I was born into a community on Saint Paul that was subject to a form of slavery created by the U.S. government after the Treaty of Cession in 1867. I was seventeen years old when we finally gained our civil and human rights in 1966 by an act of Congress. The experiences of my childhood under U.S. government domination, the efforts of our freedom fighters, my Unangan legacy of two hundred years of servitude to first Russia then the United States, and the heroic struggles of my people have formed the basis of my life’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs to this day.
My mother, Stefanida Zacharof, and my father, John Paul Merculieff, were born in the Pribilofs, and experienced both the beauty and the ugliness of the islands we call “Birthplace of the Winds” and “Galapagos of the North.” My mother was born out of wedlock on Saint George Island. Her mother had had an affair outside her marriage, and this was the source of great pain for my mother who was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her stepfather verbally and emotionally abused my mother for years in such a way that she rarely spoke of her childhood as an adult. I do know that when the family got together for meals, she had to sit alone. The only other stories, though scant, I heard from my mother began with World War II, where she was part of a U.S. government evacuation and subsequent internment of Pribilof Aleut people in abandoned canneries at Funter Bay in Southeast Alaska. It was at Funter Bay that my mother and father met as teenagers.
I investigated this period of internment in my people’s history while in my early twenties. In 1942, the Japanese military had invaded the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska and bombed Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. Attu Aleuts were taken to Hokkaido, Japan, as prisoners for the duration of the war. It had been the first time in contemporary history that a foreign power had invaded and occupied U.S. shores and captured American prisoners. Consequently, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. War Department were concerned that the Japanese military would move on to the Pribilofs because of their source of rich and thick northern fur seal pelts. The coffers of the U.S. Treasury, long supplied forcibly by my people, were at risk.
The MV Delarof, a U.S.-commissioned vessel, arrived on Saint Paul Island in June 1942. The Unangan people were given a few hours’ notice to prepare to abandon the village. Everyone was to bring no more than one suitcase and leave everything else in their homes. The government officials gave little information about where or why they were going, or even when they would be returned. They didn’t even know that the U.S. military would occupy their homes when they left. These homes now belonged to the U.S. government.
The Delarof then picked up the Saint George Island people under the same circumstances and set sail for Funter Bay. The people were kept in the holds of the ship, and many got sick. When the ship arrived at its destination, the people were dropped off along with two large crates of dried bread, the only food the government provided. Apparently, the government believed that, since Unangan were an Indigenous people, they could live off wild foods that were abundant in the area. They didn’t understand that none of them knew how to live in a rainforest, having lived in the Pribilofs since they were forcibly removed from Unalaska and Umnak by the Russian fur traders in 1767.
It wasn’t until mid-life that I began asking my mother questions about her experiences during the war:
“Mom, what was Funter Bay like for you?”
“I was only sixteen then, and we thought it was fun because it was different. But a lot of people died there. We didn’t have much food, and our people were crowded into these old buildings. Nobody lived there. It was an old cannery a long ways from Juneau. There was no privacy. We put blankets up on rope to have some privacy, and we slept on the floors. There was only two cook stoves for all of us.”
“How did people die?”
“They were mostly old people, sickly people, or babies. They got diseases like measles, or sometimes it got too hot for them there. We didn’t have sanitation, and even the government doctor left because he said there were no medical supplies. We buried them there. It was hard one year because all the men were taken back to Saint Paul and Saint George to kill seals for the government. The men wanted to stay because so many people were sick, but the government forced them to go.2 We were so happy when they came back.”
“Didn’t some men leave the internment camp during this time?”
“Yeah, some men left to join up with the army. They sneaked out of our camp and went to Juneau to enlist. But the government agent told the army that we weren’t U.S. citizens. But the army said we were U.S. citizens, and so the men joined up. Two people got some kind of medals from fighting in the war.”3
“And when did the government bring you back?”
