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Wrong Turns Where Dignity goes to die Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com mom, can you tell me a story?
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or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. It's 1741 in the kayak Islands of southeastern Alaska. A cold mist hangs over the water as strange, unfamiliar ships appear on the horizon, their masted sails cutting across routes long traveled by kayaks and umiaks of indigenous hunters and traders from shore. Wary eyes watch their progress, already sensing that this arrival will bring uncertain change. These are not empty lands being discovered. These are ancient homelands of a diverse society of tribal cultures. The arrival of Russian colonists in a land we now call Alaska marks the beginning of an era of profound upheaval that will occur in cycles of violence, negotiation, and resistance. I'm Don Wildman. Welcome to American History Hit. Our guest today is Professor Thomas Swenson at the University of Utah. He's the author of Where Next Columbus? A Native Punk Mixtape, and his newest book, the Great Land An Indigenous History of Alaska which will be published in October of 2026. In today's episode, we will be discussing the annexation of Alaska Foreign. Thomas, how are you? Great to have you on the show.
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Thank you, Don, thank you for having me here today. It's a pleasure to speak with you about the annexation of Alaska.
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First of all, very basic stuff. This is a big subject. The last frontier, the frozen north. Alaska. Let's start with that. The name we call it. Where does Alaska come from?
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Oh, the term Alaska comes from a Yunangan word, Alaska, which means the direction in which the water flows towards the mainland. So the Yunangan people are the islanders along the Aleutian chain. And that term Alaska, was then kind of anglicized into this word Alaska. And yet another interpretation of that word is the great land. So if you think of islanders pointing to this place where the waves are going, right, going north towards the mainland, and so you have this kind of dual meaning here. You know, Alaska's the official name, but also this term, the great land, which both of those are legitimate translation.
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Both the geography and the content of this story are huge. I mean, it's almost on a scale that a mainlander like myself, or at least a continental like myself, can hardly conceive. I've never been to Alaska, so it's still this epic frontier in my mind. It's fair to call Alaska in those days and even now a nation of nations, isn't it? Who were some of the different groups of people who lived in Alaska prior to contact from foreign outside powers?
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B
Don, this is a great question. And what we think of is Alaska does not start with Russia or the United States. This idea of Alaska as the last frontier is not even a jumping off place for learning about it. It starts with the people who already knew the land in an intimate way. It starts with people who had been living there for generations, raising families, building societies around rivers, coasts, mountains, and seasons that forge everything about life in the north. So what we call Alaska today is a homeland of roughly 23 different indigenous language groups. When you're talking about size here, Don, we're talking about a region of North America that is almost the size of Mexico. So in the interior, the Athabascan people have long developed networks that stretch across what is now Alaska and Canada. In the north, the Inubiaq communities are part of this larger kind of arctic world, right? This kind of Arctic world, which includes Alaska, Canada, Greenland, places that from an indigenous perspective, were never truly separate in the way that modern borders might suggest. Along the western coast, the Yupik and the Siberian Yupik communities maintained long standing relationships with the Bering Strait and their neighbors across the Bering Sea, of course, and along that southern coast into the Aleutian chain. The Yunangan and the Suviak, or Aleutic people, of which I am one, developed deeply engaged maritime worlds where survival and knowledge were built through water, weather and long distance navigation.
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We're basically talking about a massive territory across all of the north, really, that is very fluid, no pun intended. It's, you know, cultural practices and ways of life so tied to the sea. Source of my pun is intrinsic in. All right, I'm interested in. Because this. We are so naive down here of what societies practice and how they were structured in this world. I mean, for all we know, when we're growing up, I speak of myself and igloos and kayaks. That's about it, you know, and that's that it's as ugly as that. We really just don't know. And so tell us a little more about how these societies, which are very vast, are organized on a smaller basis or localized basis.
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B
I think maybe your audience may be familiar with the Alaska Southeast. And one of the large cultures in the Alaska Southeast or the Panhandle would be the Tlingit, right? And the Tlingit are known for their crest poles and their large spruce homes, right? These big, heavily crafted homes. And they too would live off of salmon, right? They would live off salmon. And quite often they would have these. These massive homes with their family crest along the front of the home. And given the seasons, they would also have a home that was further inward. So that's one, say, one group of like, material culture in that way. And then say, if you have the Athabaskan, who are the people, the interior, they have a very large territory that is traditionally theirs. And so they would move with the seasons. You know, we're talking about the kind of tundra and, you know, that kind of middle part of Alaska right there. And then to the further north, of course, as you were saying, you know, you have another group of people, the Inupiat, who of course built their lives off of ice, right? And in the, you know, six months of either light or dark, that sort of way of living, you know, creating a different kind of lifestyle. And then to the south, where I'm from, you have people who live off the sea.
