Exporting Alaskan Native Women: Exporting Alaskan Native Women's Labor

In the18^th century, Russian fur hunters kidnapped Alaskan Natives from the Aleutian Islands, Kenai and Kodiak to hunt sea otters. Only Alaskan Native women could stich the mammal skins for kayaks and whale intestines for water-proof parkas-- the tools of labor. The coerced labor of Alaskan Native women made possible the Russian empire in the Pacific. By 1812, Alaskan sea-otters were extinct, and the Russians sailed south into California building a “colony” at Fort Ross. Here, slavery met empire met the environment in a fur trade dependent on Aleut, Alutiiq, Unangan, and Kenaitze women who scraped the carcasses and intestines of sea mammals, preserved, oiled and stitched kayaks, parkas and spray-skirts. To avoid Spanish Missions, the Russians (and Bostonians) deposited Native Alaskans on California’s rocky Farallon Islands for the otter hunt. The women lived in dirt shelters, collected rainwater from rocks, and burned seal bones for warmth, until the Russians returned to collect thousands of pelts for the Chinese market. Sexual and domestic slavery, female transport, women’s productivity in a gendered economy were tools of Russian globalization that decimated fertility and destroyed an ecosystem. Yet Alaskan women found spaces of freedom by revolting, crossing tribal lines in Alaska and California with Pomo and Miwok who mutually survived in the shadow of Russian and Spanish empires. Their labor repudiates a colonial ideology of white domesticity, assimilation, and “affective values,” traditionally defined by genocide and Indian child removal.  This paper revises “settler colonialism” to consider women, as well as land, as property.