By Senior Contributor 
By ALEXANDER DOLITSKY
I recommend The Alaska Story readers to get acquainted with Lydia Black book “Russians in Alaska, 1732-1867” and “Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804, edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black” for an adequate understanding of the Russian-American chapter of Alaska history.
Here are my short book reviews of these titles.
“Russians in Alaska, 1732-1867” by Lydia Black (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004) xv pp. 328 pp., photos, maps, illustrations, endnotes, bibliographic references, index, US$29.95 (pb.). ISBN 1-889963-04-6.
Lydia Black has produced a most valuable addition to our knowledge of the Russian period of Alaska’s history from economic and sociopolitical perspectives. The subject matter of this monograph constitutes a continuation and compilation of the Black’s numerous publications on the ethnohistory and anthropology of Russian population in Alaska.
The focus of this monograph is on economic and sociopolitical developments of Russian population in Alaska from Mikhail Gvozdev’s discovery of Cape Prince of Wales and King Island in 1732 to the purchase of Alaska by the U.S. government in 1867. Fifteen comprehensive chapters and extensive bibliography divide the introduction and the index.
In investigating the history of the people of the Russian and North American North, the author examined: (1) the history of Russia’s eastward expansion into Siberia, Alaska, and California; (2) demographic fluctuations of native and Russian groups; (3) the development of geographic explorations of the Russian Far East, Alaska, and North America; (4) the changes in the ethnic structure of the Russian population during Russian-American period in Alaska and in California (1732-1867); (5) socioeconomic development of the Russian-American Company from the inception to its close in Alaska; and (6) interrelationships between Russian-American Company and neighboring populations, and rival countries. The author used primarily source materials from regional and local archives, church records, as well as extensive secondary sources.
Lydia Black, an authority on the Russian period of Alaska’s history, passed away in 2007. But her numerous publications, including this book, will remain an invaluable source of information and reference for students of history, ethnohistory, anthropology, and anyone interested in the subject for many generations to come.
“Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804.” Edited by Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Richard Dauenhauer, and Lydia T. Black. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008, 560 pp., 55 illustrations, 3 maps, bibliography, appendixes, index, 8.5 X 11 in. US$ 60.00 cloth, US$ 35.00 paper.
The Second International Conference on Russian America was held in Sitka in August 1987. Many essays by various authors, Tlingit oral traditions, and translated documents from Russian into English, included in the monograph under review, were presented in one of the conference’s symposia. For this monograph, divided into nine topical sections, the editors added published for the first time Tlingit oral recollections recorded almost half a century ago, several articles on the Russian-Tlingit encounters in 1741, twelve appendixes, gazetteer, glossary, plates, maps, and figures.
The subtitle of the book, The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804, suggests that the information compiled in this edition would be focused on the events that took place in Southeast Alaska in 1802 and 1804. Nevertheless, the editors included in this edition a material either chronologically distant from these two dates (e.g. articles on the Captain Chirikov’s encounters with Tlingits in Southeast Alaska in July of 1741), or the subject matters only indirectly related to the Russian-Tlingit relations (e.g. Appendix 4, The Raven Helmet; or Appendix 10, Russian, Aleut, and Euro-American Names, etc.).
In this edition, the editors stated that: “For the Tlingit of Sitka, the battles of 1802 and 1804 were a watershed. Our [editors] view is that these events were a turning point not only in Tlingit history but in the multicultural history of Alaska, and ultimately of American history. The popular memory of the Battles of Sitka, like the Battle of the Alamo in Texas, has merged the streams of history and myth, and they now flow together” (p. xiii).
This is an ambitious statement. One may argue (S. G. Fedorova, Russkaya Amerika v zapiskakh Kirila Khlebnikova. Moscow: Nauka, 1985, p. 6) that Tlingits’ attack of the fort Novoarkhangelsk at Old Sitka, and massacres of sixteen Russian and Alutiiq men, women and children in 1802; and then Russian retaliation against Tlingits in 1804 would be difficult to classify as a turning point in history.
A turning point in history is a point at which a very significant change occurs. Sometimes a turning point has immediate repercussions, making its significance obvious to people at the time; and sometimes the impact of an event is clear only in retrospect. A turning point can be a personal choice affecting millions; it can be an event or idea with global or local consequences; and it can be the life of a single person who inspires or affects other people.
According to the editors, “The book raises, and hopefully answers (at least to a degree), the fundamental question of who owns history (p. xv). From the Tlingit point of view, the history belongs primarily if not exclusively to the Kiks.ádi, a Raven moiety clan especially associated with Sitka, because the events took place on their land, and their ancestors died defending it from foreign invasion. From the Tlingit point of view, an unauthorized telling constitutes stealing, and one often hears the accusation “They stole our history” or “They stole our language”” (p. xiii).
From the academic point of view, however, history is not owned by a nation or any given ethnic group. History is a social process, the development and evolution of mankind from the past through the present and to the future. It tries to form a picture of all things that happened to humans from its origin upon the earth to the present moment.
In summary, despite my disagreement with the editors on several methodological and theoretical issues, I found their monograph an impressive and comprehensive work that will be used as a reference for a long time. It is the most complete collection of documents on the Russian and Tlingit ethnohistory, and oral history ever produced in the west.
The monograph is well structured, designed, illustrated, and printed by the University of Washington Press. I highly recommend it both for students of Alaska studies and those interested in the Russian-Tlingit relations of the Russian-American period in Alaska.
The author was born and raised in the former Soviet Union before settling in the U.S. in 1978. He moved to Juneau in 1986 where he taught Russian studies and Archaeology at the University of Alaska Southeast, and Social Studies Teacher at the Alyeska Central School of the Alaska Department of Education. From 1990 to 2022, he served as a director and president of the Alaska-Siberia Research Center, publishing in the fields of anthropology, history, archaeology and ethnography. Find him on Amazon.com.
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