ANCHORAGE
The Tsimshian were relatively late arrivals to Southeast Alaska. For thousands of years, the islands of the Alexander Archipelago had been primarily the territory of the Tlingit. (A third group, the Haida, arrived from the south in the eighteenth century.) The Annette Island end of the Alaska panhandle is at roughly the same latitude as Edinburgh. The warm Kuroshio Current flows north from Japan and west across the Pacific Ocean, bringing moderate temperatures and biblical amounts of precipitation. Most of the Inside Passage is temperate rainforest. Tlingit culture developed in concert with such a rich environment. Sturdy spruce, hemlock, and cedar were used to build longhouses, carve totem poles, and craft dugout canoes. The sea provided an inexhaustible source of protein, especially salmon. Fishing rights to specific areas were carefully managed by individual families.
Tlingit society at the start of the nineteenth century was made up of approximately sixteen tribes, called kwaan. The clan system within each tribe was matrilineal—inheritance and clan identity were passed down through mothers. Europeans who traded with the Tlingit, whose networks extended deep into the Alaskan interior, noted that women were the primary negotiators and drove harder bargains than men. War was common among tribes, and holding slaves was a major sign of status. The Tlingit were famous for their potlatches, multi-day feasts held to display wealth, honor the dead, or settle debts.
Once the Russians arrived in the Alexander Archipelago, change came quickly. According to Robert Fortuine’s Chills and Fever, a smallpox epidemic in the 1830s wiped out at least one-quarter and perhaps more than half of the panhandle’s native population in a few years. Russia’s minimal administrative efforts were dedicated primarily to deterring the entrance of fur-trading rivals, especially the British. When the United States purchased Alaska, in 1867, the Natives were confused. The Tlingit insisted that the Russians had been their guests and thus owned no land to sell. Under the Treaty of Cession, ratified by Congress prior to the handover, white residents of the territory were made naturalized citizens if they remained at the end of three years. “Uncivilized native tribes” would be subject to all laws and regulations but were denied “all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States.” They were barely tolerated guests in the home they’d occupied for thousands of years.
“A history of conditions in Alaska from 1867 to 1897 is yet to be written, and when written few Americans will be able to read it without indignation,” William Dall wrote shortly after returning from the Harriman Expedition. In the absence of territorial government, the U.S. Army, exhausted from the recently concluded Civil War, was given the duty of maintaining order. In 1869, three Tlingit villages at Kake were shelled with artillery, in retribution for the killings of two trappers. After a brief period during which the Treasury Department’s customs collectors were the only government authority in Alaska, the U.S. Navy was placed in charge, with similar bad results. In 1882, the Tlingit residents of Angoon demanded compensation for the accidental killing of their shaman. The navy sent a warship to bombard their village. Salmon canneries set up operations wherever they pleased and robbed clans of their traditional food source. The discovery of gold pushed Natives from their ancestral lands. “They take our property, take away ground, and when we complain to them about it, they employ a lawyer and go to court and win the case,” one Tlingit leader testified before the district governor in 1884. “We are very poor now. The time will come when we will not have anything left.” Children were orphaned by disease, and alcoholism ran rampant. Tlingit society fell into chaos.
Into this vacuum of authority stepped the Christian missionaries. When the Presbyterian cleric Dr. Sheldon Jackson arrived at the rough-and-tumble settlement of Fort Wrangell in 1877, he found a seedy boomtown, filled with gold miners, gamblers, drinkers, and prostitutes. (The “Fort” was later dropped from the town’s name by the U.S. Post Office.) But he also found in Wrangell a group of Tsimshian woodcutters who had been evangelized by William Duncan at the original Metlakatla, in British Columbia. They, in turn, had begun to spread the Word to the Tlingit. Using Wrangell as their base of operations, Jackson and his missionaries launched an ambitious campaign to save the Native peoples of Alaska through temperance and education. If they destroyed what the Christians considered a pagan culture in the process, that was not just the price of survival, but an added benefit.
