What was the relationship between Sitka’s Presbyterian mission, later known as Sheldon Jackson School, and the Alaska Native pursuit of citizenship, civil rights, and land claims?
Alaska became part of the United States in 1867 and was effectively ruled by the U.S. Army until 1877. The mission began in 1878. It was 17 years after the Transfer before Alaska got civil government with the 1884 Organic Act.
So the origins of the fight for rights, and of the mission, lie in that decade of Army rule.
First, Tlingit rights, in 1867:
Land rights:
The Treaty of Cession transferred what Russia “possessed” in North America to the United States, but what that was was not defined. Most of what they claimed was held only by the Doctrine of Discovery, the policy, originating in Europe in the 1400s, that says lands can be claimed for whatever Christian sovereign nation claimed it first, that assumes that Indigenous Peoples have no rights to their lands.
Right after the transfer, Tlingit leaders told Army leader General Jeff Davis that they did not recognize American claims. Davis told them they had no choice. In a report for Congress, he wrote that they were unaware of the Doctrine of Discovery.
Before 1867, Tlingit people did have control over all their lands. As General Davis put it, “before the transfer they looked upon themselves as the de facto rulers of this Territory, and the Russians only as traders here by permission or sufferance.” i
Citizenship and Sovereignty
Tlingit people were excluded from citizenship as “uncivilized tribes.” They were, however, sometimes treated as sovereign, in the right to apply their own laws to internal affairs, and even sometimes for their law to be respected by the U.S.
In Tlingit law, an injury or death, even if accidental, has to be compensated. For very serious matters this could mean a life for a life, of equivalent importance, but was normally in material compensation. This was generally followed by Russians and foreign traders.3
Legally, recognizing sovereignty meant defining whether or not Alaska was “Indian Country,” But this was in dispute throughout the period and into the 1880s.
The usual approach by the military was that Indians needed to be kept from attacking through a show of force and putting down “insolence.” This was the usual approach in the Indian Wars, then at their height. This led to the shelling of villages at Kake and Wrangell in 1869, and again at Angoon in 1882.
Military leaders throughout the period did sometimes honor the Tlingit system, as pragmatic.
Here is some context, for Tlingit rights in 1867:
In the Maritime Fur Trade, from 1784 through the 1810s. European and American traders joined in to the pre-existing Northwest Coast trade system, on Indigenous terms. Hundreds of thousands of sea otter pelts were sold in Canton, China, nearly all of these purchased directly from North West Coast Indigenous People.
This relationship brought enormous wealth to Boston, and to the Tlingit, and left Native control intact.1
Next is the nature of Russian colonization in southeastern Alaska. Beginning in the mid-1700s, Russian fur companies worked their way from Siberia along the Aleutian Chain and into the Gulf of Alaska, coercing Native labor to hunt sea otter for them. By the 1780s and until they pulled out, their profits depended on a system of underpaying an Indigenous workforce, based in the Aleutians, Pribilof and Kodiak islands.
By the time the Russians came to southeastern Alaska in the 1790s, Sitka Sound was a regular port of call for American and British traders.
They tried to extend their system, and hundreds of hunters, into southeast, negotiated a hunting base at Gajaa Heen near Sitka in 1799, destroyed in 1802, then after the Battle of Sitka in 1804 established a fort at Sitka; but, Kiks.adi leaders ceded only the right to have a post. They could not hunt for themselves but had to trade for furs.2
Their post at Sitka was mainly to claim the coast from other Europeans and the United States, per the Doctrine of Discovery.
In the mid 1850s, Tlingit people attacked the fort, Russians were killed, but instead of retaliating, Russians blamed their own governor, who they had replaced, and worked to make peace. They regularly paid for injury done by Russians.5
Tlingit hegemony extended to forcing the Hudson’s Bay Company to abandon trading posts up the Stikine River in 1838, at Taku in 1842, and above Chilkat on the Yukon in 1852.
Throughout the years before 1867 Tlingit clans owned and controlled Southeast Alaska.
Another important piece of context for the period is the devastating population loss between 1800 and 1867, and that continued. Russians estimated the population of southeastern Alaska in 1800 at over 50,000 people, similar to the population today. By 1867 the population was fewer than 8,000 and falling; at Stikine, which had been the gateway for a gold rush in the early 1860s, American officials said that the population had been 1,500 only a few years before, but was only 1000, and falling, in 1867.
Much was probably due to smallpox epidemics; most Native people did not have access to inoculation.
And, perhaps most important to the context of the Army decade, is the state of the economy, that probably contributed to the horrific numbers of deaths. In 1867 and throughout the Army years, the economy practically ceased to exist. Money coming in was basically the federal payroll, miners passing through, and a much attenuated fur trade. Like other depressed places, much of the trade was in alcohol. The United States and Europe were in the Long Depression of the 1870s, which depressed fur markets..
And, American traders aggressively displaced Tlingit from what internal southeast trade there was.
