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