Fr David Strong SJ, The Australian dictionary of Jesuit biography 1848-2015, Second Edition, 2017:
Cunningham, Thomas

Missionary; born near Taieri, New Zealand, 24 February 1906; died Point Barrow, Alaska, USA, 3 September 1959, aged 53.

Thomas Cunningham's grandfather had been deported to Australia from Ireland for some act of patriotism. His secondary education was with the Christian Brothers at Dunedin, New Zealand, and he entered the Society in Australia at Loyola College, Greenwich, 4 March 1924.

He was a junior at Rathfarnham, 1926-27, and studied philosophy at Egenhoven, Louvain, and Mt St Michael's, Spokane, Washington, USA, 1927-29. It was during his third year of philosophy that he was transferred to the Oregon province, volunteering for the Alaska mission. Here he was known as a quiet, hard-working student with a fine mind, who never seemed to get tired. He was fiercely competitive in sports and the best soccer player among the scholastics.

Regency was at Holy Cross, Alaska, 1930-31, before theology at Montreal, Canada. He was ordained in Montreal, and tertianship was at Mont Laurier, Quebec, Canada.

In 1935 he began his missionary work at Nome, Alaska, and the following year went to Diomede Island until 1944. He became an American citizen on 1 October 1941. From 1944-46 he was a chaplain with the US Army during which time he visited Australia and the Pacific region, which included New Caledonia, Manila, Honolulu, Guam and Japan. He even spent four months in Korea in 1946. He was highly regarded by the military.

After the War he spent another year at Diomede Island, and then spent three years as a missioner to the Eskimos at King Island. Here he taught school for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as catechizing, visiting the sick and sharing in village life. He also joined the men in hunting. From 1950-52 he was a chaplain with the air force, spending much of his time teaching Arctic survival to servicemen. After spending a year as a missionary to Kotzhuo, he moved north to Pointa Barrow, Alaska's northern most tip and, from there, went on long dog-sled missionary journeys across the world's last frontier, seeking Eskimo souls for Christ, and working with white Catholics in Barrow: construction workers, military personnel, people connected with the school, the hospital, the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Civil Aeronautics Administration. He also administered to the men working on the Distant Early Warning radar sites.

Cunningham's life in Alaska was a saga of heroic deeds. He once saved a village from starving by personally conducting a hunt on the Arctic Ocean during very severe weather. His trained eye picked out the ice flow that was to be the home of scientists and airmen for 18 months during the Geophysical Year of 1957. This project, known as 'Operation Ice Skate', was completed under the guidance of Cunningham.

His parish had been the 150,000 cold square miles of Alaska that lie above the Arctic Circle. His parishioners were anyone he met. For a quarter of a century he had laughed at Arctic dangers. He survived pneumonia, caught while cruising the icy Bering Sea in a leaky sealskin boat. He had leaped down an icy cliff and jumped to safety from ice cake to floating ice cake as Soviet officials sought to take him captive when his boat had been blown into Big Diomede Island during an Arctic storm.

He mushed safely through winter blizzards that had kept even the Eskimos indoors, traveling on one missionary journey for 2500 miles behind his dogs. His deeds in the Arctic became legend and were told and retold wherever Eskimo or white man gathered along the Arctic coast or north of the glacier-packed Brooks Mountain range.

Cunningham learned the Eskimo language in his early Alaskan years and spoke it with a fluency that amazed the natives. He was a scholar who compiled an Eskimo dictionary of over 7000 words and their English equivalents. He could look at an ice flow and tell the age of the ice and accurately guess its depth and longevity. He knew more of the traditions, legends, and anthropological lore of the Eskimo than anyone else in the north. Cunningham held a major's commission in the Air Force Reserve and had received a commendation-of-merit ribbon from the Secretary of the US Air Force.

He was a very cheerful person, very pro-Irish and anti-British, and a marvelous raconteur. He was small in stature but very strong. He said he chose the Alaskan mission because it was cold like his native place in New Zealand. He died of a heart attack in his rectory cabin at Point Barrow. The US Air Force flew his body from Point Barrow to Fairbanks and he was buried there on 8 September with full military honours, and a 15-gun salute. He was a remarkable Jesuit, described by a fellow Jesuit missionary as ‘one of the most loved, versatile and dynamic missionaries ever to serve the Alaska missions’, and by the Congressional Record as ‘a noble and gallant figure, a devoted servant of God and of his fellow men’. Time and Newsweek magazines, too, noted his passing.

(Reproduced by permission of Fr David Strong SJ.)