Jacob Netsvetov
Saint Jacob Netsvetov, Enlightener of the Peoples of Alaska
Priest · Righteous · b. 1802, on Atka Island, in the Aleutian Islands — d. 26 July 1864, at Sitka, Alaska
Commemorated 26 July — Repose at Sitka; commemoration of the Enlightener of the peoples of Alaska
Jacob Netsvetov (1802–1864) was the first native Alaskan ordained to the Orthodox priesthood — the son of a Russian company worker from Tobolsk and an Unangan (Aleut) mother of Atka — and for thirty-five years the missionary priest of the western and interior reaches of Russian America. From Atka he served a parish that ran some two thousand miles through the Aleutians and the Pribilofs, built a school, and worked out with St Innocent (Veniaminov) the written form of the Unangan language and the translation of the Scriptures and services into it. Widowed, burnt out of his house and bereaved of his father within eighteen months, he asked for harder work, and in 1844 was sent to found the Kvikhpak (Yukon) Mission among the Yup'ik and Athabascan peoples, where he devised another alphabet, translated again, and baptised some 1,320 people in twenty years. He died at Sitka on 26 July 1864 and was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America in 1994.
Atka and Irkutsk
He was born on Atka Island in 1802 to Yegor Vasilyevich Netsvetov, a Russian from Tobolsk in the service of the Russian-American Company, and Maria Alekseevna, an Unangan woman of Atka. The household was poor but set a high value on education; of the four surviving children the others went into the company's secular service and Jacob alone went to the Church.
About 1823 he entered the Irkutsk Theological Seminary in Siberia, a long way from home in every sense. He was tonsured subdeacon in October 1825, married Anna Simeonovna shortly afterwards, and graduated in 1826 with certificates in history and theology. He was ordained deacon in 1826 and priest in March 1828 by Archbishop Michael of Irkutsk — the first man of native Alaskan descent to be ordained to the priesthood in the Orthodox Church.
He could have stayed in Siberia. He asked instead to be sent home.
Atka, 1829–1844
He reached Atka in June 1829, with his wife and his father, and found a parish with no church. The territory nominally assigned to him ran through the western Aleutians, the Pribilofs, the Kurils and the Commander Islands — some two thousand miles of open water, travelled in the skin baidarka. In his first six months he baptised 16, chrismated 442, married 53 and buried 8; the disproportion between the numbers tells its own story of a population baptised long before and left without a priest.
He built a church of St Nicholas, and, until it stood, carried a large tent which he pitched as a chapel wherever he went. He founded a school teaching both Russian and Unangan, and became known as a teacher of unusual patience. And he took up the work for which he is most consequential: the reduction of Unangan Aleut to writing and the translation into it of the Scriptures and the services, carried on in a long correspondence with St Innocent (Veniaminov), then at Unalaska and later Bishop of Kamchatka and the Aleutians. Netsvetov's dialect work — the Atkan dialect, distinct from Innocent's Fox-Island Unangan — made him the second founder of Aleut literacy.
The years 1836–37 broke over him in succession: his wife Anna died of cancer in March 1836; his house burned in July of the same year; his father died in 1837. He read the sequence as a summons rather than a punishment, took the riassa of a widowed priest, and asked to be sent further out.
The Kvikhpak Mission, 1844–1863
In December 1844 Bishop Innocent appointed him to found a mission on the Kvikhpak — the Yukon. He established himself at Ikogmiut (today the village of Russian Mission) and built there a church of the Elevation of the Holy Cross.
Everything had to be begun again. The peoples of the lower Yukon and the Kuskokwim — the Yup'ik, and inland the Athabascan Ingalik and Kolchan — spoke languages unrelated to Unangan, and were not one people but many, some of them at war with each other. Netsvetov learned the languages, devised a further alphabet, translated again, and travelled for weeks at a time by dog-sled and baidarka. In twenty years he baptised about 1,320 people. He records with evident satisfaction the occasions on which traditionally hostile groups sat down together to hear the preaching — "beginning in the morning, all the Kolchane and Ingalit from the Yukon listened with attention, and in the end they all expressed faith."
