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KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 310 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [310], (1) Lines: 0 to 46 ——— 1.3301pt PgVar ——— Normal Page * PgEnds: Eject [310], (1) 13. Events and Nonevents on the Tlingit/Russian/American Colonial Frontier, 1802–1879 sergei a. kan Introduction Throughout 1877–78 the “Russian” (and some of the American) inhabitants of Sitka, a small town on the coast of southeastern Alaska, were anxiously anticipating an attack by the “savage Indians” whose village was located just outside the town’s palisade.1 Finally, on February 6, 1879, their worst fears seemed to have materialized when they heard loud noises of a drunken uproar, moving from the Native village to the town. Sitka’s inhabitants locked themselves up in their homes, and some of the men began to prepare for a gunfight. However, when a dozen Tlingit men of the Kiks.ádi clan (some of them intoxicated), finally approached the stockade, they were turned away by the head of the local Indian police force and his kinsmen (members of the Kaagwaantaan clan) and dispersed without violence. Despite the peaceful resolution of this crisis, throughout the month of February a number of Sitka’s residents conducted nightly vigils and kept guard duty. However, the only damage suffered by the town was the theft of a portion of its palisade by the “attackers.” In the meantime, Sitka’s merchants and some of the other Anglo-Americans and Russians sent a petition to the commander of the British naval base at Esquimalt near Victoria, British Columbia. As a result of this, on March 1, 1879, Her Majesty’s warship Osprey arrived in Sitka, and one day later an American customs ship also anchored nearby. Sitka’s night watchmen drank heavily to celebrate their liberation from the latest Indian threat. Embarrassed by the international publicity surrounding these events, the U.S. government , which in 1877 had removed its military garrison from Sitka, finally decided to strengthen once again its presence in Alaska by dispatching in April 1879 the U.S.S. Jamestown to the Alaska panhandle. Earlier, the KimE — University of Nebraska Press / Page 311 / SEPTEMBER . 22 . 2005 / New Perspectives on Native North America / Kan and Strong 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [311], (2) Lines: 46 to 78 ——— 6.5pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [311], (2) cabinet of President Harris had met to consider this crisis and had agreed that the U.S. Navy was in a better position to meet the demands of the situation than the Treasury Department, which had previously administered the affairs of the new territory, following a ten-year period of U.S. Army rule (1867–77) (see Hinckley 1972; Williams 1982). Although memories of the “barely averted massacre of 1879” remained central to the historical consciousness of Sitka’s Russian community for about half a century, the local Tlingit oral tradition makes no references to it (Kan 1979–95).2 American officials who investigated the affair dismissed it as a simple brawl between “half a dozen drunken members of the Kiks.ádi clan and a large force of the members of the Kaagwaantaan clan” (Beardslee 1882:45–46). Thus it appears that this entire incident was so insignificant that it could hardly qualify as a major or even a minor historical event. In fact, using Raymond Fogelson’s terminology (1989) we could call it a “nonevent” for most of the Tlingit and many of the Americans who witnessed it. This, however, was clearly not the case for the town’s Russian inhabitants . For them “the Indian attack” was something that Fogelson (1989) calls an “epitomizing event,” a narrative that condenses, encapsulates, and dramatizes long-term historical processes. “Such events,” he writes, “are inventions but have such compelling qualities and explanatory power that they spread rapidly through the group and soon take on an ethnohistorical reality of their own” (1989:143).3 To explain the difference between the Russian and the Tlingit interpretations of the 1879...

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