The friction of the floe edge: shore whaling in northern Alaska
Well before the sale of Alaska in 1867, American whalers and sealers plied the Russian waters of the Bering Sea. These voyages connected the world of Pacific beachcombers to the Arctic, and constituted another element of the ‘chaotic plurality’ of private and subimperial interests that John Darwin has identified as the core of imperial expansion.50 Whalers from New England had been steadily expanding their range, chasing everdiminishing populations of oil-rich whales (right, sperm and bowhead) through the Atlantic, the Pacific and ultimately the far north.
Whale oil (derived from whale blubber) was crucial for lighting homes and city streets, and lubricating the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Whalers’ tracks in pursuit of their prey crossed the globe, connecting the main whaling ports of Nantucket and New Bedford in Massachusetts, to the Azores, Valparaiso in Chile, New Zealand, Hawaii, Japan, San Francisco and the Siberian Far East. Five-year (and longer) voyages cut across imperial territories and gathered polyglot and multi-racial crews from all the places where ships touched shore.51 In the North American Arctic, from the discovery of the Bering Strait whaling grounds by Thomas Roys in 1848, they found unparalleled opportunity and riches, peril and ruin. Whalers, together with pelagic sealers from Britain and America, also caused the Russians considerable consternation as they made their wealth from Russian waters. After the Americans bought Alaska in 1867, they inherited this Russian anxiety, but like their imperial predecessors, could do little to protect either valuable fur seal or whale populations. Indeed, until the end of the nineteenth century, the only significant source of American political or military authority in the Bering Sea or Arctic regions was the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service, whose Arctic presence sometimes consisted of a single ship.52Ice presented an inherent danger to the Arctic whale fishery.
After the heady early days of the Bering Sea fishery in 1848—1850, the bowhead population had significantly decreased. Making a profit meant working in the Arctic in April and May, during the bowhead spring migration under the ice—ice that wooden whaleships, even powered by steam, could not break through. Moreover, whaling in the ice was not conducive to the classic ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’ of pelagic whalers because it carried with it the danger of being dragged under the pack ice. If a ship became crushed or stranded, rescue was unlikely. In 1871, thirty-three ships were lost in the pack ice of the Beaufort Sea along with the entire season’s catch. The industry was already in crisis, for the whale oil at its heart had been rendered more or less obsolete by petroleum refining in the 1870s. By the 1880s the market was driven instead by baleen (whalebone), principally for corsets. But at this point, the bowhead grounds were nearly exhausted—more than 15,000 whales, or two-thirds of the total population, had been killed.53For coastal Inupiat (Inuit), their relationship to the bowhead whale, or Agviq, was one of physical and spiritual sustenance, connecting them to their past and future, to the land, the sea and the floe edge.54 The umialik, or whaling captain, had significant authority within the extended kin groups that formed the fundamental social and political unit within the Inupiaq world. These kin groups controlled clearly defined territories and occupied (and defended if necessary) permanent villages in favourable whaling locations.55 The security of a kin group depended in part on the umialik’s knowledge of the ice and on his respectful treatment of the whale. The decimation of the bowhead population by commercial whalers drastically undermined this system, and, together with introduced diseases and the crash of the western Arctic caribou herd in the 1880s (a key source of food and clothing), threw the Inupiaq world of north-western Alaska into crisis.