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Thank you for indulging me. The stereotypes are what's important to dispense with in this conversation, because we find out that this is a very real world full of very sophisticated societies that are suddenly going to clash with another one. And that's, that's the story we're telling today. And all of this part of our conversation is really to say that there is a very, very old and society and many, many layers going on in this part of the world when eventually these colonists come from other worlds. We're going to take a break, but I just want audiences to keep in grappling with this eventual colonization. You can't copy paste the same history of what happened in the contiguous U.S. it is a unique history up here in so many ways. So after this break, we'll talk about the change, the arrivals of outsiders on the shores of Alaska. Foreign.
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Howdy ho and welcome to Fantasy Fan Fellas. I'm Hayden, producer of the Fantasy Fan Girls podcast and your resident lover of all things Sanderson. And I'm Stephen, your bookish Internet goofball, but you can call me the Smash Daddy. And we are currently deep diving Brandon Sanderson's fantasy epic Mistborn. But here's the catch. Stephen here has not read Mistborn before. That's right. Hey. Hey. So each week you'll get my unfiltered raw reactions to every single chap. Along the way, we'll do character deep dives, magic explainers, and Steven will even try to guess what's next. Spoiler alert, he'll be wrong. Newsflash, I'm never wrong. Episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find Fantasy fanfellas wherever you get your podcasts. Folks knew the colonel approved of his new Honey Chili Crisp and Jalapeno Ranch sauces the moment he tasted them and said, that's right. No notes, just absolute silence. Turns out some flavors don't need explaining, they just need dipping. It's saucy season at KFC with new Honey Chili Crisp and Jalapeno Ranch. Get dipping with a boneless bucket today.
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Prices and participation vary in a world
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where swords were sharp and hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians, me, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive head first into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages. So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids
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Welcome back.
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A
We're with Professor Thomas Swenson of the University of Utah talking about the annexation of Alaska. Thomas. We've introduced a people native to Alaska. But as we reach into the 18th century, 1700s, new groups begin to settle. And they're the Russians, per se, really. Russians, or just people from that general area.
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Well, in. In the 1740s, Russian ships began with the Kamchatka expeditions, and they entered into Ugandan territory. But we would understand as the villagers in the Aleutian chain. And this is usually treated as the beginning of Alaska's colonial history, but it is more accurate to say it is the beginning of a Russian operation that encountered with social and political structures that were already fully in place. Right. So over the course of the decades, the Russian built a maritime fur empire and sea otters. The Pacific sea otter furs proved valuable because of, like, their density and, like, how warm they were per square inch. And so that provided hats and blankets, you know, throughout the world. And Russians couldn't have developed this market alone. And I think that's what's important about the foundation of understanding Alaska.
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This is the time of Peter the Great, the emperor Peter the Great. And Russian explorers like those in England, for sure, are off launching these naval expeditions over what will become known as the Bering Sea. They are here to exploit the northern Pacific for this. It's sea otters out here. It's. It's beavers back in North America, but basically, it's very popular to kill these animals and make hats out of them and various garments.
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B
It took forever for the Russians to transport physically these ships from the eastern side, you know, the European side of Russia, across the steppes, to the water of the Bering Sea, which is just, in fact, you know, it's. It's really hard to imagine something like that these days, right, that people pushing these things from the beginning, though, as they encounter and develop these markets. And they relied on indigenous knowledge of the sea, of animal migration, weather patterns, of course, and the geography that was simply not legible, you know, immediately legible to outsiders. And I spent a lot of time trying to imagine what that was like.
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A
And I imagine the logistics of this are that the Aleutian Islands, what we call the Aleutian Islands, are there. And one by one, they kind of march their way across, depending on the availability of this resource that they're looking for, which is essentially primarily sea otters. And. And this all happens over the course of a few decades. And during this time, formal colonies are built there. The first officially being established, 1784. So over those 40 years, you have this process unfolding. And these colonies were very small in scope, I mean, we're, I, I imagine encampments, really. Settlement populations in the hundreds of people. They speak Russian, they practice Orthodox Christianity, and thus begins the process of civilizing, so called civilizing a society. Right.
