Alaska Natives at the Time of the Invasions: A Cultural Profile Project

Draft 3

Do not quote or copy without permission from Mike Gaffney or from Ray Barnhardt at the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Mike Gaffney suggests that one read the Teacher's Manual Preview first to get a good idea about the purpose and design of this secondary school textbook.

Mike Gaffney

Chapter 3
Alaska Native Cultures – Think Pluralism!

There is no such person as an Alaska Native! In the last chapter we spent some time deciding what names to use when identifying the indigenous peoples of North America. Now we further develop the identification and naming process for different Alaska Native groups. But the first thing we need to understand is that there really is no such person as an Alaska Native. Let’s explain.

When talking or writing about Alaska Natives, many times we say the “Natives” or the “Native people.” We say things like, “a Native viewpoint” or “Native studies” or “Native rights.” But we must keep in mind that the term “Native” is simply a quick, convenient way to distinguish Native people and their experiences from those of non-Native people. Indeed, even a passing glance at the multi-cultural realities of Native Alaska tells us that there has never been just one Alaska Native cultural group.

There has never been a single Native language or single Native society or single Native history. There are Haida, Tlingit, Eyak, Chugach, Alutiiq, Aleut (Unangan), Central Yup’ik, Siberian Yupik, Iñupiaq, and a variety of Athabaskan-speaking peoples. These are human groups dating from ancient times with cultures and languages distinct from one another. Thanks largely to the work of the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, we can even take Athabaskan speaking groups and sort them into eleven regional societies, each with its own language and history. We should never forget this reality of Native cultural pluralism when we hear, read, or say the word “Native.”

If anything, the term Alaska Native is a foreign concept brought to Alaska by Russians and Americans to distinguish themselves from the indigenous Native peoples. Much of Alaska’s history is about how these outsiders – particularly the Americans – constructed political and legal systems to maintained this distinction. If the term “Alaska Native” has any basis in reality, it is as a political concept signifying the common political and legal interests of all Alaska Natives regardless of culture, language, or geographic region.

It is even said by some that the term Alaska Native wasn’t often heard in Native communities until the land claims movement of the 1960s. As Natives from all regions of the state became more aware of the land claims issue, they found common political and legal ground as “Natives,” not just as Eskimos or Indians, or as Iñupiaq or Tlingit. From this struggle emerged a statewide organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), to represent the interests of all Native peoples within the larger Alaskan and American political and legal systems.

People vs. Peoples. In the last chapter we explained our method for naming Indigenous peoples of North America. Recall that we used the collective plural “peoples” rather than the collective singular “people.” In the last several paragraphs we also said “Native peoples” and not “Native people.” This is not a trivial word game. As words get used over time in certain situations, they take on different meanings, sometimes straying far from the original dictionary definition. Take the word, bad, for example. A formal dictionary definition says it is an adjective referring to something harmful, of poor quality, or most unfortunate. But today it can have the opposite meaning depending on how you use it. For example, “He ordered the biggest, baddest snow machine available.”

In international forums such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, an important distinction is made between the words, people and peoples. “People” is used as we use it in everyday life — as a collective noun. For example, it is often said that all American people are equal under the law. The commonly accepted meaning is that all Americans, as individual citizens, should be treated equally by the law. The term “peoples,” however, is now used to indicate the existence of indigenous groups whose cultural traditions are obviously different from the majority population of a sovereign nation. Because “peoples” is so often used in international discussions of indigenous and minority group rights, it now signals a possible international law issue. These indigenous groups may have legal rights as culturally distinct peoples along with their ordinary rights as individual citizens of the nation in which they reside.

For years the United States has sent representatives to international meetings on the rights and treatment of indigenous people. And for years these American representatives have opposed any use of “Native American peoples.” They have no objection to the use of “Native American people of the United States.” What they fear is that any use of peoples could be interpreted as a willingness by the United States to recognize a form of Native tribal sovereignty defined not by American law but by some international declaration on Indigenous peoples rights. In other words, the Americans have been saying: “We, the sovereign nation of the United States, will define the legal status of our indigenous tribes, not some international body of foreigners.”

