Aleut and Alutiiq Peoples: History, Culture, and Origins

Origins and Migration Theories

The Aleutian Islands run from the Peninsula of Kamchatka in the Asiatic portion of Russia to Alaska. All the islands are bare and mountainous, and the coasts are rocky and surrounded by crashing waves and enormous breakers (Larkin, unpaged). Some believe the Aleutians offer the worst weather in the world: weather fronts originating in the South Pacific create storms hundreds of miles long and many weeks in duration (Sipes, unpaged), picking up the frigid moisture of the waters and air as they move northward. It would seem that anyone wishing to live there would need some overwhelming reasons to do so. The Russians and Scandinavians who first "discovered" the area for non-natives — and later the Americans — did have good reasons to be there. As for the Aleuts and Alutiiq, an abundance of fish and sea mammals may have been the attraction if, as some theories surmise, they arrived across a land bridge from what we now call Siberia.

Several researchers have advanced the theory that the peopling of the New World involved a northeasterly-trending Siberian coastal drift along the continental shelf coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kamchatka Peninsula, and along the southern coast of the Bering land bridge. Those same researchers — Laughlin, Turner, and Vasilievsky — think that because of the glaciation still present in the Aleutian chain, settlement happened via interior migration. In other words, those who migrated into the interior later trekked, clambered, or boated amidst the pack ice to populate, eventually, the archipelagos, including the Aleutians. This second migratory wave of Siberian peoples also settled the British Columbia coast and later drifted further south to southern California. The same researchers note that the dental morphology of prehistoric California Indians is much like that of all other Indians of North and South America, and very unlike that of the Aleuts and Alutiiq — a finding that stands in opposition to earlier theories (Turner, 391+).

Turner also mentions stories of non-terrestrial migration, but refutes that idea by stating: "There are no known individuals or groups (or even stories of anyone) who boated in either direction between Siberia and Alaska along today's southern edge of the Bering Sea pack ice or the Davis Strait pack ice between Greenland and Canada" (291+). On the other hand, he also mentions those who have advocated various trans-Pacific drift theories, citing the work of Meggers in 1965 regarding Jomon boatmen who may have introduced pottery from Japan to Ecuador (Turner, 291+).

By whatever route the Aleut and Alutiiq arrived, they are thought to have been present for at least 11,000 to 14,000 years, according to artifacts found in archaeological excavations. Linguistic analyses, however, have set the date at between 12,000 and 35,000 years ago. Nuclear mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies suggest an arrival time of about 30,000 years ago, and also indicate that migration is far more complex than previously thought — multiple migrations and expansions of ancient peoples contributed to genetic diversity in all Siberian and Amerindian peoples, including the Aleut and Alutiiq. Research on dental variation suggests an arrival time of between 18,000 and 20,000 years ago (Schurr, 246). Obviously there is wide latitude in the timing, but dental morphology does at least help identify which broader group the Aleut and Alutiiq may belong to.

The mtDNA evidence reveals that among the original migrations to the Americas, the majority of modern Native American haplotypes belong to just four mtDNA lineages, designated A, B, C, and D. A comparison of Native Americans, Siberians, and Asians shows that the same mtDNA lineages across all groups share the same types of mutations. The explanation most often offered is that the mutations arose in Asia in the founding lineages and were carried to the New World by ancestral Native Americans. These mutations are, moreover, of considerable age, suggesting that the links between Siberian and Native American peoples are quite ancient. It appears that the ancient Beringian populations — those in the vicinity of the Bering Strait — gave rise to the Chukchi, the Eskimo-Aleuts, and the Na-Dene Indians approximately 7,000 to 13,000 years ago (Schurr, 246).

Language and Early Settlement

Whatever the process was all those millennia ago, it is clear that there were correspondences between the Aleut and Alutiiq and peoples from Siberia long before modern Russians arrived in the archipelago. The group known today as the Aleut people are found mainly from the tip of the Alaska Peninsula all along the arc of the Aleutian Islands, which extend for about 1,500 miles. The Alutiiq, however, are more closely associated with the Kodiak Island area and its archipelago — known as the Kodiak area — lying about 400 miles east of the Aleutians. They are also found on the mainland coasts from Chugach Bay eastward. Their culture is Pacific Rim with a Russian infusion. Their language is classified as Eskimoan because it is more closely related to Yup'ik and Inupiaq (Inuit) than to Aleut. Anthropologists sometimes also refer to the Kodiak area Alutiiqs as Koniaq, a term derived from 18th-century Russian sources that had assimilated the word Kanaa'in for the Kodiak area people (Mousalimas, 1).