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B
Well, I love that you mentioned this because in 1784, the Russians carry out a massacre of Alutiq people or the Kodiak Islanders, which in English is called Refuge Rock, or Awok Massacre. And it is a small island just off of the main Kodiak island called Sikalaktak Island. And as far as they know, villagers went into this. The tide went out. The villagers went up into this high kind of city mountain. And your listeners can Google this. And when the tide came in, it looked as though it was impossible to kind of get at. And the tide went out. The Russians waited for the tide to recede. And to this day they don't know how many villagers lost their lives. Some claim 2 to 500. Others claim in the thousands. Because it wasn't until the 1990s that archaeologists found and investigated this site. So they've never concluded how many sets of the remains. Some say that this includes men, women and children, that they were drowned, that they were stabbed and shot cannon fire onto the top of the island.
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A
What year was this?
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B
This is 1784, I believe.
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A
Oh, my God. And what had prompted that massacre using
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B
Kodiak island as the first kind of imperial base for the.
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A
For Russian America which had been resisted or.
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B
Well, I think a way to consider this is that if we think of the European colonization of the Americas, say the Spanish or the British, you know, they were following the doctrine of discovery, right? There is this kind of investment, ways of integrating the land and the people into those empires. And I think that if you look at the Russian movement east across St. Petersburg, you know, into Alaska at some point, right? That it was this kind of by force and fraud way of dealing with people, you know, like do whatever you could do to get those resources. If we think of. I'm sure you've had plenty of people on the podcast who talk about re. You know, the Spanish reading that kind of the rights of the Spanish crown to the land. There wasn't anything like that.
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A
We really need to have a psychologist on this show at some point and just give us the bottom line. Oh, my God. The Russian American company was established in 1799. I think this sounds to me like the British East India Company, that type of corpor. Right. Sanctioned by the. By their homeland to sort of conduct business and kind of build a nation, I suppose. They're granted a monopoly over trade in the region. I mean, they're as good as Russia in this Alaskan territory. Now, tell me the kind of relationship that develops and exists between the indigenous Alaskans and these Russian colonists over time. Obviously not very good at their massacring them. But were these interactions very different, as I mentioned before, between the Europeans and the American natives? Can we kind of use one as a guide for the other?
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B
Oh, you know, this is a. A great way of thinking about that. So if we think of this period of conquest and coercion that emerged as a structured colonial economy organized through that Russian American company, that native people of all ages were kind of forced into that grift. The company charter was that from teenagers to maybe 53 or something, that that age of men were required to spend two years on and two years off working for the Russian America Company. However, being able to navigate the sea in those swift kayaks requires training and requires, you know, a skill that was within those village communities. And so while that was written, you know, in the charter, that's not how it was in practice. And a refusal to take part of this, people would be punished, their families would be punished. I have read an account of people being left out on barren islands for refusing to take part. There are stories of people walking into the ocean, taking their own lives, trying to get out of this because of
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the forced labor and all the rest.
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Yeah, yeah. I mean, I write about it as not exactly, you know, serfdom, which is alive and well in Russia. Right. The majority of people at the time.
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Right.
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In the Russian. In Russia are serfs.
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Right.
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And not like European serfs. You know, it's a different kind of serfdom and not exactly chattel slavery either. So this is, you know, this is all based on hunting and keeping these generations of men involved in that. And to that aside, I would like to say that for their service, the Russian American company paid credit to these workers that they could use in supply storehouses where female labor was used to make goods and services, and those women were not paid so well.
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A
And the money comes right back to the company. It's the old fashioned grift. It really is. We did it a lot over here with the coal mining company towns, you know, all that stuff. It's so fascinating. That's an interesting historical question about the difference between the need for slavery or the creation of the slavery system versus serfdom and how that aristocratic society of so many aristocratic societies of Europe already had that kind of system of forced labor or at least coerced labor in place with that old system. It's a fascinating thing.
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B
Well, Don, I think that is a great question to think about. When Russia sells this territory to the States, they also have the great emancipation in that same decade.
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A
Russian communities, these settlements we're talking about, can you describe them? I mean, they're few and far apart, aren't they?
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B
Oh, for sure. I mean, we think of the Russian colonial outposts, you know, went from the Aleutian chain down into Northern California. And also there was a place one called Fort Elizabeth in Hawaii, of all places.
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A
I mean, they don't call it the Russian river for no reason. In Northern California, the Russians got around.
