Aleuts - History and Cultural Relations

Archaeological evidence from Anagula Island in Nikolsk Bay, Unimak, eastern Aleutians, indicates that this area was inhabited perhaps as early as 8,000-9,000 years ago. Some researchers assert that there is a cultural continuity between these finds and other later finds in the area but this has not been satisfactorily demonstrated and is questioned by other specialists. It is generally accepted, however, that populations culturally ancestral to the Aleuts inhabited the eastern Aleutians for the last 4,000 years and the western end of the chain, the Near Islands, for about 2,000 to possibly 3,000 years, with a gradient of the currently accepted dates of occupation running from west to east across the central (Andreanov) and Rat Islands. Several archaeologists (e.g., McCartney 1984, 121, and Turner 1974) have noted, on examining the results of midden-site excavations, that there appears to be a technological, if not cultural, continuity for the last 4,000 years over much of the archipelago, whereas physical remains show a marked dichotomy. There are, however, stylistic variations in space, and art objects especially show marked regional differences, so that at present at least four artistic styles can be defined. It is possible that cultural uniformity inferred from a limited archaeological record is rather illusory. In particular, regional differences in bone carving are marked (McCartney 1984, 128). At contact, in the eighteenth century, Aleut themselves recognized several political subdivisions, and to this day informants maintain that there were corresponding cultural differences.

According both to Aleut traditions and to observations by the early Russian seafarers in the second half of the eighteenth century, interregional warfare and raiding were endemic. In the Near Islands the traditional accounts hold that shortly before the arrival of the Russians in the middle of the eighteenth century, there were devastating raids from the east in which the Near Islands became virtually depopulated.

There appear to have been maritime contacts with Asian, most probably Japanese, seafarers. It is not to be excluded from consideration that some European (possibly Dutch or Portuguese) shipping touched upon the Aleutian shores prior to the middle eighteenth century, though direct evidence for this is lacking. In any case, iron was known to the Aleuts in precontact times and is documented both archaeologically and historically. In fact, one historical source mentions that the Aleuts preferred Japanese shipwrecks because Japanese nails were longer and broader than those of Russian manufacture. Iron, obtained from shipwrecks or in trade, was then cold-hammered. The most frequently manufactured items were apparently iron fighting knives (daggers). These were reported for the Shumagin Archipelago at first recorded European contact, by the Russians, in 1741.

Aleuts had elaborate armaments, including rod and slat armor, shields, a sinew-backed compound bow, and a war lance. At sea, darts cast by means of an atlatl (also used extensively in marine hunting) were used.

Following the first Russian naval expedition to Alaska's Pacific shore in 1741, under the overall command of Vitus Bering, the Russians claimed Alaska. Beginning about 1745 Russian entrepreneurs penetrated the Near Islands and, using these and the Commander Islands (where Bering's crew wintered in 1741) as a base, advanced steadily eastward. By 1758, but possibly a decade earlier, they had arrived at the eastern Aleutians and by 1761, the Alaska Peninsula and Shumagin Archipelago.

In general, Russian penetration resulted in major changes in Aleut culture within a span of two to three generations. The object was trade for furs, primarily those of sea otters, but already in the 1750s polar foxes were brought from the Commander Islands to the Near Islands, and by 1761 to 1763 Aleuts were introduced to the use of the Siberian type of fox trap and began to trap for barter with the Russians. Use of salt and salt making also found their way into the Aleut cultural inventory very early, as did the wet-steam bath.

Early Aleut-Russian contact was characterized by a steadily growing fur trade, which seriously affected the indigenous economic system, and by sporadic outbreaks of violence and confrontation. The best-known and most extensively documented conflict occurred in the winter of 1763, encompassing the political unit of the Qawalangin (Imnak and Unalaska islands) and extending farther eastward to Unimak. Four Russian trading vessels were destroyed, and of their crews only twelve men (eight Kamchadals and four Russians) survived. This incident provoked a retaliation, after the survivors were picked up by other vessels, and justified a series of preventive strikes in 1766, in which one Russian skipper destroyed Aleut technological equipment. The Qawalangin then accepted defeat, although sporadic outbreaks of fighting continued for another two decades in other areas. Thus, the Four Mountain Island group population was attacked sometime after 1770, most probably in 1772, and resistance in the Krenitsyn Islands and the Unimak/Sanak area is documented through the decade of the 1770s. By this time, however, Aleut leaders were also forming alliances with particular Russian skippers, aiding them in their own intercompany trade conflicts over hunting territories. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Aleuts sailed eastward with Russian skippers, participating in conflicts with the neighboring Kodiak Islanders and the Chugach on Prince William Sound and eventually supplying the Russians with cheap labor as well as armed manpower. It was at this time (1786-1787) that the first Aleut contingent accompanied Russian crews to the Pribylov Islands, where fur-seal rookeries were found in 1786. In 1799 Emperor Paul I granted a fur-trade monopoly to a single merchant company, thus eliminating competition. Consequently, the Aleut leadership lost any room for maneuver and the opportunity to exploit intercompany competition to their advantage. In the eastern Aleutians, impressment of able-bodied men became the rule. The old, the young, and the women remaining in the villages suffered privation. The Russian government's attempts to protect Aleut rights were ineffectual at this time. Because of circumstances outside of the control of the Russian American Company, its grip slackened in some areas. In particular, the western Aleutians, the Rat Islands, and the central Aleutians reverted to a subsistance economy. Small Russian American Company outposts were maintained on Atka and Attu, administered from Okhotsk. Contact with the outside world became minimal. A drastic drop in population apparently occurred throughout the archipelago, in all probability because of the new diseases and social and economic disruption, as well as relocation of relatively large groups to the Pribylov Islands, the Kodiak Archipelago, and the Alaska mainland.

