Creoles and The Problem of Subjectivity

Your victory was so complete

Some among you thought to keep

A record of our little lives

The clothes we wore

Our spoons

Our knives 

Nevermind Leonard Cohen 

In the 1943 article "The Russian Creoles of Alaska as a Marginal Group" Margaret Mary Wood published an account of Kodiak life. She writes, "The Kodiak area offers interesting material for a study of the influence of varying degrees of isolation upon the processes of racial diffusion and of cultural assimilation." Teaching at the Kodiak school for a quarter century Wood learns through experience about the "Creoles" in the archipelago whom she taught and lived among. These Native families, who referred to themselves as "Kreols," openly embraced their heritage with the Russian colonial era from 1741 to 1867. After that time the United States purchased the entirety of the "Russian American" estate that included the Kodiak area, the enormous mainland, and the multitude of islands that compose the Aleutian chain. While pitted as isolated in the article the cultures of Kodiak prove to be complex in their histories and in the moments of her observations.

1915 Kodiak, from the Experiment Station field. View of Kodiak, Chiniak Bay and Near Island taken from the Experiment Station field. National Geographic Society Katmai expeditions photographs, 1913-1919. UAA-HMC-0186

In 1916 Margaret Mary Wood began teaching in Kodiak where she was part of an ideological regime to bring US culture to the territory. Her work was with middle and high school age students many of whom referred to themselves as Creole derived from the Russian term "Kreol," being a people whose heritage included, at some point in time, a union between males from Russia and Alutiiq women. However this was before the coming of Western racial culture thus the term was less about the analytics of procreation but more about community access to a life non-creole Natives. Gordon Pullar, Sr. and Lydia Black note that, "Under the Russian system in Alaska the term Creole did not describe a racial category but rather a social status with specific rights" (406).  Gwen Miller suggests that Native women sought relationships with Russian men as to escape the brutality of Russian colonial life on the Native women and others in the community. Yet it is important to stress the cultural formation of Kreol was distinct from Miller's aunt Ann Stoler's work on Creole culture and colonialism in the marvelous Race and the Education of Desire. Nonetheless, Creole on Kodiak was born from violence. (see footnote 1)

Kodiak. View of a group of school girls having a foot race. Their supporters line the road to cheer the girls on. The bodyof water in the back ground  may be Chiniak Bay.  Photo taken during National Geographic Society expedition on the way to Katmaiarea. 1915. UAA-hmc-0186-volume1-3554.

 Kodiak Naval Operating Base. UAA-HMC-0715

Important for Wood proves to be tracing the "Native blood" of Creoles and other Native people living on Kodiak (like the "Kodiaks") whom she describes as having "lost their identity" due to infusion of various types of people coming to the islands. I think her feelings about race and purity contribute to her view of Creoles as a vanquishing culture. She writes, " Out of the 450 people in the village of Kodiak only 22, including 3 children, where pure blood whites and the number of pure blood natives was equally small." (206) Historian Patrica Seed has noted in Ceremonies of Possession that Northern European ideas on civility and savageness came to mark the landscapes and peoples of North America, in that the British colony represented the civil and the natural landscape with it's Native peoples was labeled savage.2 Holding on to the "blood" proved imperative for her Kodiak.

For the Creoles that she studies exist without Western ideals of purity and are therefore at a deficit in the US cultural system of the time. In her line of thinking the rights they gained by admonishing their pure racial subjectivity amid Russian colonialism has lead to a their unease within the US colonial culture now on the islands. She is unable to recognize the Creole subjectivity as a mechanism emerged from the sadistic and cruel society of Russian America. Perhaps to do so would be to spot the author's own place with the US history on the islands? For the essay is to make the Creole the problem and the sacredness of the "egg" and the "seed" as the solution for the messiness of transcolonial Native cultures.

At the end of the short piece Wood focuses in on the social lives of young Creoles whom compete with Whites for sexual relationships. She writes, "For the young creole men the competition of the white men coming into the community for the favor of the creole girls presents a problem. If many of the Kodiak girls marry into the white group, the creole men will have to look farther afield for their wives. It seems probable that this situation would result in their marrying girls from other more isolated villages in the Kodiak area where the proportion of native blood in the population is greater than it is at Kodiak." Because if White men (coming to the islands with the military for instance), in other words, marry Creole women would place a burden on Native culture because Creole men will be forced to look toward Native women for their relationship needs. In fact, she sees a problem that with the influx of White men on the island there have been countless children, born from Native women with White fathers, placed into orphanages. In her observations she the US project on the island as the problem. Where amid Russian occupation social groups came to be and were acknowledged while with the coming of the United States, with its racial culture, the Creole children of White men and Native women are cast aside.

In the end the article argues that it is Kodiak's unisolated nature that is problem, not the racial ideologies that underwrite the article.



Foot Notes
1. Formally, translated into English as "Creole," it holds a meaning distinct from how it is applied at the time as someone with an African and European ancestry. Also the cultural condition of Kreol misaligns with the Spanish term Criollo, translated into English as "Creole" as well because Criollo possesses an implication of a South Americans with only Spanish progenitors. 
One could think of the Kreoles are more situated with the cultural groups called "Mestizos," in part because they were of Native and Eurasian descent but publicly favored themselves as part of the colonial culture that occupied their homelands. As mentioned, during the Russian colonial period of this part of North America an individual would possess greater freedoms with the Russian controlled social and cultural atmosphere in Kodiak if they expressed and held proven ancestry that derived from European and Russian decent.
2. See the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Washington Irving.

Enfranchisement of Women and Natives in Territorial Alaska

"Large group of people, some in costume, pose for photograph in front of bunting and American flag; signs held by people on far right advocate women's rights" St. Patrick's Mask Ball, Flat City, Camp A.B. no. 26. 
ASL-P28-213

"Gov. Clark of Alaska signing the Shoup Women Suffrage Bill. First bill passed by First Legislature.  March 21, 1913." Left to right: "Arthur Glendinning Shoup, House of Representatives - Sitka.Governor Walter Eli Clark. Conrad Freeding, Senate - Nome. W.W. Shorthill, Sec." ASL-P226-171

Perhaps one may, with ease, read the contextual aspects of the photograph above consigned as it is with the gendered, racial, and colonial contexts of early twentieth century United States representational politics. Four white men, government officials, signing in to law the right of women to vote in territorial Alaska in 1913.In the above image, Nome W.W. Shorthill's posture, his neck tilted a few degrees forward is mimicked with the framed image behind him. I am unsure who the images on the walls are representational of, but they too add to the dramatic aspect of the historic moment as they too look on as Governor Clark places his name on this document. Below is an image of the bill as it went through the state government.  Beginning in the 19th century in the contiguous part of the nation women's suffrage movement(s) worked securing voting rights in specific states and localities. Within seven years of the law in Alaska, the United States government was pass ratify the 19th amendment, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote after a bill was passed by Congress June 4, 1919.

