More Than God Demands: Politics & Influence of Christian Missions in Northwest Alaska 1897-1918

By Anthony Urvina and Sally Urvina

A vivid, “thoughtful” account of the territorial government’s campaign to convert Alaska Natives and suppress their culture (Alaska History).
 
Near the turn of the twentieth century, the territorial government of Alaska put its support behind a project led by Christian missionaries to convert Alaska Native peoples—and, along the way, bring them into “civilized” American citizenship. Establishing missions in a number of areas inhabited by Alaska Natives, the program was an explicit attempt to erase ten thousand years of Native culture and replace it with Christianity and an American frontier ethic.
 
Anthony Urvina, whose mother was an orphan raised at one of the missions established as part of this program, draws on details from her life in order to present the first full history of this missionary effort. Smoothly combining personal and regional history, he tells the story of his mother’s experience amid a fascinating account of Alaska Native life and of the men and women who came to Alaska to spread the word of Christ, confident in their belief and unable to see the power of the ancient traditions they aimed to supplant

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781602232945

Book preview

MORE THAN GOD DEMANDS

The Politics and Influence of Christian Missions in Northwest Alaska, 1897–1918

ANTHONY URVINA WITH SALLY URVINA

University of Alaska Press

Text © 2016 University of Alaska Press

Published by

University of Alaska Press

P.O. Box 756240

Fairbanks, AK 99775-6240

Cover design by UA Press

Interior design by Amnet

Front cover photo: Two Inupiaq Eskimo hunters wearing their Eskimo parkas (Atigi) carry a rifle and walking stick while walking over the shore ice along the Chukchi Sea, Barrow, Arctic Alaska, Summer. © Kevin G. Smith/AlaskaStock.com

Back cover photo: Alaskan Eskimo scrimshaw on Walrus tusk Alaska. © Chris Arend/AlaskaStock.com.

Author photo: Wanda McQuillin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Urvina, Anthony.

Title: More than God demands : the politics and influence of Christian missions in northwest Alaska, 1897–1918 / Urvina, Anthony A.

Description: Fairbanks : University of Alaska Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015037377 | ISBN 978-1-60223-293-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) –

ISBN 978-1-60223-294-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Missions—Alaska. | Alaska—History.

Classification: LCC BV2803.A4 U78 2016 | DDC 266/.0097987—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037377

The Iñupiat, Alaska Natives

Iñupiaq Culture, History, Religion

The Friends Church, Missionary, Teachers

US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education

Alaska Gold Rush, Gold Miners, Fur Traders

All rights reserved. The book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in public reviews.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Part I - A Peculiar Work

Chapter 1 - The Bureau of Education in Alaska

Chapter 2 - Sectarianism, Human Hierarchy, and the Decades of Change

Part II - The White Man’s Window

Chapter 3 - A Matter of Perspective

Chapter 4 - A Strategy for Change

Part III - The Children of Conflict

Chapter 5 - Trouble Comes in Threes

Part IV - The Reindeer Files

Chapter 6 - A Perception of Progress

Chapter 7 - The Exodus to Noorvik

Conclusions

Epilogue

Appendix 1 - Missionaries and Bureau of Education Teachers in Northwestern and Northern Alaska 1890–1918

Appendix 2 - Village Population Data Chart, Winter 1909–1910

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Map of Northwestern Alaska

For my children and grandchildren

Acknowledgments

There are many people who have helped me in one form or another with the completion of this book, not the least of which was my former employee, Jacqueline Martin. Recognizing the historical value of the Reindeer Files, Jackie collected and preserved those documents with what is best described as loving care. Charles Bunch (Bureau of Indian Affairs) and Eric Kaiser (Office of the Special Trustee) made it possible for me to acquire a copy of the Reindeer Files—the documents that inspired me to attempt to write a book in the first place. My niece, Angela Bellacosa, a writer and professional editor, helped me through those awkward early attempts at a manuscript when it was most difficult to write my thoughts in a way that made sense to someone else—anyone else—besides me. I also want to thank a friend and former coworker, Pat Petrivelli, who, during a phone conversation, kept asking me, Why are you writing this? Then there was the scholarly reviewer who had asked of an early manuscript, Interesting, but what does it all mean? Both were good questions, and I’ve done my best to answer them.