Extended kin groups broke down, with traditional lands abandoned as thousands of often starving Inupiat searched for food and work, creating a mass diaspora along the Alaskan coast.56This formed the context in which commercial shore whaling stations were set up in the 1880s. Dozens of veteran whalers, of many ethnic backgrounds (including African Americans, Azoreans, Japanese, Europeans and others), set up small independent stations on the coast. The goal was to overwinter, trade for baleen, and whale from the floe edge in the spring, and such stations almost immediately began to draw hundreds of newly migrant Inupiat. At some locations (such as modern Barrow), stations were set up in existing villages, but on the Tikigaq peninsula (modern Point Hope in north-western Alaska), the umialik Atuqauraq forced the whalers to set up well outside the village boundaries at a place later known as Jabbertown.57 Places like Jabbertown were far from being exclusively ‘white’. Rather, they became polyglot communities, located in the confluence of heterogeneous maritime and increasingly unstable Inupiaq worlds. Lt. Bertholf of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear observed in 1898 that there were thirteen whaling stations at Jabbertown owned and run by white men, which he quickly qualified with the comment: ‘that is, there were forty men who were not Eskimos, for in that country every man who is not a native is called a “white man,” whether he is an American, Japanese, Portuguese, or a negro’.58 Bertholf s casual remark on the social construction of race, then, proceeded from an observation of both the whalers' mobility and fixity. Their semi-permanence on the ice, the commerce in which they participated, and the fact that they were not indigenous, conferred ‘whiteness’ under an American regime. Like shore whalers in New Zealand and elsewhere, these men could be viewed as the ‘advance guard of empire' whose presence at the floe edge entangled Inupiaq communities in the wider world of markets and empires.59 Yet at the same time, any authority they held depended upon strategic partnerships with Inupiaq women.
At the shore whaling stations on the floe edge, as at fur trading factories or on the beach, women stood at the centre of cultural encounter, exchange and friction.60 Successful whalers married Inupiaq women, who in turn helped to fuse Inupiaq and commercial whaling methods.61 These represented strategic alliances on both sides. Most of these women were migrants or orphans, and therefore exceptionally vulnerable in north-western Alaska at the best of times, and even more so during subsistence crises. Wives supervised the sewing of traditional skin boats (singular umiaq, plural umiat) with which commercial whalers replaced wooden whaleboats, as umiat were far lighter, flexible and more transportable. Women composed whaling crews from among their extended kin, other migrants or locals prohibited from whaling on all-Inupiaq crews because of ritual pollution (such as a death in the family).62 They accompanied their husbands’ crews to the floe edge for weeks at a time, cooking for the crews and repairing clothing and damaged umiat.
An Inupiaq woman involved in commercial whaling, however, was compelled to commit serious transgressions. Traditionally, umialik wives were not supposed to work at all during whaling times. Moreover, tents, fire and menstruating women were not allowed on the ice during whaling. Food could not be cooked, and pounding and hammering were expressly forbidden. Commercial whalers found these prohibitions inconvenient, inefficient and, ultimately, unprofitable. The veteran whaler Jack Hadley remarked in 1915: ‘The advent of the white man to engage in beach or floe whaling was a momentous event for the native of northern Alaska: it was the beginning of the end of his devil business and the old prehistoric style of whaling.’63 He saw the commercial whaling industry and his fellow whalers as agents of civilisation in the far north, and he accordingly claimed these selfproclaimed ‘beachcombers’ as an eminently respectable vanguard of modernity.
Implied here was a vision of the colonial future of northern Alaska—that whalers were the only outsiders ever likely to stay on the North Slope—and Hadley saw the whaling stations as the only possible ‘colonies’ in Alaska’s far north. Moreover, he viewed whalers—who Tony Ballantyne has pointed out have often been painted as anarchic antiheroes who ‘rejected conventions of restraint, respectability and religiosity for the egalitarian conventions of a rough and ready mateship’—as the agents of the civilising (capitalist) mission in Alaska’s far north.64For all of this, most men were themselves transformed by the experiences and exigencies of the floe edge. Several of them—notably the Americans Charlie Brower in Barrow and Jim Allen in Wainwright, as well as the German Cooper Koenig at Jabbertown (all of whom founded whaling dynasties among their Inupiaq descendants)—began to behave as umialiit in order to retain their crews, secure footholds in the community and therefore make a profit.65 They began to divide up the flesh and blubber (maktak) of the whale (which was no longer commercially viable) into traditional portions. These were shared out to the community, and also formed part of the Inupiaq crew’s ‘lay’, or portion, according to the traditional system of the fishing fleet. They also began to open their stores of trading supplies in times of need, especially during the hungry springtime. On the one hand, the adoption of the umialik role was temporary, limited to the whaling season as the shore stations became part of a new round of seasonal subsistence for migrant Inupiat. On the other hand, it gave some whalers a certain circumscribed authority, which meant that they then became useful Arctic agents of overstretched U.S. power. By the turn of the century (and well into the twentieth century), shore whalers like Brower were being employed officially as census takers, and unofficially as arbiters of the law in the unsettled state created by the confluence of ice, commercial whaling and Inupiaq dislocation, aggravated by the introduction of diseases and alcohol.66
These tensions were perhaps best illustrated by a late nineteenth-century tragedy.
