Shots rang out over the Kwethluk River as a mass of pilgrims lining the muddy banks sang a hymn of blessing on the eve of the summer solstice. At last, leaders of the Orthodox church had arrived in Kwethluk for the glorification of St. Olga – the first-ever Yup’ik saint and first female Orthodox saint in North America.
For Kwethluk, the glorification is a long-awaited honor for Olinka “Arrsamquq” Michael, or Matushka Olga, a local midwife who gained a reputation as a gifted healer of deep-seated trauma during her life. Since her death in 1979, accounts of her miracles have spread throughout the Orthodox world, culminating in this historic moment.
In the crumbling cemetery of the old St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, priests set Olga’s wooden casket on blocks, just feet from the spot where they exhumed her remains seven months earlier. It’s something that hadn’t been done in Alaska since the exhumation of St. Herman on Spruce Island near Kodiak in 1970.
As local priest Fr. Vasily Fisher explained, before Olga could be venerated as a saint, her final funeral rite, or panikhida, needed to be performed. Going forward, the day of her death will be celebrated instead as her birth as a saint.
"Everything is done as if going backwards; they come back to the church in the presence of life. Our faith is about life. Sainthood is about life," Fisher said.
Some gathered in the cemetery had tears in their eyes. Others patted beads of sweat from their foreheads. Olga’s descendants stood transfixed among headscarved pilgrims from nearby villages and from as far away as Romania and Australia. The head of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), Metropolitan Tikhon, traveled from Washington, D.C.
As Archbishop Alexei of Alaska read a passage from the Book of Psalms, a sudden gust of wind from nowhere cut through the otherwise still afternoon. It was hard to not get swept up in the feeling that something miraculous was afoot.
After the funeral rite, a procession featuring flowing robes, golden banners, puffs of incense, and a couple curious village dogs bore the casket along a short dusty track to the church in the section of Kwethluk known as downtown.
During the four-hour service that followed, it was standing room only, which worked out well for a religious tradition that doesn’t make use of pews. The chanting and choreography, what Alexei referred to as an “elaborate, beautiful dance,” ended when St. Olga’s casket was opened for pilgrims to kiss her sacred relics and receive her blessing.
One of Olga’s nieces, Bertha Howard, summed up her memories of her aunt succinctly.
"Ikayurluki yuut, naklegtarluni (she helped, she was compassionate), that’s all I can say," Howard said.
For Olga’s granddaughter, Atan' Winkelman, the inclusion of Yugtun in many of the glorification services was a highlight.
"It's very cool to see actual Yugtun words... to recognize the Yupik people, to use the word 'Elders' in song. I've never heard that anywhere else in any of our venerating any other saint," Winkelman said.
As pilgrims filed by outside the church, Winkelman said that the scene was a lot to process.
"I'm finding the whole exhuming of her body, the whole glorification, canonization, very strange. Because she was an actual person to me that would hold me, and piggyback me, and we would sit and eat together, or I would sit and watch her sew," Winkelman said.
Olga’s youngest surviving daughter, Matushka Helen Larson, remembers the many women who would pay visits to her childhood home in Kwethluk to sit down to tea with her mother.
"They’d talk for hours, but I wouldn't listen because she wouldn't want me to listen," Larson said. "But I knew she was helping someone. [They would] come in looking very heavy, you know. And then when they go, they're lighter."
With Kwethluk cast further into the spotlight of the Orthodox world, Larson said that she hasn’t lost perspective.
"I still think of her as just my mom," Larson said.
For many others, Olga has become “St. Olga, Matushka of All Alaska,” a symbol of compassion, modesty, and empathy that appears to resonate just as much across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta as it does the world.
Katie Basile contributed reporting to this story.
