Alutiiq

The Alutiiq, who also call themselves by the ancestral name Sugpiaq, meaning "the real people", are an Alaska Native people of the south-central coast of Alaska. They belong to the wider family of Yupik peoples and have also been called Pacific Eskimo or Pacific Yupik. Their homeland, inhabited for more than 7,500 years, takes in Prince William Sound and the outer Kenai Peninsula, home of the Chugach Sugpiaq, and the Kodiak Archipelago and Alaska Peninsula, home of the Koniag Alutiiq. Today Alaska is home to over 4,000 Alutiiq.

The name Alutiiq comes from "Aleut", the label that Russian fur traders applied to the Native peoples of the region. Because of that colonial origin, and because Alutiiq is also the people's own word for the separate Aleut people, some community members prefer Sugpiaq for the people and Sugstun or Sugtestun for the language. Alutiiq, Aleut and Sugpiaq are all in use, according to personal preference.

Alutiiq life has long been built around the sea, supplemented by the land. The seasonal round began in a lean spring, when people gathered shellfish, hunted octopus and picked greens at low tide. Summer brought fishing for cod and halibut and the hunting of seals, sea lions and seabirds, as well as trade with mainland peoples for antler, ivory, caribou hides and stone not found on Kodiak. In autumn families harvested spawning salmon and late berries and hunted bears and migrating ducks, preserving food by drying, smoking, freezing or storing it in oil. Winter was a time of trapping, ice fishing and festivals honouring the harvest and the ancestors. Before Russian contact people lived in semi-subterranean houses called ciqlluaq. Art in beads of shell, bone and amber, carving, skin sewing and grass weaving, along with storytelling, song and dance, carried history from one generation to the next.

By the early nineteenth century the Kodiak archipelago alone held more than 60 Alutiiq villages and an estimated 13,000 people. The Koniag had driven off Russian landings in 1761 and 1774, but in August 1784 the fur trader Grigory Shelikhov arrived with about 130 armed men and attacked people who had taken refuge on Awa'uq, or Refuge Rock, off Sitkalidak Island. Estimates of the dead range from about 200 to 500, with some sources giving far higher figures, and Shelikhov claimed to have taken hundreds of hostages, including children. The massacre opened Russian occupation, and the years to 1818, marked by harsh treatment and by infectious diseases brought by the newcomers, have been described as the darkest period of Sugpiaq history. Peter the Aleut, or Cungagnaq, venerated as a saint of the Eastern Orthodox Church, is reportedly from Kodiak.

Alutiiq people today live mainly in coastal fishing communities and work across the modern economy while keeping subsistence harvesting at the heart of their culture. Federally recognised tribes include the Sun'aq Tribe of Kodiak, the Alutiiq Tribe of Old Harbor and the Native Villages of Afognak, Akhiok, Karluk, Larsen Bay, Ouzinkie and Port Lions, among others. The Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, opened in 1995 and governed by the Alutiiq Heritage Foundation, cares for a collection of nearly 250,000 items and supports archaeology, language and arts programmes.

The Alutiiq language is closely related to Central Alaskan Yup'ik but is treated as a distinct language, with Koniag and Chugach dialects. According to one estimate about 400 people still speak it, and the Kodiak dialect had only around 50 elderly speakers when Kodiak's high school, at the request of Alutiiq students, began teaching it in 2010. Communities are working to revitalise the language, and since 2014 Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage has offered classes.

Our 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700, 1715, 1783 and 1800 maps draw an approximate Alutiiq territory along the Gulf of Alaska under the label "Suspiaq", a form of the name Sugpiaq. Our 1815 map shows the region within the Russian Empire; today it is part of Alaska in the United States.