Along with a women's suffrage movement in the Alaska Territory activists from the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Sisterhood worked tirelessly since their inception in 1912 for the enfranchisement of Native people. In an action by the Second Legislature of the Territory of Alaska in 1915 Alaska Natives could become electoral voters. They could take on the "obligation of suffrage if that showed a "total abandonment of any tribal customs or relationships, and the facts regarding the applicant's adoption of the habits of a civilized life." Then the Native applicant for citizenship would have to find at least "five white citizens of the United States" that could attest to the the applicant's degree of cultivated civility. In 1923 Alaska Native Brotherhood member William Paul, of the Raven clan, was elected to the legislative house of the territorial Alaskan government.

The Alaska Native Brotherhood

Within a decade the The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (43 U.S. Stats. At Large, Ch. 233, p. 253 (1924)), or the Snyder Act, made Native American citizenship  in the United States compulsory, asserting "Be it enacted by the Senate and house of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property." This act of citizenship followed the devastating consequences of 1887 Dawes Act, asserting citizenship upon tribal members in the contiguous part of the nation who participated in allotment. Similar to women's Suffrage, until the passage of  Indian Citizenship Act states and territories acted unsystematically in declaring Native people as voting citizens.

The Paintball Shootings of 2001

Photograph by Jerzy Strzelecki

On January 14, 2001 along an Anchorage street two non-Native male seventeen year-olds from Eagle River, a suburb, posed as tourists from California as another teenager, a nineteen year-old legal adult, named Charles Deane Wiseman —brother to one of the younger males—videotaped them confronting a Native man. They asked him if he was drunk then shot him in the face with a paintball gun. This attack was one in a series of assaults the three would commit that winter night targeting Alaska Natives they marked as intoxicated and homeless. That is to say they willfully searched out  Indigenous individuals who posed no threat to them so they could videotape themselves shooting their victims with marble-sized paint pellets from an instrument like the one below.

The police reported that at least a dozen Native individuals were shot.(1) On the videotape, what the press describe as a "voice," says "We're going to go nail some eskimos." Other accounts site that they said they were intent on "hunting" "muktuks."The videos show victims flinching as they are shot in the face, followed by the sounds of laughter from the the young men. One of the victims told the police of the crime soon after it took place and was charged for disorderly conduct, due to allegedly being under the influence of alcohol. The victim served 10 days in the anchorage jail.

Wiseman, and the two teenagers, were charged with seven counts of misdemeanor assault on march 20th to which they pleaded not guilty. In court the two brothers claimed the third assailant was the shooter and that the younger bother drove his new Subaru Impreza, while the older brother filmed the assaults. Wiseman asserted he video taped while his brother drove the car that tracked people on the street, placing the responsibility of the crimes on their partner whom they were not related to.(2) A week before the youth's first day in court Governor Tony Knowles began setting up a review of the crime and what ways the government could respond.

Upon hearing of the attack and the charges against the assailants the Alaska Federation of Natives called for a Civil Rights Commission review of hate crimes against Alaska Natives. Leadership of the organization expressed that this attack was "representative of an undercurrent of racism" in the state.(3) On March 23rd the state house joined AFN is asking the US Commission for an investigation while passing a resolution condemning the assault as a hate crime. (That spring the state government put together a plan to introduce Hate Crimes bill that has yet to materialize) Alaska Senators held contrasting views of such an investigation. Senator Frank Murkowski at the time believe there was little need for a review, while the late Senator Ted Stevens, quoted here from the Peninsula Clarion, said

 "'No, I think they're (the Alaska Federation of Natives) entirely within their rights to ask
for a Civil Rights Commission review of that and other incidents,'' Stevens told the
Alaska Public Radio Network.''There seems to be nationwide an increase in the so-
called 'hate crimes'. And I think that there are existing laws and we should use them.
'I don't think we need new laws right now as much as we need enforcement of existing
laws. And the Civil Rights Commission ... has the right to investigate,'' Stevens said.
''As far as I'm concerned, I think it should be done.''(4)

Wiseman pleaded no contest to three counts of misdemeanor assault that June. During this legal process the man remained out on bail and his attorney asked the court to reinstate his driving privileges that were revoked in January. The judge declined this.

Upon being sentenced to six months in jail, 6,000 dollar fine, and 300 hours of community service on August 31st Wiseman expressed an apology to his victims. The two others as minors have their identities sealed from this type of research. Wiseman's attorney argued that he was not culpable to the crime since he was not the one who pulled the trigger on the paintball gun. Judge Ashman asserted to the court that this crime held racist overtones from its conception.(5) After spending 40 days in solitary confinement, seeking protection from other facility's other inmates Wiseman asked for house arrest, to which the Judge declined the request. Often in situations where racially and economically privileged people face jail terms, scholars have noted that, their lawyers and family members plead for them to be separated from the prison population for their own safety or not to serve prison sentences because being around such prisoners will turn them into criminals, as with rapist Brock Turner. The conclusions are easy to understand that the attackers saw these people as socially dead and that they could hurt them without justice being brought to them. One of the victims filed a civil suite against the defendants, settling out of court for 10,000. It appears that 5 other victims filed also filed a civil case as well, but I have yet been able to locate any settlement.

On August 23–24, 2001, and October 25, 2001 the Alaska Advisory Committee on Civil Rights held community forums with a wide range of panelists representing a wide variety of Alaska community members. Their April 2002 findings and statements can be found in the document Racism’s Frontier: The Untold Story of Discrimination and Division in Alaska. (Their recommendations and advice are far too massive in scope to discuss here.) The governor appointed a 14-member "Commission on Tolerance" who on December 6th asserted that the state educational curriculum should include and emphasis Native cultures and people. 

