The conditions of privation under Russian domination continued until the 1867 Treaty of Cession when Russia sold jurisdiction of Alaska to the United States and the Unangan once again had to change their ways, this time under the heavy hands of U.S. government oppressors. Learning English was mandatory and speaking Russian or Unangan (outside of religious practice) was forbidden. The Unangan were only allowed to retain their Russian Orthodox faith, stubbornly holding onto it perhaps because it was the only thing they had that brought them hope. The language used in the church was, and still is, Slavonic and Unangan Tunuu, written with the Cyrillic alphabet (prior to the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Aleutian Islands, the Unangan language was never written down). I found out from Father Michael Lestenkof, an Unangan priest, that Unangan shamans had encoded Unangan spiritual messages in the Lord’s Prayer, written in Unangan and passed down through the generations.
The U.S. government contracted with private companies to continue killing northern fur seals for their thick luxurious pelts. The Alaska Commercial Company received the first twenty-year contract, and the North American Commercial Company won the second twenty-year contract before the U.S. government took over direct jurisdiction in 1910.
What hard-won gains the Unangan managed while surviving under Russian domination were wiped out after the Treaty of Cession, including being treated as people with the rights of Russian citizens, attending Russian schools in Russia, and becoming Russian Orthodox priests. The private companies followed by the U.S. government insisted that the people learn the Western ways, a practice carried on from similar oppressions against Native Americans. Speaking a language other than English was subject to washing one’s mouth out with soap or being hit with a specially designed stick with holes in it to increase the pain.
As Elder Gabe Stepetin once said about his childhood under U.S. rule, “they did not want us to get too smart. Only to learn how to say ‘yes sir, no sir’ and that was it. We would listen to music played by the teacher all day long, then go home.” Stepetin also talked about the food they ate one winter, as detailed in a journal he kept, “It was my birthday and all we ate that day was bread and tea. We had nothing else. It was always like that. Look at my journal entry here . . . we ate bread and had tea for most days. This day I wrote that we had bread and tea, don’t know what we are going to have to eat tomorrow.”
These conditions lasted through the early 1960s.
Chapter 3
Callorhinus ursinus: The Northern Fur Seal
I grew up hearing the sounds of tens of thousands of seals as I went to sleep every night and as I awoke every morning. I loved the sound of the seals. When I was a child, there were as many as 1.4 million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Eighty percent of the northern fur seals bred on the Pribilofs. The bull seals would arrive in May from the Bering Sea, where they stayed most of the year, to establish their territory and await the arrival of the females in June. They would never leave their territory, even for food, until they finished mating. When the females arrived, having spent the winter thousands of miles off the coast of southern California and Southeast Alaska, the bull seals would “grab” them, some as little as a fifth of the size of a bull, to be part of their harem, which during my childhood consisted of as many as one hundred females. Once a bull impregnated a female, the bull left its territory and went to sea to feed for the first time since its arrival.
Female seals have two uteruses, one to deliver a ten-pound pup and the other to become impregnated again about three days later. The pups congregate with other pups in the breeding rookery when their mothers venture out to forage. Upon return, the pup and female find each other among the thousands of fur seals through the sound each makes. The female is known to be out foraging for three to ten days, but in the Pribilofs the maximum was seven days before fur seals began declining in the 1970s.
Over time I learned a lot of the language of the northern fur seals. I knew the sounds of a bull seal mating, the warning roars as some bull seal’s territory was encroached upon by another bull, bull seals fighting, a bull seal alerting others that he is moving without threat to other bull seals, a seal awakened by surprise, the bleating of pups calling for their mothers, and a mother searching for her pup. All such sounds mixed into some kind of chaotic and rhythmic melody from every rookery day and night.
