!"#$%&##'%()&' !"#$%&'#($)&'*+',"!"#",! V OLUME 16, ISSUE 8 S EPTEMBER 2011 News from the Kanatak Tribal Council !"#!$%&'(!#&!##)%*& Letter from President 2 ***Tribal council nomination forms were mailed on Septem- ber 19th. Please look for yours in the mail. Please call the of- Kanatak History 3 fice if you do not receive your ballot by September 26th. Re- Alaska Native History 4 member to vote for 2 of the nominees! Alutiiq Language 5 ***Over 200 salmon fillets were sent out to the Tribe. Thank you Shawn Shanigan for getting the fish out to the members Native Body & Soul 6 and again we thank you, your family and friends for catching Language Extinction Tribal Happenings 7 and cleaning the salmon! The Tribe and the Council appreciate you! Kanatak Programs 8 ***Upcoming Tribal Council Meetings: Struttin’ our Stuff 9 -Sunday, September 25, 2011 at noon AKDT/4pm EDT Right-Clicked photos 10 - Sunday, October 9, 2011 at noon AKDT/4pm EDT Kanatak Kids 11 ***Annual Meeting and Contact Info 12 Election: -Sunday, October 23, 2011 at noon AKDT/4pm EDT All tribal members are invited to attend at the of- fice in Wasilla. The meeting will also Remember to vote! be held via teleconference. Vote for 2. Call in number for ALL meetings: 1-866-895-5510 Passcode: 868521# Kanatak Election Committee at work. N ATIVE TRIBE OF KANATAK P AGE 2 Letter from the Kanatak Tribal Council President The fall season is upon us and we are preparing to hold our first election since the formation of our current council in December 2010. This election is to fill two seats currently held by Kathrine Lakoduk and Henry Foshey, both of whom were appointed to their current posts. Coming up between October and November is our annual meeting, the AFN Convention, the BIA Providers Conference and the due process hear- ing for Ronalda Olivera, Shawn Olivera, Kathy Hansen, Christina Ramirez and Issac Ramirez. Our Kanatak Election Committee has been meeting regularly and a deci- sion was made and approved by the Tribal Council to open a separate PO Box that will specifically be used only for election ballots. This new PO Box is temporary, and is in Pennsylvania since that is where the election committee members reside. When you look at your ballot return enve- lopes, you will see the address is for the return PO Box in Pennsylva- nia. The Election Committee members will collect the ballots and hand de- liver them to the tribal council at the annual meeting held in October. Members that have project or program ideas are encouraged to contact Tess McGowan to get more information as to how to go about presenting these ideas to the council. If you have a need or a question, please call the Kana- tak tribal office at (907)357-5991 for more information. Don’t forget to vote! !"##"$%"&'()*$&+,($-.($& Kanatak Village in winter, 1920’s. N ATIVE TRIBE OF KANATAK P AGE 2 Kanatak, Historically Speaking... In 1920, Kanatak reemerged to the forefront of oil exploration, when Congress passed the Mineral Leasing Act, which reopened previously withdrawn lands. According to one observer of the industry, "When Congress passed a law prohibiting entry on Alaska oil-lease lands. [it] proved to be a blessing in disguise, because when Congress changed its mind again in 1920, and passed a new bill permitting oil-land development under certain prescribed conditions, interest was immediately stimulated in Alaskan oil prospects." Accordingly, "This new interest would probably never have taken place without the temporary probation." The new law allowed prospectors to lease oil and gas land, setting aside the old requirement of staking the land for mineral claims and working it each year. Whether it was a twenty-one-year-old from Seattle or Rock- efeller himself, anyone who filed an oil lease application in the federal land office and paid a $10 filing fee, plus a rental fee of twenty-five cents an acre, received an exclusive right to the petroleum under that land for ten years. With what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer exclaimed "the unlocking of the oil fields of Alaska," sea- soned gold miners, bankers and bootleggers, as well of some of the biggest oil companies in the nation, joined the "oil rush" to Cold Bay, and the near ghost town of Kanatak was resurrected. By 1921, geologists were again dispatched to the area, while the vicinity of Kanatak was the scene of concen- trated activity. From a small Native village, Kanatak grew into a well laid out American small town of two busy streets boasting a num- ber of boom town businesses—hotels, restau- rants, stores, and taverns. According to one ob- server, "three hundred people lived in Kanatak's environs at its height of prosperity." Lumber, drilling equipment, crawler-type trac- tors were barged north and brought onto the beach, and new arrivals were immediately put to work. The first task at hand: to build a road Barabara (Aleut = ulax), the traditional subterranean