Thank God for the Tok Community Library! Many of the scholarly works that we referenced in this book were made available to us by means of interlibrary loans.

I am so grateful for the many family members and friends who encouraged and supported the writing of this book; thank you. And, as each one knows, if it were not for my wife, Sally, I would have simply gone fishing. So, to the greatest inspiration of my life I can only say, Many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all.

Preface

In 2003, while employed as a natural resource manager for the Alaska region of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), I was asked to respond to a tribal request for information about a stock certificate dated from the mid-1920s. The certificate belonged to a tribal member and represented the ancestral shareholder’s ownership in a multifaceted corporation that included the sale of lumber and trade goods and the ownership of reindeer. The tribal council was curious about the history of the certificate and was especially keen to know the reason that such an impressive Native enterprise no longer existed.

Many months earlier, a member of my staff had been assembling and collating what amounted to several boxes of very old documents that the BIA had maintained for decades (in old cabinets and forgotten closets) at its regional office in Juneau. The documents were a combination of Alaska School Service and Alaska Reindeer Service correspondence and management files, some dating back to as early as 1907. It was the perfect place to begin my research of the stock certificate. The project took three weeks to accomplish, but afterward I returned many times to read through those compelling documents, referred to by the Alaska BIA as the Reindeer Files, until my retirement in 2008.

In November of 2007, the Reindeer Files were released to the archives of the American Indian Records Repository in Lenexa, Kansas. In June 2009, through the Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians, I managed to acquire a copy of the oldest portion of the Reindeer Files; these contained various correspondence of the former Alaska School Service founded in 1885 under the Department of the Interior’s Alaska Division of the Bureau of Education. At the time, I didn’t know the oldest records were almost exclusively the correspondence of the Northwest District of the Alaska Division, written by teachers, missionaries, and government officials dating from 1907 to 1918; the northwest was the same district where my mother was born in 1910.

I knew there was a good story in these files, and initially my intention was to write a book about one of the more compelling Bureau of Education teachers, but each attempt at a draft left my wife, Sally, and me convinced that a larger, more interesting story had remained untold. At Sally’s urging, we decided to begin anew. This time, instead of focusing on any one character, we first completed a detailed catalog of all 2,140 pages of letters and correspondence of the earliest records in the Reindeer Files (1907–1918). Then, through a former coworker, I was able to forward a brief annotation of several of the letters to the social anthropologist and author, Ernest S. Burch Jr. That was in January 2010. The following is Mr. Burch’s cursory assessment of my submission:

What you refer to as reindeer files I have always referred to as school files. They do contain some information on reindeer, but primarily they are the administrative records of the schools. In contrast, the reindeer files—records of the Alaska Reindeer Service—consist primarily of records on reindeer, with some material thrown in on school administration.

Ernest S. Burch Jr.

January 25, 2010

Mr. Burch was correct. The former Pacific Alaska Region of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Anchorage, Alaska, maintained a repository of correspondence from the US Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alaska Region (1908–1935) and referred to those records as Record Group 75. The NARA office’s inventory for Record Group 75 divided correspondence into four categories: school files, new school files, districts, and reindeer. However, what makes the Reindeer Files unique is the notion that many of the letters and correspondence that were hidden away in old boxes and forgotten closets in Juneau have never been a part of NARA’s Record Group 75 and therefore have not undergone an evaluation of their significance in the fields of history and social anthropology.

