Alaska Native

“ In common with nearly all semi-civilized and savage races, the native Alaskans regard their women more in 256the light of slaves than as help-mates, and nearly all the hard work, except hunting and fishing, falls to their share. ”

“ Governor Swineford, in his annual report to the department at Washington, dated 1886, says: “I have no reason to change or modify the estimate I had formed on very short acquaintance of the character of the native Alaskans. They are a very superior race intellectually as compared with the people generally known as North American Indians, and are as a rule industrious and provident, being wholly self-sustaining. They are shrewd and natural-born traders. Some are good carpenters, others are skillful workers in wood and metals. ”

“ Where there was no saloon the liquor was furnished the natives in the guise of pay or bribe, and every man who has lived in Alaska knows how little regard the white man has had for the sanctity of the native home. ”

“ Alaska and the opposite parts of Asia hold, in all probability, the key to the problem of the peopling of America. It is here, and here alone, where a land of another continent approaches so near to America that a passage of man with primitive means of navigation and provisioning was possible. All the affinities of the American native point toward the more eastern parts of Asia. ”

“ Not until long after the English, French, and Spanish discoverers had explored the country in the Temperate Zone did any European find Alaska. Even when it was found it seemed to offer little but ice-fields and desolate prairies, leading to wild mountain ranges that did not tempt men to settle. Seal hunters came and went, but generally left the native Indians in peace. Most of these hunters came from Siberia, for the Russians were the first owners of this land.
An officer in the Russian Navy named Vitus Bering found the strait that is called by his name in 1728. ”

“ The people of that country are eager to avail themselves of such an opportunity. They are being gradually crowded out of their native land by the increased flow of volcanic matter over their plains and valleys. Alaska, while it affords them in certain portions, say the valley of the Yukon, a climate similar to their own, offers them also many advantages over the place of their nativity. It is authoritatively stated that over fifty thousand souls will gladly avail themselves of this chance to emigrate to Alaska, provided our government will aid them in the matter of transportation. ”

“ The surface is somber with the all-pervading tundra, or Russian moss, which stretches over the greater part of Alaska and northern [Pg 20] Siberia. Looking down the harbor are discovered the large warehouses of one of the great Alaska commercial and trading companies, and the ancient and unique Russian settlement of Unalaska, peopled mainly by a mixed-breed population of Russian, Japanese, and native Eskimo constituents. There are a picturesque little Russian church, and the Jesse Lee Home for orphans and foundlings, endowed by a number of charitable women in Washington. ”

“ The men of these native tribes are strong and vigorous; the women are, however, forced to perform most of the domestic labor, and all of the drudgery, yet it was observed that they held the purse strings. That is to say, a native buck always defers to his wife in any matter of trade as to the price either to ask or to pay. The women of Alaska are certainly in a better condition and are better treated than those belonging to any of our Western Indian tribes, with whom we are acquainted. Though they are called upon to do much menial work, they do not seem to be actually abused. ”

“ The Presbyterians maintain, moreover, an industrial training school at Sitka. Almost the whole native population has been brought under the influence of Christian teaching.
History. In July, 1740, the Danish navigator Bering, who was in the Russian service, discovered a number of islands, among them that bearing his name. Russian explorers and traders gradually pushed further eastward and came into conflict with the natives, whom they cruelly maltreated. The coast of Alaska was visited by Captain Cook in 1778, and by the Spaniards at about the same time. ”

“ On the island of Unga, one of the Shumagin group, situated half way between Unalaska and Kodiak, is a small settlement of a score of white men and about a hundred and fifty natives. By a regulation of our Treasury Department, only natives are allowed to hunt the sea-otter, and therefore these white men have married native wives, thereby becoming natives in the eyes of the 126law. ”

“ The collection proved clearly that two or three hundred years ago these natives of Alaska enjoyed a much higher degree of civilization than is exhibited by their descendants to-day. That they have deteriorated in industry, steadiness, and ability generally is obvious. The art of forging must have been known to them in the earlier times, as shown in this collection of admirable weapons, clearly of native manufacture and of most excellent finish. ”

“ The Alaska natives have some Apache words in their language, which points to a common origin with our North American Indian tribes, but these suggestions are purely speculative. There are able students of ethnology who insist upon the origin of these Alaskans being Asiatic for various good and sufficient reasons, instancing not only their personal appearance, but the similarity of their traditions and customs to those of the people of Asia. ”

“ The natives of Kodiak are more highly civilized than in other parts of Alaska. The offspring of Russian fathers and native mothers have frequently married into white or half-breed families, and the strain of dark blood in the offspring of these later marriages is difficult to discern.
I travelled on the Dora with a woman whose father had been a Russian priest, married to a native woman at Belkoffski. ”

“ Walter, who had been in the lead all day, was the first to scramble up; a native Alaskan, he is the first human being to set foot upon the top of Alaska’s great mountain, and he had well earned the lifelong distinction. ”

“ In this region, when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too confident.
The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white population, are not often very long in one place. ”

“ The natives of Alaska are of four groups. First, the Eskimos, who dwell in the northern part of the territory in the area near the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea. Second, the Aleut, a people closely related to the Eskimos, who are to be found only in the Aleutian Islands and the mainland adjacent thereto. Third, the Thlinkits, [162] who are Indians and confined to the southeastern section of the country known as the Panhandle. Fourth, the Athabaskans, of the same stock as the American Indian, who occupy the interior and touch the coast only at Cook Inlet. ”

“ Its remoteness from the centres of European settlement and from the lines of trade and travel, and its inhospitable climate made Alaska one of the latest regions to yield to the advances of the explorer, surveyor and settler. At a date when the colonies on the North Atlantic coast of America numbered millions of prosperous people, already preparing to take independent rank among the nations of the world, the very existence of this enormous country was unknown. ”