1. "Alaskan charged with assault in egging on of 2 paintballers." Deseret News, The (Salt Lake City, UT) - March 21, 2001.
2"Briefly" Juneau Empire (AK) - March 21, 2001.
3. "Community horrified by attacks on Natives." FEBRUARY 27, 2001 Indianz.com
4. Friday, March 23, 2001
5. Juneau Empire (AK) - September 4, 2001

"Whoever holds Alaska will hold the world:" The Bombing of Dutch Harbor June 3, 1942.

"I believe that in the future, whoever holds Alaska will hold the world. I think it 

is the most important strategic place in the world."

General Billy Mitchell, 1935.

On the 3rd of June 1942 the Japanese military using two battle ships, The aircraft carriers Junyo (the peregrine falcon), and the Ryūjō (the "Prancing Dragon") on a bombing raid on the US base of Fort Mears located at Amaknak Island in Unalaska. At the time of the attack Fort Mears housed the 206th Coast Artillery, 37th Infantry Regiment, 6 anti-aircraft batteries, marines, and 30 fighters.

"U. S. Marines are on the alert in their trenches during the Jap [ Japanese ] attack on Dutch Harbor, June 3 and 4.  Black smoke in the background is coming from fuel tanks, set afire by Jap [ Japanese ] dive-bombers."San Francisco Call-Bulletin, Aleutian Islands Photographs, 1942-1948Identifier UAF-1970-11-23

The air fighters killed 25 soldiers that first day with 44 losses the next. The US military had been in residence there for two year in the build up of the Northern part of the pacific theater of battle in World War II, called the Aleutians Islands Campaign, also known as the “Williwaw War."

 

Unangax internees in Dutch Harbor in route to camps in the southeast.National Archives.

The then territory of Alaska served as a strategic site for the military and the Unangax and Sugpiaq homelands became prime geographies for the war to ensue. In the middle of the war between the Allies and the Axis Unangax communities bore the burden of being subject hosts to the carnage. By the time of the bombing Unangax, forced to raze and evacuate their villages, maintained a presence there as subjects of interment by the government. The US would separate 881 Native individuals from their non-Indigenous families members and move them to places far out of their homelands for years. The public conversations surrounding this cultural experience often use the words Aleut "relocation," or "internment."

Aleut children - Unalaska Alaska.  "Before the evacuation." Identifier ASL-P233-V141

On June 7th the Japanese military struck and occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska for a short time without incident. Months later, in 1943 during May 3-11 the Japanese forces would move forward with attacks on Attu in a battle to control sea lanes, referred to as the war's "Forgotten Battle." Japanese military also held over 40 Unangax civilians as prisoners of war in Japan. That both the Axis and the Allies held Unangax communities against their will allows for one to consider how Indigenous people are treated amid times when (strengthening) nation-states are at war. For the Unangax individuals as citizens of the nation deserved the freedoms the nation itself was explicitly fighting to uphold at the time. The Spanish nationalist government bombing of the Indigenous Basque community, by the Spanish partners the German and Italian air forces in 1937 presents a similar dreadful situation, Picasso depicted in Guernica.

General Billy Mitchell's 1935 assertion to Congress "that in the future, whoever holds Alaska will hold the world..." because, "it is the most important strategic place in the world" was not wasted sentiment for either the Allies or the Axis, but such thought, and the actions that followed, required the denial of the right of the Unangax to decide how their homelands and surrounding waters should be used amid this global conflict. The rise of the cold war between the West and the Soviet Union in the decades that followed brought about conditions in the new state of Alaska that reflected Mitchell's conception of the region. Increased military presence and weapons testing brought about uses of land and water that would be decried if even given consideration elsewhere in the nation. Below is a clip of the October 2, 1969 Milrow nuclear detonation on Amchitka Island, one of the contested places in the war.

Some resources:

https://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/unangan-internment.htm
https://jukebox.uaf.edu/site7/sites/default/files/cold_war_in_alaska_-_a_resource_guide_for_teachers_and_students.pdf
https://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/upload/mobley-aleut-book-lo_res.pdf

Link to the post, "Save This For Your Autobiography," on the Critical Ethnic Studies Blog

http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/blog/2016/3/2/save-this-for-your-autobiography

 "Save This For Your Autobiography"

By: Thomas Michael Swensen, Colorado State University  

When I was 26 I started at a community college with aspirations to learn how to become an architect. Not just any architect, but one who designed and built sets for rock bands like Mark Fisher. Along with a drafting course, and one in creative writing, I enrolled in the course “Race, Class, and Gender in Film.” As an introduction to academic prose, I read the articles “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice” by M. Jacqui Alexander and, “More Human Than I Am Alone: Womb Envy in David Cronenberg’s the Fly and Dead Ringers,” by Helen W. Robbins. Though I’d written punk songs, short plays, and fictional stories previous to this course yet the deft work of academic writing drew me in a way that these other forms hadn’t. I immediately grew fascinated with Alexander’s commitment language and Robbins’s incredible read of David Cronenberg’s misogynistic Dead Ringers and The Fly.These writers compelled me to transfer from a 2-year community college architectural drafting program to a small liberal arts college where I enrolled as a literature and fine arts major, putting off my aspirations for architectural training until graduate school.

At the four-year school, the first upper-division English course I enrolled in was British Literature II. Turning in the first 750-word essay on something either about a piece of George Elliot’s or perhaps a poem by one of the Brownings. The comments marked on the returned essay were of great surprise. For on the margin the professor wrote, “save this for your autobiography,” near one of my passages, with an added and concerned “come see me” noted at the bottom of the last page. During the meeting with the professor she told me that I earned an F on the essay but that I could choose to rewrite it over and over again throughout the term. The detailed option she offered was that I would focus solely on revising that essay with the qualification that I’d walk away from the course with a C+ grade. That, or I could choose an F for the term. I took the professor up on the deal, revising that piece about 5 times before the semester was over. I have never looked back with regret on that choice.

I learned a few things about writing academic prose from this initial experience of revision. For instance, the phrase the professor wrote, “save this for your autobiography,” has proved a source of inspiration throughout the years. Thinking about the comment always forces me deliberate the ways one constitutes ideas through the act of writing and what it means to get beyond the self to produce scholarly work. That is, something about this labor of writing academic prose forces me to get outside the intentions I have for the sake of a successful piece. A draft’s intervention most always needs the help of a few readers and editors in teasing out the directions it wants to travel. For me, an argument’s evolving destination (its derivative?) is where I let go of my aims to allow editing and re-drafting processes to shape the essay in productive ways.

