Decolonizing the Timeline of Alaska History
This article is a slightly-adapted version of a presentation I gave in September 2024 at the Sharing Our Knowledge Conference. The conference was held in Sheetʼká, the town commonly known as Sitka, on the lands of the Sheetʼká Ḵwáan (Sitka People) in Lingít Aaní (Tlingit Country).
If you’d prefer to listen to my presentation rather than read it, you can watch the YouTube video below:
Please also check out the presentation I made at the 2022 Sharing Our Knowledge Conference here.
I want to share some thoughts regarding how we think about history, how we categorize history, how we divide history, and why that matters. There are some real weaknesses and drawbacks to the idea we call “Alaska history,” and some real problems with the ways people typically split Alaska history into distinct time periods.
In fact, many of these perceptions of history that exist in the popular consciousness today are built on colonialism. In other words, these ideas were developed by outsiders who came to take control over these lands, and these ideas continue to reinforce the legitimacy of those colonial projects.
If we believe that colonialism was illegitimate, we need to change the ways we think and talk about this history. We need to ensure we are not viewing the past through a colonial lens, and that our understanding of history is not built on colonial narratives. This is what I am calling “decolonizing the timeline.” In this article I aim to explain what that means, and show you what that might look like.
Periodization: What’s the Big Deal?
Periodization, or the practice of dividing history into different time periods, may seem like a theoretical and artificial task that only historians would care about — or maybe not even all historians, but just particularly nerdy ones like me. Nevertheless, periodization strongly influences our understanding of the past, and it typically receives much less attention than it deserves.
The act of “fencing the historical landscape,” as the historian William Green put it, restricts and guides the stories historians tell, as well as the stories the general public learns and believes. Green added that periodization has a “rigidifying power” that may obscure some parts of history and even put us into “intellectual straightjackets.” It draws lines through the timelines in our minds, and can lead us to make assumptions, jump to conclusions, and ignore some parts of history at our own peril. Therefore, we should all spend time thinking about how we categorize pieces of the past, and historians should be especially careful when constructing historical narratives.
My belief is that Alaska history has long suffered under the domination of colonial periodization, and it is well past time for that to change.
Space and Time
In order to break down the colonial narratives about our past into two more manageable dimensions, I am taking inspiration from Juliana Hu Pegues’s book Space-Time Colonialism. While I am not directly addressing Pegues’s thesis here, I am still taking a page from her book in breaking down colonial thinking along these two dimensions of space and time.
Initially, I planned to focus solely on time — that is to say, the issue of periodization. However, I quickly realized I could not ignore the spatial element — the questions of where we look at certain histories as taking place, and the places we include in stories of the past we tell.
Let’s start by addressing that space, and assess how it has been shaped by colonialism.
Space: Alaska as a Colonial Construct
In the title of this article, I use the term “Alaska history.” But if we stop and think about it, our entire idea of “Alaska” has been created and shaped by colonialism.
Our political definition of Alaska, the forty-ninth state of the United States, a legal entity with well-defined borders on land and sea between Canada and Russia, evolved directly from the colonial claims of the Russian Empire and treaties made between the Russians, the British Empire, and the United States of America. Although the name Alaska originated in Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language, it was applied by American politicians to a concept that was entirely non-Indigenous in its creation.
Our idea of Alaska does not at all align with the lived realities and spatial conceptions Indigenous peoples had throughout the vast length of their histories. It should be apparent to anyone after a little reflection that the Indigenous nations now called “Alaska Natives” did not see themselves as belonging to a shared homeland or collective group until the very recent past, starting about a hundred years ago.
Let’s take the Ḵʼíis X̱aatʼáay, or the Kaigani Haida, as an example: To place the history of their homeland in a separate category from that of their relatives in Haida Gwaii, which lies just forty miles to the south, but place their history in the same category as that of the Yupiit, who live a thousand miles away, is ludicrous. It follows no logic except colonial logic, because the Russian Empire laid claim to both the Kaigani Country and to Yup’ik lands, but could not successfully claim Haida Gwaii in the face of British competition.
And yet, in spite of this idea of “Alaska” clearly originating in recent colonial history, Alaska is such an enticing concept for so many of us, and it has grown so large in our imaginations, I could easily find myself telling my students,
“About three hundred years ago or more, the Ḵʼíis X̱aatʼáay migrated north from Haida Gwaii to Alaska.”
I should not say that!
Alaska did not exist three hundred years ago. The Ḵʼíis X̱aatʼáay migrated north to Tàan, the place commonly called Prince of Wales Island, the land of the Taantʼa Ḵwáan, or Tongass Tlingit, in Lingít Aaní, or Tlingit Country. It was not a land that either Haida or Tlingit would have recognized as part of something called “Alaska.”
