Missionaries: From Alaska to Patagonia

Let's ReThink History

Faith, power, and indigenous resistance across 500 years and two continents. From Russian Orthodox priests in Alaska to Anglicans in Tierra del Fuego — ten episodes on how missions reshaped the Americas, and how indigenous nations resisted, adapted, and survived them. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

Episodes

  1. Episode 1

    How Alaska Natives Turned Missionary Assimilation Against Itself

    In 1880 a handful of Protestant leaders met in New York and divided the entire territory of Alaska into denominational "spheres of influence" — then ran federally funded schools to erase Native languages and ceremonies. This is the story of how that system worked, the harm it did, and how Alaska Native people turned the missionaries' own schools into the launchpad for a civil-rights movement. This first episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia traces the full arc: the Russian Orthodox arrival in 1794 and its very different, language-preserving approach; Sheldon Jackson's 1880 Comity Agreement and the English-only "contract schools"; the boarding-school era and the suppression of the potlatch; and the boomerang — Tlingit graduates of the Sitka mission school who founded the Alaska Native Brotherhood, won the first anti-discrimination law in the United States (Elizabeth Peratrovich, 1945), and produced leaders like Rev. Dr. Walter Soboleff. It ends with today's reckoning: the Presbyterian Church's apology and reparations for the 1962 closure of Juneau's Memorial Presbyterian Church (now Ḵunéix̱ Hídi, "the people's house of healing"), Indigenous-led seminaries, and a rural mental-health workforce crisis. We present good-faith motive and real harm side by side, and we flag what's contested — including the exact 1962/63 date and the reparations figures.

  2. Episode 2

    A Race for Souls: How Two Churches Divided the Canadian Arctic

    There was no treaty for the Canadian Arctic — there was a race. Anglican ministers and Catholic Oblate priests paddled the same rivers to reach each Inuit and Dene family first, leaving "Catholic towns" and "Anglican towns" side by side to this day. This episode tells how that rivalry spread a Native writing system, built the residential hostels that broke children's link to the land, and ended in an apology without justice. This second episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia is the mirror of the Alaska story: where Alaska's missions banned Native languages, the Canadian missions promoted Indigenous literacy through syllabics — a script Cree tradition says was a gift from the spirit world, brought back by Calling Badger, not invented by missionary James Evans. We trace the CMS-vs-Oblate "race for souls"; the syllabic Bibles still printed in Inuktitut; the religion-segregated hostels of Inuvik (Stringer Hall and Grollier Hall) and the abuses at Turquetil Hall, Chesterfield Inlet; and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's finding that severing children from the land was a distinctive Northern harm. It centers Inuit and Dene voices — survivor Piita Irniq, who became Commissioner of Nunavut and handed Pope Francis his drum at the 2022 Iqaluit apology — and ends with the failure of justice: accused Oblate priest Johannes Rivoire, who fled to France and died untried in 2024 (his allegations were never proven in court). We present good-faith motive and real harm side by side, and flag what's contested.

  3. Episode 3

    How Indigenous People Resisted the Spanish Missions — Pueblo Revolt to Serra

    Spain conquered the Southwest and California not mainly with soldiers but with friars — gathering Native people into missions that were church, farm, factory, and, for many, prison. This episode tells how that system worked, the revolt that drove Spain out of New Mexico for twelve years, the demographic collapse it caused, and why a mission-founding saint still divides the descendants of the people he baptized. This third episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia turns from the carve-ups of the north to state-directed conquest. We trace the reducción system; the 1680 Pueblo Revolt — the most successful Indigenous uprising in North American history — led by Po'pay, whose statue now stands in the U.S. Capitol; Toypurina's 1785 revolt at Mission San Gabriel; and the catastrophic population collapse in the California missions (kept carefully distinct from the deadlier Gold Rush genocide that followed). At the center is Junípero Serra: revered by defenders, including some Indigenous Catholics like Mission Dolores curator Andrew Galvan, and condemned by descendants like Amah Mutsun chairman Valentin Lopez. We follow the story to the 2015 canonization, the 2020 toppling of Serra statues, and California's 2019 apology for genocide. Throughout, the throughline is that "the Native view" is not one view — Indigenous people themselves disagree. We present good-faith motive and real harm side by side, and flag what's contested.