The ANLC Map. This textbook includes a smaller foldout version of the map, Native Peoples and Languages of Alaska published by the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 1982. Now is the time to take out your copy of the ANLC map. Starting with the next section of this chapter, you are given instructions for studying its details. But first some background information on the map’s purpose and design.

In the 1970s, ANLC undertook a research project to map the Native languages of the state. In 1982 they updated their research and published a new Alaska Native language map. ANLC wished to determine the extent to which Native languages continued to be spoken in the everyday life of Native communities around the state. They were especially interested in the number of youngsters speaking their Native language because this is a good indicator of a language’s current and future strength.

What makes this map so useful is that it places a large amount of significant information right in front of us. At a single glance we have what we need to understand the remarkable pluralism of Native languages and cultures. But note that the research represented by the map was completed decades ago. More recent research suggests that the total number of Native language speakers is less today then in 1982, perhaps in some cases much less. Yet the relative numbers seemed to have remained fairly constant. That is, those Native groups having the most speakers of their Native language in 1982 still have the most speakers when compared to other Native groups.

For example, the actual or total number of everyday speakers of Central Yup’ik surely has declined since 1982. According to ANLC, there is today about 21,000 Central Yup’ik people, of whom about 10,000 are speakers of the language. Children still speak Yup'ik as their first language in 17 of 68 villages. In contrast, the Tlingit Indian population of Alaska is about 10,000, but has only about 500 speakers of the language. Similarly, the current population of Koyukon Athabaskans is about 2,300, of whom only about 300 speak the language. The point is that compared to the Tlingit and the Koyukon, the Central Yup’ik have experienced much less of a language shift to English.¹

ANLC also assists our study with short explanations on the map itself. Note how each village has a dot ○ the size of which indicates the population size of the village. The extent to which a dot is blacken indicates the estimated number of children speaking the Native language in that village in 1982 ( e.g., ● = most children speaking the language ).

Finally, note ANLC’s use of the plural collective noun, “peoples” in the title of their map. Recall that according to common international usage, a different meaning could be assigned if the title was the collective singular – “Alaska Native People and their Languages.” It would be like saying, “ The American People and Languages they speak.” By using the plural collective, ANLC emphasizes the distinctive cultural and linguistic pluralism of Native Alaska. And it certainly emphasizes the obvious difference between the majority culture and language of the United States, including Alaska, and the cultures and languages of Native Alaska.

Language shifts and historical questions. At this point you might be asking questions such as: Isn’t this a history project? Why are we using what is essentially a map of language demographics – a map of statistics about language use among Native populations? In fact, the only time the word “history” appears on the ANLC wall map is in a short paragraph on how Native languages were suppressed by schools where children were actually punished for speaking their language. So what is the connection between this map and Native history? [demography = statistical study of population characteristics such as the number of people living in a particular area and their settlement patterns.]

While the map does not contain historical information, it does raise big historical questions. For example, the map shows there has occurred a much greater language shift to English among the Tlingit and the Koyukon Athabaskan than among the Central Yup’ik. Why? Obviously before the Russian and American invasions, all that was spoken in Alaska were Native languages. Just as obviously, the colonizing presence of powerful outsiders, especially the Americans after 1867, caused language shifts in many Native communities.

So an interesting historical question arises: What happened to cause a much greater shift to English among the Tlingit and Koyukon compared to the Central Yup’ik? To answer this question requires research into Yup’ik as well as into Tlingit and Koyukon contact histories to see how these histories differed. Indeed, the map raises other historical questions of a similar nature. Just within the Central Yup’ik region there is this historical question: Why is the Yup’ik language much stronger along the Kuskokwim River and the Bering Sea coast than in the Bristol Bay area and along the Yukon River? Again, several different contact histories must be examined for the answer.

The ANLC map is therefore worth close examination for two reasons. The first is that it clearly displays information showing the pluralistic nature of Native languages and cultures. This is absolutely required information. It makes no sense to attempt a more detailed study of Native cultures and histories without first understanding this pluralism. Secondly, the more we study the map, the more likely it is that comparative historical questions will occur to us. We will see that not only is there a pluralism of Native cultures but also a pluralism of Native histories – that the contact histories of Native regions can differ significantly one from the other. As you study the map, think pluralism, both in terms of Native cultures and Native histories!