The language itself is very likely extinct — at least as it was spoken through the centuries before the arrival of modern Russians, Scandinavians, and Americans. There were once 20 native Eskimo and Indian languages in Alaska. The Eyak language, once found on Alaska's south coast, died when the second of its two living speakers passed away in the early 1990s. There was also a linguistic divide between Na-Dene language speakers (Tlingit, Dena'ina, and Eyak) and Aleut-Eskimo speakers (including Unangan and Alutiiq) (Crowell, unpaged). Most of these languages are moribund, or possibly already gone, having been classified as endangered as far back as 1993. The only two surviving languages at that time were Siberian Yup'ik, with approximately 1,000 speakers, and Central Yup'ik, with approximately 10,000 speakers (Diamond, unpaged). These languages, regarded as the Aleut-Eskimo type, may have been known to the ancient Aleut and Alutiiq peoples.

While extinct or nearly extinct languages are difficult to reconstruct, it is somewhat easier to learn how these peoples lived. The first wave of migrants is assumed to have been primarily foragers. Later, by about 3,500 BC, permanent winter villages of semi-subterranean or plank housing were established. At that time, there was significant population growth, increased village and household size, and the emergence of social ranking. There was also widespread warfare and complex artistic, mortuary, and ceremonial traditions (Crowell, unpaged).

Maritime Culture and Social Organization

Relatively little research aimed specifically at the Aleut or Alutiiq peoples has been conducted, except as part of major projects examining the area from the eastern Aleutian Islands to the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. However, because these populations share common descent from founding Paleoarctic populations and demonstrate a high level of continued interaction over time, it is reasonable to infer information about Aleut and Alutiiq lifestyles from shared characteristics. The area surrounding the Gulf of Alaska offers one of the longest archaeological records of maritime adaptation in the Americas, possibly because of its abundant marine mammals, fish, birds, and other resources capable of supporting human life even in an inhospitable climate (Crowell, unpaged).

Crowell notes that geographic unity is a primary reason to consider the Aleut (Unangan) and Alutiiq (Pacific Eskimo) cultures alongside those of the other peoples that ring the Gulf — the subarctic Athapaskan Indian and the Northwest Coast Indian — despite differences in language. As a basis for considering them together, Crowell writes:

At the time of Russian and European contact in the late eighteenth century, all of the Gulf of Alaska peoples had maritime-focused subsistence economies, with universal reliance on salmon and sea mammals. Other fish species (e.g., halibut, herring, cod, rockfish, eulachon), intertidal invertebrates, birds, plant foods (berries, starchy roots, seaweed, spruce cambium), and land animals (caribou, elk, mountain goats, grizzly bear, black bear) were variously important in the diet, depending on location. (Crowell, unpaged)

This meant that all these peoples required watercraft, and in fact they all developed highly sophisticated and specialized kayaks, open skin boats, and wooden canoes. For hunting and fishing, they also developed specialized tools. Winter houses were built of driftwood timbers or earth. Furthermore, "Functional and stylistic similarities in clothing, jewelry, containers, weapons, and other items of material culture reflected high levels of regional interaction and cultural exchange, sustained by local and long-distance trading, raiding, slave-taking, and intermarriage" (Crowell, unpaged).

In addition to similarities in housing and provisioning, the Aleuts and Alutiiq also maintained similar sociopolitical organizations. Total community sizes could exceed 1,000 people. Within those communities, resource ownership and exploitation were managed by co-residential corporate kin groups of 15 to 40 people. Social status was based on a combination of wealth and birth, with divisions into at least free and slave classes, sometimes with sub-rankings within the free class — perhaps including a type of noble or "honorable" who owned titles and resources, while commoners, though free, did not. The ruling class did not, however, rule by divine right. Instead:

Inherited chiefly or elite status had to be validated by performance — leadership of raids to acquire slaves and booty, management of trade and political alliances, and success in organizing food and wealth production by the corporate kin group. Successful "rich men" organized feasts (potlatches) and ceremonies which served to redistribute goods and enhance personal and group prestige... household size was thereby linked to potential political influence. (Crowell, unpaged)

There were also occupational and ritual classes, which included artists, shamans, whalers, and the Alutiiq kas'at, or "wise men." Communities supported these specialists, particularly the shamans (Crowell, unpaged).

While political arrangements did not extend beyond the community, within each community political structure was organized on the basis of foraging systems. These systems were associated with resource seasonality, requiring strategic division of the harvest effort:

As well as systematic accumulation of food stores to buffer periods of low productivity. This pattern is exemplified by the Alutiiq seasonal round for Kodiak Island ca. A.D. 1790–1805. During the peak harvest months of summer and fall, kin-based households needed to simultaneously exploit a variety of spatially separated resource locales (e.g., seal haulouts, bird rookeries, salmon streams).

While these tasks were carried out from communally organized camps, in winter the population reassembled in the main villages, with kin groups living in large, permanent winter houses. Wealthy households held feasts both to assist those with less and to enhance their own prestige (Crowell, unpaged).