This blog entry features two images of Chirikof Village. One from 2005 and one from 1869. The watercolor is by Vincent Colyer - one of the first 'Indian Affairs' agents to visit Alaska after its purchase from Russia in 1867. Today the original watercolor can be found at the Bienecke Library at Yale University. Vincent Colyer later went on to become a curator at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, but in 1869 he was painting native villages in Alaska. The panoramic photo on top shows what the site of the village looked like when I visited Chirikof Island two years ago.
Chirikof Village was on Chirikof Island - way out in the Gulf of Alaska - 50 miles South of Kodiak Island, and one of the most remote places in Alaska. It took almost three hours to fly there from the City of Kodiak, and while crossing the ocean to get to Chirikof we could not see land in any direction - a most unsettling feeling in a small float plane. It's really hard to believe that people have lived out there for at least 5000 years. Not only lived out there, but made frequent visits back and forth to Kodiak Island. We know this because we found a great many tools made out of rocks only found on the Kodiak Archipelago. Travel would have been by kayak and not floatplane. It must have been an extremely unsettling feeling half way between Chirikof and Kodiak in a kayak!
A long-standing myth is that chirikof was a penal colony when the Russians ran Alaska. As you can see in the watercolor it was actually a pretty prosperous village. This 'myth' used to drive the late Lydia Black, a well-known Russian America scholar, nuts. Her research has demonstrated that it was a prosperous village whose main export product was ground squirrel skins for parkas and NOT a penal colony. She even determined that Henry Elliot (an early US government agent - famous for his reports on the fur seal industry and his sketches) started the rumor. Another myth about Chirikof that used to drive Lydia nuts is that the cows out there are some special hardy 'Russian stock'. As she put it, 'there were no cows out there until the Americans put them there'.
Today the cows are wreaking havoc on the island's ecosystem (and the archaeological sites). The island is so overgrazed that parts of the island are literally blowing away. And the cow population is at its 'Malthusian Limit'. In the Spring of 2005 there were dead and dying cows everywhere. It really is an ecological disaster. The worst of it is that the US Fish and Wildlife Service who owns the island wants to get rid of the cows, but a great many people, including our last Governor, Frank Murkowski, believe the cows are special and should be saved. So nothing has happenned and the island continues to blow away. Check out how green the place was in 1869 in comparison to 2005! Patrick
1 comment:
Fascinating. What a story. I had no idea. It was my privilege to interview Lydia Black a couple of times over my public radio career. She had so many stories, so much information in her head. I worry that we won't be able to keep track of it all. I'm glad you're putting some right here.
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