In sharp contrast to the previous cases I have presented, where ethnologists, theologians and academics freely associated what they interpreted as a primordial belief in a High God among indigenous societies with a notion of God inspired by Christianity, in Alaska no similar movements have been developed. This may be explained in part by the powerful suppression of all indigenous cultural expressions by missionaries and teachers after the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. The coordinated effort to replace one civilization with another can be traced to Sheldon Jackson, who, as a Presbyterian missionary, first arrived in Alaska in 1877. Jackson masterminded the Protestant comity strategy, which was agreed among denominational leaders in a meeting in New York in 1880, and was appointed the United States General Agent for Education in Alaska in 1885, a post he retained until 1907 (Cox 1991: 13–28). Jackson devised a plan to use government-paid missionary teachers to evangelize Alaskan Natives and to assimilate them into American culture. This included a massive effort to eradicate traditional housing, language, oral traditions, economy, marriage patterns and, of course, the practices of shamans and the apparel associated with them, principally masks (Anderson & Eells 1935: 111–23). In his first report to the Federal Office of Education as General Agent for Education in Alaska in 1886, Jackson (1886: 83) wrote: “As the people make progress, catch the spirit of civilization and come under the influences which emanate from the schools, they gradually begin to give up their old methods of living, and adopt the American”.