The Russian maritime fur trade and Unangan chiefs

The eastward expansion of the Russian Empire was driven by a lust for fur. Beginning in the sixteenth century, fur hunters (promyshlenniki') chased elusive fur-bearing mammals, especially the sable, through Siberia, in the process extending the territory of the Russian Empire.

The voyages of Vitus Bering in the 1720s—1740s did not discover, as Tsar Peter the Great had hoped, a connection between the Asian and American continents. They did, however, reveal the rich maritime environment of the Aleutian Islands. Fed by upwel­lings from the Aleutian Trench, the region is home to a rich variety of marine life, supporting large populations of sea lions, northern fur seals and especially sea otters— whose pelts fetched a rich price on the Chinese market in exchange for tea, nankeen and sugar. The lure of these pelts and the Chinese trade they promised prompted Russian merchants and promyshlenniki to expand their enterprises across the Bering Strait and into Alaska. Here they encountered (often with extreme violence) the Unangan of the Aleutian Islands and Sugpiaq of Kodiak Island (amalgamated as ‘Aleuts’ by the Russians), who lived in this difficult environment by means of a highly developed mar­itime technology.

In a region of massive storms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and alluring pelts, only well-funded Russian merchants could make a profit. By 1799, Tsar Paul had granted an official charter to the new joint-stock venture, the Russian American Company (RAC), to operate as a monopoly in North America. The RAC, as Ilya Vinkovetsky has argued, was ‘a complex institutional actor, with a split personality as a colonial administration and a commercial enterprise’.⁹ Modelled on the British East India Company, it represented something utterly new in Russian experience. Between 1818 and 1840, the company extended its operations from the Kurile Islands north of Japan to Fort Ross in northern California, with some trading posts in the Alaskan interior and northern coasts. Meant to be a highly competitive, efficient and modern enterprise, the experiment was nevertheless characterised by vulnerability. Simply supplying the colony with food and consumer goods was a daunting task, frequently requiring collaboration with (and dependence upon) Native and European competitors.¹⁰ Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Company’s headquarters at Novo-Arkhangel’sk (modern Sitka in south-east Alaska), which was a contested space from the moment of its establishment in 1804.¹¹ Subject to constant threat from its traditional owners, the Kik.sadi Tlingit (who maintained their settlements on its periphery), it was also dependent upon the Tlingit for basic supplies.¹² Furthermore, the Russians engaged in a constant struggle with their British competitors in the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) territories of Canada, as well as American private traders (or, as they were known on the coast, ‘Boston Men’) who traded independently with native peoples for pelts.

The maritime fur trade of the RAC was wholly reliant upon coerced and mobile indigenous labour. In this sense, it was no different from its imperial competitors, which also relied extensively on unfree labour (including that of slaves, convicts and indentured servants). In the Bering Sea region, forced labour was tied to the exploitation of the sea otter and the northern fur seal. Fur seals could be clubbed on land, and, from 1786, large crews of Unangan and Russian labourers were stationed on the Pribilof Islands (north of the Aleutian Chain in the Bering Sea). Sea otters, on the other hand, had to be killed at sea, and doing so required the adept use of the kayak and the throwing spear. Many travellers commented on the skill with which the Unangan manoeuvred their kayaks, the extensive training that young boys endured to stretch out their ligaments for hours of sit­ting, legs extended, in the skin boats, and the endless practice with the throwing board to cast darts at the animals, with floats attached for easy carcass retrieval.¹⁴ Martin Sauer, one of the officers on Joseph Billings’ scientific expedition in 1791 (a Russian expedition captained by one of James Cook’s o fficers), wrote: ‘If perfect symmetry, smoothness, and proportion constitute beauty, they are beautiful; to me they appeared so beyond anything that I ever beheld... Their first appearance struck me with amazement beyond expres­sion.’¹⁵ Mastery of the kayak was crucial for the sea otter hunt, a mastery that no Russian proved ever able to achieve. Indeed, the Governor of Russian America, Ferdinand Petrovich Wrangell (a former Arctic explorer and later a founder of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society), wrote that the Unangan were the ‘sole miners of the company’s wealth’.¹⁶ The RAC required all Unangan men to labour either in the sea otter or the fur seal hunt, meaning that whole villages were evacuated of men for long periods of time.