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B
Yeah, for sure. You know, where I'm from, there was this developing society where the villages would be split in half between the indigenous people and then another kind of indigenous people called the creoles. And I wouldn't confuse that with, like the criollos, right, in Mexican society or Latin American society. But the creoles with a K, R, O, E, L, they were children of Russian men and native women. And so you can think of these villages kind of cut in half in that way. This kind of Russians on one side with their Creole families and native people on the other. And the Creoles existed, as people say, in Kodiak island well into the mid 20th century.
- [21:21]
A
When did the Russian stake in Alaska begin to wane? They'd been there since. Since the early 1700s, conducting business as this Russian American company. And then fortunes begin to fall off, I guess.
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B
Yeah, well, you know, the decline of the sea otter. You know, by late 1850s, the sea otter throughout the Pacific Rim is considered almost extinct, if not entirely extinct. I think it was only decades and decades later that they. That someone found some along Big Sur, like. Yeah. And so the stock that exists today come out of those. And also we're thinking about the fallout from the Crimean War that Russia was involved. Involved with. And of course, the rights to different waterways. Right. We have, you know, Britain is still active and the British still control waterways. You have the Americans. And so I think, given that weak moment following the war, while we may look at, you know, the great emancipation in the homeland, I think Alaska, the conditions that led to Russia, the Tsar, selling that territory, are also part of that.
- [22:32]
A
It seems to be a constellation of factors. You have, obviously, the overhunting of the primary resource, which is sea otters. Bound to happen, of course, if you do, motoring over these lands, taking all you can. It's also, I imagine the geography of this place is just Very challenging. You have these small Russian settlements over such a vast territory. How do you build a society within that? Very difficult. In days without even telegraphs, I would imagine.
- [22:57]
B
I'm so glad that you mentioned this, because this was something I think I didn't give justice to the beginning, which is, you know, there were Russian kind of outposts and trade routes heading into the interior and to the north. However, you know, the mainstay of their colonies were along that southern coast. So from, you know, Sitka and Juneau, you know, along the Panhandle down through the Aleutian chain. And so even while Kodiak was the Plymouth Rock, I guess, of Russian colonization, they moved to a place that is now called Sitka, but they named it Archangel. And that is where the US first entered when, after they purchased the territory.
- [23:38]
A
And you have to understand, we're in the middle of the 19th century. This is quite modern. And Britain and now America is occupying that entire huge mass of land down to the south there. There's a lot of pressure there for Russia. And you throw in the Crimean War, which, one of these days, even though it's an international incident, we've got to talk about, because it has really huge repercussions around the world. You know, even. Even for America, 1856 and that, you know, charge of the Light Brigade, all that stuff has an enormous impact on politics around the world. And one of those things is that Russia needs to sort of pull back because they lose the war and they have to pull back. They don't want to compete with Britain, which is. Right. Canada, it's not going to be good. So they basically are going to trade out on one of their greatest assets, which is a big piece of land. Acast powers, the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
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Do you like being educated on things that entertain but don't matter? Well, then you need to be listening to the Podcast with Knox and Jamie. Every Wednesday, we put together an episode dedicated to delightful idiocy to give your brain a break from all the serious and important stuff. Whether we're deep diving a classic movie, dissecting the true meanings behind the newest slang, or dunking on our own listeners for their bad takes or cringy stories, we always approach our topics with humor and just a little bit of side eye. And we end every episode with recommendations on all the best new movies but TV shows or music. To find out more, just search up the Podcast with Knox and Jamie wherever you listen to podcasts and prepare to make Wednesday your New favorite day of the week.
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- [26:08]
A
Welcome back. We're talking about Russia deciding to sell Alaska eventually to the Americans. Thomas, they sell their claim on this place. But seriously, how do they even frame this? I mean, this has always haunted me as a question. This is a gigantic piece of real estate. I mean, that's just even silly to say it that way.
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B
Well, I think it's this idea that the territory will be important for a geopolitical strategy and this idea of the British or British seizure, you know, that the Americans presence in the Pacific would offset that kind of British power. I think that is one way to think about it in that geopolitical sense. But then, of course, as you know, this is a time in US Policy of expansion, right. So we're just about to move into the 1870s and we know how from previous episodes on American history hit podcasts, the Lakota and the people of the Plains are in that kind of moment of pacification with the United States after these great wars that had just been happening for decades.
- [27:09]
A
I've just always been surprised that the British didn't say, excuse me, that's going to be ours. It's connected to our, our country. You know, like, that's a very odd thing that this, this land that was so foreign to any Americans really wouldn't even think, even today you don't think about Alaska very much if you're down here in New York. It's, it's an odd thing. And so I, I've always thought that that was a historical dilemma.