Missions and Education
All of this – losing control of lands and resources, the state of the the economy, and so many deaths — probably factored in to Tlingit leaders asking for education and missions, reported by military leaders, as well as missionaries and others associated with them who came in the late 1870s, including John Brady, John Muir, S. Hall Young. All mentioned Metlakatla, in Canada.8
Metlakatla.
Missionary William Duncan had gone to Fort Simpson, just south of the border with the United States, in 1856. Duncan gained a following that included clan leaders; English literacy was seen as a valuable asset .19
Then, Duncan and converts built a town at Metlakatla, near present day Prince Rupert. At this new village, within a few years, thanks to mission funds, they had a sawmill and new frame houses; and, in 1862, when a smallpox epidemic struck the coast only a few lives were lost.20 Later they also had a cannery.
The request for missions and schools by Tlingit leaders, since it was based on the model of William Duncan, could have been driven in part by an effort to get and control sawmills and other commercial operations.
A Hoonah leader told missionary John Brady that his people wanted a sawmill, and that they would pay for the boards.
The earliest Protestant missionaries in Alaska were a group of Methodist Tsimshian Native men at Wrangell, during the Cassiar gold rush in the mid-1870s.
A letter written by a soldier in 1877 pleading for missionaries, to continue the work, came into Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson’s hands.
Sheldon Jackson was an extremely ambitious Presbyterian missionary, determined to pioneer Alaska, even though it was technically not his to pioneer.
He parleyed that letter, by getting it published in the Chicago Tribune, and in his newspaper the Rocky Mountain Presbyterian – later called the Home Missions Monthly – into funds for his project.
He brought missionary Amanda McFarland to Wrangell, where she started a girls’ home.
These people — military leaders, John Muir, missionaries — were seeing Native people who were experiencing a lot of deaths, alcohol and violence, and a severe lack of economic resources. All expressed their belief that this situation was due to the Natives themselves: that Native people were suffering because they were vulnerable to alcohol and to being exploited by “bad whites,” and that Native culture was primitive and inadequate for surviving in the modern world.
Sheldon Jackson exaggerated the supposed inadequacy of Native culture in order to establish the need for the work of missionaries, and to raise funds.ii
This extreme portrayal of Native depravity and vulnerability was then contrasted with descriptions of how well Alaska Native people did in school.
Because it was based on the notion that Native culture was the problem, missionary goals for Native rights diverged from the expressed goals of Native people themselves, which was to have their civil rights respected, and, to have their ownership of land and resources recognized, to get compensation for their use.
Missionaries, like other authorities, never supported acknowledgement of land and resource rights.
They supported Native civil rights only on condition that they first become “civilized” and stop participating in Native social and political life.iii This hindered or prevented collective Native political empowerment.
Sheldon Jackson didn’t invent this characterization. But I believe that Sheldon Jackson’s outsize influence, in that period of transition between Alaska as an inchoate, lawless “possession” into an Alaska we recognize today, embedded his portrayal of Alaska Natives—who were the vast majority of the population—into our conception of Alaska, even now.
Next, the Origin of the Sitka Mission
In 1878 Jackson had sent missionary John Brady and teacher Fannie Kellogg to Sitka, where they started a day school, although both left that same year.
In 1879 Presbyterian missionary Alonzo Austin came to Sitka, and his daughter restarted the day school for Natives in 1880.
The Sitka school saw initial success, due to the enthusiasm of the earliest group of students – who included young men of standing in Tlingit society.23 Sheldon Jackson parlayed that into more funds and influence.
Soon some of these boys asked for permission to live at the school. Their school building – the old Russian hospital – burned down in January 1882.
Then, after the Presbyterians acquired the land for the mission, now the Sheldon Jackson College campus, these young men, and Austin and others built their own large school building.
In 1884 Congress passed Alaska’s Organic Act, providing limited civil goverment in Alaska for the first time. Sheldon Jackson had a hand in its development. Missions received government funding, and Sheldon Jackson became Alaska’s General Agent for Education.
The first officials of Alaska’s civil government—District Judge, District Attorney, and federal Marshall–arrived at Sitka in the fall of 1884. The first term of the court in May 1885 was busy. Nine of the first 21 cases were against the mission. Case #6 was by the widow of a man who held a competing claim to the misison property: she lost.
Case number 7 was based on a petition by group of residents protesting the Presbyterian land claim, saying it would create a second Indian Village, that would threaten the “white” town, that the land was properly part of the townsite.
The Presbyterian plat for the mission school was actually in the Organic Act itself, which promised 640 acres to any “established mission.”
The petition was brought by a group that included many Russians (or “Creoles”), and several miners.
When the United States assumed conrol of Alaska, Russians and those associated with them were offered citizenship. Nearly all the Russians who stayed had Alaska Native heritage and were known as Creoles by the Russian American Company, but called themselves Russians, and were the majority of the “white” population of Sitka, and were apparently not happy with the mission’s rapid growth.
