[June 25th marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of countless fraught moments across the long history of the so-called “Indian Wars.” There are few more frustrating, more tragic, nor more tellingly American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of those conflicts, leading up to a weekend post on Little Big Horn.]
On redefining what counts as an American community, and an example of the often painful histories that act requires us to engage.
Way back in February 2012, as part of a Mardi Gras-inspired post on New Orleans and other cities I had (at that point) visited only once but that had left a lasting impression, I wrote about my weeklong experience in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 2005. As I’m sure most folks know, and as I traced in this post launching a weeklong AlaskaStudying series, the territory became part of the United States in 1867, meaning that the two early 19th century battles on which I’ll focus in the next two paragraphs took place long before Sitka was a U.S. community. But even if you don’t agree with my position that everything which happened in a place that became part of the U.S. is thus part of U.S. history, the fact of the matter, as I also noted in that February 2012 post, is that both the Russian and indigenous communities at the heart of those early 19th century battles remained in Sitka and Alaska after they became part of the U.S. (and to this day). So these are communities that not only were always American (in the continental/hemispheric sense) and not only were formative to this eventually-American territory and then state, but also continue to be part of the United States, making them entirely worth commemorating as layers to American history.
When we include such places and histories as part of the American story, of course, that also means bringing their more fraught and painful sides into the mix (well, it should also mean that—the Trump administration would of course disagree). In the case of Sitka, its most painful pre-United States histories would likely be those of the 1802 and 1804 battles between Russian settlers and agents for the Russian-American Company and members of the Kiks.ádi Tlingit indigenous nation (in that 2012 post I highlighted the Aleut people, but they actually came to Sitka during and after this moment, while the Tlingit had been in the area for thousands of years). In June 1802, after years of forced labor for the Russian settlement among other indignities, Tlingit warriors attacked the Russian fort, massacring many of its inhabitants and burning the settlement to the ground. The leader of the Sitka Russian community, company Chief Manager Alexandr Baranov, had been in the capital of Kodiak at the time, and when he returned just over two years later he did so aboard a warship, the Neva, along with additional smaller vessels and a sizeable force of both Russians and Aleut allies. In October 1804 those forces began a sustained assault on the Tlingit (who had spent the intervening years building fortifications to prepare for this battle), succeeding in defeating the indigenous warriors, massacring many, and forcing the rest of the community into what became known as the Sitka Kiks.ádi Survival March.
In many ways, that story feels eerily similar to that of the Pequot War in 1630s New England, from its origins (ones that could be attributed to indigenous aggression, but only if one ignores the entire larger context) to the build-up to and horrors of the massacre at Mystic that concluded the conflict and thoroughly decimated this indigenous community. Finding such cross-historical and -cultural similarities is of course one important effect of engaging with disparate settings and stories such as these, and reminds us that places like Alaska and Connecticut have at least as much in common as what distinguishes them. But at the same time, the history of and around the Battles of Sitka does feature specific and in some important ways unique elements, such as the presence of the Russian-American Company, a global trading company akin to the British East India Company in its central role in imperialist ventures. The Russian-American Company’s chief goods were furs, which also would connect it to the prominent role of the French fur trade in the European settlement of and indigenous relationships and conflicts within the middle of the continent during this same period. All reasons to better remember the tellingly American histories comprised by the early 19th century Battles of Sitka.
Next conflict tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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