In addition to the conscripted labour of hunters, one of the core features of Russia’s American colony was the mixed unions between Russian men and Alaskan native women. With very few Russians willing to travel and to stay in the distant colony (there were never more than 600 ethnic Russians in Alaska at any time), mixed families represented a fact of life from its earliest days. Like the Canadian Metis, Alaskan Creoles were literally born from the tensions and intimacies of empire, but unlike the Metis, Creoles acquired a unique legal status and ethnic identity as Creoles (kreol), with the Russians adopting the French term for a mixed racial category.¹⁷ The labelling of the Creoles reflected the anxiety of Russian officials to, as Gwenn Miller has put it, ‘label people of mixed ancestry as a particular social kind in the taxonomy of empire’.¹⁸ Occupying a status in-between ethnic Russians and indigenous people, Creoles were exempt from taxes, earned compen­sation for their labour and could receive education at RAC expense. Yet they were also tied to the colony, expected to complete twenty years of service in capacities ranging from hunters to interpreters, missionaries, sea captains and junior administrators.¹⁹ Russian administrators may have envisioned Alaska’s future as a mixed-race rather than a white settler colony, but nevertheless the Creoles occupied a tenuous and ill-defined place, but one that was resolutely inferior to that of ethnic Russians.

The prevailing view has long been that of all their Alaskan possessions, the Russians were most secure in the Aleutian Islands, and that of all Alaska’s native peoples, the Unangan were the most thoroughly subjected and denuded of their indigenous identity. To American observers in the Aleutians soon after the sale of Alaska in 1867, this seemed self-evident. William Henry Dall wrote after a voyage to the Aleutians in 1870 that the Unangan had been ‘ground into the very dust by the oppression of ruthless invaders’ and that their ‘religious rites, gay festivals, and determined character have all passed away. A shade of melancholy is now one of their national characteristics.’²¹ The Unangan demo­graphic collapse (a population loss of at least 80 per cent since the mid-eighteenth century), conversion to Russian Orthodoxy, and ‘Creolisation’ were all provided as evidence that they had ceased to be an ‘authentic’ indigenous people, and that the vast majority of their pre-contact beliefs and practices had vanished.

Yet the maritime fur trade that ensnared Unangan communities also posed serious challenges to any orchestrated programme of cultural transformation, and created oppor­tunities for indigenous collaboration and resistance. This was not least because so long as the fur trade existed, the Unangan byt, or way of life, would be tied to the sea.²² By the early nineteenth century, both religious difference and byt were used as a means to classify indigenous peoples and their relationship to the Russian imperial state.²³ The Statute of Alien Administration of 1822 divided the peoples of Siberia into three ‘ages’ of human development: infancy, maturity and old age, corresponding to hunting and gathering, nomadic, and agricultural ways of life. Movement between the ‘ages’ was possible if nomads and hunter-gatherers converted to Russian Orthodoxy, lived with Russians and adopted a more ‘Russian’ lifestyle by settling down and adopting agriculture.²⁴ But in the Aleutians, so long as the maritime fur trade was profitable, Unangan men and women continued to be conscripted to support increasingly long-range hunts in search of increas­ingly scarce otters, and the Unangan maritime lifestyle would be preserved, making any kind of ‘Russian’ identity as elusive as the sea otter.