And so, we have a spatial conundrum: Placing these sorts of Indigenous histories into a category called “Alaska history” is to buy into a colonial spatial framework. However, let’s just leave that problem for a moment and save potential solutions for later. For now, we can turn to the other dimension of colonial histories — time.
Time: Colonial Starting Points
What does it mean for our perceptions of history, our mental timelines, to be colonial in nature?
Let’s begin at the beginning: When does Alaska history start?
In many narratives, the history of this land began less than 300 years ago, in 1741 A.D., because that was the year when agents of the Russian Empire were said to have “discovered” this land, and they put those claims into writing. If history must be a written record of the past, and Indigenous records of the past were not put into writing, 1741 must be the starting point. Alaska history must begin and come into existence through the captains Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov, the naturalist George Steller, and other outsiders who happened to write down their experiences at that time. All human experiences that occurred on this land before that time must then be referred to as “prehistory,” because they were not put into writing.
Now, I recognize that the view described above is increasingly unpopular, and you are unlikely to hear anyone defending it wholeheartedly in 2024. Even the use of the term “prehistory” appears to be on the decline.
However, even as many people would endorse the alternative view—that the history of this land is long, that it can stretch back as far as the first arrival of humans thousands of years ago, and that it can include the oral histories of those first people—there remains a problem of proportion and emphasis.
Even if the thousands of years of human settlement, development, and stories that took place before the arrival of Bering, Chirikov, and Steller are included in a narrative of Alaska history, they are often relegated to a chapter, a few paragraphs, or even a few initial sentences of whatever narrative we look at. This stark disproportionality — that thousands of years of history merits far less attention than the last three hundred — creates the strong implication — even if a historian will not admit to it — that it is, indeed, the history written by outsiders that is most important and most legitimate, the most real part of Alaska’s history.
And yet, to recall what I mentioned only a few minutes ago, if “Alaska history” is inherently colonial in nature, then maybe “Alaska history” really does begin in 1741 A.D., and the deep Indigenous histories stretching back thousands of years on this land are something different. Maybe they belong in a different category and on a different timeline.
Again, I will let this problem sit with you a while, and we will look for some solutions soon.
Time: Colonial Turning Points
Now I turn to what is perhaps my favorite problem to address—the periodization of the past three centuries of Alaska history.
How would you divide Alaska’s recent history into different time periods?
If you ask any Alaskan, young or old, and many non-Alaskans besides, when the history of this land should be split into different eras, there is one central turning point, one pivotal, world-changing date, that everyone will ultimately land on:
1867, the year of the Alaska Purchase.
This year, we tell ourselves, changed everything. The trajectory of this land flipped from east to west — or maybe from west to east, depending on how you think about it — and our lives would never be the same. After all, our state government designates two different holidays commemorating two different events in 1867 — Seward’s Day in March, for the signing of the Treaty of Cession in Washington, D.C., and Alaska Day in October, for the transfer ceremony that occurred in Sheetʼká (Sitka).
Although 1867 has become less and less of a midpoint in Alaska history since 1741 as the years roll on into the twenty-first century, the year still very neatly colors the minds of people who learn about Alaska. On one side of 1867, there is the Russian period, and on the other, the American.
In fact, in Alaska: An American Colony, perhaps the most widely known monograph of Alaska history, published in 2002, historian Stephen Haycox splits the book between two halves, Russian and American. He justifies this division by stating that, “In a real sense Alaska has two post-contact histories: one of Russian America, the other of American Alaska.”
I could not disagree more with this statement. If “a real sense” of history accounts for the realities of political power and the lived experiences of the vast majority of people included in that history, Alaska history does not consist of a single “Russian period” that ends in 1867 and a single “American period” that begins there.
In October 1867, when Americans, Russian subjects, and Sheetʼká Ḵwáan Lingít watched the Russian flag fall and the American flag rise over the fort at Novoarkhangelsk (New Archangel, or Sitka), at the previous site of the Lingít fort Noow Tlein, nothing changed for the vast majority of people living on the land that would come to be known as Alaska. The vast majority of people across this land did not even know this event occurred. It had no significance to most of them for years. Just about the only people to experience any immediate impact were the Russian subjects living in Russian America, an extremely small group of American soldiers and civilians, and the Sheetʼká Ḵwáan — a total of around a couple thousand people, out of a population in the United States’ newly-claimed land that numbered in the tens of thousands.