In addition, the Reindeer Files’ earliest year of record, 1907, coincides with the establishment of the Northwest District of the Alaska School Service and was concurrently the year for implementation of the new rules and regulations governing the Alaska Reindeer Service. For the next decade, the Alaska Division’s Northwest District Office was headquartered in Nome, with both Reindeer and School Services under the initial supervision of the same man, Superintendent Andrew N. Evans. Four years later (1911), superintendence of the Northwest District was handed to a man by the name of Walter C. Shields.

From the beginning, the Bureau of Education, Alaska Division headquarters in Nome was the main repository for both the Alaska Reindeer Service and Alaska School Service correspondence, since these two functions were the dual responsibility of the early teachers of the Northwest District. In other words, in the Native villages of northwest Alaska, the earliest bureau teachers were both school superintendents and reindeer superintendents. Therefore, the teachers were required to submit yearly reports of both programs to the District Office in Nome. Those early Bureau of Education records remained in Nome until the responsibility for the management of the Alaska reindeer industry was turned over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1941. The reindeer records containing long-forgotten Alaska School Service information on the everyday lives of missionaries, teachers, and school administrators were also turned over to the BIA, where they remained until their retirement to the archives in 2007.

To augment our catalog of the Reindeer Files, we also researched the correspondence of the NARA office in Anchorage. Additional correspondence between William Thomas Lopp, the chief of the Alaska Division, and Walter C. Shields was acquired from the University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections, and University Archives. This correspondence contributed a total of eighty letters, dated February 6, 1913, to July 18, 1918, to the catalog. The majority of our work, however, was intentionally limited to information discovered in the Reindeer Files, and it is from within these records that our manuscript was developed. For us, the Reindeer Files describe events of the years between 1897 and 1918 that had a major impact on the Iñupiat of northwest Alaska and are therefore fundamental to my better understanding of the woman who became my mother.

Introduction

Her death certificate places the time at approximately two o’clock in the morning. I remember standing by her bed and watching as she took her last breath. Then sitting at her side, I gently held her open hand against my face, just as she would have done if she were still alive and aware of my presence. That was February 2001.

It was only a few days earlier that Mom’s doctor and the hospice people had paid their last visit to her at our home in Juneau. At ninety years old, Mom was dying of cancer. For the past three years, she had chosen to live with my wife, my two daughters, and me while her inevitable death drew near. As vividly as I recall the moment of her passing, I also recall the doctor’s last visit.

The doctor spoke to Mom privately to confirm that she still wished to have no medical treatments and that she was aware of the soon-to-be consequence. But I did not need to be in the room to know the answers to those questions. If there was ever a person who was not afraid to die, it was Mom. She did not welcome it; she simply had no fear of it.

When the doctor was satisfied, one of the hospice people called me into the room. As I walked in, Mom was smiling from some light exchange with her visitors. But when she looked at me, her countenance fell sharply. I was stunned to see such a look of animosity directed at me.

During the last weeks of her life, I had been giving Mom pain medication. I despised the task. Not because I was indifferent to her suffering, but because I knew what she thought of it. In her mind, she was convinced that all doctors had a secret desire to experiment on Native people. Moreover, she believed that the medicine prescribed for her was ultimately meant to take her life. Of course, her doctor and the hospice people were completely unaware of her true feelings. But I knew my mother. I also knew that administering her pain medication would ultimately be perceived by her as a betrayal. And so it was.

At the time, I rationalized that the combination of her illness and the medication were mostly to blame for that moment and that look. For years I tried to push the event out of my mind. But the memory of her expression had become a wound and was not easily forgotten. To move beyond the feelings of hurt, I labeled it as simply another one of those unfortunate experiences we each encounter in life. But recently I have come to understand so much more about my mother’s early life, and I have come to a more comprehensible possible explanation for one of her last conscious expressions toward me.

