Lingít ḵa Waashdan Ḵwáan, The Tlingit and the Americans: Interactions and Transformations, 1856-1896 (original) (raw)
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Jo hn C lo ud (t op ), La ur en L ie de l ( m ap ) In july 1869, george davidson of the US Coast Survey and a small party of men climbed into several large cedar boats on the shore of Sitka, Alaska. The fleet was commanded by the celebrated Tlingit clan leader Kohklux; they were bound for his village of Klukwan, the capital of the Tlingit Indians of the Chilkat River valley at the head of the Lynn Canal. The travelers paddled as rapidly as possible, for they had a great cosmic appointment: on August 8, a total eclipse of the sun would sweep across the mountains and glaciers of the Chilkat valley. Davidson was to observe that eclipse, whatever it took to get there. As it happened, what it took was the friendship that developed between Davidson and Kohklux and his two wives, who were sisters from the Stikine River Tlingits. After the eclipse, these four people made a great exchange between themselves, to honor their experience. It came to pass that, 141 years later, a surrogate from t...
The Antiquity of Tlingit Settlement on Admiralty Island, Southeast Alaska
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A series of 29 radiocarbon dates from 11 sites on Admiralty Island span the last 3,200 calendar years. Although our research corroborates many of the results of de Laguna's (1960) earlier work in the area, we find the Tlingit settlement pattern to be at least 1,600 years old, significantly older than previously believed. Dating of a wooden fish weir demonstrates that mass harvesting of salmon has an antiquity of at least 3,000 years.
The Pacific Northwest tribal culture area embraced the region from the southwest coast and islands of Alaska, through the Canadian province of British Columbia, to include the coastal region of the present-day states of Washington and Oregon. It was the home of several different tribes of different language families, including from north to south the Tlingit-speakers of the coast and islands of the Alaska panhandle, whose language was in the Athapascan language family (also spoken by the interior tribes of the Yukon and McKenzie drainage systems). To the south of them were the Tsimshian-speakers; the Kwakiutl on the coast and waterways between Vancouver Island and British Columbia; and the Bella Coola and Coast Salish, both of whom spoke languages in the Salishan family. The Haida on an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia spoke an isolate language not related to a linguistic family. The farthest south of the Pacific Northwest tribes were the Chinooks of present-day states of Washington and Oregon. Their language, a version of which became a trade jargon, also was also an isolate. Most of these tribes shared similar cultural traits, such as rectangular plank houses, carved redwood canoes for river and sea fishing, heraldric crests, carved totem poles (except for the Chinook), and the potlatch ceremony in which large amounts of artifacts were either destroyed of given away. Some of them also held captured enemies as slaves. The British and America fur trade along the Pacific Coast was initially around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America to the Hawaiian Islands and then to the Northwest Coast to trade for sea otter hides that were then taken to Canton, China, to sell for tea, silk, and other luxuries. The voyages took from two to three years. A fur trade in sea-otter pelts with China resulted from the British captain James Cook’s voyage to the Northwest Coast in 1778. The Northwest Fur Company was chartered in Montreal, Canada, in 1783-84. A competing company named the Hudson’s Bay Company had chartered by King Charles II of England in 1680. The Russians established a trading past in Alaska at Sitka in 1799. In the early nineteenth century the sea otter population began to decrease. After the merger with the Northwest Fur Company, British the Hudson’s Bay Company began establishing permanent posts along the coast, including Forts Lanley, Rupert, McLoughlin, Nass (replaced by Fort Simpson). In 1809 a German immigrant to the United States named John Jacob Astor received a charter from the state of New York to establish the American Fur Company. In 1810 Astor negotiated a merger of his American Fur Company with the British Northwest Company under the name The Pacific Fur Company. In October 1818, Britain and the United States agreed to a treaty for joint occupation of the region trade for ten years. The treaty was extended for another ten years in 1828. In the 1824 the British Hudson’s Bay Company, that had monopoly on the fur trade, built Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. President James Polk, who ran for office in 1844 on the motto “54-40 or Fight,” tried to pressure Britain to make the 54 degrees, 50 minutes parallel the border with Canada. But he settled for the 49th parallel under the Treaty of Oregon in 1846. The treaty allowed the Hudson’s Bay Company to continue to occupy Fort Vancouver, which was now within the Oregon Territory. After the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, it was administered by the War Department. During the Alaska gold rush in 1874, miners went into the mountains via the Stikine River rather than the more dangerous Skeena or Nass River routes. The Stikine Indians help freight supplies up the Stikine River. Sir James Douglas, the governor of the British Colony of Lower Vancouver Island that tried to extinguish Indian titles and placed them on small