In the eyes of the Russian missionary Fr. Ioann Veniaminov, who laboured on the island of Unalaska in the eastern Aleutians from 1824 to 1834, the maritime byt of the Unangan people actually underwrote their greatest claim to Russianness, their Orthodox faith.²⁵ Veniaminov, a Siberian polymath whose ethnographic works now provide key ethno- historical sources, subscribed to a worldview which would have been familiar to his evangelical counterparts in the British Empire, in which ethnography and the natural sciences were keys to revealing the complexity of a world created and ordered by God.²⁶ Though he (like many of his Orthodox colleagues) agitated against the RAC’s often brutal practices and especially against conscripted labour, he nevertheless saw the Unangan maritime lifestyle and the challenges of living in a marine environment as two key char­acteristics that made them exemplary Christians: endurance and patience. In his most significant work, Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District (jointly published in 1841 by the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences and the Holy Synod), he wrote: ‘It is clear that a great and direct influence is exerted upon their character, on the very basis for its formation, by the harsh and cold climate, the natural poverty of the islands they inhabit, and the kind of upbringing they receive.’ So far as Veniaminov was concerned, a rapid transition from a maritime byt to an agricultural one was ‘purposeless’ and ‘without possibility of being of benefit to the new society’. Only if the Unangan world was changed first (and with it the whole rationale of the Russian colony), could they become truly agricultural Russians. As Veniaminov suggested, ‘in respect to their byt, one can only wish [that they acquire] forests. Then they shall have agriculture and cattle breeding, and, consequently, their activity shall be stimulated and maintained.’²⁷

By 1825, Veniaminov had taken steps to pursue a program of ‘perfection' of the Unangan people. He began translating religious texts into Unangan, establishing a system of religious education and creating a corps of native and Creole lay readers and priests. The support of local chiefs (towns) and influential elders was crucial to this effort, in particular that of the bilingual and literate chief of Tigalda Island, Ivan Pan'kov. Pan'kov has been described as the ‘constant companion, mentor, guide, interpreter and sponsor’ of the much younger Veniaminov; without his sponsorship, it is unlikely that Veniaminov’s efforts would have had much purchase among more conservative Unangan.²⁸ Because of their efforts, the Alaskan Orthodox clergy was fundamentally transformed, and, within a generation, became dominated by Native (especially Unangan, Yupik and Sugpiaq) and Creole clergy.²⁹

This approach indeed led to the creation not only of a literate and bilingual (often trilingual) Unangan intelligentsia, but also to the transformation of the Unangan chief­tainship. It laid the foundations for generations of resistance and accommodation that continued through the Russian and then the American imperial administrations. In the pre-contact period, village chiefs had been lineage heads and war leaders. They also administered justice and arranged external marriages to cement political alliances with other kin groups. A chief was elected by his high-ranking kinsmen and exercised power at their pleasure. He functioned as a ‘first among equals’, but his authority remained restricted to his kin group, was limited and temporary, and consisted of ‘prestige and power, but not formal authority’.³⁰

The role of the chief became substantially more complex under colonialism, defined by the middle ground between local and stranger, tradition and invention. Under the RAC, village chiefs (towns) were elected by their communities and confirmed in office by company authorities.³¹ Chiefs became salaried company employees, responsible for arranging conscripted labour for the Company, but exempt (along with their families) from labour themselves.³² They sent out short-range sea otter hunting parties at their own discretion, but long-range parties required the approval of the Russian District Manager. The Creole priest Iakov Netsvetov wrote in 1828 that the village chief of Amlia ‘has full authority in all matters pertaining to shore tasks, sea voyages, and in hunting of all kinds’.³³ Chiefs also served as middlemen and bartered with the Russians for goods at the end of the season. Netsvetov noted in 1834:

The exchange [of pelts for goods] is effected through the toion: the entire catch obtained by the Aleuts is delivered to the Company with his knowledge, in fact, he delivers the catch and, as he is well aware of the established rate of payment for each kind of pelt, and knows the proportion of the catch contributed by each individual Aleut, as well as each Aleut’s need or desire for certain goods, he is an indispensable intermediary in settling accounts [between the Company] and individual hunters.³⁴

As sea otter populations collapsed from overhunting, the Russians began to place greater emphasis on the fur seal industry in the Pribilof Islands (St George and St Paul) in the Bering Sea. In addition to resettling whole communities, this also required young Unangan men to travel seasonally to the Pribilofs. As they had with the sea otter hunt, chiefs also exercised their authority to determine who would stay and who would go, and how their families would be provided for.³⁵