This last month an essay that has gone through multiple revisions in the last 2 years is finally in press. The readers and editors worked hard to turn it into something I’m proud of. Trusting the suggestions these people had provided the most important and needed aspect in this essay’s production. Close to a couple of decades ago when that Brit Lit professor sat me down with the grave ultimatum they indoctrinated me into the peer-review process of letting go to let the work flourish with its own path. The other lesson that I’ve taken away from that experience was that a C+ allows one to pass a course. It's a sign of success. Only later after dropping out of architecture school to pursue a masters in literature would the techniques put forth in John Gage’s The Shape of Reason further test my resolve as a writer. Give that a read.

"The Fish Belong to Everybody:" The Native Environmental Politics of Fish Traps

People and organizations have employed the fish trap in Alaska since before the beginning of the fishing industrial complex in the late 19th century. However, new technologies that allowed for the canning of fish at a higher rate brought capital into southern Alaska like no previous time in history. Industrial fish traps coming into use threatened the traditional ways of living for Native communities throughout Alaska. I have read many letters from village leaders, dating from the nineteenth to well into the 20th century addressing territorial and federal government officials with appeals to cease the practice for the sake of village survival. 

Fish Traps: Logs lie in the water near shore and small wooden structures perch atop them in the Tongass Narrows near Ketchikan. 4 X 5 B&W negative.Steve McCutcheon, McCutcheon Collection, Anchorage Museum, B1990.14.5.TV.93.46

The Days of Salmon Traps & Fish Pirates

By 1889 the territorial government made illegal blocking off entire rivers with traps. In 1906 any permanently secured traps within known salmon migration routes were forbidden. Scholar Steve Colt has the great resource "Salmon Fish Traps in Alaska:An Economic History Perspective" on the Alaskool website here. He contends that the rise of fish traps brought two problems to Native Alaska. "Besides appropriating [Native people's] major food source," he writes, "the fish trap replaced purchases from Native fishermen and made Natives the first group to join a growing chorus of protest against the brutal efficiency of the trap." In other words, the trap left Native fishers without jobs and the larger Native community with less food.

Alaska Packers Association fish traps on Wood River, Bristol Bay, Alaska, 1900 Photographer John Nathan Cobb.

When an organization would set traps at the mouths of rivers these traps would capture great amounts of salmon, leaving little to none for village subsistence users. What was seen as blocking off entire traditional fishing areas to Native communities proved a deeply political issue for decades within Native and non-Native households. William Paul in the October, 1928 publication of the ANB newspaper The Alaska Fisherman made the desisting of fish traps one of the main agendas during a campaign for office. He writes that what sets him apart from other candidates was that, "I will not rest until ALL FISH TRAPS ARE ABOLISHED." "Fish" he asserts, "should be caught by Alaskans." In the statement he also aligns the seasonal colonial fishing enterprise with the racialized migrant labor force these companies hired in situations extremely asymmetric for Filipinos. In a previous post I've examined how William Paul felt camaraderie with Filipinos workers in Alaska, yet this political advert below is not without the intonation of racialized language.

Previous to the 1930s Filipino cannery workers, not yet unionized, faced harsh and forbidding conditions amid long hours of work often in secluded cannery sites. Paul's affront to "trapowners" and "Filipinos"I think should be weighed with the consideration that many in these two groups would leave Alaska after the closing of fishing season to places where food sources where in great supply. Perhaps with this statement he could rouse non-Native non-Filipino workers into voting for him by figuring an imagined sincere bond between the "trapowners" and Filipino workers. As a student of power, I find the forging of affiliations and dis-alliances between racial and indigenous communities in formal political arenas as unending and not surprising in anyway. Additionally,  if ones peers to the bottom of the advert one can see Paul's appeal to women voters with his support of  a platform that would "recognize woman's part in life," by redefining "Community Property Laws." Taken together, the racialization of the fish trap issue, and all for the mobilization of women voters, shows the importance fish traps and property rights were in Alaska Territory amid the first decades of the 20th century.

20 years later  William Paul still found the topic of fish traps deserving of his time.  Here is a 1948 article (from I believe Eskimo Magazine) where Paul, freed from the impressing discourses of formal governmental politics, lent a more substantial read to the problems fish traps cause for Native communities. Entitled "Fish and Fish Traps—The Indian Viewpoint," the article pits industrial fish traps as contrary to Indigenous ways of living. Yet as Paul drew out this argument he also put forth that Native people have always being willing to "submit" to any regulation that "honestly" seeks "conservation" as "its end." Noting forms of conservation efforts as colonial practice, he writes that, "The Indian realized that all areas suitable for his form of gear the seine is closed 'in the interests of conservation.' " Perhaps one could infer the meaning of this passage as Paul communicating that industrial capital with fish traps could convince governments to open expanses of water to suit their needs while Native communities without such power would find their traditional areas closed to their use.

In the end of this article Paul wrote that those fishing up river should be allowed to capture as many fish as the fish traps built along its mouth. "The fish belong to everybody," he writes, "and therefore you a lower fisherman [at the mouth] will not be allowed to capture all the fish and deprive me an upper fisherman of my share." This saying was to him a principle as "old as the Magna C[]arta," signed in 1215 by English king John proclaiming that no one is above the law. These pieces by William Paul are only two of the many pieces written by Alaska Natives concerning the Native environmental politics of fish traps in 20th in Alaska.

Aseuluk Relocation: No More Sleeping Villages

There is a current political movement in Alaska to close rural public schools in order to balance the state's budget. This of course would mean that thousands of children would have to relocate to the region's few urban centers to gain a formal education, leaving their families behind, or that they would enroll in distance-based courses administered through these urban schools and lack the face-to-face experience so important for a quality educational experience. The dismantling of the school system would hold severe outcomes for Native villages, many that already possess a history of forced emigration brought on by past governmental policies. Growing up in rural Alaska I am familiar with how imperative it is for families to stay together so they can maintain traditional knowledges and subsistence lifestyles in their indigenous environments. Not only that the relocation of children out of villages undermines the training of such children in the vocations their families employ to support themselves in a global marketplace.

