On the Kenai in Extreme Northwest America
- On the Kenai in Extreme Northwest America
This brief anonymous article titled only "Über die Kenai im äußersten Nordwesten Amerikas" was possibly written by the editor of Globus, an illustrated German journal devoted to geography and anthropology created by Karl Andree (1808–1875). The journal was published from 1862 to 1910, a period when Europeans, and to some extent Americans, were ravenous consumers of literature dealing with travel and with foreign peoples (Belgum 2013). It is possible that Andree himself wrote this article based on information he had received from travelers.
One individual who capitalized on the rush for knowledge of things foreign was the Hamburg animal collector/trainer Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913). In the 1870s, when the animal trade was declining, Hagenbeck began to display peoples from around the world, such as the Sami (Lapp) with reindeer and Ceylonese with elephants. Included among these peoples were natives from North America, namely Inuit from Labrador (Hagenbeck 2021; see also Cartwright 1792) and the Bella Coola from the Pacific Northwest (Cole 1982). The Bella Coola group made a striking impression on Franz Boas after visiting them in Berlin. Subsequently, Boas traveled to the Northwest Coast, where he conducted research, publishing extensively in various journals, including Globus in 1888 (Boas 1888). Other travelers who visited northwestern America and published their descriptions of the Native Americans they encountered were Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1977), Alphonse Louis Pinart (Parmenter 1996), and of course Franz Boas (2006), to mention only a few.
Over the next decades, most research on the natives of Alaska was conducted in areas other than the Kenai Peninsula, for example, on the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska (Ivan Veniaminov, Frederica de Laguna, the Dauenhauers, and others) or the Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands (Ivan Veniaminov, Roza Lyapunova, Knut Bergsland, and others). However, with few exceptions, the natives of the Kenai Peninsula, particularly the southern Kenai, were only superficially examined.
Though the Tanaina (Dena'ina) were encountered by Europeans at the beginning of the 19th century, the encounters were not accompanied by special studies of the Indigenous peoples, such as occurred with the Tlingit and Aleuts. The newcomers were primarily interested in exploiting the natural resources of the land and left little more than a record of their meetings (Townsend 1981). As a result, such pieces as the following shine a small light into the lives of a little-studied people.
I have left the text much as it is in the original. Words in brackets are those of the translator. All notes are those of the translator.
On the Kenai People in the Extreme Northwest of America1
The tribes of people in the previously Russian part of America are notable in many respects, and now, on the group of so-called Kinai or Kenai, we receive an important contribution to their particular information through the efforts of famous linguist L. Schiefner in St. Petersburg. He published (in the Mémoires de l'académie des sciences de St. Petersbourg, VII. Serie, Tome XXI, Nro. 3) Leopold Radloff's dictionary of the Kenai language. We are primarily interested in the foreword of Mr. Schiefner, whom we heartily thank for the gracious transmission of the appendix sheet.
Leopold Radloff's health has been severely shaken through continuous studies; he went to seek recovery in Germany and died in Gotha on the 29th of October 1865 after finishing his 47th [End Page 98] year. The languages of the tribes in Northwest America, on which he published valuable proceedings, occupied him ardently, primarily the Kenai language, on which he had collected word lists. A similar situation had been the case of the mining engineer Doroshin, and the latter had obligingly placed the material collected in the Kenai region at his disposal.2 Thus, he was able to put together his dictionary, whose publication Schiefner had now directed. He could then use not only Doroshin's linguistic notes for the Kenai language but also those on the Ahtna on the Copper River and, in addition, copious ethnographic notes. From this, we want to give below some information but to note beforehand that the Kenai people call...
