The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. The Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

The Cottage, The Church, The Claim: Settlement and God’s Plenty in Native Alaska

Lecture by Maura Lucking
Chaired by Lucia Allais

This talk will address the planning, construction, and occupation of a Native Alaskan ‘cottage settlement’ by Presbyterian missionaries outside Sitka, Alaska in the 1880s as an instrument of conversion. This conversion entailed both the tentative formalization of an ungoverned U.S. territory into claims for aboriginal title and the Christianization of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsm’syen peoples through the disciplinary niceties of western domestic architecture. The use of the cottage as a colonial housing type represents an important development from its origins in European enclosure, where the cottager was defined and therefore regulated as a legal status of landlessness in moments of resource consolidation. I argue that the cottage settlement adopted an ethos of Calvinist evangelism, one that held space both for the social and prosperity gospels at work in their Alaskan mission. Aesthetically legible conventions of settlement became allowed the church to operate within the ambiguous legal landscape of territorial Alaska, tethered to the financial success of the church as a fundraiser and itself as a speculator in the failed Sitka gold rush. The cottage settlement also, however provided a framework for indigenous efforts at self-determination under new U.S. governance, inspired by Tlingit spiritual and legal conceptions of clan ownership rights (at.óow) that could not be wholly subsumed by the land’s conversion into property.