 King Island cliff houses. "View of some of the homes built along the cliffs of King Island. The buildings are supported by stilts braced against the steep slopes. A hide is stretched out on a frame in the right hand side foreground of the photograph." UAA-hmc-0219-131T

The community of about 200 people on Ugiuvak, or King Island in English named in the 1700s by James Cook, had over the course of decades been a target for policies and actions that pushed hard enough to evacuate all the inhabitants from the island by the late 20th century. Before these policies the Aseuluk wintered in Ugiuvak for well over a 1000 years constructing elaborate villages with nimble architectural forms that still sit on the Island's cliffs, perched over the Bering Sea. Above you can see the these homes, keeping in mind Ugiuvak is without trees, the villagers collected all building timber when it was drift wood. Government policies enacted during World War II dislocated residents throughout Alaska, and Aseuluk people were not immune to this. Popular historical narratives tend to focus on a tuberculosis outbreak being the catalyst for Aseuluk abandonment of the island, about a mile away from Nome, yet others point to the closing of the village school in 1959 as a main reason for the island's current day desolation. With the children in schools on the mainland, residents grew shorthanded in the work required for indigenous subsistence lifestyle, a hallmark of tradition for Native people. The parents then followed their children to towns like Nome, Fairbanks, and Anchorage. The off-island economies also played a part in luring people from the Island. Since the 1970s these families have lived away from King Island.

A school in Nome, 1973. AMRC-B1990-014-5-AK

A couple years ago I was fortunate to see the King Island Dancers perform at the Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. When Yup'ik writer and performer Jack Dalton introduced them he said something to the effect of, "Just because you've been made landless doesn't mean you don't have a home." Being very moved by that statement I watched on, appreciating the ways such practices like dance serve to keep the spiritual and pragmatic ties to the village with the culture. Below is a clip of them with the Little Diomede Dancers in 2013. (The last time I saw them was a performance with the youth performers included, which was awesome.)

Poet Joan Naviyuk Kane often embeds the history of the relocation and its consequences in her work. In an interview with National Public Radio, Kane describes her mother feelings when she learned as a child that she wouldn't be allowed to return to the island due to school closures. Kane says in the interview, "there was ... this belief that perhaps it was a temporary relocation, a temporary closure of the school." While some believed that the school closing was temporary it helped stoke a diaspora of islanders onto the mainland. Now Ugiuvak stands as what one can call a "sleeping village," a term I'm employing here to suggest that just because the village is presently without occupants now, is not condemning it to a future without Aseuluk residents in the future. (Note: I borrowed the meaning of the term "sleeping language," coined by Miami Linguist Wesley Y. Leonard, in which he asserts that Indigenous people can always return to using cultural practices, after they have long stopped doing so.) In fact, Joan Naviyuk Kane recently ventured to the island for a cultural homecoming, financed partially through crowdsourcing. In an interview with Harvard Magazine she responded to if and how the return to the island would make its way into her work, “I think I’m ready to begin in the next couple of months,” she says, “and really make sense of how hard it is to go back to a place that was left—that people emigrated or migrated from—and of this idea of returning.” Below is a clip of Kane reading her work during an Alaska Writers Quarterly reading.

The school closure on Ugiuvak and how it brought long term displacement to an entire Native community is an example of what is possible if the state closes rural schools. While shutting them down may not end Native cultures, such actions assist in reenforcing dominant systems that inflict hard choices on Native individuals, such as to remain at home without formal educations or leave home to make a living after their economies downgrade in the wake of taking apart public education for rural villages.


SOURCES
NPR Interview with Kane: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/21/193952830/ghost-island-looms-large-among-displaced-inupiat-eskimo
Harvard Magazine  article about her return to the Island: http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/a-poets-return
Threat of closing schools: http://www.alaskapublic.org/2015/10/23/wasilla-lawmaker-keep-education-spending-in-check-cut-rural-schools/
About King Island: http://www.preservationnation.org/issues/11-most-endangered/locations/king-island.html
Some of Wesley Leonard's work
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wesley_Leonard

The Activist Work of Amy Hallingstad: "Taking our land from us means driving us off the face of the earth"

 Petersburg, Alaska. ASL-P258-III-67-687

On December 19, 1947, two years after the passage of the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act, a Tlingit resident of Petersburg, Alaska Amy Hallingstad wrote a letter to the National Congress of American Indians, then a newly founded Native rights organization. Though beginning with an ironic opening line, her correspondence progressed to concerned the fierce racial oppression Native people in her village faced on a seemingly day to day basis. The Anti-Discrimination Act was to allow Native people to live in Alaska with access to public spaces and to conduct themselves without the fear of prejudice from non-Native residents. Her letter begins as follows,

         Dear Mrs. Bronson:

       Here in the land of Santa Claus, Christmas will bring little cheer to our children this year.
       We natives, 35,000 Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts, are half of Alaska's permanent population,
       and we must watch our children die of diseases that come from cold and lack of food. Our
       homes and lands, our fisheries and trees, our trap· lines and reindeer, everything we possess
       is being seized or threatened by unscrupulous white men, who tell us that what they

       are doing to us has been approved in Washington.
       All of the promises that have come to us from Washington are now broken.

President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, Amy Hallingstate happen to be the first Native student to enroll at the Peterburg school as a child, and as an adult, when writing the letter, she grappled to understand why "Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts," would be having their property forcibly taken by white men, regardless of the territory's laws against such behavior. As national citizens in the Alaska Territory, Native people in villages and towns, many of their own making, were having non-Native residents vandalize and assault them with impunity. Her list of such abuses includes livestock, trees, and entire fisheries that non-Native people had taken from them. After highlighting the illegal and horrifying aggressions perpatrated upon the Native community in Petersburg, her letter then lends treatment to the legal agreements forge between Native communities and the federal government that vowed the Native land rights and other associative hunting and fishing agreements.

       Presidents and Secretaries of the Interior have promised us the last time was in June, 1946
       —that the boundaries of all our lands would be marked out clearly so that no trespasser  

       would take the fish and game and furs that we need to keep our children warm and well fed
       throughout the long Alaskan winters. Now Secretary Krug, who is supposed to be our
       guardian, refuses to let this promise be kept. Petitions on his desk from many native villages
       are still unanswered. Secretary Krug himself promised us, on the 9th day of last December, 

       that he would have such boundary line drawn immediately, beginning with the 

       lands of Klukwan. That promise, too, stands broken. Our friends in the Indian Bureau
       have made many efforts to hold such hearings. Always Secretary Krug has stopped them.

