ii. Inupiat/non-Inupiat Relations

Colonizing the Inupiat in Alaska: Trade, Economy, Education, and Missionization–Ari Cohen with Elizabeth Hutchinson

Seven nations of indigenous peoples have inhabited Alaska for thousands of years. The Inupiat peoples – who speak several dialects of Inupiaq language but spoke many more before Europeans arrived and colonized Alaskan soil – witnessed many generations of tumultuous changes that followed initial contact with Europeans.  The most effective methods of Euro-American colonization in Inupiat regions were trade, education, missionization, and reindeer herding; all of these processes contributed to the establishment of Euro-American patriarchy in Alaska.

Early History

According to oral tradition, the Inupiat have occupied certain areas of Alaska for over 20,000 years (Evon Peter). Over the course of those years they developed intricate and often seasonal traditions involving feasts, dances, hunting, labor organization, mystical leaders, etc. They were for the most part peripatetic; the majority of Inupiat did not live in sedentary villages, but rather hunted and gathered nomadically, moving their families from place to place (Wexler 19). Historically, it was their nomadic nature that allowed them to trade amongst themselves and with neighboring nations as well as hunt for game. In fact, the Inupiat “engaged in long-distance trading and hunting for centuries before coming into contact with Europeans” (Bodenhorn 118). Contrary to some of the colonial narratives, then, which paint the Inupiat as nomadic but unsophisticated, the Inupiat were both mobile and self-sufficient. They frequently engaged in sophisticated trade practices with not only other Inupiaq-speaking peoples, but also foreigners. Social and sometimes formal systems were in place to receive and trade with visitors from distant lands.

Economy and Trade in the Colonial Era

In the eighteenth century, Alaska was visited by exploring ships from Britain, France, Spain and Russia.  The latter established trading posts along the coast in the 1740s, pressing Aleuts and other Natives into service.  While the Inupiat were implicated in the fur trade, their lifeways were not dramatically affected until Russian naval officer Otto Von Kotzebue crossed the Bering Strait and began to heavily trade with the Inupiaq in 1816 (Wexler 20).  In the 1840s, whaling increased the number of foreign visitors to the Bering Strait and expanded the American interest in exploiting the natural resources of the region.  Over time, the Inupiat became increasingly dependent on trade goods and more implicated in non-Native systems of exchange and labor.   Whaling ships employed Inuit sailors, taking them away from their communities and replacing their tradition of seasonal migration with wage labor.  By 1891, Inupiat labor was a near-universal characteristic of the social landscape in Alaska: “virtually all able-bodied Inupiat men and women worked to some degree for the commercial whaling industry” (Cassell 133).

Euro-American whaling differed tremendously from the 1000-year-old whaling practices of Native Alaskans, and the colonial economy displaced older forms of social cohesion grounded in the leadership of the umialak (whaling captain).  The Umialik played a major role in a community by “providing food from the previous year’s whale hunt to crews and their families in late winter and early spring so that preparations for the coming whaling season could be undertaken without the need for ancillary game hunting” (Cassell 134).  This leader also presided over the qargi,the communal men’s house that was the center of a community’s ceremonial life.  Inupiat and other Alaska natives struggled against economic and cultural changes brought by commercial whaling in a variety of ways, from work stoppages to more subtle forms of resistance (Cassell 136).  Russians and Americans sought to control more direct forms of aggression by banning the importation of guns and outlawing indigenous gun ownership (Ray 122).  When violence erupted–which it frequently did in the context of the competition for wealth and the exploitation of natural resources among and between the Natives–Europeans and Americans attributed it not to the disruption caused by colonial trade but to the “natural” savagery of indigenous people.  (Wexler 19)

The balance of power between indigenous people and the colonizers was extremely uneven.  For example, Europeans and Americans did not consult with natives about the appropriation of their land and resources but with one another.  Yet visitors to the region were often dependent on locals for their knowledge of the environment.  A record of this dependence can be found in the journal of Rockport McGuire, commander of the British whaler The Plover.  As Nancy Fogel-Chance recounts, the journal shows that British sailors relied on the Inupiat for information about “ the movement of sea ice, indications of possible changes in wind and weather, and coastal geography” and they collaborated with indigenous allies despite their feelings of cultural superiority  (Fogel-Chance 802).

Education and Missionization

The imposition of non-Native systems of education provided another traumatic disruption of indigenous lifeways.  Traditionally, stories and narratives were used by Inupiat parents/elders to teach moral lessons to children and young adults (Wexler 19). After listening to these parables, young people retold them to one another, reinforcing the lessons in the stories and at the same time practicing their orating (Wexler 19). These young generations had the opportunity to participate in a special kind of interpersonal learning, which was social and significant.  After the Americanization of Alaska, Native education was taken over by the federal government which was dedicated not only to instilling Native pupils with knowledge but also indoctrinating them in Western values (Prucha, Adams).  Federal Indian policy of the post-Civil War period trusted indigenous education to missionaries, with different denominations dividing up Indian territory among themselves.  The Alaskan system was developed by Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson beginning in 1885.  While U.S. Indian schools were becoming more secular by the end of the nineteenth century, Jackson expected clerical affiliation and/or certification from all teacher applicants to his schools (Ray 207).  Jackson instilled in his missionary education leaders his own belief that “G-d put Christians on Earth to glorify Him through tireless secular work,” and that Alaska’s educational system “had the potential to teach Natives how to function in a cash economy, and in so doing, lead them to the correct vocational, spiritual, and moral path” (Wexler 22).

Classes were conducted primarily in English, and teachers established firm authority over the “uncivilized” and “uneducated” Inupiat (Wexler 29). The shift to Euro-American reading and writing methods was problematic not only because of the language barrier, but also because Inupiats understood education to be oral and interpersonal. Inupiaq man Raymond Neakok, Sr. said: “Reading to my people is different than what you are reading in a book. The ability of my people to read what they know in association with giving information to another person is phenomenal… it’s the reading that the Inupiaq people have been able to do with the eons of life” (Bodenhorn 117).

Reindeer Herding

An important emphasis of Federal Indian policy’s assimilationist program was the disruption of migratory traditions.  In Alaska, Sheldon Jackson attempted to root Natives in their home communities all year by developing reindeer herding as an industry.  The Reindeer experiment began with the importing of domesticated livestock from Siberia in 1892.  Siberian herders came as well to train Natives at the reindeer station in Port Clarence in animal husbandry.   By  1900, reindeer husbandry was considered to be a viable and vital part of the Native school curriculum  (Fair 481).  The reindeer were distributed among the missions, and to those Natives who were “deemed worthy,” and or whom administrators thought were in need of a more thorough “education” (Wexler 18).  Often those participating in these programs were already full-grown men who were put in the position of serving as apprentices as a result of the devastation of their older means of subsistence.

The federal government’s emphasis on interrupting seasonal migrations facilitated the dispossession of Indian people, as settlement undermined Native claims to the traditional hunting and fishing grounds. During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans flooded into northern Alaska, adding pressure to free up land from indigenous control.

Conclusion

According to scholar Lisa Wexler, by the year 1907, native communities in Alaska were no longer viable or strong; they were in “a state of abject misery” (Wexler 21). Ancestral migratory cycles were replaced with sedentary lifestyles, wages replaced subsistence hunting and farming, and “starvation became a real threat” (Wexler 23).  Native communities, now clustered together year-round in close proximity and engaging in many indoor activities, were devastated by disease.  Wales, the community from which the drawings in this exhibition come, was nearly wiped out in the influenza epidemic of 1918.  But the community has persisted and maintained its cultural identity despite the history just recounted.