The Iroquois in the Civil War: From Battlefield to Reservation

Kan (anthropology, Dartmouth College) portrays the meeting between the Tlingit Indians and the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska in the late 1700s and analyzes the indigenous Orthodoxy that developed over the next 200 years. Examinations of Russian Orthodox theology, ritual practice, and missionary methods, as well as descriptions of Tlingit culture enhance this story of the synthesis of two cultures. Kan concludes that the Tlingit and Russians tended to act in mutually beneficial ways, but for completely different reasons. He goes on to explore the ways the Tlingit used the Orthodox tradition to resist Americanization with the arrival of Presbyterian missionaries in the 1880s.

Laurence M. Hauptman is professor of history at the State University of New York at New Paltz.