While I never fully understood the details of my mother’s early life in Alaska, I knew that the circumstances surrounding her childhood had been harsh, even severe. From those long-ago circumstances, I believe that resentment had developed, which as she grew older was intensified by an increasingly singular long-term memory that eventually became her most constant companion. Throughout my life, Mom had occasionally shared a few of her childhood memories with me, but mostly she was silent on the subject of her youth. When I would ask her questions about her life, the answers were limited. I perceived that she considered the details too personal for my consumption. But details there most certainly were, and some of those details were discovered in a surprising place—literally right in front of me. The information discovered in the Reindeer Files has created for me a bridge to understanding the circumstances of Bertha Cahill’s early life—indeed, a bridge to a better understanding of my own mother. But, to begin this story, you need to understand some family history.

The Cahill Brothers

In 1898, with the discovery of gold on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula at a place called Anvil Creek, men from the Klondike to California began pouring into the region in the hope of striking it rich. The following year, yet another gold strike was discovered, this time on the beach near a hastily erected town that would eventually be called Nome. Rumors had begun to spread far and wide about the golden beaches of Nome, where you could pick gold up off the beach like sea shells.¹ A vision of harvesting gold nuggets as if they were seashells stirred the imaginations of many, including two brothers living in central California.

A second-generation Irishman, Charles Sebastian Cahill was born in San Leandro, California, on December 1, 1874. His father, William, and mother, Johanna Healy-Cahill, had raised five sons—William Jr., John, George, James, and Charles. William and Johanna Cahill were typical of the many thousands of Irish immigrants that streamed into the United States from about 1830 to 1850: they were both Catholic and poor and not exactly welcomed by Americans of English and Scottish ancestry.

Of the five Cahill brothers, only James and Charles booked passage aboard one of the steamships that were, by 1900, sailing regularly from California to the Seward Peninsula and the golden beaches of Nome. By the time they arrived, however, Nome had become a raging community of some eighteen thousand inhabitants, mostly men possessed by the same vision that brought the Cahill brothers north.² If it were ever true that a man could pick nuggets off the beach, those days had passed by the time my maternal grandfather, Charles Cahill, and his brother James arrived around 1900.

Confronted by the reality of the rumor, older brother James assessed his situation. If there was any gold laying on top of the ground anywhere on the Seward Peninsula, it was no longer to be found near Nome. So, instead of using his meager grubstake for mining, he decided to purchase enough lumber to build a cigar store within the booming community. In 1900 there was still much gold to be found in Nome. And if you were a clever fellow (and maybe a little dishonest), you didn’t have to thrust a pick or wash out a gold pan to find it.

At the age of twenty-six my grandfather, Charles Cahill, was still possessed of gold-strike fever, and he used his grubstake to press farther into the mostly uninhabited country of the Kiwalik River drainage, formerly the Kaŋiġmiut Eskimo Nation. The Kiwalik River is located on the northern shores of the Seward Peninsula. The region quickly filled with prospectors like my grandfather who had spilled out of the southern peninsula headed for yet another gold strike that was reportedly located within the tributaries of Kiwalik River. By 1905 the influx of several hundred miners to that region, plus an unrecorded number of Iñupiat from other nations besides Kaŋiġmiut, led to the founding of the little town of Candle near Candle Creek.³

The indigenous inhabitants of the Candle Creek area were the Kaŋiġmiut, or Buckland River Eskimos. By 1910, the year my mother was born, the Kaŋiġmiut Nation had ceased to exist as a distinct society. According to social anthropologist Ernest Burch, the traditional Kaŋiġmiut people had been accustomed to trading in the regions of Kotzebue Sound, Norton Sound, and the Yukon River below the mouth of the Koyukuk River, constantly moving back and forth across the passes between the Kiwalik and Buckland watersheds on the north and the Koyuk River drainage to the south. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Kaŋiġmiut Nation had an estimated population of three hundred Iñupiat. When the Russians established a trading post at St. Michael, around 1835, on the south side of Norton Sound, the post enticed a number of Kaŋiġmiut to the region. A few years later, the Norton Sound region was devastated by a smallpox epidemic that severely reduced the Native population in the territory between Kaŋiġmiut country and the post at St. Michael. According to Ernest Burch, these two events provided the Kaŋiġmiut people with a stimulus . . . to southward expansion and away from their homeland. Then, about forty years later, the Nulato Hills caribou herd crashed, followed closely by the crash of the Seward Peninsula caribou herd. Those members of the traditional Kaŋiġmiut Nation who had not been enticed to southward expansion were now compelled to scatter in different directions in search of food. By the time my Irish grandfather arrived in the region, the Kaŋiġmiut population had decreased from its estimated 300 people to 122, as recorded in the 1900 census.⁴