Drawing the connection to land and environmental resources with the wellbeing of Native children, Hallingstad illuminates the importance of subsistence life-ways for Native people. For her, the government breaking an agreement that demarcated established boundaries to traditional areas, as well as access for hunting and fishing, held dire consequence on the village's most vulnerable. The federal government has not responded, even though villages residents had organized petitions demanding answers and solutions to such problems. In pointing out Krug's alleged unwillingness to work in concert with prior accords with Native people, Hallingstad sites an example from the arctic region of the territory.

       We were promised by Secretary Krug on the same day, that our farthest north Eskimo town,
       Barrow, on the Arctic Ocean, would be allowed a town reserve to include its whaling grounds
       and the places where its men dig the coal to keep warm with through the long Arctic night.
       That promise, too, stands broken. We were promised by President Roosevelt, President
       Hoover, President Coolidge, President Wilson, and even by presidents before their
       days, that our possessions would always be protected.

Point Barrow, Alaska, 1899-1908. Reverend Samuel Spriggs. Photographs. ASL-PCA-320

In Barrow, she cites, how Native people's access to traditional whaling grounds had been denied, leaving them without a way to sustain themselves for the winter season. Moving from how the government failed to keep up its legal agreements with Natives, she discusses how not only are people being denied entry into places they have always gone (and possess federal rights to be there), but that they are being arrested for the very same actions the government allows corporations. The letter reads,

      Now the men in Washington who are supposed to be our protectors say that big corporations 

      can take our trees, our minerals and all our lands without asking our permission or paying us. 

      One of our Eskimo boys was arrested and thrown into jail when he tried to mine jade on the 

      lands that belong to his own people. One of our Indian men was arrested when he tried to fish 

      in the fishing grounds that always belonged to the people of his house. Now the Agriculture 

      Department men threaten to arrest us if we cut down our own trees. We are wondering if 

      they expect us to live on snow and to keep warm in the winter by burning ice.

       Now a bill has just been introduced in Congress by the heads of the Indian Affairs
       Committees, who are supposed to protect us, that would take away our reservations,
       which are our homes and our Promised Land. Where can we go then? We are not like
       white men who are always moving. Most of our homes and villages have been right
       where they are now for many hundreds of generations. We know this is true because
       animals that have not roamed on earth for thousands of years are sometimes found
       in the dump heaps of our villages. Taking our land from us means driving us off the
       face of the earth. When we were under the Russian Czars they said that nobody should
       take our possessions without our consent. When they sold Alaska they did not consult us,
       but they asked the United States to promise that our land rights would be respected. That
       promise is set out in the Treaty, but it is no longer observed.

Columbia Lumber Company sawmill at Whittier, May 7, 1947. ASL-P207-31-29 

She insists that the laws in practice previous to the coming of the United States to Alaska, of which the nation agreed to honor, had been violated, even though Native communities have done there best to abide the newcomers. "We have gone to schools and learned how to operate sawmills and canneries in the most modern way," she wrote but, "Now that we are attempting to do this with our own resources, everything is taken from us, and we are thrown into jail." So while Natives attempt to adapt to the new regulations, the government and business are not living up to their side of the bargain struck with Natives. For Hallingstad, this breach is dispossessing entire communities to such a degree she asks, "Why? Why are we suddenly to be made what you call 'displaced persons?'" The laws, for her, are removing Native people from an environment that is used to construct the very cultures they possess. This leads her to ask,

       Is it because our skins are not as light as yours? But the Declaration of Independence
       you brought us says that all men are created equal. Your constitution promises that the
       property rights of all men-not just white men-shall be safeguarded. And the Bible that
       you brought us and translated into our native tongues says that we are all brothers
       and children of God. It does not say that it is all right for white men to rob from men
       of copper skin.

Referencing both the nation's Declaration of Independence and the Bible, she pushes to understand why the government, and its actors, would allow such treatment to Native people. "Is this done to us on the ground that we are not citizens," she asks, "But your Congress passed a law in 1924 making us all citizens, and that law is still alive." While the Indian Citizenship Act made Native people throughout the nation's states and landholdings citizens she insists there might be a piebald organization to US citizenship. In closing her letter, she returns to referencing the Christmas season , writing,

      You have asked us not to lose faith in the American people, but to tell our story to
      those who will listen. And so we are asking Santa Claus, when he rides through
      Alaska this year, on his way south to gather the cries of our children and to take them with
      his sleigh bells to the hearts of men and women in the States who will dare to raise their
      voices in our behalf and to insist that their public servants in Washington shall not enrich
      their friends by giving away our trees, our fisheries, our traplines, our lands, and our homes.

                                                                                     Respectfully,
                                                                                     Amy Hallingstad

   

Reference:

Petersburg Listening Project: The Legacy of Amy Hallingstad"Alaska Native Sisterhood Human Rights Leader Amy Hallingstad – A Glimpse to 1947" http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/cdmg47/id/42/rec/1

http://shispecialcollections.blogspot.com/2011/09/alaska-native-sisterhood-civil-rights.html
http://www.kfsk.org/2015/08/17/native-civil-rights-activism-has-roots-in-petersburg/

Tlingit Encounters with the Second Kamchatka Expedition

Years in the planning Russia's Second Kamchetka Expedition departed from the shores of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with the two ships the St Paul and the St Peter in May 1741. The expedition leader Vitus Bering commanded the St. Peter and Aleksei Chirikov the St. Paul across the expansive eastern waters toward North America. In late June a rough storm forever divided the two ships. Below one can see their path, Bering in red and Chirikov in blue. From Kamchatka they kept pace with one another in trough and arc movement in the lower left of the map. Then they separated, heading their own directions, with Bering doubling back for a bit, correcting himself and heading southwest.

frontiers.loc.gov

In the longterm Bering's red route (above) proved more than slightly troubled, ending with the crew losing their commander and ship less than 300 miles from Kamchatka. In a previous post I marked the first contact Bering's party made with the Unanagan people by reading a section from Gorg Steller's journal, a naturalist who was part of the crew. Bering lost his life, the St. Peter was destroyed, and the crew stander on the Commander islands only 20 miles from Kamchatka for months, as they rebuilt another ship.

