The Cradle of the Winds: Aleut Survival in Russian America

In a house dug half into the earth against the wind, a woman feeds a wick of twisted moss into a stone lamp of sea-mammal oil. Her name is not recorded; almost none of their names are. On most of the Aleutian chain there are no trees and nothing large to hunt on land, but the sea is generous, and for thousands of years it fed the Unangan, the people the Russians would call Aleut: urchins and mussels from the kelp beds, halibut as long as a man, and, from skin boats in fog that could swallow the next island whole, seals, sea lions, sea otters and whales.

In 1741 Vitus Bering's St. Peter was wrecked on the voyage home from America, and its survivors reached Kamchatka with sea otter pelts. The promyshlenniki, Russian fur hunters, followed island by island, holding hostages to force Unangan men to hunt for them, and when the Unangan rose against them in the 1760s, Russian reprisals destroyed whole villages. Unalaska became a colonial port and the Russian-American Company rose to its peak. After Russia sold Alaska in 1867, the Americans came for the fur seals of the Pribilofs. The history carries on to the Unangan towns of today.

The fur companies kept careful count of every pelt. The name of the woman at the lamp went into no ledger at all.