- [27:29]
B
Well, no, I, I love that you mentioned the British because I think the, there are places along that eastern border of Alaska that had been argued over, you know, who owns, you know, where does that border actually lie between what is now Canada and Alaska? So ongoing conversation there, I guess.
- [27:48]
A
Yeah. So in 1859, this begins. The Russia offers the United States or approaches the United States with a deal. Understand there is a set of program problems that they are confronting. What they came for. Their corporation is no longer making the money they used to it's hard to run this place in this vast territory. And they just lost the war with the neighboring country. Britain has Canada, and so it's not going to be an easy place for them to manage. So they are a motivated seller, as we say, in the real estate business. The other factor that's so interesting is that the American Civil War is going on just after they decide to do this. Really bad timing. And so for a good four or five years, the Americans are like, hey, yeah, interesting. Can't do it right now. Have to fight a war amongst ourselves. The Talks resume in 1867. Take me from there, would you?
- [28:39]
B
The Secretary of State Seward, right, negotiated this deal and for $7.2 million, the United States made the last sort of large scale acquisition of land in the Americas, right?
- [28:57]
A
So $7.2 million for what is 586,412 acres. That breaks down to something like 2 cents per acre. Pretty good deal.
- [29:08]
B
Yes.
- [29:09]
A
You know, this, this ranks right up there with the Louisiana Purchase as far as like, oh my God, real estate deals. But the fact is the vast resources of Alaska that had in so much abundance were not realized. I mean, this was not an exploited territory at all in terms of that. So many, many people just saw this as a ridiculous waste of money, you know, especially coming right after the Civil War. It had to have been a great controversy. Indeed. It was called Seward's Folly, wasn't it?
- [29:35]
B
Yes, Seward's Folly. And you know, the icebox or any kind of derogatory term for this act position, for sure, sure.
- [29:42]
A
And that's when probably, I would imagine with the, with the rise of media, which we always talk about on this, this podcast, you would have the cartoons, I'm sure this is when the stereotypes begin. Those people with their kayaks and their igloos and all this sort of silly cartoonish things are made very popular and suddenly people start to look at this place in one way and not the others. Not to mention racism and bigotry and all the rest of this natural stuff that happens, or not natural stuff, but you know, the, the fact of. In America. But the deal goes through 1867. William Seward, acting on behalf of Andrew Johnson and the United States government, purchases Alaska from the Russians Authority then switches over on these Alaskan lands to Americans. Probably not good news to the indigenous peoples, right.
- [30:32]
B
When, you know, the first sort of cutter came into what was called Archangel, the Russian American capital, which is now called Sitka, they got off their ship and marched to the governor's house there and replaced the Russian American flag with the US flag and there was no military conflict with the native people.
- [30:53]
A
Were they glad to see Russia go after all, what had happened?
- [30:56]
B
Well, this is something we didn't talk about during the Russian annexation, but in that area of the world, the panhandle of Alaska, the Russians had forts, you know, these kind of walled in forts. And tensions could be high between the native people there and the Russians. A very different relationship than along the islands. So it was always a bit precarious and. But by the time that the U.S. comes, you know, there, you, you do not see, you know, this kind of fabled Western U.S. western expansion of violence and you know, frontier fights or anything like that. That.
- [31:33]
A
Right.
- [31:33]
B
That is not something that happens in Alaska.
- [31:35]
A
Well, again, so far away, limited manpower to spare, you know, in this particular time and place. And, and that's going to be the story for the rest of time, really. I mean that's, I mean, not so much now in terms of, you know, being able to get up there and all that, but it's still a far away land for Americans. The people of, of the native people of Alaska are not deemed as citizens by either Russia or America. Right. They're left in this legal limbo at the time. How does that, how long does. Well, I guess it lasts for almost a century, doesn't it?
- [32:08]
B
Well, from 1867 forward, you see native people using ingenuity to maintain their presence in the culture and politics of this developing political territory. And one example I would really like to turn your audience to is in 1890, an Athabaskan man whose English name was Jim or John Minook, but he's also known as Ivan Pavlov Jr. He made a plea for citizenship so he could continue working as a gold miner. So this is in the interior there the law was that indigenous people were not allowed to be miners, but they were allowed to provide kind of supplementary businesses, you know, trading post, that sort of thing. So he sued saying that his, his father, he was born five years after this purchase, but he was saying that, you know, he, his, he challenged this kind of native status so he can continue to work the mines. And, and so if we, you know, we can look at that for its face value, right, that somehow he was saying he was not a native person or we can look at that in a way that, a very entrepreneurial way of looking at the law, right? Saying, well, my father, I come from a Russian line, so I should be allowed to do this business. And so the court ruled in his Favor. So the court ruled in his favor. And as we see going forward, engaging with U.S. law and with U.S. domestic life, native people organize and there's a refusal to let go of Alaska being theirs in that way. Until today, you know, contemporarily, Native people engage with the politics and the domestic cultural life of the territory and maintain their, their status. And as we can go forward, we can continue to talk about this.