Grave of Vitus Bering. Photo by  Leon Petrosyan

Following the blue line one can see that Alexie Chirikov's course led the St. Paul east, toward what is now called Alaska's southeast (or an area non-Alaskans label part of the 'Northwest'). Chirikov's party traveling aboard the St. Paul, the blue line, turned north eventually reaching Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit coastal territories. The crew saw land at Baker Island off Prince of Wales Island at the south end of what it now the Alaska panhandle, approximately 450 miles southeast of Bering's landfall near the mountain, Yasʼéitʼaa Shaa, meaning "mountain behind Icy Bay," or Shaa Tleinat "Giant Mountian," near the north end of the panhandle, (officially called by the United States and Canada as Mount Saint Elias). Unable to locate a suitable harbor the St. Paul sailed north along to meet with Sheet'-ká X'áat'l, now known more broadly as Baranov Island. In these waters the commander sent out a longboat with a crew of to find an anchorage site to which they could take shelter. On July18, ten members of the crew, including two siberian guides embarked toward the shoreline. Historians Bland and Grinëv detail that, "they were all armed with guns, straight navy broadswords, and cutlasses, and in addition they were given as mall copper cannon and two signal rockets. Dement'ev was ordered to be very careful and to try to gain the trust of the local inhabitants with small gifts in the form of kettles, beads, Chinese tobacco, smoking pipes, fabric, needles, and silver coins." This party never returned to the St. Paul. After a few days Chirikov sent a smaller party of 5 men to search for the missing ones. This group of sailors also disappeared without notice.

Mt. St. Elias and Icy Bay Glacier, Alaska. & Icy Bay Glacier, Alaska.By Fhoki Kayamori. Photographs, ca. 1912-1941.ASL-P55-117

After a few more days Chirikov set up closer to the shore firing cannons in hopes of catching the attention of the missing crew members. As they searched they saw two canoes approaching them, with Native who waved their arms, yelling "Agai! Agai!"Then the boats returned to the shore. Renowned scholars of Tlingit History, Language, and culture, Nora and the late Richard Dauenhauer, have put forth that the Tlingit party were exclaiming, ""Ayx?a\"or "Row!" perhaps as they returned to land. On the 27th Chirikov sailed west without his crew members.

Historians tell divergent narratives about the fate of the men the St. Paul left behind. In "Reflections on the Fate of Alexei Chirikov's Missing Men" scholars Andrei V. Grinëv and Richard L. Bland debate the current literature surrounding the possible destiny these men faced after they left the sight. Many scholars suggest that the Tlingit captured the crew either taking their lives at that point or impressing them into service for a Tlingit family. Yet even more scholars discount such a proposed fate by insisting that due to the being deep into fishing and hunting season, Native people would have been less concerned about fighting with the crew members than with stocking up for the coming winter.

Based on traditional stories, the honored late Tlingit scholar Mark Jacobs, Jr., put forth that the crew members meeting with Native people decided to stay on land because life on the ship, under military disciplined confines, left the men scared to return. These men married into families and their descendents became clan leaders. Often ship's officers used nefarious methods to enlist men on board. After sailing through the Bering, the St. Paul, low on food and water, without a distinct direction of travel perhaps convinced these sailors to spend their days in Tlingit territory, adopting into clans. In the past 270 years Russian artifacts have been found in villages, that are said to be dated back to around this time. There is also an oral history of Chief Annahootz, meaning "Grizzly Bear," disguising himself as a bear as to ambush the shored crew members. And perhaps in this meeting the crew members decided to stay on the mainland.

For further reading:

Nora Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer. Haa Shuka, Our Ancestors: Tlingit Oral Narratives. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press/Sealaska Heritage Foundation. - 1990.

Jacobs, Mark. “Early Encounters Between the Tlingit and the Russians,” in Alaska History, Number 35: Russia in North America: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Russian America, edited by Richard Pierce, pp. 1-6. Fairbanks, AK: The Limestone Press, 1990.

Andrei V. Grinëv and Richard L. Bland. "Reflections on the Fate of Alexei Chirikov's Missing Men."Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2005), pp. 1-8  

Lydia Black, Russians in Alaska. U of Alaska press, 2004.

Self-reinvention in the Birth of the Last Frontier

On June 25, 1897 the steamer the Alice carried a first load of gold through St. Michael's Trading post in Yupik territory on the western coast of the Alaska. Originally the Russian American company founded St. Michael Redoubt in 1833 and by 1897 the town of St. Michael became a major hub in the burgeoning Yukon-Alaska Gold Rush. The map below illustrates the Yukon trade routes the mineral would travel with St. Michael there on the shores of western Alaska Territory.

Klondike travel routes

Between 1886 and 1899 approximately 100,000 people entered (invaded?) the Alaska-Yukon area with aspirations of securing hefty tins of gold. This urgent haste started after, in August 1896, a group of Tagist family members, Shaaw Tláa, K̲áa Goox̱, and Keish, and Shaaw Tláa's non-Native husband George Carmack located gold in Rabbit Creek (afterwords known as Banaza Creek), around the relatively new (and contested) border between Alaska and Canada. The family decided to allow Carmack to announce the discovery to the trading post because the authorities would most likely have denied such claims made by Native people, leaving the claim open to others.

When near-do-wells flooded the north armed with pick axes and gold pans they transformed the shape and governance structures of Natives villages and towns. For example within a year from three prospectors finding gold in the village of Siqnazuaq in 1897, which previously held less than a 1,000 residents, the population swelled to 10,000. Upon the coming of this immense amount of people, Siqnazuaq's name was changed to Nome, Alaska. It's estimated that by the early twentieth century the town's population reached 28, 000. Currently, the population sits under 4,000.

The Alaska Territory's boom economy reopened an American frontier once proclaimed closed by historian Fredrick Jackson Turner in 1893 with his work  The Frontier in American History. In the nineteenth century there was an idea that the continent was an empty space allowing non-Natives to travel westward, securing land and sequestering and killing Native people, until the movement ended on the Pacific side of the contiguous part of the nation, what would be known as the "Lower-48." As the United States pushed westward that shifting border allowed those, within the context of U.S. sponsorship, to reinvent themselves. For Turner,  the end of the frontier meant the foreclosure to a distinct way of life, an end for the ability of the nation's population to reinvent and adapt themselves to a new land. Fortunately for the nation, the gold rush in the Alaska Territory created a "Last Frontier" bringing with it a sense of renewal to the nation's imagination. Factory workers in the industrial economy could rest assured that there were rugged independent people at the edge of the nation living lives that their own social and financial situations disallowed them (this is of course the time when Inuit art came to serve a similar purpose).

