Rural Alaska

Presbyterian church will apologize to Gambell residents for cultural abuse

Presbyterian leaders who believe old church practices caused decades of cultural harm plan to deliver an unusual face-to-face apology to a Yup'ik village on a Bering Sea island.

This weekend in Gambell, the officials will "seek reconciliation" for past cultural abuses, such as attempting to stamp out the Native language and traditional dancing and drumming as part of a decades-long assimilation campaign that began more than a century ago, said Curtis Karns, a top church official with the Presbytery of the Yukon.

Church efforts prompted villagers who became Christians to speak against their own heritage, said Karns.

"That does a lot of damage in a culture," he said. "We were operating under the world view of the day," which encouraged efforts to Westernize people once described as "heathens" and to eliminate customs thought to be "evil," such as traditional drumming, he said.

The presbytery administers 23 churches primarily in the Interior, Northwest and the North Slope. Officials planning to make the trip to St. Lawrence Island more than 700 miles northwest of Anchorage include Karns and Elder Clayton Antioquia from the national church's General Assembly Mission Council.

The delegation will include Father Michael Oleksa of the Russian Orthodox Church, an expert on the cultural conflict created after Christianity came to Alaska, as well as Dorothy Boezak, historical trauma therapist.

Presbyterians arrived in St. Lawrence Island at the turn of the last century and ran a mission school on Gambell for four decades beginning in 1900. A handful of elders who are still alive remember suffering physical punishment -- such as swats with a yardstick -- for speaking their own language, said Lucy Apatiki, who was born and raised in the village and is now the Presbyterian pastor.

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"We were told our drum and dance were evil, and it was almost a prerequisite to become Western to be a Christian," said Apatiki, in her mid-50s.

Her parents and grandparents' generations felt ashamed simply for being themselves. That humiliation festered through generations, and she believes it still contributes to widespread social ills among Alaska Natives, including soaring rates of suicide, domestic violence and alcoholism.

"We're hoping through this (meeting) we'll be given an opportunity to forgive and put that to rest and move forward into the future. We're hoping there is restoration to the person and that healing can begin," Apatiki said.

Unlike other Native villages that saw their dancing and drumming stamped out by local churches, residents in Gambell continued to practice those customs, but only outside the mission school and the Presbyterian church.

But the clash between Christianity and culture flared anew a few years ago, when some hoped to bring dancing and drumming into church services.

"We wanted to worship God in our Native way," she said.

But others resisted, creating tension in the community. The village's feelings toward the religion are underscored by low attendance rates at Presbyterian services and the village's other church run by Seventh-Day Adventists, Apatiki said.

The conflict over drumming and dancing prompted members of the church's local governing body, known as the session, to request the unique meeting.

It's an unusual effort that stands out from resistance by the Roman Catholic Jesuits in Alaska to redress past wrongs associated with child sexual abuse. It also seems counter to recent conflicts in Alaska involving the Russian Orthodox Church, whose former leader, Bishop Nikolai Soraich, seemed defiant when he was accused of cultural insensitivity.

Sexual abuse by Presbyterian church officials was not a problem in Gambell, said Apatiki.

The Yukon Presbytery has been unusually forward thinking in the past, including issuing a written apology in 1992 after some Alaska Natives suffered racial attacks, Karns said. The presbytery was not directly related to those attacks, but felt partly responsible, believing its old efforts to eliminate Native customs had contributed to the mood that led to the assaults, said Karns.

But that was a written apology. After the Gambell church leaders suggested a face-to-face apology, the presbytery agreed that traveling to the island would have a greater impact, he said. The apology is timely because elders who attended the school deserve to meet with church leaders before they pass on, Karns said.

Those elders, now in their mid-80s, will be given a chance to speak before the apology is given at the meeting in the school gym, set for Friday and Saturday. The "reconciliation event" will include gospel singing in both English and St. Lawrence Yup'ik -- the language was allowed back into the Presbyterian church in the 1970s. The Savoonga and Gambell dance groups will also perform with traditional dancing and skin drumming, said Apatiki.

Apatiki said she began to realize things needed to change after she accepted Jesus in the early 1970s.

"It was through that experience that I learned we were created to be whole in spirit and body and we were created to worship God in who we were," she said. "So this needs to be restored, this identity of who we are and to feel good about it, and to feel it's OK to be Native."

Contact Alex DeMarban at alex(at)alaskadispatch.com

Alex DeMarban

Alex DeMarban is a longtime Alaska journalist who covers business, the oil and gas industries and general assignments. Reach him at 907-257-4317 or alex@adn.com.

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