The Beginning of Memory

The Beginning of Memory Oral Histories on the Lost Villages of the Aleutians by Nicholai S. Lekanoff Nicholai Galaktionoff Eva Tcheripanoff Irene Makarin Moses Gordieff A report to the National Park Service, The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Restitution Trust, and the Ounalashka Corporation Introduced and edited by Raymond Hudson December 2004 Raymond Hudson 15 South Gorham Lane Middlebury, VT 05753 (802) 388-6867 [email protected] Acknowledgements This project was made possible through a grant from the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Restitution Trust. Special thanks go to the Ounalashka Corporation for its assistance to me in a host of ways. Linda Cook with the National Park Service has been an enthusiastic supporter of my efforts ever since she conceived the idea for the recordings. The National Park Service graciously loaned me an excellent recorder. Gail Morrison at the Unalaska City School library supplied a cassette player that was indispensable. Harriet Hope, director of the senior center at Unalaska, helped with preparations for the interviews and encouraged the participation of Unalaska elders. John Galaktionoff, Okalena Patricia Lekanoff-Gregory, and Bobbi Lekanoff helped with interviews. Anna Jacobs Bateman kindly made copies of the recordings for the participants. Walter Dyakanoff and the late Moses Gordieff provided insights into conditions at Unalaska after World War Two. I especially want to thank again the four major participants: Nicholai S. Lekanoff, Nicholai Galaktionoff, Eva Tcheripanoff, and Irene Makarin. They showed great patience with my persistent and, at times, irrelevant questioning. Contents Part One — Historical Background 1. Introduction 1 2. Biorka, Makushin, Kashega, and Chernofski in the Late 19th Century 6 3. The Early 20th Century 18 4. The 1920s and 1930s 25 Part Two — Oral Histories Introduction 48 Eva Tcheripanoff (Kashega) 1. June 3, 2004 50 2. June 3, 2004 – Glosses on an interview of Sophia Pletnikoff conducted by Platonida Gromoff in 1978 68 3. June 8, 2004 78 Nicholai S. Lekanoff (Makushin) 4. June 8, 2004 90 Nicholai Galaktionoff (Makushin and Biorka) 5. June 2, 2004 111 6. June 4, 2004 145 7. June 7, 2004 164 Irene Makarin (Biorka) 8. June 6, 2004 186 Moses Gordieff (Unalaska and Biorka) 9. June 9, 2004 206 Post Script 216 Oral History Release Agreements 218 The Beginning of Memory Part One: Historical Background 1. Introduction When I was a young baby and I was just starting to remember things, I remember looking out the window and seeing that everything was white. I was holding a watch in my hand. My mother was holding me by the window when this awareness came over me. I remember later it was summer, and the people were catching fish for drying. Nicholai Galaktionoffi Little did Nicholai Galaktionoff know, but the watch he was holding was running out of time. In a few years Makushin Village on Unalaska Island would dissolve. The majority of the Makushin people would move twenty miles around the island’s great volcano to Unalaska Village, the economic and religious center of the eastern Aleutians. They would find themselves outsiders. Nick would discover that his language locked more doors than it opened. But at the time he was beginning to remember not even the adults in Makushin could have foreseen the end coming so rapidly. The village was stable. Men worked for wages each summer in the Pribilof Island fur seal harvest. They returned in September, in time to catch and preserve salmon for subsistence use. During the winter they trapped fox and sold the pelts at Unalaska. 1 2 The Beginning of Memory The eldest of the four participants in this project, Nicholai S. Lekanoff, was born at Makushin on June 4, 1925. In 1937 his father moved the family to Unalaska, perhaps driven away by the autocratic storekeeper Pete Olsen. At Unalaska Village (or Iliuliuk as Eva Tcheripanoff still called it when speaking in Aleut in 2004), Nick served as an alter boy with Bishop Alexy (Panteleev) and Father Theodosia. This began services to the Church of the Holy Ascension that would continue as starosta (warden) throughout his life. After World War Two he married Pauline Kudrin from Kashega. Nicholai Galaktionoff was born at Makushin on December 19, 1925. Following the death of his father and two other men in 1937, he and his siblings moved to Unalaska with their mother and paternal grandmother.ii Following the war, he married Irene Ermeloff of Biorka and was closely associated with the brief resettlement of that village. While working and living with older Unangan, Nick absorbed stories and traditions rooted in the 19th and late 18th centuries. Fourteen miles south-southwestward of Makushin, the village of Kashega was thriving. Unlike at Makushin, the men from Kashega did not regularly work in the Pribilof Islands.iii There was usually enough summer employment at the sheep ranches at Chernofski and at Kashega itself. Occasional salmon and cod fishing was another source