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.”
St. Michael’s Cathedral and Russian-American Company buildings, Sitka, late 1800s.
RUSSIAN AMERICA: THE FORGOTTEN FRONTIER
PROMYSHLENNIKI AND THE RUSSIAN FUR TRADE
Old Russian block house at Sitka, with “Baranov’s Castle” in background which burned in 1894.
The arrival of the first Europeans in Alaska, the Russians, grew largely out of their fur trading operations in Siberia. Trappers and traders called promyshlenniki began to extend European influence east from Moscow and Kiev toward Siberia in the late 1500s. For adventurers and entrepreneurs, Central Asia and Siberia represented the Russian frontier of the day, a land of opportunity similar to the American and Canadian frontiers of the 1700s and 1800s.
Like the American mountain men and French-Canadian voyageurs, the promyshlenniki sought furs that commanded dazzling prices in Europe and, especially, China. Sometimes they trapped the fur-bearing animals themselves; in Siberia sable was the most valuable. More often, they extracted tribute in the form of furs from the Asiatic tribes they encountered—distant relatives of the Native peoples they would later find in Alaska. This system, in which hostages were taken to enforce the tribute, later became a model for Russian operations in Alaska.
Pushing ever eastward as regions were trapped out, by the 1690s the promyshlenniki reached the Kamchatka Peninsula on Siberia’s Pacific coast. The imperial Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church extended their influence along trails and waterways opened up by these pioneers, especially during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great between 1689 and 1725. The tsarist government appointed agents to collect a 10 percent tax on the furs. In strategic places it established ostrogs, or citadels—fortified trading posts, which were isolated wilderness camps. In 1726, Okhotsk, Russia’s most important Pacific port until the early 1800s, was a tiny cluster of log sheds and dwellings, a chapel, and only 10 or 11 Russian households. (Later, St. Paul Harbor on Alaska’s Kodiak Island [founded in 1792] and New Archangel—today’s Stika, founded in 1804 and center of Russia’s American operations after 1808—were established as such remote outposts.)
In January 1725, shortly before his own death, Tsar Peter commissioned a naval expedition to explore Pacific waters north and east of Kamchatka. The emperor’s motives were more scientific and political than economic. He wanted to know if Asia and North America were joined by land, to determine the extent of Spain’s control in the Pacific, and to extend Russian power into the New World. But his order would have important economic consequences—it would inaugurate the Alaskan fur trade. Alaska’s European discovery was at hand.
FIRST CONTACTS: THE VOYAGES OF BERING AND CHIRIKOV
A sea otter. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.
Two ships set sail from the Siberian coast in June 1741 on an expedition commissioned by the Russian government. At the helm of the ill-fated St. Peter was Vitus Bering, a 60-year-old Danish captain who had served