“It was 1945. When we got back, we found all our homes wrecked and lots of things were stolen. I guess the army stationed people in our houses when we were in Funter Bay. Most of our houses were a mess. They must have used some of our furniture to burn in the wood stoves. Our [Russian Orthodox] icons were stolen, and most of the stuff in the church was stolen too.”
As I listened to my mother tell this story, a lot was not mentioned because either she didn’t want to remember or, English being her second language, she didn’t know all the words. I knew the facts already, though: The World War II Commission documented from firsthand accounts of survivors that ten percent of the interned Unangan, primarily the elderly and the infants, died from malnutrition, disease, and heat prostration in the two years they were imprisoned by the U.S. government in these abandoned canneries. The government doctor resigned in protest of the squalid conditions and lack of medical supplies.
Several Unangan men escaped from these camps to Juneau to join the war effort. The U.S. government agent in charge of the Unangan, not wanting to lose the men skilled at killing seals, charged that the men were not U.S. citizens, but the War Department decided otherwise. It was during the time the men were in Juneau that they discovered that other people didn’t live like the Unangan were forced to live. They were free to go and do as they pleased, and a government agent didn’t dictate every aspect of their lives. It must have been a real shock to these Unangan to see what freedom really was. This realization led the Unangan men to the Alaska Native Brotherhood (ANB), organized and led primarily by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska. The ANB was at the forefront of the battle for Alaska Native human rights and had hired a brilliant lawyer, Felix Cohen, to represent their cause. The ANB instructed Mr. Cohen to help the Unangan as well, and this was to mark the beginning of the Unangan fight for freedom that would take twenty-one years after the interned Unangan were returned to the Pribilof Islands in the summer of 1945.
In 1943, the Unangan men left behind were forced to leave their families in Funter Bay to kill seals on Saint Paul and Saint George Islands in order to supply the oil to lubricate war machinery and weapons. The men did not want to leave as there was so much sickness in the camp. They were afraid that they would come back to find their loved ones gone. But, forced to go by the government agent, they returned to Funter Bay three months later to find many of their fears had been realized: scores of people had died that summer from pneumonia and other sicknesses.
Upon their return to the Pribilofs in 1945, the Unangan discovered that their homes had been trashed and valuables stolen by the U.S. military personnel when they were stationed on the Pribilofs. Everything considered valuable was taken, including most of the old Russian Orthodox religious objects in the homes and church.
Unangan from the Aleutian Islands of Akutan, Unalaska, Umnak, and Atka had also been evacuated and interned in Southeast Alaska and suffered equally. When Unalaska Unangan were returned, they found that most of the land they had lived on had been sold by the U.S. military to private fish companies without Unangan knowledge or consent. And the Unangan taken from two Unalaska Island villages, Chernofski and Makushin, were returned to the village of Unalaska after the war without means to return to their communities. Many of the Unangan from Attu Island who had been taken as prisoners of war in northern Japan, subsisting only on rice, died before release. Those who survived were forcibly relocated to Atka in a U.S. government decision that determined it was too costly to rebuild the homes on Attu that had been destroyed by the Japanese military. Most of the survivors of this ordeal never talked about these times, not until the U.S. government commissioned an investigatory body headed by Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye in the 1970s. The World War II Commission was charged with documenting abuses of Japanese-Americans and Unangan during their internment and to recommend steps to redress the abuses.
The Unangan men who had seen and experienced what real freedom was like, and what it was like to be treated like a real person, set out in earnest to strategize how they would change the Unangan status as a captive labor force for the U.S. government. With the aid of ANB leaders and Mr. Cohen, they set out to establish the Unangan as a federally recognized tribe under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934—a law that recognized Native Americans as U.S. citizens and tribes as their vehicle for self-government.
Since the U.S. government had established rigid rules about Unangan gatherings—only gatherings for church services were allowed—Terenty Philemonof, Gabe Stepetin, Irish Stepetin, Alexander Melovidov, Elary Gromoff, Mamant Emanof Sr., and my uncle, Iliodor “Eddie” Merculieff, secretly devised a plan for covert meetings among themselves: Gabe Stepetin came up with the idea to propose to the government agent that the men be allowed to put on a play or performance for the white government employees on the island, and to do so required rehearsals. The government agent swallowed the story and allowed the men to gather. The men actually produced a play during this time, but no one remembers what it was about.
