Dear readers,
This edition of nu1 will give you information about the landscape and the first native people of Alaska.
I have been there this year and connected with Grandmother Rita from ‘The International Council of the Thirteen Indigenous People’ and her niece Marie Mead both Yupik and working at the University in Anchorage to keep their culture alive. I met Jennifer Andrulli also family of GM Rita with whom we picked healing plants. She wrote an article in one of the Editions of nu1.
At the time of the Alaska purchase in 1867 there were an estimated 35,000 of the 74,000 Alaskan Natives living in this huge land. The rest had been killed by disease, starvation and hardship.
At the time Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts made up the vast majority of Alaska’s population. Ninety-five to one hundred percent through its five geographic regions until 1880, when non-Natives began arriving in search of whales, fur and gold.
Through the age of competing empires - Russian, British and American - fighting for Alaska’s resources, concerns for land claims for Alaska’s indigenous people were nonexistent.
Aleuts come from the fact that before the arrival of the Russians, the Pacific (southern) Eskimo called themselves Sugpiaq (the real people). The Russians called them Aleuts, which applied to three different Native communities.
Enjoy reading,
Monique