In 1818 the conduct of the Russian American Company officials came under government scrutiny, and the Aleut population received some protection from abuses. Their status was equated to that of the free peasants in Russia, but they were freed from taxation. The Aleut settlements were obliged, however, to provide a number of young men for service to the company in lieu of the military obligation to which the Russian peasantry was subject.

This service, however, was limited in time, subject to the same regulations as those in metropolitan Russia governing military conscription, and the Aleuts were paid for their labor and catch according to an officially approved schedule of prices. In some areas, such as in the Central Aleutians, Aleuts did not enter company service but sold all their sea-otter catch to the company. Fox trapping became an industry. Throughout the nineteenth century Russians kept introducing a variety of valuable fox species to the Andreanov and Rat islands, where the foxes were regularly "harvested" by the Aleuts. The cash economy became an accepted fact of life, although traditional sea-otter hunting methods were employed throughout the Russian period. Aleuts permanently settled in the Pribylov and Commander Islands began to hunt fur seals. This enterprise was managed in the Pribylovs for several decades by a man of Aleut origin, Kassian Shaiashnikov. Beginning in 1805, the Commander Islands were exploited for the Russian American Company by a Russian crew, who were abandoned there until 1812. In that year they elected to stay on, and sometime between 1812 and 1824 they were joined by a group of Attuan Aleuts. In 1828-1829 the fur sealing enterprise there was reorganized and the islands were put under the jurisdiction of the Alaskan office of the company. At this time Attuans concentrated on Mednoi or Copper Island, whereas the crew for Bering Island was provided by volunteers from Amila/Atka and Rat islands. In 1866 a number of large families moved from the Commander Islands to the Pribylovs. Later on, after the sale of Alaska to the United States, the Commander Island Aleuts were joined by a group of Kodiak Islanders, who earlier had been living on Urup Island in the Kuriles. Also in the 1870s a group of Atkans and Attuans moved to the Commander Islands from the territory newly acquired by the United States.

Orthodox Christianity was introduced to the Aleuts by laymen at the earliest contact and spread with great rapidity. Today being Orthodox is an identity marker for most of the Alaskan populations who call themselves Aleut. With Orthodox Christianity came literacy. Some Russian traders took their godsons to Siberia and sent them to schools there. When in 1824 the first resident parish priest, Ioann Veniaminov, was appointed to the Aleutians (soon followed, in 1828, by the first Orthodox priest of Aleut descent, Iakov Netsvetov, in his mother's native Central Aleutians), literacy in the Aleut language was created. Veniaminov and Netsvetov translated into two Aleut dialects scriptures and church services and wrote compositions of moral content in Aleut. By the end of the Russian period, most Aleut men were literate in their own language and many also in Russian. During the Russian period, local affairs were managed by the Aleut leadership. By the end of the period, the Aleuts—along with that stratum of the population that could claim mixed descent, the Creoles—provided the backbone for the Russian activities in Alaska.

When Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, American ventures, primarily the Alaska Commercial Company, continued to employ Aleuts as sea-otter hunters and introduced the use of rifles in the hunt. At Akutan and Kodiak, where commercial whaling stations were established, Aleuts were hired to man the whaling stations and hunt whales. This employment continued until the eve of World War II. Fox trapping also continued. For a short while, some of the Aleuts experienced an economic boom. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the population of sea otters was depleted (their hunting was prohibited in 1911 by an international convention), and the market for fox fur collapsed not too long before the outbreak of World War II. The only economic opportunities were provided by the fur-seal harvest in the Pribylov Islands, now a U.S.-government enterprise. The situation in the Pribylovs became very difficult, however. Aleut rights were not recognized, and the resident Aleuts were treated as indentured laborers. Local agents interfered in community affairs, in private affairs of individuals, and in the conduct of the church and the local church school (maintained by the Aleuts themselves). Only in the last several decades have the Pribylov Aleuts gained their citizenship rights.

During World War II, Aleuts were evacuated from their homeland to Alaska's southeast, where they were quartered in abandoned mining camps and canneries. The young were taken to boarding schools. The Aleuts lost nearly one-third of their population, mostly the old and the very young, to epidemic diseases. The cultural disruption thus created is felt to this day. In 1982 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians recommended that survivors be paid compensation, which was finally paid to a few survivors in 1989-1990.