Alaska Native Makes Orthodox Church History – Part One
an article by Peter
Smith in the 23 June 2025
edition of the Los Angeles Times
It was in the dusty streets and modest homes of this remoted Alaska Native village - Kwethluk - that Olga Michael
quietly lived her entire life as a midwife and a mother of 13. As the wife
of an Orthodox Christian priest, she as a “Mathushka,” or spiritual mother to many more.
The Yup’ik woman became known in
church communities across Alaska for her quiet generosity, piety and compassion – particularly as a consoler of women
who had suffered from abuse, from miscarriage, from the most intimate of traumas. She could share from her own grief, having
lost five children who didn’t live to adulthood.
Her renown spread to a widening circle of devotees after her death from cancer
in 1979 at the age of 63 – through word of mouth and reports of her appearance in sacred dreams and visions, even among
people far from Alaska.
Now, after an elaborate ceremony in her village of about 800 people in southwestern Alaska, she is the first female
Orthodox saint from North America, officially known as “St. Olga of Kwethluk, Mathushka of All Alaska.”
“I only thought of her as my mom,” said her daughter, Helen Larson, who attended the ritual June 19 along with St. Olga’s other surviving children and many of her grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. She is in awe of her mother’s wide impact.
“This is not just my mom anymore,” said Larson.
St. Olga is “everybody’s helper.”
For a church led exclusively by male bishops and priests, the glorification of
Olga, the first Yup’ik saint, is significant. “The church is
often seen as a hierarchical, patriarchal institution,” said Metropolitan Tikhon, head of the Orthodox Church in America. “Recognizing women like St. Olga is a reminder that the same path of holiness
is available to all. Male or female, young or old, rich or poor, everyone
is called to follow the same commandments.”
St. Olga’s sainthood is especially meaningful because many women canonized
by the church have been ancient martyrs or nuns, said Carrie Frederick Frost, a professor of religion and culture at Western
Washington University who studies women and Orthodoxy. “To come here
and be a part of the glorification of a woman who was a lay woman and was a mother and a grandmother and lived a life that
many women have lived, it’s just incredibly appealing,” said Frost. St. Olga’s appeal to those who have
suffered abuse or miscarriage is also important, she said: “I think the church has largely failed to minister to those
situation , not entirely, but largely.”
There are several female Catholic saints from North America.
They include St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk Algonquin woman canonized in 2021.
Hundreds of visitors from near and far
converged for her canonization – or “glorification” in Orthodox terminology.
“Thou are the glory of the Yup’ik people … a new North Star in the firmament of Christ’s holy
Church,” the choir sang. The ceremonies were replete with ringing
bells, robust hymns and processions of black-robed clergy, golden-robed acolytes, women in headscarves and other devotees
in mingling of dust and incense.
Some worshippers arrived for the glorification from nearby Yup’ik villages.
Others flew in from far away states and countries to the regional hub of Bethel, and then rode in a fleet of motorboats
some 17 miles up the broad Kuskokwim River – a watershed central to the traditional Yup’ik subsistence lifestyle,
marked by yearly rhythms of fishing, hunting and gathering. Choral chants and incense began rising after they disembarked,
and continued for hours in the uncharacteristically hot sun of Alaska’s long solstice eve…..
- Conclusion next
week -
