Lingít ḵa Waashdan Ḵwáan, The Tlingit and the Americans: Interactions and Transformations, 1856-1896 (original) (raw)
The Tlingit Map of 1869: A Masterwork of Indigenous Cartography
2012
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
American Antiquity, 1989
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.
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.
Makahs, Quileutes, and the Precontact History of the Northwestern Olympic Peninsula, Washington
Journal of Northwest Anthropology, 2019
Variations on the related ideas that: (a) the Makah people arrived on the northwestern Olympic Peninsula of Washington as recently as 1,000 years ago and (b) they displaced Quileute people who had previously held those lands have appeared on a few occasions during the last century. As offered, such claims rely heavily on ethnographic and linguistic arguments. A detailed examination shows that all of these arguments are flawed. The currently available archaeological data is not sufficient to address these ideas in an unequivocal way, but may still offer relevant insights. Doing so, however, requires some ability to recognize these groups in the archaeological record; this possibility is explored using the artifact and faunal assemblages from this region. Preliminary findings suggest that Makahs and/or other Wakashan speakers have been present for at least 3,000 to 4,000 years and that there is no credible evidence for an earlier presence of Quileutes and/or other Chimakuan speakers.
Coastal lakes and lagoons as dynamic sites of exchange among the Tlingit of Alaska
Maritime Studies
Among the maritime Tlingit of the Northwest Coast of North America, little lakes or lagoons are defined by several terms, the most common of which is áak'w. The Tlingit term is applied to both freshwater lakes and salt water lagoons, and is relational (lagoons are small as compared to large freshwater lakes or saltwater bays) and processual (involving seasonal changes, permeability and even long-term transformation vis-à-vis contiguous features, such as rivers, bays, and wetlands) in its portrayal of these dynamic coastal features. Lagoons are also conceptualized, and in some cases even engineered, as rich and liminal ecological edges and sites of exchange. Birds, mammals, fish, amphibians, insects, along with humans, exploit them intensively at particular stages of the seasonal round or life cycle, while at other times they are perceived as relatively dormant, even forbidding, landscapes. This paper examines the complex Tlingit perceptions of and interactions with lagoons and their implications for contemporary coastal management.
Negotiating the Waters: Canoe and Steamship Mobility in the Pacific Northwest
Journal of Transport History, 2014
The transition from canoe to steamship on the remote Skagit and Nooksack Rivers in Washington Territory occurred in a brief period of settlement in the nineteenth century. Diaries and historical accounts from the Pacific Northwest describe settlers' perceptions of mobility derived from communities they had left in their journey west. As they confronted an indigenous mode of travel rooted in place, they adapted and then usurped the canoe, bringing steamships to the Skagit and then Nooksack River. Steamship travel required a complex infrastructure of cleared rivers, supply chains, mechanical knowledge and observational navigation, linking travelers with a larger, regional network. The advent of steamships triggered significant environmental changes to the riverine landscape and the broader region.
Abstract The Yakutat Tlingit Tribe and the National Park Service have collaborated to document Tlingit traditional ecological knowledge about salmon ecology and fisheries management in the Dry Bay/Alsek River Delta. Historically Northwest Coast Peoples including Tlingit have managed fishing and fish populations. Each Tlingit clan or house managed and controlled specific rivers or in larger river’s sections of rivers in southeast Alaska. Traditional beliefs about reincarnation of animal spirits and a kinship with animals contributed to how Tlingit traditionally treated and handled salmon and animals. In recent decades, sockeye salmon have dramatically declined in the Dry Bay/Alsek area. It is hoped that this study, by showing hw the Tlingits historically understood and managed sockeye habitat, population and harvest in the Dry Bay/Alsek area, will aid in developing a restoration plan.