In 1897 an Inupiaq man from Tikigaq, known to the whalers only as ‘Pysha’, was taken by a commercial whaler to Herschel Island off the coast of northern Canada, together with his wife and family. Herschel Island, by that time, was a major centre for commercial whaling, where several ships would overwinter and commence whaling in the spring. One evening when Pysha was drunk, he killed his daughter. A few days later, an outraged crowd of whalers, led by the missionary and the ships’ captains, bound Pysha to a log and flogged him in an episode of vigilante justice that led the whaler Jim Allen to recall years later, ‘I think that whipping was one of the cruelest things I’ve ever witnessed.’67 The public humiliation of the flogging drove Pysha insane, and he went on to kidnap a woman from Barrow and to kill at least eight other Inupiat. When he turned up in Barrow a few months later, he encountered the relatives of his victims as well as several of the commercial whalers from Herschel Island (including Allen), who were now shipwrecked and waiting for rescue. Pysha’s victims’ kin demanded retributive justice, and Brower, acting on his wife’s advice, convened a jury of the relatives and commercial whalers. They found Pysha guilty, and the kin took him to the edge of town and killed him in satisfaction of the blood feud he had instigated.68 The incident illustrated the continuing friction in the social landscape of the ice. In the trauma of the diaspora partly caused by commercial whalers and partly by environmental factors, everyone had to make up new rules for sites like shore whaling stations, which were central to a new subsistence round and to the whaling industry. But they remained, as Pysha’s case indicated, liminal zones of engagement with all kinds of strangers. Brower’s jury represented one way to deal with this friction of the floe edge, in a way that fused American justice, vigilantism and Inupiaq social control.The ice did not only fix people in place as awkward agents of empire. Its products also travelled, in the form of the baleen harvested and processed on the ice. Under the supervision of ‘white’ shore whalers and their wives, Inupiaq employees cleaned, scraped and dried baleen, and then cut it into strips, which were then tied together in 100-pound bundles and shipped out when the ice opened in the summer. The bundles themselves were then transported via Hawaii to San Francisco, where they entered the orbit of the fashion industry. In the most profitable year of 1893, Alaskan baleen flooded the market with 300,000 pounds of baleen. The end result meant that the hourglass figure—the iconic image of white feminine desirability and respectability (until the first decade of the twentieth century, when corsets went out of fashion)—and the torturous daily ritual of cinching up the whalebone corset were partly made possible by the friction, intimacies and alliances of the floe edge.69
Commercial shore whalers in the Alaskan Arctic, like their Russian predecessors in the Aleutians and imperial agents elsewhere, were forced by the exigencies of extreme and rapidly changing environments to adopt and adapt indigenous knowledge, practices and connections in order to secure their own (often precarious) colonial and commercial pro- jects.70 The Arctic and subarctic regions thus became entangled via the maritime fur trade and commercial whaling industry in global systems of commerce and exchange. But here, as in India, New Zealand, Africa and elsewhere, indigenous people also turned imperial and commercial practices and technologies of rule to their own ends, amidst (and because of) severe environmental and cultural change.71 These were certainly strategies of survival, from the expansion of the role of the Unangan chief to the marital alliances of Inupiaq women. What the stories of the nineteenth-century Arctic and Bering Sea regions bring to our attention is that all parties in imperial and colonial contexts, natives and strangers, were simultaneously trying to make sense of (and survive in) rapidly changing natural and cultural environments. If we understand that strategies of imperial rule, patterns of indigenous survival, practices of resource extraction and the environments in which they took place were all dynamic and relative to one another, then we can continue to develop a more complex and nuanced picture of the colonial past.
