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Aleut baskets. Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.

NATIVE TRADITIONS

ALASKA’S FIRST PEOPLES

Eskimo village, Plover Bay (Siberia). Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.

Alaska’s original discoverers, most authorities believe, were prehistoric hunters from Siberia. In a series of periodic migrations they followed game onto a now-vanished Bering Sea land bridge that—depending on changing sea levels—sometimes connected Asia and North America to create an ancient landmass known as “Beringia.” The timing and details of these events are matters of robust debate and conjecture, fueled by ongoing climate research, language studies, archaeological discoveries, and DNA analysis.

Around 14–12,000 years ago the last ice age ended, sea levels rose, and the land bridge was permanently submerged. Alaska and Siberia were severed by the Bering Strait, 56 miles wide. As rising temperatures opened ice-free corridors in the continental interior, some hunters moved south to become ancestors of today’s lower North and South American Indians. Even earlier, recent excavations suggest, some migrants may have traveled in boats along the coast, as glaciers receded into fjords. Some later waves of land-bridge migrants stayed north, however, to become ancestors of today’s distinctive, broadly-defined Alaska Native cultures: Indian, Unangâx/ Aleut, Eskimo, and Alutiiq/Sugpiaq.

Each of these groups created its own rich spirit world and unique ways of surviving, and even prospering, in the often-harsh North. For hunters, aided by snowshoes, dogsleds, and a deep knowledge of weather patterns, the frozen landscape was a highway rather than a frightening barrier. Likewise, for coastal kayakers and canoeists, the cold ocean straits and passages became trade and communication arteries. And despite the northern latitude, the land could be generous, especially along the coasts where fish, waterfowl, and marine mammals made leisure, and even high culture, possible.

Russian fur merchants began to arrive in the 1740s. The coming of the Europeans, as elsewhere in North and South America, had a drastic impact on the Native population. Europeans unwittingly introduced measles, smallpox, and other maladies for which the Natives had no immunity. The introduction of liquor and firearms also speeded the erosion of Natives’ traditional lives. In 1741, the year Vitus Bering claimed Alaska for Russia, the Aleut population is thought to have been between 12,000 and 15,000. By 1800 it had dwindled to 2,000. A similar fate befell some other Native groups, such as the Tlingit and Haida of Alaska’s Southeast.

There were notable cases of harmony between Natives and newcomers. Contacts with outsiders, at least temporarily, actually enriched the indigenous cultures. On the Southeast coast, for example, the ready availability of iron tools encouraged an expansion of Native woodworking traditions. New wealth created by the fur trade made more frequent and lavish ceremonial feasts, or potlatches, possible.

But the sometimes-violent struggle for control of the region led inevitably to non-Native dominance. Some Russian Orthodox priests and Anglo-American missionaries made sincere, though sometimes misguided, efforts to protect and educate the Natives. Yet in Russian America, as in the Canadian and American West, the commercial drive usually won out. A favorite saying of the rough-and-ready promyshlenniki (Russian fur traders) could just as easily describe the unrestrained conduct of many of Alaska’s other foreign visitors: “God is in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.”

BAIDARKA: THE UNANGÂX WAY

Aleut kayaker of Unalaska. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

Today’s 8,000 Aleut people descend from hunters who moved from the Alaska mainland into the Aleutian Chain some 4,500 years ago. The volcanic peaks of the Aleutian Islands sweep in a 1,200-mile arc from the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula toward Kamchatka in Siberia along the top of the “Pacific Rim.” The name “Alaska” itself may derive from the Aleut word “alaxsxag” or “agunalaksh,” meaning either “great land,” or more poetically “shores where the sea breaks its back.”

Aleutian temperatures are surprisingly mild—the most southerly island lies just north of Seattle’s latitude—but violent 125-knot winds, heavy rain, and dense fog are typical. Yet below uninviting skies the ocean abounds with life. This natural wealth drew the Aleuts toward the sea and a seafaring life.