“ Each country has its spell; but none is so great as the spell of this lone and splendid land. It is too sacred for any light word of pen or lip. The spell of Alaska is the spell of God; and it holds all save the basest, whether they acknowledge it or deny. Here are sphinxes and pyramids built of century upon century's snow; the pale green thunder of the cataract; the roar of the avalanche and the glacier's compelling march; the flow of mighty rivers; the unbroken silences that swim from snow mountain to snow mountain; and the rose of sunset whose petals float and fade upon mountain and sea. ”

“ This is the more important because all the world’s supply comes from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and upon its continuance between four thousand and five thousand semi-civilized natives of Alaska depend absolutely and wholly for the means by which they are enabled to live beyond simple barbarism ”

“ But no traces of original Eskimo settlements have ever been found in the true Alaska inland or along those parts of the Alaska rivers that constitute the Indian territory.
2. The present population is sparse, with many unpeopled intervals, and not highly fecund, but, except when epidemics strike, it [Pg 362] no more diminishes; children and young people are now much in evidence, hygienic and economic conditions have improved, and the people in general are well advanced in civilization. ”

“ As might be inferred from the method and exigencies of aboriginal life in Alaska, these natives do not survive to any great age; rarely, indeed, will an authenticated case of the full limit of sixty years be recorded or observed—an overwhelming majority of them are old at thirty-five and forty. When a man or a woman in a settlement rounds the fiftieth year of his or her life, a noted example of the tribe is afforded ”

“ The northern shore of Alaska is extremely shallow and sandy, great sand-spits being shoved up by the ice all along the coast. The beach is covered with drift-wood, which comes from the rivers emptying into Behring Sea. In conclusion, the Indians of Alaska have been reported as savage and treacherous. In my experience, I found the natives of interior northern Alaska the most kind and hospitable people in the world. ”

“ The boys and girls of Alaska belong to several different races. There are the yellow-skinned Eskimos of the far north and west; there are the copper-colored Indians who are found in the south, and along the banks of the rivers of the inland country; there are the Aleuts, who live on a chain of islands stretching westward towards Asia, and who are like Indians in some ways and like the Japanese in others. ”

“ Nowhere else in all the world are there such wondrous tints as in Alaska. To appreciate the beauty of the land, however, one needs must be an early riser. To have seen the marvelous change which comes over the pure whiteness of the snow-crowned crests between the darkness and the dawn! ”

“ By some happy dispensation of the Creator every savage is so constituted that here in Alaska, at least, he believes in his own particular area of existence as the very best realm of the earth—he becomes homesick and refuses to be comforted if taken to California or Oregon, enters into a slow decline, and soon dies if not returned to the dreary spot of his birth—a sad illustration of fatal nostalgia. ”

“ VILLAGE OF KASA-AN, ALASKA.—It will doubtless be a surprise to many persons not familiar with the conditions of the Alaskan Indians to observe that their houses are usually quite substantially built of frame or wood. We generally think of Indians as living in wigwams or huts, but in the case of the Alaskans they were for many years previous to the purchase of that country by our government under the influence of Russia, and are therefore partly civilized and somewhat advanced in the modern ways of living. ”

“ Wonderful is our latest American Continental possession—the rich territory of Alaska. Limitless are its resources, unmatchable its possibilities. One of its admirers thus sounds its praises: "In scenery, Alaska dwarfs the world. Think of six hundred and seventeen thousand square miles of landscape. Put Pike's Peak on Mount Washington or Mount Mitchell and it would hardly even up with Mount Logan. All the glaciers of Switzerland and the Tyrol dwindle to pitiful summer ice-wagon chunks beside the vast ice empires of Glacier Bay or mighty Malaspina. ”

“ The fact nevertheless stares us in the face, that Alaska is nearly as large as the whole of the United States lying east of the Mississippi River, or three times as large as France. Within the last twenty years greater intelligence has been shown, in part through missionaries,—self-sacrificing and devout men,—who have sought by their teachings to abolish the wild superstitions of the natives, together with their cruel rites of Shamanism. ”

“ The people of Alaska, a strong, large-limbed, and tall race, with flat faces, high cheek-bones, and small, bead-like black eyes, who delighted in disfiguring their lips and noses with pendent ornaments, seem to have stood in considerable awe of their visitors, and supplied them with game and fish in abundance during the first few weeks of their stay. ”

“ The presence here of some thirty white men, pure Russian Creoles, and several of our own people who have really settled in the country, many of them married, and who call the place home, makes Kadiak unique in this respect. Elsewhere, if we find a white man living at the trading-posts, or plying his vocation as a cod-salmon fisherman, or miner, he always draws himself up and emphatically denies any idea of permanent residence in Alaska. ”

“ About her, shielding her from the Arctic wind was a tent.
“Tomorrow,” she thought, “we start to the Promised Land.” This land was the Matamuska Valley in Alaska. “Not far now, only a short way by rail. And then—” A thrill ran through her being. They were to be pioneers, modern pioneers, she and Mary, Mark and her aunt. What would life in this new land be?
[20]
She had seen much of life, had Florence, city life, country life, the wild beauty of Isle Royale in Lake Superior, and the finished beauty of France were not new to her. But Alaska! ”

“ Whenever an excursion steamer enters the harbor, the people of Sitka make ready for a holiday, while the Indians hasten to get out their blankets to sell to the visitors. Many people travel in Alaska in the summer time, on purpose to see the wonderful sights there,—the high mountains covered with snow, the valleys 78 filled with flowers, the wild Indians, the strange huts before which the totem poles rise high in the air; but most interesting of all are the glaciers, whose beginning is far up in the snow-covered mountains. ”