Although now officially Company employees, in practice the traditional election of chiefs continued. They held the formal authority that they lacked in the pre-contact period, and it encompassed the entire village, not only their kin group. They leveraged that authority in the interests of their community during and after the period of Russian rule. When the Alaska Commercial Company purchased the Russian American Company’s interests in 1870 after the transfer of sovereignty to the United States, they also invested in the Russian practice of appointing village chiefs as labour and political authorities.³⁶ They continued confirming elected chiefs, but sometimes appointed chiefs without first consulting villagers, and their legitimacy suffered accordingly. For example, in Unalaska in 1887 the villagers elected their own chief when they could no longer endure one appointed by the Alaska Commercial Company. The two men held parallel offices for a year before the Company relented and hired the chief elected by the community.³⁷ Chiefs still controlled the workforce and were elected by the community well into the twentieth century.³⁸ In the 1920s, for instance, commercial whalers recruiting workers in Biorka had to do so through the village chief.³⁹

The most visible and consistent expression of chiefs’ social power was in the Orthodox Church. Even after Veniaminov’s reforms, there were never many Orthodox priests in Alaska, and they often had to cover tremendous distances under gruelling conditions to minister to their flocks.⁴⁰ After the initial visit of a missionary, who would baptise every inhabitant of the village and offer some initial instruction in the Orthodox faith, the village would be left for several years without the attention of the priest, a pattern that continued into the twentieth century. In the priest’s absence, chiefs often acted as lay readers (or ‘deacons’), took responsibility for the villagers’ spiritual wellbeing, and presided over most services, baptisms and funerals.⁴¹ The lay reader conducted services several times a week, and more frequently during fasts and celebrations, in both Unangan and Russian. The religious texts translated by Veniaminov and Ivan Pan’kov were widely available in the Aleutians, handed down from generation to generation, and given by chiefs as gifts to visitors, a practice which persisted into the 1930s.⁴² Chapels were supported in part by the Orthodox Church in Russia until the 1917 Revolution, but most support came from the community, whose hunters donated a portion of their furs to the Church.⁴³ After the Revolution, community support became more crucial. Andrew Makarin, a former chief of Biorka who was born in 1898, remembered: ‘During the Tsar’s time all the teachers and readers in the Church and the priests were paid by the Russian government. When the Tsar died all this stopped. After that we started to support the priests ourselves.’⁴⁴

Village chiefs’ authority also extended to the education of the young. In the pre-contact period, educational responsibilities were shared between village elders, who imparted oral traditions to young boys, and maternal uncles, who were responsible for teaching their nephews both hunting skills and social mores.⁴⁵ Under both Russian and American colo­nialism, chiefs appropriated these duties as a part of their roles both as church officials and labour organisers. Chapel schools remained the only educational institutions in the small, outlying Aleutian villages from the 1820s until the 1920s, when Bureau of Indian Affairs schools were established in the remote settlements. In their capacity as lay readers, village chiefs usually took charge of instruction in the all-male schools, overseeing the young men whom they would later send out on hunting parties.⁴⁶ The curriculum changed little over the century of the chapel schools’ existence: conducted in both Russian and Unangan, it included reading, writing, religion, grammar and arithmetic. After the sale of Alaska in 1867, chapel schools received no support from the American establishment, and, like the chapels, largely drew support from the community with some supplementary funds from Russia.⁴⁷ This support halted with the 1917 Revolution, meaning that the burden of support fell exclusively on the community.

One might see Unangan chiefs as collaborators, first with the Russian and then with the American Empires in the Aleutians. It was, after all, only with their help that sea otter and fur seal populations were devastated in the Bering Sea, until the 1911 North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty transformed the commercial hunt. Afterwards, when the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Fisheries oversaw the fur seal industry in the Pribilofs (and kept the Pribilof Unangan in a state of near-slavery to support it), village chiefs continued to select men for the seasonal harvest until the forcible evacuation of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands by the American military in the Second World War.⁴⁸ But the matter is significantly more complicated than that. Unangan chiefs used the conditions of Russian and American colonialism to consolidate and maintain their own local power, and to manage and perhaps ameliorate the pressure on their communities from outsiders. They adopted and adapted Russian attempts at cultural transformation (especially through the Orthodox church) to their own ends. Over several generations, these efforts ultimately helped to form a literate, bilingual (and later trilingual) population, with leaders able to defend their communities’ interests eloquently under the rule of two empires, through the trauma of the Second World War and during the battles for restitution that followed.⁴⁹