You have it backwards SpenAk.  In Southwest Alaska, there had been years of culture, education, and literacy under the Russians.  Seek out Father Michael Oleska and listen to his recounting of the history of that region.  When Alaska was purchased, in 1887, the American exceptionalist Presbyterian Church came in and treated these people with great disrespct as backward heathen needing to be saved and edgemicated.  The children were yanked from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their own language.  Those people were shamed.  White Americans were their oppressors erasing many years of culture and education.