St. Herman of Alaska

He was born in Russia around 1756, of a merchant family, and entered monastic life young. He was at the Trinity-St. Sergius hermitage near Petersburg and then at Valaam on Lake Ladoga, where he was tonsured with the name Herman and lived about fifteen years, most of them in a forest cell at a distance from the monastery. He was never ordained. He remained a simple monk his whole life, which in the Russian tradition is a station and not a lack.

In 1793 the Holy Synod assembled a mission for the new American colonies. Herman was chosen with nine others under the archimandrite Joasaph, and they crossed Siberia by land and the Pacific by sea and reached Kodiak Island on the twenty fourth of September, 1794, having traveled something close to eight thousand miles. Joasaph, consecrated bishop, went down with his ship in 1799, and by the early 1800s the mission was, in practice, Herman.

The Russian-American Company held the trading monopoly and in practice the colony, and its treatment of the native people ran from exploitation to atrocity: forced hunting parties, hostages taken from villages, and a mortality its own records do not hide. Herman took the side of the Aleut and Alutiiq against the Company and never stopped, in writing, to the managers and over their heads to the imperial authorities. The chief manager Alexander Baranov regarded him as an intolerable nuisance. He had no rank, no office and no protection, and he kept filing for four decades, and some of it worked.

After about 1811 he moved across the strait to Spruce Island, which he called New Valaam, and lived there in a forest cell for the rest of his life, keeping a garden, teaching, and gathering the orphans of the epidemics into what amounted to a school. The people of Kodiak held him for a saint while he was alive and did not particularly need Russia's permission for it.

He reposed on Spruce Island in the winter of 1836 or 1837, having told those with him the day, asked for candles and for the Acts of the Apostles to be read, and died as they read. He was glorified on the ninth of August, 1970, the first canonization of a saint in North America. His memory is kept on the ninth of August, the day of the glorification, and the thirteenth of December, the day of his repose.