Knowledge of pre-Russian contact Aleut life is sparse, though archaeologists are unearthing more evidence. The word “Aleut” is actually a Russian label. The people called themselves Unangâx (oo-NUNG-ah, “original people”), but under Russian rule they accepted the term Aleut—and Orthodox Christianity, a hallmark of their post-contact identity. In today’s climate of heritage revival, “Unangâx” (sing. “Unangan”) is increasingly used, though “Aleut” remains common. In many ways the best authority on Aleut folkways is Father Ivan Veniaminov, who worked as a Russian Orthodox priest among the Aleuts in the 1820s and 1830s, leaving detailed and enlightening notes on their culture. The people lived in earthen lodges (called barabaras by the Russians) and mummified and entombed some of their elite dead in caves where volcanic heat aided preservation. Aleut women were remarkable basket makers and seamstresses, weaving elegant watertight containers from island grasses and fashioning all-weather clothing from the skins of birds and marine animals. The men were consummate masters of maritime hunting, perfectly adapted to their marine world. In this they exemplified the qualities that strike us today as so remarkable about Alaska’s Native peoples: their ingenious, creative use of the environment and their harmonious adjustment to nature’s rhythms.

Using harpoons and wearing steam-bent visors made of carved and painted driftwood and fitted with amulets designed to ensure hunting success, Aleut paddlers traveled hundreds of miles in skin-covered kayaks that the Russians called baidarkas. Early visitors marveled at the seaworthiness and sheer grace of these boats, which Aleut boys learned to make and maneuver from the age of six or seven. “If perfect symmetry, smoothness, and proportion constitute beauty, they are beautiful,” wrote 18th-century traveler Martin Sauer. Russian naval officer Gavriil Davydov observed, “The one-man Aleut baidarka is so narrow and light that hardly anyone else would dare to put to sea in them, although the Aleuts fear no storm when in them.”

Aleuts made their boats watertight by fastening their gutskin parkas to the gunwales of their vessels—a method still used by modern kayakers. Their quarry were Steller’s sea lions, seals, sea otters, the now-extinct Steller’s sea cow, and (using poisoned harpoon points) small whales. And they harvested salmon, halibut, and other marine life.

Aleut hunter with bentwood visor. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

Ironically, the hunters’ prowess worked to their disadvantage after Russian discovery. Siberian fur traders used them as forced labor to do their hunting for them, holding their families hostage. Aleut warriors resisted, but arrows and amulets couldn’t prevail against firearms. The three-hatch baidarka was devised to enhance control over the hunters: an armed Russian overseer occupied the lead kayak’s middle seat in every hunting party. By the 1830s, Aleut paddlers—aided by transport on ships—traveled as far afield as California in relentless pursuit of the sea otter. Some hunters were also resettled north to the Pribilof Islands to harvest fur seals for their Russian overlords.

INUA: THE ESKIMO WORLD

Eskimos of the Gulf of Kotzebue. Drawing by Louis Choris, 1816–17.

Eskimos, the last of Alaska’s Native people to migrate from Siberia, belong to a hunting culture spanning the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland. They occupy, in fact, the largest geographical expanse of any of the earth’s cultures. The name “Eskimo” evokes many stereotypes—ice-hewn igloos, for instance, sometimes built by Greenlanders and the Canadian Inuit but not (except in traveling emergencies) by Alaska Natives. In truth, the term encompasses diverse ways of life reflecting the different conditions under which Eskimos live. Alaska’s Eskimos belong to two distinct language groups. Above the northern shore of Norton Sound live the Iñupiat; south of that line Yup’ik is spoken, from the sprawling Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta down to Bristol Bay and the Alaska Peninsula. A small, distinct subgroup known as Siberian Yupik—walrus and whale hunters with kinship ties to Russian Natives—live mainly on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. These Eskimo subcultures share many customs yet are different in important ways.

The Iñupiat people of the High Arctic live half the year or more under dark and frigid conditions, yet have evolved a hunting and whaling culture suited to their daunting environment. The Yup’ik Eskimos live in a less severe, subarctic setting, rich in sea mammals, salmon, waterfowl, and herds of inland caribou.