His journals — kept in the required Russian-American Company form and preserved — are among the best sources for the interior of Alaska in this period, and record the ordinary and the extraordinary side by side: births and burials, weather and travel, a woman delivered from a demonic affliction by prayer and holy water, epidemics nursed while he was himself ill, a shaman-chief who resisted for years and was at last baptised.
Sitka and repose
By 1863 his sight was failing and his health broken. An assistant brought accusations against him; he was summoned to Sitka, where Bishop Peter examined the charges and dismissed them. He was not sent back. He spent his last year serving the Tlingit chapel at Sitka, and died there on 26 July 1864, aged sixty-two by the reckoning of his own record and sixty by others. He was buried by the entrance of the chapel; his grave is at Holy Trinity, Sitka.
Glorification
He was glorified by the Orthodox Church in America in October 1994, at St Innocent Cathedral in Anchorage, with the title Enlightener of the Peoples of Alaska. He stands with Herman of Alaska and Innocent of Alaska — his own bishop and correspondent — among the founding saints of Orthodoxy in North America.
Feast and commemoration
July 26 (church date; New Calendar civil July 26, Old Calendar civil August 8), the day of his repose. He is kept by the Orthodox Church in America — where he is one of the principal saints of the Diocese of Alaska — and by the Russian Church; the OCA calendar places him first among the day's commemorations. He shares the day with the priests of Nicomedia, with Parasceva of Rome and with Moses the Hungarian, and the coincidence is sometimes preached on: a company of missionary priests, one of them at the far end of the world.
He is invoked as a patron of translators, of catechists and of the native peoples of Alaska, and his feast is kept with particular solemnity at Sitka, at Atka and at Russian Mission on the Yukon.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
Born of the islands and returning to them as a shepherd, thou didst carry the Gospel in the tongues of thy people, O righteous father Jacob; through storm and ice and sorrow thou didst not turn back, but didst bring whole nations to the waters of baptism. Enlightener of Alaska, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the English
Appointed readings
Epistle — Philippians 3:7–14
7But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. 8Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, 9And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: 10That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; 11If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead. 12Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. 13Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, 14I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Gospel — Mark 10:29–31, 42–45
29And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, 30But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life. 31But many that are first shall be last; and the last first. 42But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. 43But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: 44And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. 45For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.
Iconography
Jacob Netsvetov is painted as a priest of the Russian tradition: in the phelonion and epitrachelion, or in the dark riassa with the pectoral cross, holding a Gospel-book or a scroll — the scroll frequently inscribed in Unangan or Yup'ik, the point of his life. His face is given the features of his Aleut descent, and he is shown as a man of middle age with a short dark beard. The developed compositions place behind him a Yukon landscape — the river, the dog-sled, the small wooden church of the Elevation of the Cross at Ikogmiut — or the baidarka in which he travelled; some group him with Herman of Alaska, Innocent, Juvenaly and Peter the Aleut in the icon of the Saints of North America.
All of this is necessarily modern: he was glorified in 1994, and every icon of him post-dates that year and is the copyrighted work of a living or recently living iconographer. No image has therefore been stored. Nineteenth-century photographs of him are said to exist in the Alaskan church archives, and would be public domain, but none in a verifiable published form was located.
Disputed questions
- Age at death. The sources give sixty and sixty-two; the birth year 1802 and the death date 26 July 1864 give sixty-two if the birthday had passed. Both figures circulate.
- "Creole". The Russian-American Company's term for a person of mixed Russian and native parentage; it was a legal category with its own rights and disabilities, not a slur, and Netsvetov's whole career turns on it — it is why he could be educated at Irkutsk and why his ordination was epoch-making. His wife Anna is variously described as Russian and as of the same background; the record is not decisive.
- The accusations of 1863. The nature of the charges is not stated in the published accounts beyond that they were made by an assistant and were found baseless by Bishop Peter. Nothing more should be built on them.