winter home seventeen miles long from Kanatak, up through the mountain pass, and over to the spot above the southeast corner of Becharof Lake where the drilling was projected. One of those new Horse races on the beach in Kanatak, 1923. arrivals was Benjamin A. Grier who managed the Ray C. Larson lumber yard in Kanatak from 1923 to 1924. Grier, who lived in many parts of Alaska and even served on the Alaska Territorial Legislature in 1925 and 1927, was no shrinking violet, and even he noted how tough it was to live in Cold Bay. For enter- tainment, miners raced the only two horses in town against each other. According to Grier, "these damned horses tried to commit suicide. [And] I don't blame them!" Kanatak Connection Through Memories! Frieda Shanigan Byars remembers: I recall the sick horses that the oil company abandoned without any food and we did not know what to feed them. My Mom decided we would take care of them. She helped us bring them back to good health by feeding them seaweed and old soft potatoes that had been buried in the sand (for preservation) from the year before. Everyday we tended those poor sick horses. When they were well again, Dad taught us to ride them bareback. Mine was Snake Eye, and my younger brother and sister had Blue Boy and Silveretta. Dad trained those horses to walk around and around our large house. One even liked to open the door and come into the windbreak. Then someone from the oil company returned to the village and wanted to take the horses away. N ATIVE TRIBE OF KANATAK P AGE 4 Alaska Native History or How Did We Get Here? Second in importance to the conversion of Native Alaskans was their education. On the founding of the first Russian colony on Kodiak Island in 1784, a school as well as a church was immediately established. Signifi- cantly, the school, supported by the Russian American Company, was bilingual, with studies in Russian and Aleut/Alutiiq. Bilingualism and the close connection between commerce and education were to be hallmarks of the educational system throughout the Russian American era and well into the American period. Undoubtedly the greatest educator in Russian America was Father Ioann Veniaminov, later Bishop Innokentii, who devised an alphabet for the Aleut language, expanded the educational system, and insisted that priests learn Native languages and customs. In 1841, he established the ecclesiastical seminary at Novoarkhangelsk (Sitka), which included coursework in Latin, trigonometry, navigation, medicine, and six years of Native languages. Local parish schools offered reading, writing, and arithmetic, Biblical history, penmanship, music, and, at times, as many as four languages simultaneously: Russian, Old Church Slavonic, Eng- lish, and a Native language. Indeed, the stories of the many remarkable graduates of the Church system, mostly Creoles like the priest Iakov Netsvetov and the explorer-soldier Alexander Kashevarov, are among the most moving in the history of Russian America. Among the most enduring legacies of Russian America are the works written and published in Native Alaskan languages: translations of Christian texts, dictionaries of Native words, grammars, primers, and prayer books. Soon after the founding of Russian America, attempts were made to learn Native languages. As early as 1805 Nikolai Resanov of the Russian American Company compiled a dictionary of some 1200 words in six Native Alaskan languages. The greatest proponent of multilingualism was Father Ioann Veniaminov. He created an alphabet for the Aleut language, and, with the help of the Aleut Toien (Chief) Ivan Pan'kov, wrote and published in 1834 an Aleut catechism, the first book published in an Alaskan Native language. As Bishop Innokentii, Veniaminov encouraged the study of Tlingit and a variety of Aleut-Eskimo dialects such as Atkan and Central Yup'ik, most successfully through his Creole protege, the priest Iakov Netsvetov. The latter, in turn, trained other Native and Creole priests such as Innokentii Shaiashnikov and Lavrentii Salamatov, who contin- ued his work well into the American period. With the American purchase of Alaska in 1867, the understanding of Native languages declined, although notable efforts to translate Tlingit were made. Ironically, in the sunset of Russian influence in Alaska, more translations (about fifteen) were published than in the "Golden Age" of the 1830s - 1860s (about eight), but many of these were reis- sues of earlier pioneering studies. The Russian American tradition of bilingualism is often contrasted with the American system, dominated by the Presbyterian minister Sheldon Jackson. Appointed the first Federal superintendent for public instruc- tion in 1885, Jackson decreed that only English could be taught at schools. His antagonism toward the "Greek" church prevented his rec- ognizing the unusual success of the bilingual Russian program, whose effects are still evident today.