Alaska missionary

GPZ and I went for a wander around Woodlands Cemetery, one of my favourite places in the neighboorhood, once the private grounds of an English-style mansion, now the resting place, among fine old specimen trees, of Philadelphia's great and good. The stark marble and granite Victorian graves provide little information about their occupants beyond dates of birth and death (although the size of many of the monuments suggest that these people were well-heeled.)

So, when I noticed this grave-marker my attention was immediately captured: Deaconess Bertha W.Sabine, missionary in Anvik, Alaska for 20 years. The history and culture of the Arctic regions has long been an interest of mine (only yesterday I bought a classic anthropology text about Eskimo culture, by Franz Boas.) I remembered also the searing novel Black Robe, by Brian Moore, about the spiritual crisis of a 17th century Jesuit missionary among the fur-traders of Canada (recommended)

Anyway I've discovered that our Bertha sailed from Seattle in July 1909 to join the tiny, remote settlement at Anvik on the Yukon River. The Episcopal mission church and school had been established in 1887 to bring Christianity to the indigenous population - hunters and fishers who lived a subsistence existence based on knowledge of the seasons and terrain. Ten years later the Klondike gold rush flooded the area with fortune-seekers from across the world, bringing a completely different sort of profit-driven culture, and much else that changed the way of life for good.

Bertha first went to Alaska in 1894 when she was 50; she was in late middle age when she took up her post in Anvik and over 70 when she left. (She died in 1931.)
According Forty Years in Anvik the reminiscences of a fellow missionary, Deaconess Sabine, "Sister Bertha," was the only woman who has served at Anvik to make any considerable headway in learning to speak the native language. She was an indefatigable visitor in the native homes and acquired quite an extensive vocabulary, to which she constantly made additions. She delighted in telling the scripture stories and made great use of pictures for that purpose. This was one means by which she learned many native words and expressions.

During her time at Anvik there were two major influenza epidemics which wiped out a large numbers of the Alaskans. The missionaries took in the orphaned children and Bertha was in charge of a girls'boarding school. There is much that is controversial about the effects of bringing Christianity to indigenous people and the history of the Eskimo and the Inuit is a catalogue of appalling cultural destruction whose effects are all too evident today. Leaving that aside, I remain curious about Bertha Sabine's personal odyssey. She wrote a couple of small pamphlets which would be fun to try and track down. Anvik is still a tiny place, population only around 100 (although it was much higher 100 years ago) but if you can afford it you can hire a fishing lodge on the river which looks fabulous and nothing like Bertha Sabine's living conditions. The wooden huts the mission inhabited were regularly destroyed by fire and
In the spring of 1890 occurred one of those infrequent floods which occasionally accompany the breaking of the ice in the Yukon. These floods appear to be local, and to be caused by the ice jamming at some contracted point in the channel. At this time of my first experience with them it had seemed incredible to me that the water should rise forty feet higher than the low water level, although the natives had told me that it might do so. It has occurred three times during the forty-three years of my residence in Anvik. The water remains at the high stage only a day or two and then goes down, leaving everything covered with a layer of mud. The loss to the mission from this source has been comparatively slight; but the annoyance has been great; and on this account we have found it expedient to raise the ground on which the mission stands, by washing down earth from the hills which stand directly in the rear. The strip of land between the hills and the river is so narrow that it is necessary to do this in order to secure room for building.