As a result of these meetings in 1948 and 1949, a petition was smuggled off the island for recognition of the establishment of the Unangan Communities of Saint Paul and Saint George under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 as amended in 1936 (to include Alaska Native peoples). The men sought to gain the human rights that the Pribilof Unangan had been deprived of since first being enslaved by the Russian fur traders, who had brought them to the islands, and then by the U.S. government.
From the time the U.S. government gained control of the Pribilofs after the Treaty of Cession with Russia in 1867, Unangan had been a captive labor force, first for two private companies the government had contracted with, then for the U.S. government when it assumed direct administration of the Pribilofs in 1910. From 1910 until the early 1960s, Unangan were not allowed to leave the islands, own their own homes, or write letters to anyone on the outside unless such letters were first censored by the government agent. The government agent served as judge, jury, and law enforcer in a colonial dictatorship over the Unangan. Food, government housing, and clothing were rationed as pay for the back-breaking work of the Unangan men who worked seasonally up to seventeen hours a day for three months, killing seals and removing and processing their pelts. Men were debilitated by the time they reached the age of thirty-five.
The Pribilof Unangan men directed Mr. Cohen to draft an Indian Reorganization Act charter, which he formally submitted to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. When the charter was granted in 1951, as their first official act, with the aid of Cohen, the first organized Unangan tribal council launched a claim against the U.S. government for failure to deal with Pribilof Unangan fairly and honorably, and for violating the terms of the Treaty of Cession that required the U.S. government to treat Unangan as U.S. citizens with all the rights and privileges of citizenship. This lawsuit was filed with the Indian Claims Commission, which had jurisdiction over claims of Native Americans throughout the United States. The lawsuit was vigorously opposed by the U.S. government, and so it took twenty-seven years to reach a judgment in favor of the Unangan. The government lawyers, however, appealed the decision to force the Unangan to settle out of court in 1978. By this time, most of the men who began this effort were dead.
From beginning to end, Pribilof Unangan were represented by five different attorneys, all of whom took the case pro bono. A former state supreme court justice, Roger Conner, was the first to take over the case from Cohen on behalf of the Unangan. After Justice Conner died, Anchorage attorney Lloyd Miller took over the case. After Lloyd Miller retired, Don Green and Stephen Truitt finally won the lawsuit. Through the efforts of these good men, the Unangan were able to prove that the U.S. government had rationed an equivalent of 1,700 calories per day for each working man to kill seals in extremely arduous labor over 8 to 17 hours daily during 3 months of every summer. In dramatic contrast, the attorneys demonstrated that German POWs received an average of 1,900 calories per day to do essentially nothing.
Meanwhile, the seals were the reason the U.S. government was on the Pribilofs in the first place. Seal pelts brought a considerable profit to the government every year on the backs of the captive Unangan labor force who were the only ones who knew how to kill the seals so efficiently. No one else would do such dirty work without just compensation and fair treatment, but the Unangan didn’t know that they were the only labor force held captive by the U.S. government in the entire United States, and the only labor force in U.S. history that made a profit for the U.S. government. The Unangan thought everyone was treated this way by the government, having already had over a hundred years of slavery as their legacy before the U.S. government appeared on the scene.
The Pribilof Unangan finally achieved political independence after the first director of the Alaska Human Rights Commission, African-American Willard Bowman, led an investigation in the early 1960s. The Commission’s report eventually reached Congress, and Senator Bob Bartlett led a congressional investigation in 1964 that led to the Unangan civil rights bill, ironically called the Fur Seal Act of 1966. This act recognized Pribilof Unangan rights to vote in state and federal elections, own their own homes, and receive full civil service wages. Little did the Unangan know the challenge to the human spirt that lay ahead.