Felice Pedroni aka Felix Pedro

One such story of reinvention in the Last Frontier was that of prospector Felice Pedroni who uncovered gold amidst the shallows of Cleary Creek, now Pedro Creek, in the Fairbanks region of central Alaska allegedly on July 22, 1902. Born in Trignano di Fanano, Pedroni sailed to New York in 1881 at 23 years of age when he reinvented himself as Felix Pedro, donning a Hispanic name change. Working his way through the country he moved to the Yukon in 1895, with dreams of gold. His search went on for years as he worked claims on either side of the border. Upon a discovery near the Tanana Hills, he famously exclaimed, "There's gold in them there hills!"

Journalist and historian Dermot Cole discusses the shadow of scandal and drama that surrounded Pedroni's life in this exciting article published through the Alaskan Newsminer.com. Pedroni's claim to the mining site proves complicated by a partner Alexander L. Hanot, whom Pedroni knew from his days working in Washington state. Pedro claimed that the only reason Hanot became a split partner with him was that latter owed him 75,000 dollars and that signing him into the claim protected Pedroni's assets due to an alleged maternity case. Hanot denied such allegations that he owed money or that even his share of the claim was fake in any sense. Pedro asserted that when he made the deal with Hanot he was not of a healthy mind. From 1903 to 1909 various people testified to Pedro's deteriorating mental health, notes Cole. Yet, other's testified to the contrary! In divorce papers, Cole writes, Pedro's wife accused her husband of fraud in the Hanot situation.

View of a stone monument with brass plaque dedicated to Felix Pedro located at mile 16.5 of the Steese Highway at the location where Felix Pedro is believed to have discovered gold in 1902. UAA-hmc-0620-series1-f5-16

8 years after his claim, Pedro passed away at the age of 52. Reportedly losing his life to a heart attack, many thought he was a victim of murder. He body was buried in California and laid there until exhumed in 1972 to ship to his hometown in Italy. Upon the transfer, his body was examined and authorities determined his death was the result of ingesting poison. Many suspect his wife Mary Doran took his life. The notion of the frontier in the national imagery served for countless people such as Felice Pedroni shed their old lives as they domesticated an imagined frontier, refusing to acknowledge Indigenous lands, culture, and authority. One need not be Edward Said to see that the imaginative geography of imperial frontiers, which allow people to put forth, new names, or invented personas, are always home to other communities these actors help dispossess.


Source:
Dermot Cole's article "Accusations of scandal, legal battle followed Felix Pedro to the grave"
http://www.newsminer.com/news/dermot_cole/accusations-of-scandal-legal-battle-followed-felix-pedro-to-the/article_7635918a-f112-11e2-a15e-001a4bcf6878.html

Attu Boy: Unangax̂ Prisoners of the Japanese during World War II

Japanese troops raise the Imperial battle flag on Kiska Island in the Aleutians on June 6, 1942

Coordinated with the Battle of Midway as part the Pacific Theater of World War II, around the island of Amaxnax̂, at Dutch Harbor, the Japanese Navy attacked the American territory of the Aleutian Islands. On June 3rd and 4th, 1942, six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they took the US Navy Weather Station on Qisxa island, Kiska in English, that held 12 Navy personnel. Two American soldiers lost their lives as the Japanese rounded up the island's residents. One man fled their capture, but turned himself in after about a month and a half of hiding on the island. One of the main reasons for the occupation was that is doing so they could control that shipping route corridor of the North Pacific. I have an Sugpiaq cousin who worked down in Dutch Harbor during the war when he was 16 years old, cleaning the pilot's sleeping quarters.

Picture of the June 3rd Attack on Dutch Harbor.

"The village. View of Attu." Photograph taken during the 1937 Smithsonian Institution's Archaeological Expedition to the Aleutian Islands. uaa-hmc-0690-s1-1937-69a 

On June 7th, the 301st Independent Infantry Battalion of the Japanese Northern Army invaded the Aleutian island of Atan, or Attu in English. The axis fighters made 44 villagers, two of them non-Native, prisoners of war. The villagers remained captive for months before they removed them from the island and interned them at a prisoner of war camp at Otaru, Hokkaido. Half of the islanders would never return from the camp.

 "Aleut (Unangan) relocation to Southeast Alaska: Kasaan, Killisnoo, and Ward Lake Refugee Camps, 1942." Photographer's notes: Vaccinations, Aleut Refugee children. Three girls, F. Prokopeuff, Oleana Snigaroff and Anfesia Gardner, laughing and holding their shoulder. ASL-P306-1065

On June 12, 1942 the United States began forcibly removing 880 Unangax̂ people, and their associated family members, from their villages in the Aleutians. After making them help raze their homes, the government boarded them on ships. Once in the water, government transported Non-Native villagers to the contiguous part of the nation and the Unangax̂ people taken to dilapidated facilities along the Alaskan Panhandle. Over the following two years, due to unsanitary conditions, one in ten islanders would lose their lives in residence at the camps. Important to note that just 30 miles away from one camp, the United States kept German prisoners of war in more humane conditions then they did their own citizens.

    

This month marks 73 years since the United States and Japan began the transnational project to intern the Unangax^. These islanders suffered great losses even though they were not at war with either nation. United States and Japanese efforts to fight one another worked together in dislocating a third group of people (note: Unangax̂ were and are US citizens). Hundreds of islanders would never return to their homes again, nor would they reunite with their Non-Native loved ones at the time of the war's end. Nick Golodoff was a child on Attu when the Japanese invaded and occupied the island. He returned to live his life away from the village after surviving the prisoner of war camp in Otaru. The reason why he didn't go back was because with so few remaining islanders the government choose to leave the village uninhabited, distributing them to other villages. Golodoff wrote a beautiful memoir  of his war time experiences in the book Attu Boy: A Young Alaskan's WWII Memoir. Leaving behind loving family, Golodoff passed away in 2013. Below is a moving interview he did with then KUBC reporter Stephanie Joyce in 2012.

A few resources:
http://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/unangan-internment.htm

http://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/upload/2-Introduction-Telling-the-Story-of-Attu.pdf

http://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/upload/13-Conclusions-Bibliography.pdf

http://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/unangan-internment.htm

http://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/upload/mobley-aleut-book-lo_res.pdf