In 1867, the United States had merely purchased a colonial claim to ownership of the land; it did not purchase a reality of ownership, control, or effective sovereignty. Lingít Aaní experienced the earliest and most intense American occupation and settlement after 1867, and Lingít lands arguably became one of the first regions of “Alaska” convincingly controlled and ruled by Americans. However, this establishment of American political dominance did not truly occur until the 1880s, and more remote parts of Alaska did not come under American control until decades afterward.
Put simply, Alaska did not become a U.S. colony in 1867. The takeover was piecemeal, enacted step by step with the establishment of military garrisons and repeated shows of force, as the U.S. government had to fight to establish sovereignty over numerous Indigenous nations and forcibly colonize the land and its peoples.
If we look to 1867 as our turning point, the pivot of Alaska history, we are denying the continuity of Indigenous sovereignty and the complexities of colonization. We are falling for the colonial narrative promoted by the United States — that the Alaska Purchase was legitimate.
I will mention some other turning points, although their importance pales in comparison to 1867: Works such as Ted Hinckley’s 1972 book The Americanization of Alaska, 1867–1897 periodize late nineteenth-century Alaska history according to events that were irrelevant to the vast majority of the local population. For example, one event that Hinckley uses to divide two of his chapters is the 1873 dissolution of the Sitka town council, an occurrence that had virtually no impact on anyone living within the claimed borders of the Department of Alaska, except for a few American settlers in Sitka.
Similarly, the passage of the Alaska Organic Act in 1884, and the Second Organic Act in 1912, which are far more commonly highlighted as turning points, held the most importance for those who oversaw and directly interacted with the American colonial apparatus. That is to say, these laws impacted only a minority of people living on the land, perhaps up until the 1920s, when the federal and territorial governments’ influence had grown to reach almost everywhere.
I would even argue that the date 1959, the achievement of statehood for Alaska, is overemphasized as a turning point in most people’s mental timelines of Alaska history. But, given that I am much more of a historian of the nineteenth century than the twentieth, I won’t push that argument and I can save it for another time.
Returning to my comfort zone, the nineteenth century — the use of the year 1897 or 1898 as a key turning point, representing the Klondike gold rush, also has its weaknesses. For one thing, the event was actually initiated earlier, in 1896, when a Lingít-Tagish family of Keish, his sister Shaaw Tláa, and their nephew Ḵáa Goox̱ — in English known as Skookum Jim Mason, Kate Carmack, and Dawson Charlie — discovered rich placer gold deposits in Bonanza Creek. And, while the rush was certainly significant in bringing thousands of newcomers to the claimed American colony of Alaska, many of those newcomers did not stay within those borders for the long term — or even the short term, given that they were traversing Alaska to reach Canadian-claimed lands.
And, again, while the Klondike rush certainly impacted Lingít Aaní, the Tutchone, and other peoples of what is now known as the Yukon, it is fair to say the event had no immediate impact on most people across most regions of Alaska. The Klondike gold rush is part of Lingít history, but not Inupiaq history, Unangax̂ history, and so on.
Decolonizing the Timeline
I have now started to reveal what I believe is the best path forward, a way to decolonize our timeline. It is only one possible path, and there could be many others. I am open to any and all ideas and suggestions.
What I say, to those who continue to tell this single story of Alaska history, ever-so-neatly divided into a “prehistoric” or “pre-contact” period, a “Russian period,” and the American present, is that there is no single story. There is no one “Alaska history.”
Instead, there is Unangax̂ history, Sugpiaq history, Yup’ik history — histories of the Inupiat, Dene (Athabaskans), dAXunhyuu (Eyak), X̱aadas (Haida), Tsmʼsyen, and Lingít. And, so as not to be accused of excluding anyone, there are of course more recent histories of people with mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage (Creoles), as well as groups of non-Indigenous visitors, settlers, and immigrants to this land. And, within those broader national or ethnic histories, there are community histories, clan histories, family histories, and more.
We should not be telling a single story, or following a single timeline, because that single story and single timeline will be colonial.
I do not deny that there is such a thing as Alaska history, if Alaska history refers specifically to the development of this political entity called Alaska, beginning with Russian colonial claims and then developing through Russian colonization efforts, American claims, and the piecemeal establishment of U.S. military and legal dominance over this land.
Alaska is a real place. However, we cannot allow these present-day borders to frame every story we tell, or allow the idea of Alaska turn an immense diversity of histories into a single, all-encompassing story.
Decolonizing Space
Let’s address that spatial problem: If we are telling a narrative of Lingít history, for example—the shared story of an Indigenous nation, a recognizable ethnolinguistic group—the setting of that history is not this place called Alaska. It is Lingít Aaní, Tlingit Country, and larger than that, it is lingítʼaaní, or the known Lingít world. It is a setting that includes the furthest reaches of Lingít exploration, including the waters to the west and south, and treks through the mountains to the north and east. It is a world that expands as Lingít boarded Russian and American ships to travel even further, and it is a world that, eventually, comes to be constricted by the state of Alaska, Yukon Territory, and the province of British Columbia, but only in the very recent past.
