas and its potential legal implications, like when the Pope of Rome gave Brazil to Portugal, and the whole rest of the hemisphere to Spain! As far as Scand. knew, they still had comrades here, and had since before the millennium, though because of the Little Ice Age, they'd lost contact with them.)
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