Alaska

A

2

The Athapaskans

Unlike the coastal Natives with their plentiful resources, the speakers of the Athapaskan languages lived in the demanding arctic and subarctic lands at the northern edge of the continent. This huge area was not rich in resources, and people had to search diligently for them. Long, cold winters and short, warm summers characterized the region. The wildlife included moose, caribou, black and grizzly bears, sheep, and various small game and fish.

The Athapaskans were nomadic or seminomadic hunters and gatherers, relying on fish and caribou as staples. They fished for salmon with dip nets and basket-shaped traps. They also caught trout, whitefish, and pike, using various fishing methods. They hunted some mammals with bows and arrows and snares. Bears, wolverines, and smaller fur-bearing animals were caught in deadfalls, shot with bows and arrows, or captured in rawhide nets. Snares were used for hares and ptarmigans. Spruce hens, ducks, geese, and roots and berries supplemented their diets, but periods of starvation were not unusual.

The type of shelter varied by climate and time of year. All Athapaskans built log or pole houses of various sizes covered with animal hides. The more mobile groups lived in simple dwellings. The more sedentary groups, such as the Ingalik in the Yukon and Kuskokwim basins, occupied permanent winter villages and summer fishing camps. They built winter houses that resembled the semisubterranean, earth-covered Eskimo houses.

The Athapaskans had a simple society. They spent most of the year in small bands of a few nuclear families. Kinship was matrilineal, and kin groups were held together by reciprocal social obligations. A member generally had to find a spouse outside the kin group. If resources allowed, small groups came together and combined into a regional band, to hunt caribou, for example. Although men made decisions together, leaders often emerged who attained prestige through their superior abilities, particularly as hunters. The Athapaskans engaged in both offensive and defensive warfare, and often produced a war leader who demonstrated great physical strength. Generally, leadership was not hereditary but acquired; once a leader lost his special abilities he no longer exerted any influence.

---

---

The Athapaskans had ceremonial feasts where the host gave goods to the guests. Such a feast was given after someone died. After the Athapaskans began to acquire wealth through trade with the whites, ceremonial feasts were given more often and modeled after the potlatches of the Northwest Coast. Feasts were given to mark the killing of the first game of each kind by a child; to mark a deed or an unusual accomplishment; to celebrate the return, recovery, or rescue of a relative or friend; and to pay for an offense or transgression. A man was expected to potlatch at least once and preferably three times before he married. The potlatch giver had to give away all the property he owned and could not accept aid from anyone else for a year after the ceremony.

The Athapaskans lived in a world of many spirits, which they believed influenced every aspect of their lives. They believed that human souls were reincarnated in animal form and that they had to placate animal spirits to use the natural environment. Shamans were the only religious practitioners and possessed the greatest personal power in the culture. They used magical-religious rites to control the spirit world, prevent and cure disease, bring game to hunters, predict the weather, and foretell the future.

A

3

The Eskimo

Eskimo (Inuit) culture developed in western Alaska, and it was also there that the Eskimo and Aleut languages diverged from each other. In time the Eskimo developed techniques to exploit the arctic seas. The Arctic Small Tool tradition, starting in Siberia, was the technological base. It developed further in Alaska and spread across the Arctic to Greenland about 4,000 years ago.

From Alaska’s northern coast to Greenland the Eskimo hunted large sea mammals such as whales, walruses, and seals. Some groups, however, depended on caribou hunting as their mainstay. These groups included the Caribou Eskimo in Canada’s Barren Grounds west of Hudson Bay, and smaller groups along the Colville and Noatak rivers and in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Despite these differences, the Eskimo were fairly uniform culturally. This happened because about 1,000 years ago the whaling-oriented Thule culture, with its innovations of dog teams and kayaks, spread from Alaska, eventually reaching all the way to Greenland.

Eskimo social life centered on the nuclear family. However, there were also men’s organizations related to hunting. The Yupik Eskimo, for instance, had ceremonial houses for men, where men taught traditional skills to the boys, while mothers taught their daughters in the homes. Most marriages took place within the community.

Survival depended on the ability to take game and fish. These animals, therefore, were important in religion, and the Eskimo placed great importance on charms to aid in hunting. There were also many taboos, such as a prohibition against combining land and sea products. The Bering Sea Eskimo had elaborate rituals that centered on the animals they hunted; the so-called bladder feast was the most complex of the various ceremonies and focused primarily on seals. The northern coast hunters and fishers, on the other hand, did not develop such complex rituals.

A

4

The Aleut

The Aleut adapted superbly to life in the difficult environment of the Aleutian Islands. They developed a rich culture and obtained a well-balanced livelihood from the sea. But neither their culture nor their livelihood survived for long after their first contact with the Russians in the 1740s.

The typical Aleut house, built underground, housed several related nuclear families. Villages consisted of related individuals, and large villages might have as many as four such dwellings occupied at one time. These were the permanent settlements, usually situated on the northern (Bering Sea) side of the island because of the more abundant marine resources and driftwood supplies. The Aleut also built seasonal houses.

Aleut society was divided into three classes: honorables, common people, and slaves. The Aleut shared with the Tlingit their regard for wealth and status. There may also have been cultural links with Siberian groups. Descent was probably matrilineal. Households usually included a man and his wife or wives, older married sons and their families, and sometimes a younger brother and his family. The adolescent sons of the household head were sent to their mother’s village to be reared by her older brothers. Women owned their houses.

