The Qayaq and the Bering Sea

A Russian imperial map from 1775 pictures a Native man and his qayaq riding the Bering Sea. Wearing a feathered hunting visor and waterproof parka stitched from seal gut, the mariner propels himself forward at a pace outstripping seabirds. In the late eighteenth century, these lightweight qayaqs and their Native navigators frequently surprised Russian ships. Flying like arrows across open ocean, they were a source of power and a critical medium for Unangax̂ and Sugpiaq nations’ authoritative engagements with a sea-oriented world.

This paper, focused on Aleutian Island watercraft at the outset of the Russian colonization of the Bering Sea, offers a counter-narrative to top-down stories of imperial conquest. Examining the qayaq’s insurgent materialities and their living connection to ocean ecologies, from the circulation of Arctic driftwood to the migrations of sea mammals, it reveals how aquatic material practices defied foreigners’ attempts to project mastery over the seascape. Qayaq designs, crucial vehicles for belief systems and identity, were connected to intra-Indigenous negotiations of the sea’s legal borders; they reveal a historical and territorial ocean that contradicted Russian imperial claims to an empty and universal sea.

Taking the qayaq as an analytic lens, the paper explores entanglements between an agentive ocean, Indigenous design, and attempts to dispossess people of their terraqueous homelands. Across the long nineteenth century, the qayaq’s worldmaking dimensions went undiminished. Maintaining and adapting watercraft was one means by which Unangax̂ and Sugpiat confronted and survived colonial violence.