- [34:09]
A
Sure. Because the geography is a great advantage in that regard, I'm sure. And for those decades after the purchase, right up until what we will discuss next three decades worth, there's very little attention paid by the US To Alaska. It doesn't pay off because there's just not the, I guess, the infrastructure to take advantage of or the need necessarily to take advantage of these resources. So it's just up there. Then everything changes. The discovery of gold, of course, in the Yukon Territory, the klondike Gold Rush, 1896. And boy, suddenly there is a surge of population as white settlers and Jack London and all the rest start flocking into Alaska.
- [34:54]
B
Oh, there are, there are accounts of villages which may have had 600, 700 people in them and in a year and a half have thousands of people coming in. So this influx of people, of course, start taking over the land, start, you know, bringing in aspects of culture that, you know, are hierarchical to people who are, who are there.
- [35:15]
A
There is a conspiracy story to be told throughout American history. How much did we know the gold was there before we got the place? You just look at these different frontier lands, you know, and every one of them just conveniently finds the gold just after we inquired it. It's amazing. And yet maybe not as a result of this tremendous shift in demographics. There is all the rest of what goes on. A system of racial segregation develops in Alaska. The ugly stuff starts similar to rules and laws of what was Jim Crow on the continent, basically. And we're talking now, we're getting into the 20th century here. Indigenous people are treated as second class citizens. Movements develop over the decades to fight for the interest of many Native tribes. This is. Now we're moving into your, into the struggle that your people are very aware of. Right. I mean, this is, this is pretty new.
- [36:05]
B
Oh, for sure. One thing I want to kind of emphasize here is that in the beginning of the 20th century you have the rise of what's called the Alaska Native brotherhood and sisterhood. And these are two groups in the Southeast who are advocates for Native people in political life and cultural life in this developing territory. And 1915, they managed to advocate for statutory citizenship of Native people. So Tlingit man, this makes me wince, of course, but a Tlingit man, if he could have five white men sign off on his civilized demeanor, you know, quote unquote. Quote unquote. Of course, I mean, looking back, we know this makes us really uncomfortable, right. And that these five white men would attest to the applicant's extinguishment of his tribal ties and tribal customs. This applicant would be allowed to become a citizen. And as you know, being familiar with US History, this is almost a decade before the American Indian Citizenship Act.
- [37:09]
A
Well, yeah, it's so much about assimilation, isn't it? That that was the theory of everything back then was, you know, eventually we all just need to be, you know, happy, happy Americans together, and you're going to be doing just what we want under our flag. Forget your own identity.
- [37:23]
B
And looking at it that way, you know, is one thing, but also thinking about this kind of ingenuity of remaining relevant in this developing political situation, because Native people at this time are the majority of people in Alaska. And I mean, that goes on well into the 20th century.
- [37:39]
A
Well, the same happened, and the same happened in the west as that happened. You have tremendous demographic changes, and I don't have the numbers here, but it must be extraordinarily different up there in Alaska at that period.
- [37:50]
B
In the 1920s, the white population in the southeast of Alaska had petitioned to become a separate territory from the rest of Alaska because it was that they could limit their dominance, right, Their population dominance to that southeast area, not have to worry about their constituency of Native people that outnumbered them when he took the whole territory into account. But so one thing I want to note here, coming out of that Alaska Native brotherhood and sisterhood come a whole series of activists. And one of them is a man named William Paul. He was a lawyer who had been educated in Washington. He was a Tlingit person, and he became the first indigenous person who was in the territorial legislature. So 1927, this is, I mean, really remarkable when you think about it. Right? And one of the first things he did was promote and endorse what we know now as the Alaska State flag, designed by a Unangan teenager at a boarding school so that the Big Dipper with the North Star to us is known as the Great Bear. So that Dipper is known as the Great Bear. And, you know, being from Kodiak, when you think of the Great Bear, you know, that's very significant. Sure.
- [39:06]
A
Kodiak bears, right?