The early Eskimos’ weapons and hunting kit, fashioned from bone, ivory, and driftwood and engraved with magic images, reflected their belief that animals wish to be killed by beautiful tools. Despite the stark appearance of their world—the treeless landscape and icy waters—resources were plentiful to the practiced eye. Roaming inland—also home to Athabascan Indians with whom they traded and often warred—they took caribou, bear, and other land animals. In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the Yup’ik established many inland settlements.

Men fished, hunted waterfowl, and harpooned seals from slender kayaks. Wider beamed umiaks—open-hulled vessels covered in walrus hide—carried hunting parties in pursuit of whales and ivory-tusked walrus. An Eskimo specialty, especially among the Iñupiat, whale hunting required high levels of community planning and sharing. Membership in a whaling crew brought special honor and, following a successful hunt, the meat was divided among all members of the community.

Winter’s enforced leisure produced a rich ceremonial life, centered in the qasgiq (men’s house), an earthen and driftwood bath-house and hunter’s lodge that doubled as a meeting place for community rituals. In the Eskimo world, humans, animals, and even stones have an inner soul, or inua, with the power to transform into other life forms. A man might become a seal, or a walrus a man. A dead creature’s spirit remained alive in the bladder, carefully preserved by the hunter until—in the bladder festival—it was returned to the sea to be reborn in another animal.

Whalers invaded west Alaskan waters in the 1840s; traders brought firearms, liquor, illness, and the cash economy; and gold was found at Nome in 1898. By the turn of the century, each sizable settlement included a modern school and white schoolmaster. Today, the old ways survive, but the modern hunter prefers the snowmobile and outboard engine to the sled or kayak. Yet the spirit world remains a powerful force for traditional Eskimos, and endures in their graceful bone and ivory carvings, wooden masks, and other Native arts.

ALASKA’S ATHABASCAN PEOPLE

Athabascan man of Fort Yukon. Photo by E.W. Nelson, about 1877.

Alaska’s Athabascan Natives, scattered mainly across the Interior, occupy a vast homeland that also extends south to Cook Inlet’s shores, part of the Kenai Peninsula, and eastward to the Copper River basin and Canada. Bows and arrows for hunting, snowshoes, fringed and beaded moose and caribou hide clothing, and canoes and utensils made of birch bark were hallmarks of their traditional culture. Athabascans are divided into various regional groups—the Tanaina of Cook Inlet, the Tanana and Koyukon of the central Interior, and the Ahtna of the Copper River country, for instance. (The Eyak, a small group related to Athabascans but influenced by Tlingit culture, live in the Copper River delta.) Their diverse languages, part of the same broad Na-Dene speech group, belong to the same language family as the Southwest’s Navajo and Apache. Mainly nomadic, Athabascan hunters and trappers followed moose, caribou, and other mammals of the taiga steppe, muskeg flats, and conifer and birch forests lying north of the coastal mountains. Along major rivers and tributaries, they lived a seminomadic life, setting up summer fish camps to harvest the rich salmon runs swimming upriver from the sea.

Spartan survivalists habituated to Alaska’s severe Interior winters, Athabascan peoples were known for exceptional strength, resourcefulness, and stamina. They traveled light in small groups, on a moment’s notice, following the migration paths of their game. Their caches, elevated log boxes to store food and gear, are icons of wild Alaska. In summer they lived in easily collapsible bark houses, and in winter built semi-underground dwellings or used domed lodges of moose or caribou hide. Caribou were as important to Alaska’s Athabascans as bison were to southern Plains Indians, and their hunting methods were highly efficient. In autumn, herds were driven into staked barriers equipped with snares, or funneled into corrals where 20 hunters could kill hundreds of animals—several months’ supply of food, skins, horn, and bones.

When Russian agents established an Interior fur trade in southwest Alaska in the 1820s and 1830s, many Athabascans of the region became contract trappers employed by the Russian-American Company. It was an entrepreneurial way of life for which their traditions of mobility and solitary hardiness prepared them well.

