KWETHLUK, Alaska — It was in the dusty streets and modest homes of this remote Alaska Native village that Olga Michael quietly lived her entire life as a midwife and a mother of 13. As the wife of an Orthodox Christian priest, she was a “matushka,” or spiritual mother to many more.
The Yup’ik woman became known in church communities across Alaska for quiet generosity, piety and compassion — particularly as a consoler of women who had suffered from abuse, from miscarriage, from the most intimate of traumas. She could share from her own grief, having lost five children who didn’t live to adulthood.
Her renown spread to a widening circle of devotees after her death from cancer in 1979 at age 63 — through word of mouth and reports of her appearance in sacred dreams and visions, even among people far from Alaska.
Now, after an elaborate ceremony in her village of about 800 people in southwestern Alaska, she is the first female Orthodox saint from North America, officially known as “St. Olga of Kwethluk, Matushka of All Alaska.”
“This is not just my mom anymore.”
Why Olga’s gender and ethnicity matter
For a church led exclusively by male bishops and priests, the glorification of Olga, the first Yup’ik saint, is significant.
“The church is often seen as a hierarchical, patriarchal institution,” said Metropolitan Tikhon, head of the Orthodox Church in America. “Recognizing women like St. Olga is a reminder that the same path of holiness is available to all. Male or female, young or old, rich or poor, everyone is called to follow the same commandments.”
St. Olga’s sainthood is especially meaningful because many women canonized by the church have been ancient martyrs or nuns, said Carrie Frederick Frost, a professor of religion and culture at Western Washington University who studies women and Orthodoxy.
“To come here and be a part of the glorification of a woman who was a lay woman and was a mother and a grandmother and lived a life that many women have lived, it’s just incredibly appealing,” Frost said. An Alaska Native woman is the newest saint for the Orthodox Church in America.
St. Olga’s appeal to those who have suffered abuse or miscarriage is also important, she said: “I think the church has largely failed to minister to those situations, not entirely but largely.”
There are several female Catholic saints from North America. They include St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk-Algonquin woman canonized in 2012.
An elaborate canonization ceremony
Hundreds of visitors from near and far converged for her canonization — or “glorification” in Orthodox terminology.
“Thou art the glory of the Yup’ik people … a new North Star in the firmament of Christ’s holy Church,” the choir sang. The ceremonies were replete with ringing bells, robust hymns and processions of black-robed clerics, golden-robed acolytes, women in headscarves and other devotees in a mingling of dust and incense.
Some worshippers arrived for the glorification from nearby Yup’ik villages. Others flew in from faraway states and countries to the regional hub of Bethel, and then rode in a fleet of motorboats some 17 miles up the broad Kuskokwim River — a watershed central to the traditional Yup’ik subsistence lifestyle, marked by yearly rhythms of fishing, hunting and gathering.