A comparative Native history question. To highlight the importance of understanding the pluralism of Alaska Native histories, let’s look at a question not involving language shifts. When explaining the choice of “invasion” to describe the coming of the Russians and Americans, we mentioned that in all of Alaska history only the Tlingit – Russian battles at Sitka rivaled the scale and intensity of Lower-48Indian wars. In fact, the Tlingit were fairly successful in resisting Russian conquest and colonization. The Aleuts, on the other hand, were not nearly as successful despite several heroic efforts, particularly on the Fox Islands in the 1760s. So the question arises: Why were the Tlingits much more successful than the Aleuts in resisting Russian colonial control?

When attempting to question like this, many people resort to armchair psychology. Their answer to our Aleut vs. Tlingit resistance question is something like: Whereas the Tlingits were an aggressive and warlike people, the Aleuts were a passive and gentle people. Therefore we should not be surprised that Tlingit resistance was more successful.

“Aggressive” and “passive” are psychological terms we might use to describe the personality of a single person. Regrettably, it is assumed by many that the same words can accurately describe the character and motivation of an entire group or class of people. The problem with this naïve psychology is twofold. First, it cannot explain why a particular group behaves one way under one set of conditions but another way under another set of conditions. Some, for example, have wondered why European Jews did not more forcefully resist murderous persecution by Nazi Germany. If you say it is because they are basically a passive people, then you must also explain the aggressive Jewish military defense of Israel since 1948. Secondly, such thinking can lead to stereotyping and easily serve whatever ethnocentric biases may be held by users of the theory.

Rather than a cultural and personality analysis, we use a “comparative conditions” approach to answer our Aleut and Tlingit versus the Russians question. We look at the various conditions under which each group faced the invaders and then ask: Were the Aleuts and Tlingits operating under different conditions? If so, did the different conditions result in different outcomes? Let’s see how this approach works.

1. Environment:

Aleuts – Mostly barren Island environments offered little physical protection and had few land-based subsistence resources. They were easily cut off from the sea which held their primary subsistence resources.
Tlingits – Heavily forested islands and mainland offered considerable protection and contained adequate subsistence resources if cut off from the sea.
Abundant forest products provided materials for building strong fortifications.

2. Demography:

Aleuts – Small island populations meant small scale contact which favored the Russians because it did not take a large force to invade and establish control one island at a time.
Tlingits – Large scale contact. Invading Russians confronted large, densely populated settlements – e.g., the Sitka Battles.

3. Social Organization:

Aleuts – Weak inter-island relationships, hence military alliances difficult to build at the time of the invasions. Russian divide and conquer strategy worked well.
Tlingits – Clan social structure united groups across Tlingit settlements, thus providing a built-in military confederation. If invaded, one Tlingit group could call upon other groups in other locations for support.

4. Technology:

Aleuts – No access to firearms.
Tlingits – Access to firearms and other military equipment through trade with British and Americans.

5. Foreign Relations:

Aleuts – No alternative to the Russians. Until 1867 the Russians were the only outsider presence of any significance in the Aleutians.
Tlingits – Multiple early contact history. Unlike their monopoly of force in the Aleutians, the Russians faced rival European powers in Tlingit country. Tlingit contact with British and American traders gave them a strong bargaining position when dealing with the Russians.

We see that under each of the five conditions the Tlingits had a clear comparative advantage over the Aleuts. And when all of these Tlingit advantages are bundled together, we have the answer our comparative history question.

Often overlooked features of the ANLC map. There are, however, ten features of the map which are often overlooked or which deserve special attention because they raise important historical questions.

1. Be mindful that the purpose of the ANLC map is to display the different Native language regions of Alaska and not the different Native cultures of Alaska. In the broadest terms, the boundaries between languages also represent the boundaries between significant cultural differences, between, for example, the Iñupiaq and Interior Athabaskans. Yet the Alaska Native cultural picture is actually more complicated than this. Within the larger Iñupiaq region, for example, there are important differences between the coastal whaling communities and the inland settlements along the Noatak and Kobuk rivers and the interior caribou hunting people of Anaktuvik Pass. We also find similar kinds of differences within the large Central Yup’ik and Interior Athabaskan language/culture regions.