Notes
1 I borrow the term ‘crossroads of continents’ from William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (eds), Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (Washington, DC, 1988).
2 Ryan Tucker Jones has made a related argument in an article that appeared after this book went to press. See Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into Whales: The History of the North Pacific from below the Waves,” American Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 349-377.
3 Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver, 2005).
4 Exceptions include John Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far.North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven, 2009); and Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire (Oxford, 2011).
5 Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past (Wellington, 2012).
6 Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994); Michael Kho- darkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500--1800 (Bloomington, 2002).
7 Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840--1865 (Cambridge, 1999); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, 2004).
8 Vinkovetsky, Russian America.
9 Ibid., pp. 52-53.
10 James R. Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply in Russian America, 1784-1867 (New York, 1976).
11 Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer and Lydia T. Black (eds), Anooshi Lingit Aani Ka: Russians in Tlingit America, the Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804 (Seattle, 2008).
12 The most complex and extensive treatment of Russian-Tlingit relations can be found in Sergei Kan, Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle, 1999).
13 James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Montreal, 2001).
14 Ioann Veniaminov has the most extensive description of the training of young boys for the nineteenth century. See Ioann Veniaminov, fapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela: Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District, Lydia T. Black and R.H. Geoghegan (trans.), Richard A. Pierce (ed.) (Kingston, 1984 [1840]); Marfa Golodova, ‘Pregnancy, Child Bed, Widowhood, and Rearing of a Boy', in Knut Bergsland and Moses L. Dirks (eds), Unangam Ungiikangin Kayux Tunusangn: Aleut Tales and Narratives, Collected 1909-1910 by Waldemar Jochelson (Fairbanks, 1990), pp. 278-283.
15 Martin Sauer, An Account of a Geographical and Astronomical Expedition to the Northern Parts of Russia. by Commodore Joseph Billings, in the Years 1785, &c. to 1794 (London, 1802), p. 157.
16 Quoted in Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier America, p. 363.
17 The difficulties of defining ‘Metis’ identity administratively, historiographically and individually are explored in Jennifer S.H. Brown, ‘Metis, Halfbreeds, and Other Real People: Challenging Cultures and Categories’, The History Teacher, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1993), pp. 19-26. See also Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Norman, 1996); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870 (Norman, 1983).
18 Gwenn A. Miller, ‘“The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy”: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Chapel Hill, 2006), p. 313.
19 Aron L. Crowell, ‘Ethnicity and Periphery: The Archaeology of Identity in Russian America’, in Sarah K. Croucher and Lindsay Weiss (eds), The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts (New York, 2011), pp. 85-104.
20 Quoted in Miller, ‘“The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy”’, p. 313.
21 William H. Dall, Alaska and its Resources (New York, 1960 [1870]), p. 385.
22 James R. Gibson, ‘European Dependence Upon American Natives: The Case of Russian America’, Ethnohistory, Vol. 25, No. 4 (1978), pp. 361-363.
23 Michael Khodarkovsky, ‘“Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects”: Constructing Non-Christian Identities in Early Modern Russia’, in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (eds), Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917 (Bloomington, 1997).
24 Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994), pp. 84-85.
25 Veniaminov, fapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela, pp. 1-129.
26 David Nordlander, ‘Innokentii Veniaminov and the Expansion of Orthodoxy in Russian America’, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 (February 1995), pp. 19-36; Sujit Sivasundarum, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge, 2005).
27 Veniaminov, fapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela, pp. 187, 320-323.
28 Lydia T. Black, ‘Ivan Pan’kov: Architect of Aleut Literacy’, Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1977), pp. 94-107.
29 R.R. Rathburn, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church as a Native Institution among the Koniag Eskimo of Kodiak Island’, Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1981), pp. 12-21.
