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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Cama'i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zk010k2 Author Swensen, Thomas Michael Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cama’i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire By Thomas Michael Swensen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies in the Graduate Division Of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Thomas J. Biolsi, Chair Professor Laura E. Perez Professor Keith Feldman Professor Hertha Sweet-wong Fall 2011 Cama’i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire © 2011 by Thomas Michael Swensen Abstract Cama’i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire by Thomas Michael Swensen Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Thomas J. Biolsi, chair The word “cama’i” in the title, pronounced cha-my, is the Alutiiq word for “hello.” Given that in the nineteenth-century Alutiiqs, working in California, passed the word on to Kashaya speaking Pomo whom still presently use the greeting in their language today, I use the term to underscore global geopolitical articulations in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. The first chapter, “Cama’i America,” examines oral narratives by conscripted Alaska Natives and colonized Kashaya Indians at the village of Metini, California during the Fort Ross trading period in the early nineteenth-century. The second chapter, “Citizens/Subjects in the Last Frontier,” analyzes Alaska Native citizenship during the movement that resulted in statehood in 1959. This chapter focuses on the textuality of the Alaska flag, adopted in 1927, and how images and representations of Jon “Benny” Benson, the flag’s Alutiiq designer, and the children of Athabascan Chief Luke, relate to the perceived incorporation of the region’s indigenous people into the nation’s racial culture and gender hierarchy. The third chapter, “Impossible Sovereignty,” reads the indigenously-produced films Our Aleut History: Alaska Natives in Progress (1986) and Aleut Story (2005) as indigenous heritage recovery projects with contrasting goals, covering twentieth-century enslavement, World War II internment, and United States citizenship. Chapter four, “Of Displacement and Domestication,” turns to the play River Woman as Tlingit writer and Alaska politician Diane E. Benson’s dramaturgical response to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The final chapter, “The Ends of Imperialism,” articulates the Bering region as an indigenous cultural center reading the Cold War-era politics of transcontinental Yupik culture through the work of “American” and “Russian” Bering Strait Yupik women writers. i Table of contents Acknowledgements iii Chapter One 1 Cama’i America Chapter Two 17 Citizens/Subjects in the Last Frontier Chapter three 33 Impossible Sovereignty Chapter Four 53 Of Displacement and Domestication Chapter Five 68 The Ends of Imperialism Image Appendix 85 Works Cited 93 End Notes 101 ii Acknowledgements My utmost appreciation goes towards the members of this dissertation’s committee. Dissertation Chair Professor Thomas J. Biolsi has exercised tremendous patience in his supervision of my work. Warm heartfelt thanks I extend to Professor Keith Feldman’s raw generosity and keen intellect. I wish to extend my gratitude toward Professor Sweet Wong for kindly reading numerous drafts of this project over the last few years. This project would not be possible if not for this important, and surely incomplete, list of people and organizations. Gordon Pullar, for all his work on the behalf of myself and all Alaska Natives. Shari M. Huhndorf, Brian Klopotek, the late Phillip Frickey, Saul-Ling Wong, Susan Gunter, Khatharya Um, Kathleen Karlyn, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Nina and Michael Vought, the staff at the Sweet branch of the Salt Lake City Library, Cal’s Native American Studies Librarian Jon Barry, K. Bambi Krause at N.A.T.H.P.O., Matt Basso, Angela Marie Smith, Pat Hilden, José David Saldívar, Floyd O’neil, Jeff Ostler, the late Peggy Pascoe, Jason Chang, Julie Choffel, and Cora, Blake Hauseman, and University of Oregon Ethnic Studies department. Jodi Byrd, Elizabeth Tsukahara, Leanne Howe, Robert Warrior, Matt Gilbert, John Mckinn, Fred Hoxie, Bob Parker Corbett Upton, Mimi Thi Nguyen, J K ēhaulani Kauanui, Woody Island Tribe, Koniag, inc, and Koniag Education Foundation, The National Association of Tribal Preservation Officers, The University of Utah’s American West Center, KANA, Leisnoi, inc., the kind staff at the Utah Museum of Natural History, filmmaker Judy Ann Peterson, Francisca Cázares (really deserves an entire paragraph for continually going above and beyond her job on behalf of all graduate students at UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies), Jeffery McCarthy, Center on Diversity and Community at the University of Oregon, the staff at Westminster College’s HWAC, my graduate school colleagues at UC Berkeley, and my fellow Duck iii Chapter One: Cama’i America Let us start with a workable definition of empire: the use and abuse, and ignoring, of other people for one’s own welfare and convenience. Now in truth, America was born and bred of empire. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life This introductory chapter explores the oral narratives and historical accounts of North American indigenous people, now referred to as Alaska Natives and California Indians, who were involved with the North American Russian empire during the nineteenth-century. Alaska Natives, as subjects of the Russian Crown, worked for the Russian American Company throughout the Pacific and Bering region, while the Southern Pomo, California Indians, hosted the Russian enterprise, known as Fort Ross, in the village of Metini on the Sonoma coast of Northern California. Through an examination of indigenous oral narrative and historical accounts, this chapter links indigenous people to imperial structure by inquiring into how they create and maintain cultural space within the coercive landscapes empire manifests. After the Russian and Spanish territoriality of their regions, both Alaska Natives and California Indians would of course find their lands occupied by the United States, another imperial project, from the mid-nineteenth-century to the present. Covering pre-United States occupation of Alaska and California, this chapter recognizes a transitional link between Russian and United States activities in North America through indigenous narrative in the consideration of my project’s broader inquiry of Indigenous people and “American” empire. In the essay “Empire as a Way of Life” Williams speaks to the United States’ rise as a global power by defining the nation as an empire “born and bred” from the “use and abuse” of others. In turn, he views the nation’s history as embodying a set of sinister deeds committed against other nations. Published in 1980 in the wake of the Vietnam War, “Empire as a Way of Life” is interested in constructing a genealogy to account for contemporary United States imperial formation. His views on national empire have clearly become the basis for a critical understanding of American history bringing into focus both those who benefitted, and those who were victimized in the rise of the nation as a global power. But what of the latter, those whose “welfare and convenience” empire has worked against? Does William’s important work hold true for the , national subaltern? And how has empire put them to use against their own interests in the service of empire’s beneficiaries? The term “America,” of course encompasses more than a single nation-state; it is a designation for two continents colonized by Eurasian empires 500 years ago, and perhaps should include US overseas possessions and spheres of influence, that are certainly part of the American empire. Since the original European entry, an imperial system has conscripted the labor of colonized people for resource extraction, transportation, and commerce in the “New World” and abroad, and incorporated territory for the colonial settlement of European populations. The “America[n]” nation, of which Williams writes, is part of a global system of neocolonial states. Perhaps to emphasize the global nature of this imperial system, Williams establishes an uncomplicated spatial demarcation between those benefiting from empire inside the United States, and those subordinate, external to the nation, whom embody the subaltern. This composes a common enough understanding of empire. Articulating Williams’ “workable definition,” and speaking to the spatial organization of empire, geographer Ronald Johnston 1 describes empire as “the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial” project, primarily “based on domination and subordination” of one territorially-based people upon another (375). But does empire’s imagined geography not require a deeper analysis? What of those who were “born and bred” in empire—within its metropolitan “home”—who have been “use[d] and abuse[d]” themselves, in ways akin to empire’s overseas victims? Are not the internal imperial subaltern just as much a part of America as those in the position of “domination?” Care should be exercised in one presuming a clear territorial division between those who benefit and