I am going to tell you a story. It is a story of pain, bloodshed, resilience, and survival. It is a story passed down in my family through oral tradition that runs through my veins. It is my history. 

It begins in Unalaska, an Aleutian island that chains west of the Alaskan mainland. Our Native community, the Qawalangin, lived in harmony with nature and the neighboring Aleutian tribes. There was a respect for their surroundings: the seasonal shift between the snap-cold long winter nights and the fresh endless summer days, the thriving ecosystem of wildlife, and even the smell of the ocean at sunrise. 

Hunting was only done out of necessity, and every part of the animal was used. The meat provided nourishment, hollow organs insulation, bones became tools and fat fueled fires. Hunters would kayak out to sea and ask the ocean for its grace, and when an animal was caught, they would ask for the blessing of the animal’s spirit. Everything was connected through a spiritual language, an unwritten, unifying language that transcended the tribes and their dialects. 

Then, one day, foreign people came on big ships, speaking a strange language that lacked the transcending kindness. Their language was laced with material greed and shrouded in religious doctrine. They were explorers of the Russian Empire, seeking to expand their capital and spread the word of the Russian Orthodox Church. Soon after they arrived in 1741, the Russians focused on a discovery: the abundance of fur seals. 

The northern fur seal was a thriving species in the region, and its relationship with my ancestors was imperative to their survival. The Aleutians knew the nature of the fur seal, when to hunt the animal, and when to show respect and leave them in peace. However, to the Russians, this species was a goldmine that could be exploited for fur trading, particularly with the Empire of China. The Russians began sending fur hunters to the region but quickly realized that their hunters lacked the skill and patience—the spiritual connection and respect—that the Aleutian hunters practiced. 

The Russians began pillaging villages, robbing them of their fur and resources, and leaving my ancestors no choice but to negotiate with these oppressors. What started as an offer of Aleutian servitude in exchange for preserving their families, devolved into the widespread enslavement of thousands of Aleutians at the hands of the Russian Empire. Once enslaved, the Aleutians were forced to turn against their culture, no longer living in harmony with nature. 

Within the hunting culture of the Aleutian tribes, there were certain islands and hunting grounds that were respected and kept off limits to maintain a balance within the aquatic ecosystem. Among these protected grounds were the Pribilof Islands, the region’s primary fur seal mating grounds, north of the Aleutian chain. Known as Amiq by the Aleutians, the islands located 240 miles north, were discovered by Gavriil Pribylov in 1786, and renamed St. Paul and St. George, after key figures within the Russian Orthodox religion. These islands were respected and left uninhabited by the Natives, but that soon changed with the rise of the profitable fur industry. 

The Russians quickly established a hunting and trading system on the islands, forcing Aleutian hunters to kill the fur seals for their pelts. But the Russians went even further. Fueled by greed, the Russians insisted the pelts be undamaged to retain the most value. They punished anyone who damaged the fur in the killing of the animal and, ultimately, forced Aleutian hunters, my ancestors, to club the fur seals to death. My ancestors were forced to beat the fur seals for hours, bearing witness to their screams, regardless of their age or sex, on ceremonial grounds. Once the pelts were taken, the entirety of the animal was tossed into the ocean and wasted. The Pribilof Islands became a bloodbath, bringing riches to the Russians and psychological destruction to the Aleutians. 

Several Aleutians chose to take their lives to save their spirit from causing such pain to the fur seal and the earth. Aleutian hunters brought to the islands by the Russians often never returned home. The Pribilof Islands became a fur seal-hunting camp that was seen as a force of darkness that mysteriously claimed lives. The Russian-American company in charge of leading operations in the region for the economic benefit of the Russian crown recognized that they were dependent on Native labor for their success. 

They coerced the people in Native villages to sign a contract demanding the labor of half of all males between the ages of 18 and 50. This was the short-term solution the Russians employed to meet the growing demand for fur and the growing need for hunters stationed at these camps—and it led to the deaths of thousands more Native men and furthered the destruction of Native communities. The fur seal population was nearly destroyed. It was not until 1848, over 100 years after Russian arrival in the region, that the company restricted killing female fur seals and their pups when the fur seal population dropped by about 80% and threatened their profit. 