There were a number of Alaska-related subjects I wanted to get up to speed on quickly, so a couple of months before I left on the Kennicott, I made a reconnaissance trip to Anchorage and Fairbanks to pick the brains of several experts. My first stop was a visit with Diane Benson, a Tlingit assistant professor of Alaska Native studies and rural development at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks (UAF). Her Tlingit name is L’xeis’. I’d asked her to help me fill in the black hole of history from the Native perspective at the time the Elder arrived.
“I’ve always been fascinated by this period, because there’s so much transition, so much devastation,” Benson told me during a long lunch. We were seated in a booth at a Mexican restaurant near the university’s Anchorage campus. Benson recommended I clean my palate of guacamole before attempting the correct pronunciation of Tlingit, which requires placing the tongue behind the front teeth.
Many Alaskans have multiple jobs; it’s not uncommon to learn that the person foaming milk for your cappuccino is also a carver-fisherman-bookkeeper. Benson’s résumé was eclectic even by local standards: She had hauled nets on a commercial salmon boat, driven tractor trailers on the Alaska Pipeline, worked as a newspaper reporter, run an all-Alaska talent agency, written and starred in a popular one-woman show about an Alaskan civil rights pioneer, and, prior to her academic career, run unsuccessfully for both U.S. Congress and lieutenant governor as the Democratic candidate.
“My grandparents and great-grandparents were alive when the Harriman Expedition arrived in 1899,” she told me. “People were just trying to find a way to survive this onslaught. There was a whole push to acculturate and assimilate.” Sheldon Jackson was a tireless advocate for providing education for Native children when few people were looking out for their interests. He just thought their languages were “too heathen and sin-ridden to express civilized Christian thought,” according to historians Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer. In what now looks like a pretty flagrant violation of the separation of church and state, Jackson was named superintendent for education in Alaska. His personal distaste for Native languages was codified into law under the Organic Act of 1884. Even people’s names were changed. “My grandfather had a perfectly good Tlingit name that they couldn’t pronounce, so he became George Dick,” Benson said.
Life under military control had been anarchy for Alaska’s Natives, but under the Organic Act things didn’t improve much. As noncitizens, Natives had almost no legal rights. Their property could be seized, and they could be jailed without trial. “I worked on the pipeline the first three years, so I have a pretty good idea what lawless looks like,” Benson said. “Who’s going to ensure justice in the event of a crime? Who’s going to step in if somebody comes and takes away your child or your land? Nobody. One of my grandfather’s sisters was taken away and probably sold into slavery.” Under Jackson’s system, children were also sent away to boarding school, where speaking a Native language elicited swift punishment. Deadly waves of smallpox and other diseases swept through Native communities well into the twentieth century. Faced with extermination or assimilation, most Natives chose the latter. Entire generations grew up not learning their traditional language or culture. “My great-grandmother refused to learn English,” Benson said. Today the situation is commonly reversed—a Native community will have a few octogenarian members who speak their language fluently and are trying to pass it along to their great-grandchildren before it vanishes.
“So Alaska in 1899 is a disrupted place, made all the more disrupted by the Great Death, that final sweep of epidemic,” Benson said. “It impacted the choices my family made. I can hardly speak about it without weeping.” The period of death and destruction “was kind of the final blow for our reliance on our shamans. And that created a huge depression, in a sense, an emotional depression.”
Jackson’s direct influence on Alaskan culture is still being debated, just like that of William Duncan at Metlakatla. I met one ninety-five-year-old Tlingit elder who said that being sent off as a boy to the Sheldon Jackson School in the late 1920s was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. Jackson’s indirect role in preserving the state’s wilderness is less well known. While making one of his frequent stops on the lecture circuit at a national convention of Sunday school teachers held at Yosemite Valley on June 7, 1879, Jackson found himself paired with a disheveled amateur who spoke on the topic of California’s glaciers. Whatever vague plans John Muir had to explore the north evidently were accelerated by Jackson’s descriptions of Alaska’s natural wonders. A few weeks later, both men were aboard a steamship ultimately bound for Wrangell. Jackson would be saving souls. Muir had no set plans other than to see some glaciers and perhaps find something worth writing about.