The life of St Juvenaly of America
In 1794 he was among the company Valaam sent across the ocean to Kodiak Island in Alaska, a group led by Archimandrite Joasaph Bolotov, called Joseph in some accounts, and including the lay monk Herman. Two years later, unlike most of his companions who stayed near the settlement, Juvenaly pushed his own preaching onto the Alaskan mainland, and there baptized hundreds of Chugach Sugpiaq and Athabaskan people.
Late in 1796, as his path carried him still farther northwest toward the Bering Sea, Juvenaly vanished. Accounts of his end differ and do not fully agree with one another. Alaskan Native oral tradition tells that a Yupik shaman, alarmed by gestures of the sign of the cross he did not recognize, ordered an attack that left Juvenaly dead by spear and arrow, while other Russian-language accounts point instead to anger over restrictions on polygamy or the removal of children to mission schools. At least one purported eyewitness account later circulated in print has since been shown by scholars to be a fabrication, a reminder that even the written record here is not settled, and no physical trace of Juvenaly has ever been found.
He is remembered as the first Orthodox martyr on American soil, his memory kept on July 2 and again within the wider commemorations of Alaska's saints and of the first martyrs of the American land.
