E-mail: marina.raskladkina@gmail.com Tel.: +7 (495) 739-73-85
20–6, Berezhkovskaya emb., Moscow, 121059, Russian Federation
PhD (Political Science), leading specialist, SCANEX Ltd
The article reports an unusual combination of information sources on the community life of Upper Kuskokwim Athabaskan Indians. The sources include Orthodox church record books that were kept in two villages from the late 1920s till the early 21st century, as well as the Facebook social network. Orthodox traditions in the history of the Alaskan native people are explored, along with their construal in the context of new means of communication. Orthodoxy penetrated the Upper Kuskokwim area relatively late, not long before the sale of Alaska by Russia, but it got deeply entrenched and became not only a part of the local population’s culture, but also a constituting structure at the time of power vacuum, when Alaska was already appropriated by the United States but still had the status of territory.
Sources belonging to different epochs intertwine intricately in the studies of everyday life in traditional cultures. Resources such as church books are among the earliest historical documents. The originality of our find is determined by the fact that it is a chronicle of the people who did not write in their own language. In its turn, social media is a “digital reinstatement” of such chronicle.
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