- [39:07]
B
Yeah. Kodiak Bears. And so when this child, his name was Benny Benson, when he designed it, he also wrote a little narrative saying the North Star is for the future of the state. So this is 1927. This is decades before this. And, you know, I think in my work, this is what's really important, is just how Native people stayed relevant and stayed guiding and shaping what we're calling Alaska today. So by the 1920s, you have indigenous people involved in the politics. You have a Native child who just designed the state flag with his pontification that Alaska is going to become a state in the Union. And then Alaska Native people, I think up to 5,000 Alaska Native people took part in protecting the homeland in the North Pacific theater of war.
- [39:57]
A
The time. All of this is happening in the 20th century, this resistance towards assimilation, or at least representation as themselves as a legitimate force in government, had really formed itself into a civil rights movement, essentially. And that became enacted into law through the Indian Citizenship act of 1924, which gave all Native Americans within U.S. citizenship. That included Alaska. Right. The Alaska Equal Rights act happens after World War II, 1945, and it becomes a ban on racial segregation. System of Alaska between night natives and white settlers. Much of what was happening across the country under Truman and all that takes hold in Alaska as well. Statehood comes along in 1959, and I want to talk about this. Alaska officially joins the United States in 1959, becoming the 49th state in the Union. How similar to Hawaii's annexation in that same period. I mean, it's no coincidence that they're basically at the exact same time, right?
- [40:55]
B
1959, they had left Hawaii for the 50. Right. And so Alaska was to be the 49th. And in these initial meetings, Territorial Governor Ernest Greening, he has a famous speech, let's end colonialism in Alaska, something like that. And the idea was that if Alaska could become a state, then it would have more control over its economy and culture and trade routes, et cetera. So that that was the kind of a push there. And in these meetings, in these kind of statehood meetings, again, the Alaska Native brotherhood and sisterhood remained tenacious. Frank Peretrovich, who was related to the activists who pushed through the Anti Discrimination act, he was there also making an argument for statehood, for that kind of regional power to exist.
- [41:47]
A
So in general, would you say it was embraced by indigenous peoples to become a state or not?
- [41:52]
B
I think because of its vastness. I mean, that is a real argument. My. My father. My father, for instance, he has a tattoo of Kodiak Archipelago on his arm with the state flag. Because he grew up next to the designer Benny Benson, and he would say Kodiak should have been its own state.
- [42:11]
A
Oh, my God. I mean, it seems extraordinary. I mean, when you mentioned long ago in this conversation that Alaska is the size of Mexico, that's actually the first time I've ever heard that parallel. But it gives you perspective. And the fact is Alaska could so easily be its own nation and, and deservedly so, I would suggest, because there's so many different realms, there's so many different states within that nation in like the Aleutian Islands, all the different places.
- [42:39]
B
There is an Inupiac activist who in the 60s was one of the first people to ask this question, who owns the land? You know, because the. During statehood, states require land, right? States have to own land. So that hadn't been hashed out. And so this Inupiaq young college student who had just returned from George Washington University and was finishing a master's degree in finance at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he wrote an essay, you know, who basically, who owns this place? You know, we never signed any treaties with anybody. But he later on in his life made a case. He said, you know, it was really too bad that we couldn't control, you know, become our own nation and control our borders. I mean, it was just a little aside in some of his writings. But, I mean, there is that. There was definitely that sentiment for sure,
- [43:29]
A
and I imagine continues on just like it does in Hawaii. The landmark law that I guess addresses what you're talking about came along in 1971. It's, it's really the last step in this conversation. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement act resolves the long standing land claims of native Alaskans. It is interestingly, the largest land settlement in American history. What are they settling? Who owns the land? So how does it play out for indigenous peoples after statehood?
- [43:56]
B
So after statehood, native people began coming together. And these are groups of people, you know, members of communities who maybe didn't think they had anything in common previous to this. Right. However, the people who were involved in, the activists who were involved in this, you know, taking out second mortgages, flying back and forth between Washington D.C. and their homes, you know, they were very invested in maintaining Alaska as a whole. You mentioned the Cold War. The Cold War has a lot to do with this, right? People are products of their time in so many ways. And this idea that Alaska was this kind of, you know, the border of the free world, right, to Russia, you know. And so I think that the Alaska NATO Claim Settlement act, as we understand it kind of comes out of that understanding of the Cold War fears because unlike this kind of aboriginal or indigenous occupancy that we see, tribal nations like the various Lakota nations or the nations that inhabit around Utah. Right. We don't see that with the Alaska Native Claim Settlement Act. We see the establishment of 13 regional corporations and hundreds of village for profit corporations. For instance, I am an original shareholder in the Koniag Regional Corporation and there are just short of 5,000 shareholders and we have thousands of descendants.