Growing up with the 1.4 million seals in the Pribilofs was magical and mysterious. I would watch the seals for hours either from the land, or when I was out with the men fishing for halibut. The seals are extremely agile, alert, and highly social animals, always in groups onshore or at sea. The prime breeding males had manes, just like lions or bears—in fact, they are known as “sea bears.” If you watch a seal run on land, its front and hind quarters move exactly as a bear would. Like a bear, the males are highly territorial and the females aggressively protect their young regardless of the source of danger. The prime males are as dangerous as any grizzly bear; no one messes with these males. They can move faster than any man over the rocks and within seconds can cause severe injury as they sink their canine teeth through flesh or fur with a viciously strong shaking action of their muscular necks. Fights between these males are frequent, intruding younger or older bulls are very likely to have large parts of their fur and skin ripped out by the prime males, and several bulls may attack an intruder together. Rarely, however, do such encounters end in the death of a territorial intruder.
At sea, the seals are a contrast to their lives onshore. Most of the time, the seals at sea are simply floating aimlessly or playing. They are not aggressive there except in the case of a bull seal chasing a reluctant female to mate in the water. They are unafraid of humans and can come up to the side of a boat, craning their necks high out of the water as they curiously stare at us. All seals move very quickly and gracefully in the water. I have always been amazed at the agility and flexibility of the seal’s body, as it twists and turns rapidly in an underwater ballet that is as graceful as anything anyone would hope to see in their lifetime. No one can tell me that seals don’t play. On certain types of stormy days, when the waves would break far from shore, the seals, young and old, would “catch a wave” and surf either on top of the wave or immediately inside the wave. I loved watching the silhouettes of seals inside the clear water of a steep wave. When the wave was expended or ready to break onshore, the seal would turn around and catch another wave offshore. Sometimes, under the right conditions, the seals would play like this for a better part of an hour. In the fall, I would watch the seal pups, born in June and July, play for hours at sea, finding and playfully shaking seaweed picked off the sea bottom, surfing on small waves, or chasing after other seal pups.
The only threats to the seals, besides humans, are the orcas and Steller sea lions, the latter of which are not like the gentler California counterpart. They are larger and much fiercer—the female is larger than the male and is responsible for finding food so that her pup can survive on her milk. One fall day I watched as a male and female transient orca pair moved up to the rocks along the rookery where seal pups were gathered in pods. Astonishingly, the orcas started “playing” with the pups. The orcas would nuzzle below the pup and gently toss the pup into the air. The pups would twist, nose down, back into the water, like some kind of Olympic diving-board exhibition. The pups obviously loved this play and gathered around the orcas to get “their turn” to be thrown into the air. Suddenly, as if a signal passed between the orcas, they simultaneously attacked the pups when their defenses were down. What pups survived, the sea lions would then chase in open water and eat when caught. That day, I saw at least a dozen seal pups eaten in a matter of a couple of minutes, two and three at a time.
More frequently, orcas at sea would stalk and even steer seals toward other waiting orcas. We could always tell when this had happened as there was the inevitable large circle of blood on the water surrounded by four or five orcas. We would never purposely dare to come into the circle of orcas when
a seal was taken—many times a female orca and her calf would be feeding on the seal while at least two large male relatives would maintain patrol in an invisible defense perimeter around the vulnerable pair. One time, we accidentally wandered into this invisible perimeter in a skiff and soon after spotted two huge dorsal fins speeding toward our boat. The boat operator quickly started up his seventy-horse power outboard and headed in a 180-degree direction at maximum speed. We ran for ten minutes before stopping, when we didn’t see the flukes anymore in the direction we came from. We sighed in relief; however, the boat operator then looked below the outboard and saw the two huge males looking up at him. They had followed us to make sure we didn’t turn back. Once we were an adequate distance from the feeding area, they turned around and headed back to the female and her calf.
Today, sadly, there may be three to five females to the northern fur seal harem instead of a hundred, with many bulls, upon establishing territory, waiting in vain for a female. Northern fur seal numbers in the Pribilofs have declined over the past 30 years to about 450,000, probably due to climate changes affecting migration patterns, location of food, and availability of food sources; discarded plastics and rope wrapped around seals’ necks causing them to slowly choke to death or die of infection; and the likely contribution of commercial fishing by factory trawlers that target food sources eaten by the seals, sea lions, and seabirds of the Bering Sea.
Gone are the times I remember the most, when I would go to a rookery and see the seals by the tens of thousands.
Chapter 4
Internment
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 instruct
ed 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.
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