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.
The Russian-American Company began operations in southeastern
Alaska in the 1790s. Against a description of Tlingit culture at
the time of the Russians' arrival, Kan examines Russian Orthodox
theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, and the Tlingit
response to them. An uneasy symbiosis characterized the early era
of the Russian-American Company, when the trading relationship
outweighed any spiritual or social rapprochement.
A second, major focus of Kan's study is the Tlingit experience
with American colonial domination. He attributes a sudden revival
of Tlingit interest in Orthodoxy in the 1880s as their attempt to
maintain independence in the face of concerted efforts by the
newcomers (and especially Presbyterian missionaries) to Americanize
them.
"Memory Eternal" shows the colonial encounter to be both a power
struggle and a dialogue between different systems of meaning. It
portrays Native Alaskans not as helpless victims but as historical
agents who attempted to adjust to the changing reality of their
social world without abandoning fundamental principals of their
precolonial sociocultural order or their strong sense of
self-respect.
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