As the Russians became more profitable, they also became more cruel. The Russians stationed on the island would line up Aleutian slaves in front of a cannon, placing bets as to how many bodies the cannonball would go through for sport. This frequent action to exercise power and strike fear was one of the leading causes of Aleutian death, following foreign illnesses and suicide.

The Russian-American company continued to establish contracts with communities to ensure control over Aleutian life, ensuring a pipeline of slave labor to these hunting plantations and decimating the Aleutian population. Between 1741 and 1866, the Aleutian population dropped by 75%, from ~18,000 at the time of the Russians’ arrival to 4,400, just before the Alaska Purchase; this was a destruction of language and culture not through colonial assimilating, but colonial massacring.

The Russian colonization of Alaska had a stronger impact on my people, the Aleuts, than any other Native Alaskan group due to their earlier contact with and dependence on each other. Despite the devastation of the ancient Aleutian lifestyle through forced fur seal hunting, many Russian customs and traditions began to engulf the island chain. The most influential were the missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church, who were instructed to spread the word of God using education, through preaching and written text. Resources were poured into this project, and, by 1831, a phonetic alphabet was created to mimic the sounds of the Aleutian language known as “Aleutian Fox.” 

By that point, all education was controlled by the Russians, and they began teaching Aleutians how to read and write using the Orthodox Bible. Several Russian translators and grammatical intellectuals were sent over to the region to support the creation of this Russian-Aleutian dialect, and within ten years of its creation, an Aleutian dictionary was made. Almost every Aleutian had some level of literacy in this new dialect. With this sudden surge in Native literacy rates, utilizing both the Aleutian Fox alphabet and the newfound Russian-Aleutian dialect dictionary, several family stories were able to be written down and preserved for the next generation. 

The oral tradition began to shift towards writing: this is when the Native Qawalangin language began to plummet. Younger generations of Aleutians were sent to school and learned the contemporary dialects and Aleutian Fox alphabet, only allowing the practice of the original language in their own home. The Russian-Aleutian alphabet also oversimplified certain unique sounds that cannot be mimicked by Russian phoneticism, further spreading the divide between younger and older generations. 

This sudden boon to literacy, using a hybrid language cloaked in dogmatism, also led to the spread of Russian Orthodoxy and the establishment of churches across the islands, with Aleutian leaders appointed as church representatives. Among these church leaders was my Qawalangin 4th great grandfather, Shayashnikov, who led a movement to spread Russian literacy amongst his Native peoples. He helped establish several churches and used them as a proxy for the education of contemporary language and literacy. He also was a teacher for several years and aided in the Aleutian Fox translation of the Orthodox Bible. 

He used the foreign language from a foreign land as a means to preserve his culture. Several of his civil, anthropological, and religious documents have survived and proven vital in understanding the expansion of the Russian language. First appointed to lead a church in the Pribilofs, Shayashnikov then returned to our homeland of Unalaska and led the famous Holy Ascension Cathedral near Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, where generations of my family are buried. By 1865, 21,000 schools were established by the Russian Church in the region, with a recorded student population of 400,000 Aleutian students. 

When the so-called “United States” bought the Alaskan territory from Russia in 1867, the Government made little changes to the newly formed Aleut Orthodox society. The fur seal hunting and pelting industry was maintained, and there were few resources extended to the Native peoples in the transfer of power. However, the so-called “United States” did use the Aleutian tribes for a national discipline of great curiosity at the time: anthropology. 

The American Anthropology Association was established in 1902 and organized several national exhibits of captured and foreign peoples for the public. One of these events was the Kansas Exhibit of 1904, a fair held displaying thousands of Indigenous peoples across the new America after the Louisiana Purchase, including the Native Alaskan. Within this exhibit, my great-grandmother was dressed scarcely and put in a glass cage for people to see, mislabeled as “Eskimo.” This indignity was recounted to my mother during my great-grandmother’s lifetime and will continue to be shared throughout my future. 

Now, there are only about 8,000 Unangan left within the territory of Alaska, and less than 150 speakers of our Native language that pre-exists the “discovery” of our people. Language is the essence of our culture; both the language is spoken by our mouth to others’ ears, as well as the language between our spirit and the vastness of the universe. We use foreign languages, Russian and English, to keep our culture alive. It is up to us, as the future of our people, to share our story and empower the cause to rehabilitate ourselves.

R. Ofunshi Hernandez Abreu collaborated on the making of this piece.