Rome Newsroom, Jul 27, 2025 /
06:00 am
For Yup’ik woman Danielle Beaver, 33, sharing her Catholic faith is not just a mission but the reason why she’s alive today. After joining the Native American ministry of the Diocese of Fairbanks, Alaska, in January, Beaver told CNA in an interview that it is her hope to bring younger generations to the Church that saved her life more than once.
The birth of her first child in 2010 was an awakening for Beaver — a descendent of Nora Guinn, the first woman and first Alaskan Native to be a district court judge — who, at that time, was in an abusive relationship with a man and trying to navigate her first year of college studies.
“A week after my son was born I had decided this little boy needed me,” she said. “He needed me to live and I needed to be there for him.”
“So I left that relationship and I believe God had given me him so that I can live,” she continued. “If I continued with that relationship, I don’t think I would be here.”
Beaver said “it took a village” to raise her son. Her grandparents, mother, brothers, the local Catholic community, including members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, were the family who supported her in those challenging years of her early adulthood.
While grateful for the love and fervent prayers of the community of Immaculate Conception Parish in Bethel, Alaska, particularly of its parish administrator Susan Murphy — who is also her grandmother — Beaver said going to church was not a priority until 2015.
That year, the young mother suffered a brain aneurysm and was diagnosed with Moyamoya disease, a rare blood vessel condition, while 26 weeks pregnant with her second child.
“My head was 80% filled with blood,” she told CNA. “Both she and I had a 20% chance of making it.”
She was transported to Seattle for lifesaving surgery but doctors were not convinced she or her daughter would return home to Bethel alive.
With the odds against their survival, family members turned to the Blessed Virgin Mary and trusted in the power of prayer to save them.
“My grandma was praying the rosary every night, every morning, every day,” she shared with CNA. “I had so many people praying for me around the world.”
“[Grandma] told me there’d be people in Europe praying for me, there’d be people down in South America praying for me, there’d be people around the U.S. praying for me,” she said.
As the blood in her brain began to dissolve, Beaver no longer needed to have an emergency cesarean section and managed to carry her unborn daughter to full term.
After giving birth to her baby girl, she then underwent a successful double craniotomy and STA-MCA bypass surgery to help improve blood flow to her brain.
Some doctors who cared for her during her monthslong hospital stay began to call Beaver the “miracle woman with the baby,” telling her that they never met a “survivor of an aneurysm” before.
(Story continues below)
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Looking back on her life so far, the mother of two said she believes sharing one’s personal story and faith journey is a simple but effective way of helping people discover their need for God and the Church in their own lives.
“I don’t know how many people I do reach when I tell them about my life story or what I’ve been through because I never realize that I am ministering to them,” she told CNA.
“I just feel as though I am connecting to people in some way or feel as if it is something they want or need to hear,” she said.
Boardwalk encounters
According to the young lay evangelist, Bethel’s tundra conditions are not a hindrance for her work with Native Americans in the the geographically largest Catholic diocese of the U.S., spanning approximately 410,000 square miles.
Traveling to villages and cities by boat or snow machine, Beaver makes an effort to walk the boardwalks or streets of the new places she visits and to meet people in spaces beyond the parish walls.
She told CNA most people stop to greet and welcome the “new face” in town and speak to her in their own native languages.
“Conversation starts from there,” she said. “Just in Chefornak alone, I was able to connect with an individual and we talked for a good 45 minutes, and I told her I’ll be at the church the next day.”
“On Sunday, after church, we talked again for another 30 minutes,” she said.
Still new to her role with the Fairbanks Diocese, Beaver said she has spent the last few months getting to know her colleagues better, learning, and reading books on evangelization.
“The most rewarding part of working with the Native American communities and families is knowing that I am helping my people,” she told CNA.
“I have been told by several individuals how happy or proud they are to see me, someone young, working in this position, helping with the Church,” she said. “It makes me happy.”
Connecting with the younger generations of Alaska Natives
For many Catholics living in the Diocese of Fairbanks’ Yukon-Kuskokwim Region, the opportunity to see a priest or attend Mass may be once every one to three months.
As a member of the diocese’s Ukveryaramta Tungiunun team, led by Sister Kathy Radich, OSF, Beaver said her team is doing a lot of good in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Region by assisting permanent deacons and providing formation programs, including retreats and workshops, for people.
“Deacons do speak the languages [spoken] in the villages, which helps a lot especially with the elders,” she said. “I think the main thing that is a problem though is that we don’t have a lot of young adults that attend church.”
“What I’m hoping to do with my job is to bring in the younger generations to church or back to the Church,” she shared.
Relying more on prayer than her own efforts to bring people closer to God, Beaver said she has been encouraged by some young people who have told her of their desire to go back to church.
“All I tell them is, I’ll pray for you,” she told CNA. “I don’t say ‘you should’ because I don’t want to tell them what to do, I just say I’ll pray for you.”
Kristina Millare is a freelance journalist with a professional communications background in the humanitarian aid and development sector, news journalism, entertainment marketing, politics and government, business and entrepreneurship.