In the enforced leisure of winter, they held potlatches—ceremonial feasts to mark important events such as deaths, births, and marriages.

For Athabascans, as for other Alaska Natives, all creation was a spirit realm in which the human and non-human were one. Elaborate rituals and taboos governed the use of nature’s resources. There was a formalized reverence for the earth and its life forms. Nature in the Interior was less generous than along the coast; resources were scarce, starvation was possible in lean years, and the spirit of every animal killed demanded its due of gratitude and honor. Tradition required, for instance, that each animal be ritually fed after being killed. Despite Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic missionary activity, ancient beliefs survive even today among many villagers. “They believe everything has spirits,” writes a contemporary Eskimo neighbor. “The land, the leaves, water, everything… [Their] view is that this is a watchful world, and the world knows human action. So you have to be really careful what you do, or else there will be consequences.”

PEOPLE OF THE RAIN FOREST: TLINGIT, HAIDA, AND TSIMSHIAN

Cape Fox village near Wrangell. Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.

The gray-green islands, misty fjords, and spruce and cedar rainforests of Alaska’s Southeast are home to three Indian groups: the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian. At the time of Russian contact (and today), the Tlingit were most numerous of these Native people, their villages and fishing camps strewn among the islands and along the narrow shore from Yakutat Bay south to today’s Prince of Wales Island. The Haida, renowned builders of seagoing dugout canoes, were clustered on the (now Canadian) Queen Charlotte Islands—today called Haida Gwaii—and the south end of Prince of Wales Island. The Tsimshian were last to arrive in Alaska. Seeking better living conditions, 823 Tsimshian moved from British Columbia to Alaska’s Annette Island near Ketchikan in 1887, led by Anglican lay minister William Duncan. Today about 1,000 Alaska Tsimshian live there in the village of Metlakatla, which is Alaska’s only Indian reservation.

Alaska’s linguistically and ethnically distinct but culturally similar Southeast Indian peoples lived in an area blessed with a mild, maritime climate and plentiful food. The abundant salmon made possible a life of relative wealth and leisure. They evolved elaborate rituals and kinship systems, and the arts flourished, creating the most complex Native American cultures and societies north of Mexico’s Mayan and Aztec civilizations. This sophistication was amply reflected in their richly carved cedar artifacts, such as ceremonial masks, house posts, colorful totem poles, and canoes, and their striking woven hats, baskets, and the celebrated blankets of the Chilkat Tlingit.

A defining tradition of the Southeast peoples was the potlatch, an elaborate ceremonial feast involving dancing, storytelling, and gift-giving by the hosts. Potlatches were held to celebrate major life events and to validate the social status of the hosts. Occasionally slaves, commercially valuable commodities, were sacrificed or set free as ultimate proof of the host’s wealth, or highly valued “coppers”—shield-like sheets of pounded copper—might be broken or destroyed.

Outsiders considered the potlatch, like masks and totems, evidence of heathenism—something to be eradicated. In fact, the potlatch tradition embodied an important logic, for it reinforced the vital fabric of social roles and authority patterns that held Southeast Coast cultures together. Efforts by whites to uproot potlatching by discouraging Native customs or even prohibition (the potlatch was outlawed in neighboring Canada from 1884 to 1951) served to erode community bonds and, ultimately, cultural vigor. Adding to the impact of liquor, firearms, and new diseases, the traditional ways of the coastal peoples rapidly deteriorated. In recent decades the potlatch has returned and Native language-recovery programs have blossomed, contributing to a renewal of cultural prosperity. Today, new generations are rediscovering a heritage that was almost extinguished.

CROSSROADS OF CULTURES: ALUTIIQ/SUGPIAQ HERITAGE IN ALASKA’S GULF

“We are Alutiiq! We are Alutiiq!” In Kodiak’s new Alutiiq Museum, youthful dancers in ethnic regalia proudly intoned the chant during a performance shortly after its 1995 opening. Their verbal tattoo proclaimed the rise of a newly minted sense of Native community among residents of the Gulf of Alaska. Was it a renaissance of ancient heritage or an invention of modern politics? Or both?

