Alongside St Herman and St Innocent, the Orthodox Church in Alaska honours other early witnesses to the faith. Their icons tell the story of the first decades of Orthodoxy in America, with its dangers and its deep roots among the native peoples.
St Juvenaly, protomartyr of America
Hieromonk Juvenaly was one of the monks of the Valaam mission that reached Kodiak in 1794. He travelled to the Alaskan mainland to preach and, according to tradition, was killed there in 1796, making him the first Orthodox martyr in America. He was glorified in 1980. In icons he appears as a priest-monk, often holding a cross.
St Peter the Aleut
St Peter was a young native Alaskan from Kodiak, remembered under the name Chukagnak, who was baptised Peter. Around 1815 he was part of a Russian hunting party off the coast of California. According to the account later passed to St Herman, Peter was captured by the Spanish and, when he refused to renounce his Orthodox faith, was tortured and killed. The details of the story are uncertain and historians have questioned parts of it, but it has been told in Alaska since the early nineteenth century. The Alaskan diocese of the Orthodox Church in America glorified him in 1980. His icons show a young man in simple dress holding a cross, the sign of a martyr.
St Jacob Netsvetov, the first American-born saint
Jacob Netsvetov was born in 1802 on Atka Island in the Aleutians, to a Russian father and an Aleut mother. He studied at the seminary in Irkutsk, was ordained a priest in 1828, and returned to Atka, where he served a parish spread over hundreds of miles of islands and sea. Like St Innocent he worked on an alphabet for the Aleut language and translated Scripture and services.
In 1844 he went to the Yukon River to found a new mission among the Yup'ik people, where he worked for many years in very hard conditions. He died in Sitka in 1864. In 1994 the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America glorified him, the first saint born in America. He is depicted as a priest in vestments, holding a cross or the Gospel, sometimes with the river and the mission church behind him.
Icons of the Alaskan saints
Group icons of the saints of Alaska are common in Orthodox churches across North America. They usually show St Herman and St Innocent at the centre, with St Juvenaly, St Peter, St Jacob and other saints of Alaska beside them, against a background of sea, mountains and a small wooden church with onion domes. The Orthodox Church in America has also glorified St Olga of Alaska (Matushka Olga Michael), a Yup'ik midwife and priest's wife from Kwethluk, who now appears in newer icons of the Alaskan saints.