In each story we tell, the spatial framing should be defined by the people in that story, not an idea like “Alaska” that so many of us imagine to be timeless, when it absolutely is not.
Decolonizing Time
Let’s take a look at the other problem we left — starting points to our timelines. Again, we can let the people in the stories decide. How far back do the oral histories stretch? What stories can archaeological evidence inform us of?
In thinking about the Russian ships of 1741, there were Indigenous people whose lives were impacted in that year. There were sailors who likely deserted from Alexei Chirikov’s ship, and according to oral history brought to light by Lingít historian Mark Jacobs, Jr., they went south from Xunaa Ḵáawu territory to live among the Hinyaa Ḵwáan, where their descendants became the heads of several notable families. That event is noteworthy, for the Xunaa Ḵáawu and Hinyaa Ḵwáan, but it is not a starting point, or even a significant turning point, in their histories. 1741 is still a starting point in the history of Russian America, and Alaska history — but again, only the specific history of Alaska as a colonial political entity.
I’ll give you a concrete example of what this kind of periodization might look like: I am writing a manuscript on the Lingít nineteenth century with the working title Independence Defended and Denied: History of the Tlingit Nation 1775–1912. I begin the narrative in 1775 because that is the start of continuous interaction between the Lingít and people from other continents. While some people might call 1741 the moment of “first contact,” that date did not significantly alter Lingít history, other than for some families of the Hinyaa Ḵwáan. After 1775, however, there were regular arrivals of ships that brought new materials, technologies, diseases, and colonial projects that Lingít used, resisted, and responded to.
If periodization is the fencing of the historical landscape, I want to un-fence and re-fence the landscape of nineteenth-century Lingít history, viewing it as 137 years of interconnected interactions and transformations.
Within that long century, shorter time periods are framed by key events that many throughout Lingít Aaní would have seen as significant: In 1788, the Russians returned to Lingít Aaní. Around 1839 and 1840, American ships stopped trading with Lingít and the British established Fort Stikine in Shtaxʼhéen Ḵwáan territory. I do use the date 1867, because even as it mattered little to other Indigenous nations, it was a turning point recognized by Lingít. And, even though the Alaska Purchase itself was not as significant an event for the Lingít as the building of Fort Tongass and Fort Wrangel in 1868, or the U.S. Army’s violent attacks on the Sheetʼká, Shtaxʼhéen, and Ḵéex̱ʼ ḵwáan in 1869, 1867 was still the prelude that led to what happened in the following two years. But then, the U.S. Army withdrew from Lingít Aaní in 1877, the same year that the first American missionaries arrived. And, one year later in 1878, the first salmon canneries were built in Lingít Aaní. Finally, I conclude with the founding of the Alaska Native Brotherhood in 1912, which represented a sea change in how Lingít leaders would choose to continue fighting for their communities.
And, by emphasizing that this is a long nineteenth century of Lingít history, just as other historians have described a long nineteenth century for the world, I am attempting to fire a direct shot at the target of 1867, that date that has framed colonial narratives for so long.
Conclusion
There are certainly some dangers to the path that I suggest: It’s a frequent criticism of academics that they are too obsessed with the particular. I would not want to miss the forest because I so want to tell the story of a single tree. In my own work, for example, I cannot let focusing on a national history of the Lingít prevent me from seeing the inescapable interconnections between the Lingít and other Indigenous nations and histories, not to mention European histories and U.S. history as well.
But, I think this danger can be avoided, as long as we remind ourselves to think both locally and globally. The far bigger danger, which has caused and continues to cause so much harm, is too much thinking colonially.
In many cases, to decolonize is to decentralize, so decentralizing this single narrative of Alaska history and insisting that there are many histories, is, I believe, the most effective way to start opening people’s hearts and minds to other stories. Ultimately, those stories should be centered on the lives, lands, and voices of the people who lived them.
Sources
- Green, William A. “Periodization in European and World History.” Journal of World History vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring, 1992).
- Grinev, Andrei V. “Reflections on the Fate of Alexei Chirikov’s Missing Men.” Arctic Anthropology vol. 42, no. 2 (2005).
- Haycox, Stephen W. Alaska: An American Colony. University of Washington Press, 2002.
- Hinckley, Ted C. The Americanization of Alaska, 1867–1897. Pacific Books, 1972.
Please leave a comment below with your thoughts or questions. Gunalchéesh!
