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.”
St. Michael’s Cathedral and Russian-American