Until the 1980s ethnologists usually distinguished three broad Alaska Native cultures: Unangâx/Aleut, Eskimo, and Indian. Yet civil rights ideals of the 1960s—combined with the discovery of Alaskan oil and Native land claims legislation (see page 120 and 124)—converged to kindle a Native politics in a new key, including on Kodiak Island, Prince William Sound, and the Kenai and Alaska Peninsulas. Today, knowledgeable observers often add “Alutiiq” or “Sugpiaq” (or both) to the inventory of Alaska’s broadly defined Native groups.

This story has a richly braided background. In the 1700s, Russian colonizers imported the Siberian word “Aleut” (Aleuty) as a catch-all name for Natives they subjugated in the Aleutian Islands and Alaska’s Pacific Gulf (including the Kodiak Archipelago). Though people of these two areas spoke different languages and often fought, the people eventually accepted the label, along with Russian Orthodox Christianity. Many Russian traders married Native wives, producing a sizable “creole” (kreoly) population with mixed ancestry and Russian surnames. The name “Aleut,” Orthodox Christianity, and Russian ancestry became signatures of identity. After America’s 1867 purchase of Alaska, the population was leavened by influxes of Americans and Europeans to work in whaling and fisheries. Many married local wives, yielding a host of European surnames. According to late Kodiak Judge Roy Madsen, whose father was Danish, “They flavored the mix, like herbs applied to a dish after the salt and pepper.”

Meanwhile, linguists determined that the speech of most Gulf Natives derived from the Yup’ik languages of Bering Sea Eskimos, but was entirely different from that of Aleutian islanders, so ethnologists decided they were “Pacific Eskimo” rather than Aleut. (More localized ethnic modifiers were widely used, too, especially “Koniag” and “Chugach.”) Generally, though, local people rejected “Eskimo” and preferred “Aleut” (or “Russian” or just “American”). Anthropologists conceded that their folkways shared more with Aleuts than Eskimos; to confound things, scholars noticed that some of their art forms overlapped with Southeast Alaska’s Tlingit Indians. Centuries of cross-fertilization created, as Madsen observed, a “heterogeneous culture… mixed, mingled, blended and combined with those of many other cultures… ”

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA) (see page 136) became a catalyst for an experiment to fuse these sundry traditions into a shared sense of “Alutiiq” ethnicity. This federal law resolved Native land claims to enable construction of a pipeline to move Arctic oil to Alaska’s Gulf. It awarded Alaska’s Native groups, collectively, 44 million acres of land and $962.5 million, and established regional economic development corporations to manage the wealth for Native shareholders (defined as people of at least one-quarter Alaska Native ancestry). Overnight, it created ethnically defined, regional shareholder constituencies with varying financial and political interests. Across Alaska, Native leaders began to craft strategies that promoted stockholders’ interests. They quickly recognized the psychological importance of shared heritage for galvanizing and empowering constituents—not least in Alaska’s Gulf, with its mosaic of influences and sometimes absent or confused sense of Native ethnicity. In the 1970s, recalls Gordon Pullar, little Native heritage awareness existed in Kodiak; when named president of the Kodiak Area Native Association in 1983, he himself “had little idea of what it meant to be Alutiiq.” Enabled by ANCSA and federal grants, local leaders and curators—some fashioning new Native identities themselves—launched heritage projects in the 1980s: museums, exhibitions, archaeological digs, and school and language-revival programs. Damages from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill financed the Alutiiq Museum. The Alutiiq identity project and its semantics are still evolving. Indeed, the (evidently pre-Russian) name “Sugpiaq” (meaning “the real people”) increasingly rivals “Alutiiq” as a preferred name in some circles. Still, it appears that Kodiak’s heritage-builders have made a case for an imagined Alutiiq community in Alaska’s Pacific Gulf. There’s perhaps irony, though, in the fact that “Alutiiq” is Yup’ik (Sugtestun) rendition of that old Russian import “Aleut.”