Native cultural pluralism can get even more complicated. Not only do we find different cultural characteristics within a Native region, but we also find similar elements of social organization cutting across Native regional boundaries. For example, the southern Native societies – from the Aleuts in the far southwest islands down to the Tlingit and Haida in Southeast – had socially stratified societies containing different social classes, including the institution of slavery. In the next chapter we explore in more detail this similarity in southern Native social organization and compare it with the very different social organizations of Native groups north of the Alaska Range.

Notice the several places on the map where a broken line – – – is found within a Native region. This indicates a boundary between different dialects of the same Native language which may mean still more cultural differences. It may be that an important element of any one community’s cultural identity is how their dialect – the way they speak the language – distinguishes them from the others of the same language group. Always keep in mind that the map’s broad language boundaries do not reflect all aspects of Alaska Native cultural and historical pluralism.

2. Look at the Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) region along the Gulf of Alaska and the North Pacific. Also known as the Pacific Eskimo region, it includes Kodiak (Koniag people), the Alaska Peninsula and Prince William Sound. These are the people whose culture and economy was most affected by the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. According to ANLC, in traditional times the people called themselves Sugpiaq (suk 'person' plus -piaq 'real'). The appellation Alutiiq was adopted from a Russian plural form of Aleut, which the invaders applied to the Native people they encountered from Attu to Kodiak. Unlike the Aleut (Unangan) language, however, the Alutiiq language is closely related to Central Yup'ik. Over time, Sugpiaq has given way to Alutiiq as the appellation of that region’s language. [Appellation = the name by which someone is known.]

3. You should memorize the correct spelling of Native groups, including all eleven groups within the larger Athabaskan language region. Substitute Gwich’in for Kutchin since it is now the most commonly used appellation for this Athabaskan group. Likewise, note on the map the newest appellation for Ingalik is Deg hit’an.

4. Study the North American insert in the upper right-hand side of the map. Note the extension of the Athabaskan language throughout much of Northwestern Canada. Also note that the language resurfaces among several small tribes on the pacific coast in Oregon and Northern California. It then makes a huge geographical leap to the Southwest where it is spoken today by the largest Indian nation, the Navajo, and by certain Apache groups. How there came to be such a large geographical gap between Athabaskan speakers in the Far North and the Navajo and Apache Athabaskan speakers in the Southwest certainly raises intriguing questions about ancient North American Native history.

We should also note that Dene, meaning “the people” in Athabaskan, is the most common appellation used in Canada. One example is the Native political organization Dene Nation of the Canadian Northwest Territory. Also the word, Dine, meaning “ the people” in the Navajo Athabaskan language is rapidly becoming the preferred appellation within that Indian nation.

5. Again look at the North American map insert. Note the extension of the Iñupiaq/Inuit language across the entire North American Arctic rim into Greenland. Although marked by strong dialectical differences — for example, between Iñupiaq spoken in Alaska and Kalaallisut spoken in Greenland — it is all one Inuit language area.

Knud Rasmussen, the famous Arctic explorer of the early 20th Century, found this to be the case during his 1921 - 1924 Great Sled Journey across the North American Arctic. He was born and raised in Greenland, the son of an Inuit mother and Danish father. His first language was Kalaallisut. Danish was his second language which he learned in school. Upon reaching Iñupiaq settlements in Alaska, he made this observation:

In so prolong a separation, it would be natural for the language and traditions of the various [Inuit] tribes to have lost all homogeneity [similarity]. Yet the remarkable thing I found was that my Greenland dialect served to get me into complete understanding with all the tribes.²

Of course this raises another interesting historical question: How did this language cohesiveness survive over such a wide area of extreme terrain and climate for so long?

6. Now look at the population figures of the Language Table on the left-hand side of the map. Notice how much stronger the Athabaskan and Inuit languages are in Native areas outside of Alaska – in Canada, Greenland, and among the Navajo. Why is this? Only comparative historical research will yield the answer.

7. Look for St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait. The map shows that the Siberian Yupik language is also found on the Chukchi side of the Bering Strait, not on the Alaska side. Moreover, Siberian Yupik ancestral ties are found on the Chukchi side and not the Alaska side of the Strait. Finally, notice that the Siberian Yupik language is among the strongest in Native Alaska. Why?