My Iñupiaq Ancestry

Since my grandfather had not claimed my mother as his child, these few details, gleaned from a death certificate and a few anecdotes that his brother James had shared with my mother, are the sum total of my knowledge concerning Charles Cahill. To be honest, I have no greater story to tell about my Iñupiaq grandmother, Nancy Patch.

Very little is known about my maternal grandmother. In fact, next to nothing. From my mother, I learned that my grandmother was an invalid whose floors were always clean. In the forty-nine years that I had with my mother, invalid and clean floors are the only descriptions she offered about my grandmother other than that she lived in Candle when my mother was born in 1910, so she was likely a member of the Kaŋiġmiut Nation. And because mother was orphaned at a young age, it is doubtful that she knew much more.

In his writings, however, Ernest Burch acknowledged an assertion by anthropologist Charles V. Lucier that [T]he Kaŋiġmiut [Buckland River Eskimos] kept a strong sense of identification with their homeland . . . even during the chaotic conditions of the late nineteenth century.⁵ A herd report in the Reindeer Files from 1923 shows that my great-uncle, Billy Patch, owned reindeer in the Buckland herd. This fact, combined with the oral account of my grandmother being an invalid who lived in a region where Native people had strong ties to their homeland, has led me to believe that half my maternal ancestry is most likely Kaŋiġmiut.

My grandmother’s invalidism was always a disturbing question in my mind. How long had she been an invalid? How did she become an invalid? And most unsettling, was she an invalid at the time she became pregnant by my miner grandfather, Charles S. Cahill? An answer to these questions is, of course, unknowable. Albeit, from the numerous documents that I have read and their descriptions of human behavior (both white and Native), the facts have rendered the last question far less disconcerting. In its place, however, there had entered a sense of sadness concerning a possible reference to both my mother and grandmother—details that we uncovered from within the Reindeer Files.

My Mother Is Born at Candle

In the winter of 1909, a Bureau of Education physician, Dr. Benjamin W. Newsom, visited five Native villages in northwest Alaska. Candle was one of those villages. In his report to the commissioner of education, he recorded a statistic that was of great interest to me: number of chronic invalids. My grandmother, Nancy Patch, would have been among the group of chronic invalids reported by Dr. Newsom. The doctor’s report also recorded that, in the year before my mother was born, 1909, the population of Candle had the highest percentage of Native children and infants compared to the four other communities he had visited on his winter tour of villages. In addition, because Candle was a mining town, it also had the largest non-Native population from among those same five villages. There is a connection here. Wherever white men resided among the Natives for prolonged periods, such as in a mining district, the closest village often became known as a squaw town. In 1909, Candle was a mining town that had also attracted a large number of Natives. As a consequence, many of the children and infants living in that community were undoubtedly half-breeds like my mother. Today, the term half-breed is generally considered a pejorative; a more appropriate term may be mixed race. However, because the word half-breed is used in quotations from the Reindeer Files, I have used the term throughout the book for the sake of consistency.

A few miles downriver and west of where my mother was born is the village of Deering. Deering is located at Cape Deceit, about twenty-five miles due west of where the Kiwalik River flows into the southern region of Kotzebue Sound. Quaker missionaries Z. E. Foster and Anna Hunnicutt-Foster relocated to Deering in 1901 after their marriage at Kotzebue in 1899. Between 1901 and 1904, the couple operated (intermittently) the Friends’ (Quaker) mission and church at that place. In the spring of 1905, the Fosters and a Bureau of Education missionary-teacher named Bertha S. Cox staked the boundaries of a government school reserve at Deering.⁶ Iñupiat from the coastal areas of the southern Kotzebue Sound, first attracted by trading opportunities generated by the influx of miners, began to settle permanently at Deering with the arrival of missionaries and a government school. Because of Deering’s proximity to Candle, and the substantial influence that the missionaries had on the Iñupiat, I believe that Miss Cox was a likely inspiration for my mother being named Bertha.