Case number 7 then gave rise to cases number 16, 18, 19, 20, and 21 against Sheldon Jackson personally. 18 through 21 are over his building a fence around the mission.
Those cases were all dismissed and did not seem to have any permanent impact on the mission or on Native rights.
But cases 9 and 10 did. These were petitions on behalf of the families of two students who wanted to leave the school. The court decided that it was not legal to make a contract with a Native person, and that a person could not be held against their will.
The mission made parents sign a 5-year indenture in order to send their children to school. According to Sheldon Jackson, the court decision led to more than half the students at the school leaving.
Thanks to Sheldon Jackson’s influence with the incoming President, that first set of officials was dismissed, and Alaska’s next officials, in 1886, were his supporters. When that court heard case 32 the following year, in 1886, ar petition by a mother wishing to take her son out of the school, the new judge decided that the school could not let a child go home because that would “render all efforts of both the government and missions to civilize them abortive.”iv
In Jackson’s first Annual Report on Education, for 1885, he described losing half the student body who would “go back to the filth, superstition, degradation and vice of their native condition.”v
After 1885 the way was clear for Sheldon Jackson’s mission, except that perhaps it was no longer as attractive as it had been. Tlingit membership in the Russian Orthodox church expanded exponentially in the later 1880s. Still, the Presbyterian Church maintained a Tlingit membership, and the same families sent their children for generations.
So finally, to the question of how Sheldon Jackson School helped prepare young people who went on to found the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1912 and to work on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act?
First, we have to recognize as erroneous the notion that Native people ever needed any different education than anyone else. They did not need to learn about commerce or technology any more than do white students, and they did not need to have their Native identity expunged.
That notion is belied by the success Native people saw in the centuries before Europeans arrived and in their successful economic and political relationships with British, American, and Russian leaders.
Next, to see the school in the context of the environment in the 20th century pervaded with the belief that Native people were indeed handicapped by being Native: pervasive racial bias.
The racial bias was justified by Sheldon Jackson’s characterization of Native people as not ready for self government or citizenship, needing missionary help to adjust to white society and culture. That belief persisted throughout the 20th century, from a statement by a missionary in 1908 about “racial inferiority” to the widespread belief that Native people were culturally adapted to simply living off the land and so they needed help to learn how to adapt to a market economy.
We see that narrative today in the ascription of modern health problems to culture: to “culture clash” between Tlingit and European culture and in the notion that Native people are culturally more susceptible to alcohol, rather than to the actual cause, systemic racial bias that led to massive loss of life.
The climate of bias in the 20th century led to being pushed out of a still-depressed Alaskan economy, it was harder to have a job that wasn’t physically dangerous, harder to access health care and good housing. Education was segregated. This contributed to unbelievably high rates of premature death, especially for babies and young people.
I recently worked with the 1930 census and death records for the decade of the 1930s: for young people in 2022, the death rate was less than one in 1000. For young people in Sitka from Native families in the 1930s, that rate was 43.
Disparity in health and wealth today between Native and non-Native people is a direct result of being the targets of racial bias, by missionaries as well as other authorities, based on the conception that Native culture is inadequate.
Sheldon Jackson School undoubtedly did help students who went there, but it’s important to note that they had no other option; Native people did not have access to Sitka’s public high school until 1949. But especially in the 1940s and 50s, graduates report developing a pan-Alaska Native identity, which certainly contributed to the fight for land claims.
Also, SJ was a private school that students had to want to attend, or their parents had to want them to attend, and had to pay tuition. Students were self selecting, as people who could handle or even thrive in a boarding school environment.
We see then that the achievements of Sheldon Jackson graduates were their own. Sheldon Jackson the school gave them an opportunity, but in an environment that denigrated Native culture, and a lack of other opportunities, due to the beliefs promoted by Sheldon Jackson, the person. The school continued to promote that notion.
Missionaries, by and large, truly intended to help Native people, and many did, literally saving lives, and encouraging young people to pursue their dreams. Students took advantage of what the school had to offer as a stepping stone, in an unfair world.
The relationship, between the mission, and Native rights?
The mission, along with government, was instrumental in limiting rights. Even citizenship was only offered on the condition of leaving Native cultural and political identity, based on the stereotype of all that being incompatible with “civilization.”
When we see this stereotype for what it is, we can see what the school did within advancing that notion.
By looking at the history, and the beliefs and assumptions of that other time, we can also discern how those beliefs and assumptions persist. We have a better understanding of our past, and of where we are, now.
i Jeff Davis 1870 report
ii Sheldon Jackson, Alaska, and missions on the north Pacific coast. (New York, Dodd, Mead & company, 1880) 116
iii Certain Tlingit leaders, including Tillie Paul and Walter Soboleff, advocated for Tlingit values and culture, but this was not embraced by the missionaries. The creation of artwork was supported but only when it was divorced from its cultural or historical significance.
iv In re Can-ah-couqua, 29 F. 687, 690 (D. Alaska 1887)
v Sheldon Jackson education report 1885