8. Look for Metlakata at the southern most point of Alaska. The green area is Annette Island, home of a Tsimshian tribe who occupy the island as the only Indian reservation, hence Indian country, now existing in Alaska. Here is another historical question: Are all Native groups shown on the ANLC map indigenous to Alaska?

Of course the answer is no. In 1887 the United States government gave a missionary and his congregation of Tsimshian Indians from Old Metlakatla in British Columbia, Canada, permission to settle at New Metlakatla on Annette Island and establish a reservation. The Tsimshian are the only non- indigenous Native tribe in Alaska. (Incidentally, the Court of Claims in 1959 agreed that the Tlingits held aboriginal title to Annette Island and must be compensated for its illegal taking by the United States.)

9. Look for the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea. Be sure to note that these islands are occupied and locally governed by Aleut communities. They should be marked as Unangan or Aleut on whatever map test you may take.

10. Look, finally, at the southern coast of the Seward Peninsula and note the isolated Central Yup’ik area on Norton Sound. Here are more historical questions: What are the Central Yup’ik doing there? Isn’t this area part of the traditional homeland of the Iñupiaq? Actually, even larger portions of the southern Seward Peninsula may have been occupied at one time by the Central Yup’ik .

Selecting a Native group for cultural profiling. Now it is time to take the first step in completing the Cultural Profile Project. Your first decision is whether to focus on a larger Native culture area or on a smaller group occupying a distinct ecological zone within that area. Webster’s Universal Dictionary defines ecology as “the branch of biology which deals with the relations between living organisms and their environment.” We are concerned here with how traditional Native groups as living social organisms adapted to their different environments in different ways. Again, cultural pluralism is a key idea here.

When you begin constructing your cultural profile in the next chapter, you are first asked to describe the main elements of the ecological zone within which your selected Native group lives. Why do we need this information at the very beginning? Because the nature of the ecological zone and the amount and kind of subsistence resources it supported largely determined the social and technological adaptations a Native group had to make in order to most effectively live in that zone. The concept tying together the relationship between an ecological zone and its influence on a Native group’s social organization and cultural products is environmental adaptation.

For now, think of environmental adaptation as the process by which a traditional Native society socially organized itself and developed technologies to effectively live in and harvest the subsistence resources of its ecological zone.

Ecological zone as a major selection factor. Let’s take the Iñupiaq as an example of why the ecological zone is a major factor influencing your selection of a Native group. You can do a general profile of the larger Iñupiaq culture area as it is shown on the ANLC map. But remember that the ANLC map displays only language regions within which may exist different ecological zones. This means you have different Iñupiaq groups making adaptations to different environments. So you might consider focusing on a specific ecological zone within the Iñupiaq region such as coastal sea mammal hunting areas or the more inland settlements along the Noatak and Kobuk rivers. Or you can move deeper inland and select the Iñupiaq of Anaktuvik Pass. Here again we are reminded that cultural pluralism is a defining feature of Native Alaska, both past and present.

Cultural pluralism also forces us to make a similar decision for other large Native language/culture areas. Within the large Athabaskan speaking region, for example, there are major differences between the ecological zone of the Tanaina people south of the Alaska range and that of Koyukon people north of the range. Of course the selection process is much easier when an entire Native culture area essentially occupies the same ecological zone. Examples are the Unangan (Aleut) in the Aleutians, the Siberian Yupik on St. Lawrence Island, and the Tlingit and Haida in Southeast Alaska.

Assignment

Having firmly in mind the pluralistic nature of Alaska Native cultures and histories, it is time to take the first step in completing the Cultural Profile Project. Before proceeding, you should now select the Native group whose life in traditional times you will research.

In the next chapter you take the second step which is to research and describe the elements making up the first section of the Cultural Profile, “Ecological Zone and Environmental Adaptation.”

What we should be thinking about – key study questions:

Why do we say there is no such person as an Alaska Native?

Why make a distinction between people and peoples?

Why do we emphasize the pluralism of Native histories as well as Native cultures?

Can you explain why differences in Native language shifts to English raise interesting historical questions?

Can you define ecological zone and environmental adaptation and explain how these two concepts are tied together?

If you were given a blank map of Alaska, could you reproduce the ANLC map, including correct spelling of the different Native groups?

Table of Contents | Chapter 4