Aleut

Related Topics:
Aleutians_East :: Aleutians_West :: Aleuts :: Aleutian_Islands

The Aleuts (self-denomination: Unangax, Unangan or Unanga) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, U.S.A. and Chukotka, Russia.

Location

The homeland of the Aleuts includes the Aleutian Islands, the Pribilof Islands, the Shumagin Islands, and the far western part of the Alaska Peninsula. They were also deported from the Aleutian Islands to the Komandorski Islands (now part of Kamchatka Oblast) by a Russian-American company during the 19th century.

For specific tribal village names, see List of Native Alaskan Tribal Entities.

History

After the arrival of missionaries in the late 18th century, many Aleuts became Christians by joining the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the earliest Christian martyrs in North America was Saint Peter the Aleut.

Russians there were 25,000 Aleuts on the archipelago, but that the barbarities of the traders and foreign diseases eventually reduced the population to one-tenth of this number. Further declines led to a 1910 Census count of 1491 Aleuts.

In 1942 Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska Islands in the western Aleutians, and later transported captive Attu Islanders to Hokkaido, where they were held as POWs. Hundreds more Aleuts from the western chain and the Pribilofs were evacuated by the United States government during World War II and placed in internment camps in southeast Alaska, where many died. The Aleut Restitution Act of 1988 was an attempt by Congress to compensate the survivors.

The Aleutian Islands was a significant component of the operations of the Asian theater.

Culture and technology

Aleuts constructed barabaras, partially underground houses that functioned well, as Lillie McGarvey, a 20th-century Aleut leader, wrote “keeping occupants dry from the frequent rains, warm at all times, and snugly sheltered from the high winds peculiar to the area”.

Hunting, weapon-making, boat building, and weaving are some of the traditional arts of the Aleuts. 19th-century craftsmen were famed for their ornate wooden hunting hats, which feature elaborate and colorful designs and may be trimmed with sea lion whiskers, feathers, and ivory. Aleut seamstresses created finely stitched waterproof parkas from seal gut, and some women still master the skill of weaving fine baskets from rye and beach grass.

Aleut basketry is some of the finest in the world, the continuum of a craft begun in prehistoric times and carried through to the present. Early Aleut women created baskets and woven mats of exceptional technical quality using only an elongated and sharpened thumbnail as tool. Today Aleut weavers continue to produce woven pieces of a remarkable cloth-like texture, works of modern art with roots in ancient tradition. The Aleut word for grass basket is qiigam aygaaxsii.

Language

The Aleut language is in the family called Eskimo-Aleut languages. It is related to the Inuit and Yupik languages spoken by the Eskimo. It has no known wider affiliation, but supporters of the Nostratic hypothesis sometimes include it as Nostratic.

Aleuts in literature

Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash featured Aleut warrior Raven, a huge, imposing Aleut of few words and great physical strength, as well as cunning. Raven has few goals besides fulfilling a lifelong ambition to "nuke America". Raven sees this as payback for his father being blinded whilst attempting an escape from a Japanese prison camp, by the nuclear blast from the destruction of Nagasaki by the U.S., and then being impinged upon again by a second nuclear blast, this time from testing at Kamchatka. "You bastards nuked my father twice," is his explanation. Raven is a complex character, and many highly-developed Aleut talents of his (whale-hunting and kayak-making, particularly) are showcased and mythologised throughout much of the text. Raven, it must also be said, is commonly seen as being the epitome of a "bad-ass motherfucker", as apart from his racial and physical traits he rides a motorcycle that is sidecar-linked to what is eventually revealed to be an ex-submarine-class hydrogen bomb.

External links

Commander Islands, Kamchatka, Russia (in Russian) - About Commander Islands In Russian
Aleut (In Russian)

The AMIQ Institute - a research project documenting the Pribilof Islands and their inhabitants

Alaska Native tribes