Title: Memory eternal : Tlingit culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through two centuries /
Authors: Kan, Sergei.
Publisher: University of Washington Press,
Year: 1999
Subjects: Orthodox Eastern Church Missions Alaska Sitka.; Tlingit Indians Missions Alaska Sitka.; Tlingit Indians Religion.; Tlingit Indians Rites and ceremonies.; Sitka (Alaska) Social life and customs.
Abstract: "In Memory Eternal, Sergei Kan combines anthropology and history, anecdote and theory to portray the encounter between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and to analyze the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. As a native speaker of Russian with eighteen years of fieldwork experience among the Tlingit, Kan is uniquely qualified to relate little-known material from the archives of the Russian church in Alaska to Tlingit oral history and his own observations. By weighing the one body of evidence against the other, he has reevaluated this history, arriving at a persuasive new concept of "converged agendas"--The view that the Tlingit and the Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways but for entirely different reasons throughout the period of their contact with one another."--Jacket.
Contents: 1. Lingit Kusteeyi: Tlingit Economy, Society, and Religion at the Time of Contact -- 2. Anooshi: The People "from Under the Horizon" -- 3. The Early Decades of Tlingit-Russian Interaction -- 4. The Tlingit and the Russian Orthodox Church, 1834-67: From the Smallpox Epidemic to the Sale of Alaska -- 5. The Early Decades of the Waashdan Kwaan Rule, 1867-85 -- 6. The Massive Conversion to Orthodoxy during the Donskoi Era, 1886-95 -- 7. Native Brotherhoods and the Further Development of Tlingit Orthodoxy, 1895-1917 -- 8. Village Orthodoxy: The Case of Killisnoo -- 9. Tlingit Orthodoxy as a Cultural System -- 10. The Difficult Years and the Survival of Tlingit Orthodoxy, 1917-67 -- 11. Tlingit Orthodoxy in a New Era, 1967-90s -- 12. Conclusion.