reservations, but he failed to obtain the necessary funds. After the merger of the Island and Mainland Colonies to form the Crown Colony of British Columbia, Douglas ordered the establishment of large “reserves” (reservations) in the Fraser Valley. With the confederation of the Crown Colony of British Columbia with the Dominion of Canada in 1871, the Canadian Indian law went into effect. Under it the Indians were considered Canadian nationals, but not Canadian citizens, but the Indian title to the land was not extinguished. In 1884, the Canadian government under Sir John Macdonald passed a law prohibiting the potlatch ceremony. Franz Boas, the German-Jewish anthropologist, who was the curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City between 1895 and 1905, took an interest in the Kwakiutl potlatch on Vancouver Island and around Queen Charlotte Sound in British Columbia. He worked with George Hunt, the son of a Hudson’s Bay Company official and a Tlingit noblewoman, and who was raised in the Kwakiutl community of Fort Rupert. Hunt also worked with the photographer Edward S. Curtis, who came to the Northwest Coast to gather material for his book The North American Indian on which he had been working since 1906. Hunt helped Curtis in 1912 in filming what became In the Land of the Head-Hunters (later re-released as In the Land of the War Canoes in 1914). The film was criticized for staging rituals that were no longer being practiced by the Kwakiutl. In 1951 the Canadian Indian Act was revised to delete the section dealing with the potlatch, but it not repealing it. In 1952 the first “legal” potlatch was held in Coast Salish territory hosted by Chief Mungo Martin, who worked had the British Columbia Provincial Museum carving totem poles and teaching young carvers.
In 1994 I took an initial look at Isaac Stringer’s Western Arctic diary, and based a chapter of my U of Wisconsin, Madison, Ph. D. thesis (a dismal affair) on his 1897-1901 stay at Herschel Island, west of the Mackenzie Delta, where his contacts included the Nunatagmiut, Alaskan Inuit who had come with American whalers to Herschel Island. That stimulated my interest in his visits with the original Inuit of the Eastern Delta—the Kukpugmiut, as whites then called them—and once I returned to medical practice in 1996 my evenings were taken up transcribing his 1892-1901 journals. These included contacts not only with Kukpugmiut and Nunatagmiut, but with Gwich’in, whalers, would-be Klondike miners, HBC traders, and the permanent residents of Fort McPherson, including two Oblate missionaries who opposed Anglican efforts. At a later date I separated the diary portions that related to each of these different groups and built alphabetic citation guides to each person mentioned in Stringer’s diaries and correspondence as well as in letters or publications by others who were present in or knew of the Delta, including the years forward up to 1925, and backward to the 1820s. With each such step, my understanding increased of the 1890-1900 period of intense culture contact, but it is only recently, after writing up the Inuit’s first mission contact (at Fort Simpson in 1859) that a sense of overview has settled in. Even so, there are still periods to which I’ve given insufficient attention. The archival material is so vast one can never cover it all. One problem in tackling Delta history is that few of the scholars who have accessed primary materials have made their transcriptions publicly available—which means one has to start nearly from scratch in studying the human dynamics of the region. Yet given the many sources in anglophone and francophone depositories, it is hard to see how releasing preparatory transcripts can harm a career or let others take advantage. By making transcriptions publicly available it means time need not be lost by students and scholars just entering the field, or by those who wish to see their concepts applied to another era of arctic culture-contact, the history of missions, or the role of women, whalers, Gwich’in, fortune seekers, the fur trade, biology, and so on. Imperfect as this transcription is, it will help orient readers to Stringer’s contacts at several sites—in this case Fort McPherson and the Central and Eastern Mackenzie Delta. The focus here is on the Kukpugmiut, and includes his eleven visits to the outer Eastern Delta, including three spring journeys south with them (1894, 1895, and 1897) from Tununiak at the southern tip of Richards Island to Fort McPherson. Before long, I will also place on the web the Stringer diaries related to his 1893-1897 visits to, and 1897-1901 year-round stay at Herschel Island, as well as those that depict his journeys through the Delta’s Western Channel and along the Yukon Coast. It is difficult in these to define the original residents of the Yukon Coast (whom Stringer refers to as Kogmollit), of whom there seem to have been surprisingly few. In short, presented here is my early transcription of Stringer’s 1892-1901 summer diary for Fort McPherson, and of all his visits to the Kukpugmiut in the Eastern Delta. Contacts with whites and Gwich’in have not yet been filtered out. During journeys in the Delta those lines adds little bulk, but at McPherson they come to many. The original diaries are in the Stringer family fonds at Anglican Church of Canada General Synod Archives in Toronto. During this transcription I knew none of the names, which Stringer often spelled in several different ways, and surely transcribed some incorrectly. And since I know none of the Inuvialuit’s tongue, I was uncertain about native terms used by Stringer.