- [45:22]
A
So you communally hold land together. Would we call that a reservation the way we do in the continent?
- [45:27]
B
Don, that is a fantastic question. If we think these lands that cognac holds, for instance, they are held by the corporation. So the corporation has very distinct aspects to it that make it different than a non native corporation. And one of those things is that the land is held untaxed unless developed.
- [45:49]
A
I see. Interesting.
- [45:50]
B
However, the land must be maintained. So that's an aspect to it. But these are for profit corporations, so they pay dividends to their shareholders, and
- [46:00]
A
it certainly gives a lot more leverage in the governance of this great land. Right.
- [46:05]
B
And they're not based on tribal affiliation. So where, say I am a Lutic or Sukpiak. My aunt, who is a Lutik. Supiak. She was enrolled in a different corporation on the mainland. So it's all based on where you were at the time.
- [46:18]
A
Yeah. And how interesting if that had been the case, you know, 100 years before when they were figuring out what to do with the lands here, wouldn't have worked out quite the way it did. I mean, we're talking about land use and land preservation, but we haven't mentioned the national parks and the general environmentalism of this very delicate place. I mean, there have been enormous tragedies that have happened there. Exxon Valdez comes to mind.
- [46:40]
B
Oh, yes. When I was in high school that spring in 1989, the Alaska Exxon Valdez, of course, crashed into a reef. And that brought on such devastation that, say, where I'm from in Kodiak, up to 85% of the. The population made a living off of the ocean, you know, off the sea. And to this day, that has never risen back. And my father, who had gone to a technical school and learned to be a machinist, his vocation just disappeared. And so the effect on the environment and the people by that oil spill is incalculable. Is incalculable. I don't think I would be here. I wouldn't be here speaking to you If I, you know, for good or bad, right, for seeking out other ways to make a living and. And find other interests. But coming out of this, in the early 90s, the federal government recognized, you know, the hardships that were brought on by this. In a memo, an undersecretary of the state of the federal government pronounced all native villages as federally recognized tribes. So to this day, we have the village corporations. Mine is called Lesnoy, my regional corporation, which is called Koniag. And then I also belong to my tribe, which is called Danganuk, but it's spelled with a T, so. But that's the Woody. In English, you call it the Woody Island Tribe. It's a small island about a mile from the town of Kodiak.
- [48:07]
A
That oil spill was 1989. You know, just to put it in perspective, that's only 30 years after statehood. I mean, that's how new Alaska really is in terms of its place, you know, official place in the United States of America. And no wonder, you know, only a few generations have been dealing with the upshot of all of this. Now, of course, oil and all the rest of this is part of that conversation. It's still a changeable land and an amazing one that one day I will visit. I have not yet to get there.
- [48:37]
B
We do have the Brown Bear Center. You know, you can come to Kodiak. At the south end of the main island there is what we call the Brown Bear Center. So you can rent a cabin and be around Kodiak bears frolicking.
- [48:51]
A
How cool. You know, there's a. There's actually a very, I think a big salmon fishing camp that I keep seeing online webs. I'm going to plug them. They're getting plugged. But it's a wildman camp, and I've always thought, oh, that's a perfect way in. I'm going to go. I'm going to stay at the Wildman Salmon Camp.
- [49:07]
B
I love that they give you a discount there.
- [49:09]
A
Yeah, I know, right? At least a free cup of coffee. Thomas Swenson is a professor of ethnic gender and Disability Studies at the University of Utah, author of Where Next Columbus? A Native Punk Mixtape, and his newest book, coming out imminently. The Great Land and Indigenous History of Alaska, is released in October of 2026 this fall. Is there a website to look for? Thomas, as far as following your work
- [49:33]
B
goes, listeners can look at the University of Washington Press and see the catalog for the Great Land in Indigenous History of Alaska. You know, keep up on that and. And with the kind of catalog description that they can see that what I use are indigenous sources and indigenous timelines, lines to build this kind of more holistic narrative of Alaska history framed around Native people. And University of Oklahoma Press New Directions in Native American Studies for where Next Columbus, a Native Punk mixtape, which was released last month through that press. And so if you like punk music and Native American studies, it's a great book to check out.
- [50:11]
A
Thank you very much.
- [50:12]
B
Thank you.
- [50:15]
A
Thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.
- [50:56]
B
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- [51:16]
A
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [51:18]
B
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