Living where the sea is free of ice, the Aleut developed sophisticated open-sea hunting techniques to harvest the sea otter, hair seal, sea lion, and migrating fur seals and whales. They shared many tools with the southern Eskimo, such as the two-hole kayak and bone and antler implements. The Aleut used a multibarbed harpoon head for large sea mammals and also fished for cod and halibut with hook and line. They caught salmon in nets or traps as the fish ascended the streams to spawn. They collected clams and other mollusks and ate large quantities of green spiny sea urchins. They also gathered kelp and other seaweed, salmonberries, blueberries, crowberries, and roots to eat.

Birds and their eggs provided much food. More than 140 species are found in the islands, and not surprisingly the Aleut not only used the birds for meat and eggs, but also used their skins for parkas and for decorations. Hunters captured birds on the ground in nets or with snares and caught them in flight with bolas. A bola consisted of four to six strings about 1 m (3 ft) long, tied together at one end. To the free end were attached small stones for weight. As birds flew overhead, the hunter twirled the bola and threw it into the flock, each string swinging out like a spoke on a wheel. The strings wrapped around the bird and brought it down.

The Aleut also used the throwing stick, or atlatl, a long, narrow board with one end carved to fit the hand and with a small peg inserted at the other end to hold the butt of the spear shaft. The spear was laid on the board and then thrown. The device gave more power and distance to the cast.

B

Early European Exploration

B

1

Russian Expeditions

In 1654 Russian merchant Fedot Alekseyev sailed east from the Kolyma Peninsula of Siberia in search of the Pogicha River, believed to be rich in walrus tusks, sable furs, and gold. Semyon Ivanovich Dezhnyov went along to collect the yasak, or tax on the fur trade. The yasak amounted to one-tenth of the furs obtained by merchants and a somewhat smaller percentage of furs traded by indigenous peoples. On this voyage, Dezhnyov was the first person to sail from the Arctic into the Pacific via what is now called Bering Strait. However, his report of the discovery was apparently never forwarded to the central government. Thus Tsar Peter the Great did not know whether Siberia was joined to North America. Shortly before his death in 1725, Peter the Great posed the question to Captain-Commander Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in the service of Russia. Bering sailed to find out, rediscovering Bering Strait in 1728, but because of heavy fog, he failed to sight North America.

In 1733 the Russian government appointed Bering to head a great expedition to inventory Siberia’s resources and establish trade with Japan. He was also to explore the American coast. Bering set out for America from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, on June 8, 1741, in two ships: the Sviatoi Petr (Saint Peter), which he commanded, and the Sviatoi Pavel (Saint Paul), commanded by Aleksey Chirikov. Each ship had several scientists aboard. On June 20 the vessels became separated. On July 15 Chirikov sighted land, probably Prince of Wales Island. Bering, who was farther north, came upon Kayak Island the next day. He could see a great mountain in the distance, which he named Saint Elias because July 16 was St. Elias’s Day. Georg Wilhelm Steller, the ship’s surgeon and a noted German scientist, went ashore on Kayak Island to gather plants to help crew members suffering from scurvy. While ashore, Steller gathered artifacts, plant specimens, and a few birds and concluded that the ship had reached North America.

Chirikov returned to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski on October 8, 1741, but Bering’s ship was wrecked in the Komandorskiye Islands east of Kamchatka. The explorers spent the winter on what is now Bering Island, and Bering died there. In the spring they built a crude boat out of the wreckage of the Sviatoi Petr and got back to Kamchatka in September. Bering’s voyage established Russia’s claim to northwestern North America.

The Russian ruler, Empress Elizabeth, was not interested in North America. She issued an order that the native inhabitants should pay the yasak and be well treated, but otherwise ignored Alaska. Russia showed little interest for the next 50 years, although individuals were lured to the Aleutians by the prospect of profits in furs. Bering’s party had brought back animal pelts, notably those of the sea otter, one of the finest fur-bearing animals. A ready market developed in China, where Russian merchants made tidy profits.

From 1743 on, Russian fur merchants sent hunters who quickly subjugated the Aleut. At least four-fifths of the Aleut are estimated to have been wiped out in the first two generations after Russian contact. European diseases such as smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and pneumonia, as well as Russian guns, reduced the Aleut from an estimated pre-contact population between 15,000 and 20,000 to 2,247 in 1834, and 1,400 in 1848. By 1864, following intermarriage with Russians, the population had risen to 2,005, but by 1890 it had declined to 1,702.

The hunters moved eastward along the island chain as the supply of animals thinned out. As they moved farther from Kamchatka, costs went up and smaller companies dropped out. By 1770 three enterprises, those of Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov, Pavel Sergeyevich Lebedev-Lastochkin, and Grigorii and Petr Panov, dominated the Alaskan fur trade. After Catherine the Great became ruler of Russia in 1762, the government was more aware of the Aleutians. She terminated the yasak on the Aleut in 1769 and demanded better care and treatment of them, but provided no means to enforce her decrees.

B

2

Competition from Other Powers

Spain was also interested in the North Pacific. The fear of Russian expansion persuaded the Spanish to occupy Alta California (now the state of California) and build forts at San Diego, Monterey, and other California settlements. Expeditions were sent to Alaska in 1774, 1777, 1778, and 1790 to explore and perhaps take possession of territory. However, when the Spanish confronted ships of Britain at Nootka Sound (now in British Columbia, Canada), they gave up all claims to territory north of there.

Britain, France, and the United States explored Alaska but did not attempt to acquire territory. In 1778 British Captain James Cook mapped the Alaskan coast and visited the Aleutians. Cook sailed from Alaska with sea otter pelts, which his men sold in China at high prices. Subsequent British interest in Alaska centered on trade. The French sent one expedition to Alaska under the ill-fated Jean François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, who was lost at sea on his way home in 1788. The French Revolution in 1789 cut short France’s interest in the region.

	More from Encarta
	•  Important Notice: MSN Encarta to be discontinued. Learn more. •  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain