When Tsarist Russia launched the Second Kamchatka Expedition in 1741, the result was an increased understanding of the maritime geography of Siberia and Alaska, and an understanding of the wealth of sea otter and fur seal pelts that could be available for exploitation in the North Pacific. The resulting ‘fur boom’ led, in 1799, to the creation of the
Russian-American Company, a mercantile corporation which controlled this trade until the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867.
Sea otter pelts were sold to the Chinese, in exchange for a wide variety of goods, and the great wealth to be made led to over-exploitation of the resource, and the need to reach further and further south along the Pacific Coast of North America. In 1812 the Company established Fort Ross in what is now Northern California, and maintained it as a fur trade post until it was sold to an Anglo-Californian in 1841. Kent Lightfoot has undertaken long-term research at this location, focusing on the Native laborers who lived and worked at the fort.
Fort Ross was a complex mix of cultural influences. Those in charge of the operation, and those representing the Russian Orthodox Church, came from Russia. The expert sea mammal hunters were largely Alutiiq men, brought by the Company from Kodiak Island in Alaska. Many of the laborers, particularly in providing food to the population, were local Native Californians, including Kashaya Pomo, Coast Miwok, and Southern Pomo. These, along with a variety of creole, or mixed race people, interacted on a daily basis in the operation of the enterprise, but lived in spatially segregated areas around the facility.
Lightfoot became fascinated by the Native Alaskan Neighborhood, where census data show that Alutiiq Alaskan men were living with Kashaya Pomo women. This combination of a gendered and ethnic dichotomy provides an interesting case study. A number of the houses were semi-subterranean, a form familiar to both Alutiiq and Kashaya. The Alutiiq, however, disposed of trash in the bottom of the central room of their houses, covering the floor with grass, and slowly accumulating trash under their feet. The Kashaya, on the other hand, carefully swept clean all interior space, and cleaned exteriors around their houses, disposing of trash in middens well away from the houses. This is the pattern found in the Neighborhood, with clean floors indicating that Kashaya women maintained Kashaya ideals of cleanliness and order.
In their cooking practices the foods were baked in tiers of rocks from a hot fire, in underground ovens, a method typical of the Kashaya and unknown to the Alutiiq. The foods included many of the terrestrial animals commonly eaten by the Kashaya, as well as the sea mammals, sea urchins, and sea birds common in the Alutiiq diet, including seal flippers, an Alutiiq delicacy. Added to this was beef and mutton introduced by the Russians. The artifact assemblage shows no indication of Alutiiq domestic objects, but heavy representation of debris from Alutiiq bone sea mammal hunting tools, and repair of birdskin parkas and skin boats that were Alutiiq technology. Chipped and groundstone lithics were all from local sources, reflecting traditional Kashaya lithic use. Fragments of European ceramic and glass tablewares appear to have been scavenged from broken vessels, in order to reuse them as bead blanks and chipped-glass tools.
The spatial arrangement of the houses, in a long line overlooking the bay, is typically Alutiiq, yet its location on a terrace near the fort, and not directly on the waterfront, probably reflects overall control by the Russian administration of the spatial layout of the settlement. Lightfoot’s overall impression of the village is one in which the Kashaya women and Alutiiq men have accommodated to each other’s needs in various ways, with little change toward European ways of life. The Kashaya women depended heavily on their kinship ties to inland Kashaya villages, whereas the Russian colonists provided little to these families. The Native Alaskan Village at Fort Ross is thus an excellent example of how colonial situations bring together unique, and varying, cultural interactions, and how daily practices can create entirely new identities.
World History
