Moravian Missionaries Found Nain in Labrador

On 12 August 1771, a party of fourteen Moravian missionaries, three married couples and eight single men led by the Danish surgeon Christoph Brasen with Jens Haven among them, began building a mission house on the northern Labrador coast they named Nain, twenty two years after Parliament recognized the Moravian Church as an ancient episcopal church in 1749, already recorded here, and one hundred fourteen years before Moravian missionaries founded the Bethel Mission in Alaska in 1885, also recorded here. Haven had first proposed a Labrador mission after an earlier attempt failed in 1752, when Inuit killed the missionary Johann Christian Erhardt and six companions; he spent years afterward learning Inuktitut and building trust with Inuit visitors to Europe before securing a hundred thousand acre land grant from the British Crown in May 1769, the government having claimed Labrador from France only six years earlier under the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Nain became the Moravian Church's first permanent Labrador station, administered with the stations that followed at Okak from 1776 and elsewhere along the coast by the mission board in Herrnhut, Germany, until the First World War. Missionaries taught reading, writing and Scripture in Inuktitut using the Roman alphabet alongside arithmetic, history, geography and singing, work that made Inuktitut one of the earliest Indigenous languages of North America to acquire a substantial written Christian literature. Nain remained the Labrador Mission's headquarters into the years after the Second World War and stands today as one of Nunatsiavut's oldest continuously inhabited communities.