30 Margaret Lantis, ‘The Aleut Social System, 1750 to 1810, From Early Historical Sources’, in Margaret Lantis (ed.), Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and the Southern Yukon: Method and Content (Lexington, 1970), pp. 250-255; Roza G. Liapunova, Essays on the Ethnography of the Aleuts: At the End of the Eighteenth and the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Jerry Shelest (trans.), William B. Workman and Lydia Black (eds) Rasmussen Library Historical Translation Series, No. 9. (Fairbanks, 1996), pp. 146-148.
31 Veniaminov, Japiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela, p. 244; Iakov Netsvetov, The Journals of Iakov Netsvetov, Lydia T. Black (ed. and trans.) (Kingston, 1980), p. 21; Nikolai Lekanoff in Ray Hudson (ed.), The Beginning of Memory: Oral Histories on the Lost Villages of the Aleutians. A Report to the National Park Service, Aleutian Pribilof Islands Restitution Trust, and the Ounalashka Corporation (Anchorage, 2004), p. 108.
32 Veniaminov, Japiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela, pp. 240-245; Netsvetov, The Journals of Iakov Netsvetov, p. 12; Douglas W. Veltre, ‘Perspectives on Aleut Culture Change During the Russian Period', in Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond J. Barnett (eds), Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier (Tacoma, 1990), pp. 175-183.
33 Netsvetov, The Journals of Iakov Netsvetov, p. 21.
34 Ibid., p. 19.
35 Hudson, The Beginning of Memory.
36 Veniaminov, Japiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskogo Otdela, p. 244; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of Alaska, 1730-1885 (New York, 1960 [1880]), p. 639; Hudson, The Beginning of Memory, p. 18.
37 Ray Hudson (ed.), People of the Aleutian Islands (Anchorage, 1986), pp. 102, 164.
38 Nikolai Lekanoff in Hudson, The Beginning of Memory, p. 108.
39 Knut B. Birkeland, The Whalers of Akutan. An Account of Modern Whaling in the Aleutian Islands (New Haven, 1926), p. 79.
40 Rathburn, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church as a Native Institution among the Koniag Eskimo of Kodiak Island', p. 15.
41 Andrew Makarin in Hudson, The Beginning of Memory, p. 191.
42 Isobel Hutchinson, Stepping Stones from Alaska to Asia (London, 1937) p. 97.
43 Henry Wood Elliott, Our Arctic Province (New York, 1886), p. 172; Andrew Makarin in Raymond Hudson (ed.), Four Villages (Unalaska, 1978), p. 57; H.D. Fassett, ‘The Aleut Sea Otter Hunt in the Late Nineteenth Century', San Francisco Chronicle, 28 December 1890. Reprinted in Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May 1960), pp. 134-135.
44 Andrew Makarin in Hudson, Four Villages, p. 57.
45 William S. Laughlin, Aleuts: Survivors of the Bering Land Bridge (New York, 1980), pp. 28-31.
46 ‘Report on the School Work of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska', Russian Orthodox American Messenger, Vol. 5 (1900), p. 160.
47 Fassett, ‘The Aleut Sea Otter Hunt in the Late Nineteenth Century', p. 135; Lael Morgan, ‘Early American Years', in Lael Morgan (ed.), The Aleutians (Anchorage, 1980), p. 114.
48 Fredericka Martin, The Hunting of the Silver Fleece: Epic of the Fur Seal (New York, 1946); Dean Kohlhoff, When the Wind Was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II (Seattle, 1995).
49 See especially Kohlhoff, When the Wind Was a River.
50 John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion', The English Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 447 (June 1997), pp. 614-642.
51 Briton Cooper Busch, ‘Whaling Will Never Do For Me': The American Whaleman in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington, 1994).
52 John Bockstoce, Whales, Ice and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle, 1986); Truman R. Strobridge and Dennis L. Noble, Alaska and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service (Annapolis, 1999).