  4. Episode 4

    Black Robes and Praying Towns: Two Ways to Convert a People Who Outnumbered You

    In the 17th-century Eastern Woodlands, the French and English were badly outnumbered by powerful Native nations — so they made two opposite bets. The French Jesuit "Black Robes" moved into the longhouses and learned the languages; the New England Puritans herded converts into "Praying Towns" and demanded total surrender. Both ended in catastrophe — and yet the Bible one Puritan printed to erase a language would one day be used to bring it back. This fourth episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia traces both halves: the Jesuits' strategy of accommodation, backed by the fur trade and the musket, and the collapse of Huronia through division, war, and epidemic; the Jesuit Relations, a fundraising campaign that accidentally documented a biological apocalypse; John Eliot's Praying Towns and his 1663 Massachusett Bible, the first Bible printed in North America; and the betrayal of King Philip's War, when some 500 "Praying Indians" were interned on Deer Island to die. We center Native agency — traditionalists who read baptism as a death curse, Kateri Tekakwitha who embraced the faith on her own terms and became the first Native American saint, and Jessie Little Doe Baird, who used Eliot's own Bible to revive Wôpanâak from zero living speakers. We present good-faith motive and real harm side by side, flag that the records were largely written by the missionaries themselves, and end on survival and reclamation.

  5. Episode 5

    The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: Friars, the Inquisition, and Our Lady of Guadalupe

    After Cortés destroyed the Aztec empire in 1521, twelve barefoot friars set out to convert millions — fast, because they believed it would trigger the end of the world. They tore down the temples and built churches from the same stones. But the brutality forced Spain to do something no other empire did: hold a formal debate over whether the people it was conquering were even human. This fifth episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia is the template the rest of Spanish America was built on. We trace the mendicant orders and their apocalyptic mass-baptism campaign; the Valladolid debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Sepúlveda over Indigenous humanity; the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the hill of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, and how Indigenous people made the faith their own; and the Inquisition, which burned the Aztec noble Don Carlos in 1539, then exempted Native people as "legal minors" and turned its fire on hidden Jews. We center Indigenous agency — the Nahua who wrote their own account of the conquest in the Florentine Codex (The Broken Spears), and Juan Diego, canonized in 2002 as the first Indigenous saint of the Americas — and handle Guadalupe with respect for both believers and skeptics, noting where historians dispute the record. We end on the living reckoning: Mexico's demand that Spain and the Vatican apologize, and the survival of Nahuatl. Good-faith motive and real harm, side by side.

  6. Episode 6

    Andean Resistance and the War on "Idolatry": Missions in the Inca World

    In the Andes the Spanish didn't find scattered villages but the devout remnant of an empire — and discovered, decades after declaring the people Christian, that they had been secretly feeding their mummified ancestors in mountain caves the whole time. The Church's answer was the Extirpation of Idolatries: torture the elders, find the sacred stones and the mummies, and burn them in the square. This sixth episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia traces the Andean mission machine: the doctrina parish system, where the priest doubled as a tax collector and a labor boss feeding the deadly silver mines of Potosí; the standardization of Quechua and Aymara for conversion, which produced the first book printed in South America (1584) and, ironically, helped carry the Andean worldview forward (God rendered as Viracocha, sin as hucha, a rupture of cosmic balance); and the Extirpation campaigns that hunted huacas and burned ancestral mummies, exposing a clandestine religion that had never died. We center Indigenous voices — above all Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, whose 1,200-page illustrated letter to the king of Spain denounced the priests and argued that the Spanish were the real idolaters, worshipping gold. We end on survival: Quechua and Aymara still spoken by millions, and Roxana Quispe Collantes defending the first doctoral thesis in Quechua in 2019. Good-faith motive and real harm, side by side; the record flagged where it's contested.

  7. Episode 7

    The 500-Year Crusade for Amazonian Souls: Jesuits, Pombal, and the Uncontacted

    In Brazil the cross and the slaver's net arrived together. For two centuries the Jesuits fought colonists for control of Indigenous bodies — protecting them from the sugar plantations while gathering them into mission villages and inventing a single language to convert them in. Then a Portuguese prime minister destroyed the whole system overnight, banned the language on pain of the whip, and the catastrophes that followed have never really stopped — because in the Amazon, the spiritual conquest is still happening. This seventh episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia runs from the 1500s to today: José de Anchieta and the aldeia system; the engineered Língua Geral; the Marquis of Pombal's 1759 expulsion of the Jesuits and the Diretório that banned Indigenous languages and engineered racial mixing; the genocidal rubber boom; and the present-day frontier, where high-tech evangelical groups like Ethnos360 (formerly New Tribes Mission) use helicopters and satellite imagery to reach the world's last uncontacted peoples, in defiance of Brazil's no-contact policy — a contact that can wipe out a village with a single cold. We center Indigenous voices, above all the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, author of The Falling Sky, and end on the unresolved fight over the forest's isolated peoples. Good-faith motive and real harm, side by side; the record flagged where it's contested.