On December 15, 1912, the superintendent of the Northwest District of the Alaska Division of the Bureau of Education, Walter C. Shields, made his way into Candle after four days on the trail. His trip report states that he had accomplished two objectives. One objective was to work out a government contract with Candle’s Fairhaven Hospital, and the other was to begin the relocation of Natives away from that predominantly Anglo-American town. There are fewer natives at Candle than ever, wrote Shields. The Kotzebue traders have sent small stores into this whole country so that there is less reason for natives coming to Candle for supplies. The village of Buckland is holding its own, and keeping most of the natives away from Candle.⁷

There are at least two reasons why Shields wanted to keep the Iñupiat away from Candle. To begin with, Candle had its share of squaw-men as they were commonly called—that is, white men who lived with Native women. These men were especially loathsome to the missionaries, who considered them immoral and a degrading influence on the Natives. Moreover, the opinions of church mission societies throughout Alaska held great sway with the government, as in the earliest years of its attempts to civilize the Natives, the teachers of the US Bureau of Education in Alaska were exclusively church members who had answered the call to mission work.

While not all miners were a bad influence on the Natives, it was equally true that a prospector’s transient lifestyle, often combined with the loneliness of being separated from family, led to unbridled behaviors (frequently incited by the use of alcohol) that became a profoundly corruptive influence on many Iñupiat but particularly Iñupiat women. Missionaries, teachers, and officials of the Bureau of Education vigorously opposed such negative influences, openly proclaiming the miners as malicious and unscrupulous men.

As in every other century of human existence, the offspring born from the domination of one race over another, although blameless, bear a great burden in life. It was no different in Alaska. In his book Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled (1916), Episcopal Archdeacon of the North Hudson Stuck wrote, My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.⁸

The other reason Shields wanted to keep the Iñupiat away from Candle was related to the bureau’s limited funds for improving Native health. A combination of events, both natural and man-made (mentioned earlier) had, for decades, devastated Iñupiat populations throughout northwest Alaska, and by 1907 the government’s policies toward Alaska Natives included a priority for improving Native health. Fairhaven Hospital, located in Candle, had occasionally addressed medical emergencies from among the Native population, but it was generally considered to be a whites-only hospital. In his report, Shields wrote, As we now have our own physician at Kotzebue [the location of the Quaker mission hospital], the medical work done for us by this hospital [Fairhaven] will be confined almost entirely to natives of Deering and Candle.⁹ However, under the government’s new contract with Fairhaven, the hospital was specifically exempt from providing long-term care for invalids or impoverished Natives. For long-term care, like that required by widows, orphans, and invalids, the government-supported mission hospital at Kotzebue was the only available source.

As a result, Natives in need of long-term care were often required to travel great distances to receive treatment at the mission hospital. Depending on the patients’ physical limitations and factors such as weather, travel to Kotzebue could be a difficult journey, and patients seeking long-term care were often accompanied to the hospital by their entire families.¹⁰ The difficulties of travel would have been even greater for those at the lowest end of Iñupiat society, like widows and orphans.

In the Reindeer Files, there is a letter written by Dr. Herbert N. T. Nichols from the Native hospital at Kotzebue that reads, Don’t think us extravagant in the amount of wood we are burning. The outfit that Mr. Shields sent up from Candle have to be kept warm. In that outfit there are two invalids, one old woman mother to one of the invalids, two children of 3 or 4 yrs. and a dog. Quite an array of paupers.¹¹ (Underline in the original text.)