of employment. A codfish cannery had once existed at Kuliliak Bay, on the Pacific side of the island opposite the village. There was a store at Kashega. In a few years, a school would be established. Eva Tcheripanoff was born here in 1928. Her mother, Sophie (Borenin) Kudrin, was from Chernofski but had moved to Kashega as a child. Eva lived in the village until the wartime evacuation. Following the war, she married John Tcheripanoff of Akutan and soon afterwards settled at Unalaska. Historical Introduction 3 The year Eva was born, people at Chernofski recognized the fact that their village, eight miles southwest from Kashega, could no longer survive. The people tore down the chapel dedicated to the Epiphany, indication of a determined evacuation.iv The families collected their personal belongings and waited on the beach for the first boat to come along. Henry Swanson arrived, skippering the Alasco-4. “The sheep ranch that had been established there,” he said, “wasn’t doing them any good so far as making a living went. There were just so few of them left they figured they might as well move.” Henry said there were only a dozen people, counting the children and an old blind man. He left a few people at Kashega with the goods from the church; and then he took others, including the chief, Alex Gordieff, to Unalaska. George Yatchmenoff, another resident, went to Biorka. Biorka Village was on the northern end of Sedanka Island, essentially an extension of an eastern arm of Unalaska Island although separated by the deep Udagak Strait. To reach the village from Unalaska, a vessel left the harbor and circled north and east, passing Kalekta and English bays before entering Beaver Inlet. The village lay a mile across the inlet. Although poor, the village had good leadership and the people got by with occasional summer jobs and fox trapping in the winter. Biorka people would skiff down and across the inlet, pull ashore at Ugadaga Bay, and hike a well-worn trail to Unalaska. Born at Unlaska in 1930, Irene Makarin was raised at Biorka. Her mother died around 1932 and she was adopted, with her father’s consent, by Andrew and Ester (Eustina) Makarin, leaders in the Biorka community. She lived at Biorka until evacuated at the start of World War Two. Following the war, she married William (Coco) Yatchmenoff, son of the George Yatchmenoff who had come from Chernofski. Irene was part of the resettlement of Biorka after the war. At the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, these four settlements formed a loosely united whole with Unalaska Village (Iliuliuk) in the center. None was completely independent, not even Unalaska. This mutual reliance had historic roots dating back at 4 The Beginning of Memory least to 1763 when these villages were part of a confederacy that annihilated almost 200 Russians in a series of coordinated attacks in the Fox Islands. This reliance had been reshaped through new economic, political, and religious ties in the 19th century. Religion and economics frequently overlapped as in 1891 when the residents of these four settlements joined with those from Nikolski and Akutan to formally contribute to the construction of a new church at Unalaska through deposits with the Alaska Commercial Company.v During the first quarter of the 20th century, inter-village familial bonds were re-enforced by a common dialect or very closely related dialects of Aleut and by common subsistence practices. The villages operated politically with independent village chiefs who acknowledged one paramount chief, Alexei Yatchemev of Unalaska. A similar system had existed in the church since the 1830s in which village lay readers were overseen by a priest or priests resident at Unalaska. The fifth village in this project, Attu, was almost 800 miles west of Unalaska. Although the history of none of these villages can stand entirely independently, the geographical and cultural distance between Attu and the villages on Unalaska Island are such that Attu must be treated separately. Although their history is laced with contact with the eastern villages, the Attu people retained a unique identity to the end. Long before 1926, of course, the exclusivity of distinct Aleut communities had been shattered. Soon after the arrival of westerners in the mid-eighteenth century the eight relatively distinct groups of Aleuts had been reduced to five with the loss of the Qaxûn or Qaxûs (inhabitants of the Rat Islands), the Naahmigûs (people of the Delarof Islands), and the Akuugûn (people of the Islands of Four Mountains). Over the next century, the surviving groups declined in numbers and localities from a variety of causes including voluntary and involuntary resettlement programs. By the Alaska Purchase in 1867 the Sasignan people of the Near Islands were found only on Attu (plus a transplanted colony on Bering Island in the Commander Islands.) In the central Aleutians, the Andreanof Islands, only the Niigûgîs on Atka and Amlia remained.

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