  8. Episode 8

    How the Guaraní Fought Two Empires: The Jesuit Reductions and the Guaraní War

    Deep in the forests between the Spanish and Portuguese empires, the Guaraní and the Jesuits built something no other people in the Americas managed: an armed, literate, self-governing republic of some thirty cities, with its own communal economy and its own army — an army that in 1641 wiped out a Portuguese slaving expedition and held the frontier for a century. Then two kings in Europe traded the land out from under them, and the Guaraní went to war rather than obey. This eighth episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia is the series' high point of Indigenous agency. We tour the "Republic of the Forest" — the Abambaé and Tupambaé communal economy, the yerba mate monopoly, the printing presses — and the great arming that led to the Guaraní victory at the Battle of Mbororé (1641). Then the betrayal: the 1750 Treaty of Madrid ordered seven reductions and 30,000 Guaraní to abandon their cities and ancestors' graves, sparking the Guaraní War, the legend of Sepé Tiaraju, and the massacre at Caiboaté, where about 1,500 Guaraní died against four European soldiers. We give the Guaraní their own voice — they were literate and wrote letters in their own language to resist — and end on the ruins, now UNESCO sites, and the living Guaraní language, still the majority tongue of Paraguay. Good-faith motive and real harm, side by side; quotations flagged where dramatized rather than verbatim.

  9. Episode 9

    Indigenous Survival in Tierra del Fuego: Missions, Genocide, and the Refusal of Extinction

    At the frozen tip of the Americas, the spiritual conquest reached its coldest and bleakest end. An Anglican captain and his men starved in a Fuegian cave; the Yámana they came to save later rose up and killed the next missionaries on the beach. The one missionary who truly learned their language built a 32,000-word dictionary of it — and watched the people who spoke it die of the diseases his own mission carried in. To the north, sheep companies paid a bounty for dead Selk'nam, and the Catholic missions that "rescued" the survivors became quieter death camps. This ninth and final episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia closes the journey that began with the division of Alaska. We follow the South American Missionary Society from Allen Gardiner's fatal 1851 expedition through the 1859 Wulaia massacre to Thomas Bridges and his Yámana dictionary; the corporate genocide of the Selk'nam and the Salesian missions on Dawson Island, with their terrible ambiguity of rescue and ruin; and the refusal of extinction by living descendants — Cristina Calderón, the last Yaghan speaker, who died in 2022, and Hema'ny Molina, whose people won Chile's recognition as a living nation in 2023. The series ends not on erasure but on survival. Good-faith motive and real harm, side by side; quotations flagged where dramatized.

  10. Episode 10

    The Cold War Battle for Latin Souls: Liberation Theology, Evangelicals, and the CIA

    For four centuries the question in Latin America was which church would convert the Indigenous. In the Cold War it became which Christianity would win the poor — and the two answers went to war. On one side, Catholic priests reading the Gospel as a demand to overturn unjust structures; on the other, a surging conservative Protestantism preaching personal salvation and anti-communism, backed — to a degree historians still debate — by Washington and its intelligence agencies. This special thematic episode of Missionaries: Alaska to Patagonia steps off the geographic map into the 20th century. We trace liberation theology from Medellín (1968) and its Christian Base Communities; the U.S. policy turn against the radical Church (the 1969 Rockefeller Report, the 1980 Santa Fe Document); the expulsions of the Summer Institute of Linguistics over CIA-collaboration suspicions; the evangelical dictator Ríos Montt and the Maya genocide; and the murders of Archbishop Óscar Romero, four American churchwomen, and the UCA Jesuits. We are careful throughout to separate what is documented from what is contested: the killings were carried out by U.S.-backed state forces and death squads, while claims that the CIA "weaponized" evangelicalism or that missionary rhetoric provided "cover" for the killings are presented as debated interpretation, not proven fact. We give the conservative critique of liberation theology a fair hearing too, and center Latin American voices — Romero, the Jesuit Ellacuría, and the Maya survivor Rigoberta Menchú. It ends on the lasting result: the historic shift of Latin America toward Protestantism. (This episode was independently fact-checked.)

  • 10 Episodes

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Faith, power, and indigenous resistance across 500 years and two continents. From Russian Orthodox priests in Alaska to Anglicans in Tierra del Fuego — ten episodes on how missions reshaped the Americas, and how indigenous nations resisted, adapted, and survived them. Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research.

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