53 Bockstoce, Whales, Ice and Men, pp. 220-221.
54 Bill Hess, Gift of the Whale: The Inupiat Bowhead Hunt, A Sacred Tradition (Seattle, 1999).
55 Ernest S. Burch Jr., Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln, 2005).
56 Ernest S. Burch Jr., The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska (Fairbanks, 1998).
57 Tom Lowenstein, The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (Berkeley, 1992).
58 Ellsworth P. Bertholf, Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Cutter ‘Bear' and the Overland Expedition for the Relief of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean from November 27, 1897 to September 13, 1898 (Washington, DC, 1899), p. 25.
59 Ballantyne, Webs of Empire, p. 136.
60 Brown, Strangers in Blood; Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; David Haines, ‘In Search of the “Whah- een”: Ngai Tahu Women, Shore Whalers, and the Meaning of Sex in Early New Zealand', in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, 2009), pp. 49-66.
61 Charles D. Brower, Fifty Years Below fero:A Lifetime of Adventure in the Far.North (4th edn) (New York, 1943); Arthur James Allen, A Whaler and Trader in the Arctic, 1895 to 1944: My Life with the Bowhead (Anchorage, 1978).
62 Margaret Lantis, ‘The Alaskan Whale Cult and its Affinities’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1938), pp. 440-445.
63 Jack Hadley, ‘Whaling off the Alaska Coast’, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 41, No. 12 (1915), p. 917.
64 Ballantyne, Webs of Empire, p. 125.
65 Mark Shannon Cassell, ‘“If They Did Not Work for the Station, They Were In Bad Luck”: Commercial Shore Whaling and Inupiat Eskimo Labour in Late 19th/Early 20th Century North Alaska’, PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000.
66 U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900 Census, Twelfth Census of the United States: Census of Alaska (Northern District), National Archives and Records Administration, Alaska Region; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1910 Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: Census of Alaska (Northern District), National Archives and Records Administration, Alaska Region; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1920 Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States: Census of Alaska, National Archives and Records Administration, Alaska Region.
67 Bockstoce, Whales, Ice and Men, p. 279; Rob Ingram and Helene Dobrolowski, Waves Upon the Shore: An Historical Profile of Herschel Island (Whitehorse, 1989). The quotation is from Allen, A Whaler and Trader in the Arctic, p. 37.
68 Allen, A Whaler and Trader in the Arctic, p. 69.
69 Bockstoce, Whales, Ice and Men, pp. 231-252.
70 This is the main thrust of one strand of historiography on the nature of imperial information and intelligence gathering. See, for example, C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780--1870 (Cambridge, 1996); and Tony Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC,
2006).
71 Bayly, Empire and Information; Ballantyne, Between Colonialism and Diaspora; Ballantyne, Webs of Empire; Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000); Paul Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga- Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca, 2002).
Further reading
Ballantyne, Tony, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's Colonial Past (Wellington, 2012).
Bockstoce, John, Whales, Ice and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle, 1986).
Bockstoce, John, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven, 2009).
Burch, Ernest S. Jr., The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska (Fairbanks, 1998).
Burch, Ernest S. Jr., Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln, 2005).
Busch, Briton Cooper, ‘Whaling Will Never Do For Me': The American Whaleman in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington, 1994).
Cruikshank, Julie, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver, 2005).
Gibson, James R., Otter Skins, Boston Ships and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841 (Montreal, 2001).
Haines, David, ‘In Search of the “Whaheen”: Ngai Tahu Women, Shore Whalers, and the Meaning of Sex in Early New Zealand', in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, 2009), pp. 49-66.
Kan, Sergei, Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle,
1999).
Lantis, Margaret (ed.), Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and the Southern Yukon: Method and Content (Lexington, 1970).
Lowenstein, Tom, The Things That Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (Berkeley, 1992).
Miller, Gwenn A., ‘“The Perfect Mistress of Russian Economy”: Sighting the Intimate on a Colonial Alaskan Terrain, 1784-1821', in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Chapel Hill, 2006), pp. 297-322.
Slezkine, Yuri, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994).
Vinkovetsky, Ilya, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire (Oxford, 2011).