The importance of celebrating our culture

I congratulate Danielle Riha on being named one of the nation’s top educators and commend her recent submission to the ADN.

Your culture is “the story into which you were born.” What Ms. Riha is advocating is for Alaskans to know our story, the story of this place, whether your ancestors were here for thousands of years or you just got here yourself. Cultural sensitivity is not just feeling good about who you are. It’s about feeling a certain pride in where you are.

And we do not do a very good job as we teach the story of Alaska today. Consider that Alaska Natives were the majority of the population until the 20th century. Logically, then, our story must be about what Alaska Native people were doing in the 1700s and 1800s. But that is not how we tell our story. We depict Alaska’s indigenous people as the passive observers or the innocent victims in someone else’s story, when in fact that is not at all what was happening.

Our written history begins with Siberian fur traders paddling across the Bering Sea and intermarrying with local Unangan women, producing several generations of bilingual (Russia-Aleut) offspring. The "Russians" who came were, in fact, mostly Siberian Native people who baptized each other's children and built chapels in all the villages.

In fact, ethnic Russians were forbidden to settle permanently in Alaska, since the Tsarist government was much more interested in filling Siberia than populating Alaska. If Alaska was going to develop, the Alaska Native people would need to be trained to run their own schools, churches, hospitals, build their own trading posts, sail their own ships, map their own coastlines.

When the first official missionaries came, they encountered Alexander Baranov’s oppressive and illegal abuse of the Kodiak Alutiiq people and they became whistleblowers, writing protest letters back to Russia, developing the first alphabets, opening the first schools for Alaska Native people. Sophie Vlasoff was the first Alaska Native school teacher — in 1804!

In the next decades, Alaska Natives were trained as teachers, navigators, musicians, artists, cartographers, clergy and accountants. By the time Alaska was transferred to the U.S. in 1867, Kodiak was 90% Native; Sitka, the capital, was 60% Native. There were never more than 800 Russian citizens in the entire territory — and most of them were Siberian Natives! Ioan/Innocent Veniaminov developed writing systems for Unangan Aleut (1824) and Tlingit (1834). His protegé, Aleut Jacob Netsvetov translated even more texts and opened the first Yup’ik school (1848).

After the transfer, Alaska Native people appealed in letters and petitions as well as court cases for the civil rights that they were guaranteed in the 1867 treaty. Tlingit activist Elizabeth Peratrovich led the civil rights movement in Alaska 20 years before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did so in the Lower 48.

But this, our real story, is not well known and certainly not taught in our Alaska history courses today. The contributions of Alaska Natives are often ignored, with one happy exception: The new State Library, Archives and Museum building in Juneau is named the Father Andrew P. Kashevarov Building, for an Orthodox Aleut priest who could read, write and speak four languages: English, Russian, Alutiiq and Tlingit. But where is he mentioned in our story?

The essential point is that this is not just Alaska Native history, but also the history of Alaska, the story all Alaskans should know and embrace as ours, our culture. It has been forgotten or ignored for too long. Thank you, Danielle Riha, for challenging us to embrace our story!

Rev. Michael J. Oleksa, Th. D., teaches Alaska Studies and cross-cultural communication for the Alaska Staff Development Network, as an adjunct professor at Alaska Pacific University, and has taught on all three campuses of the University of Alaska system during the past 38 years.

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