6 God, Santa, and the American Way: The U.S. Alaska Reindeer Project
April 10, 2007
The first reindeer I ever saw was hitched to a parking meter in Anchorage. It was March 17, 1972. The reindeer was decked out for the St. Patrick’s Day parade with green ribbons strung through its antlers. A reindeer hitched to a parking meter is not common, even in Alaska, yet for me, a newcomer from “the lower 48,” it seemed no stranger than much else in pre-pipeline Alaska. What else would you do with a reindeer in Anchorage?
How the reindeer’s forebears came to Alaska is a more interesting story. Though wild caribou are native to Alaska, domesticated reindeer are not. They were imported in the 1890s to help Native people whom U.S. officials mistakenly thought were starving, and to help “civilize” village-based hunters and gatherers by turning them into nomadic herders.1 That policy was the brainchild of the Reverend Sheldon Jackson, from 1872 to 1885 superintendent of Presbyterian missions for the Rocky Mountain Territories, and, from 1885 to 1908 General Agent for Education in Alaska.2
The United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, but Alaska did not become a Territory until 1905 and had no government structure until the First Organic Act of 1884, which, among other things, guaranteed the Native peoples’ possession of their lands and appropriated $25,000 for the Secretary of the Interior to educate school-age children—a task he delegated to the Commissioner of Education, who delegated it to Jackson.3 Jackson was responsible for all Alaska Natives: Haida, Tlingit, Aleut, Tsimshian Athabaskan, and Eskimo (Inupiaq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Yup’ik, and Cup’ik). The reindeer were primarily for the Inupiaq, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, and Yup’ik.4
Alaska Natives were resourceful and maximized their food sources in a challenging environment. They accepted reindeer as an additional potential food source. But reindeer were only one component of Jackson’s civilizing mission, which consisted of five “Rs”: reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, religion, and reindeer.5 Each Native village adapted reindeer as a new resource in its own way, while selectively accepting, rejecting, or adapting the other “civilizing” intentions of the missionaries and the U.S. government.
To understand the reindeer project requires some background on everyone involved: the Alaska Natives, the Whites who brought the reindeer and managed them, and the situation in Alaska when they met. These provide the background and contexts for an analysis of Native reindeer owners and how they selectively incorporated reindeer into Native subsistence and culture.
Unlike Canadian Inupiaq, Alaska Natives have continued to use the term “Eskimo,” a name conferred by neighboring groups that means “raw flesh eaters.” In the 1890s, they might say they were “Inuit” or “Yuit,” which mean “the people,” and add, “I am Kingikmiut,” “I am Kuskowagmiut,” “Taremiut,” “Tigaramiut,” “Utkiavmiut,” or “Sivokakmete”6—“I am from Kinegan, the Kuskokwim, the coast, Tigara, Utkeavie, or Sivokak”—places Whites called Cape Prince of Wales, the Kuskokwim River, the Arctic Coast, Point Hope, Point Barrow, and Gambell (see Figure 6.1). People traveled from their village base throughout a territory that supported seasonal hunting and gathering rounds, a pattern that led anthropologist Margaret Lantis to call them “excursionists.”7 Identification with a village implied identification with this territory as well and with the subsistence activities it supported.
In most northwestern Alaska villages from 1890 to 1920, there were one or two White Americans. They would not have introduced themselves saying “I am from Kansas,” or “I am a real person,” or even, “I am a White American.” They would say “I am a Christian missionary.” Their identities and support came from Christian service, which infused the version of American culture they represented. Their primary ties were to other missionaries, the government, and sometimes, over time, to the people they came to serve.
Figure 6.1 Northwest Alaska with Reindeer Project Sites. Map by Jennifer Arthur.
Eskimo culture was neither monolithic nor unchanging. There is a split at about the present-day village of Unalakleet: the Yup’ik live south of there and speak the Yup’ik dialect; the Inupiaq, who speak Inup’ik, live North of there and along the Arctic coast. The people of St. Lawrence Island are related to Siberian Eskimos, speak a Yupik dialect, and had little contact with the Alaska mainland. There was considerable local diversity in social organization, family, kinship systems, and local foodways, but much that was common, too.8
I could at one time recite the kinship systems and annual hunting and gathering cycles, village by village that I learned in my Alaska Anthropology class at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in the summer of 1972. I can’t do that anymore but focus here on the subsistence practices that the reindeer project was intended to change.
Almost all able-bodied men hunted; what they hunted and with whom depended on local environment and practice. Each village had a food the people considered particularly “theirs”—walrus for St. Lawrence Island, salmon on the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers, whale and seal at Point Hope and Point Barrow, and caribou inland. The dogs ate the foods considered “inferior” that humans avoided, except in emergencies. The inland Nunamiut hunted their prized caribou communally. Walrus and whale hunting were crew activities, similar in organization and importance for the villagers who valued them.
No area depended on a single food source. That would be a foolish survival strategy in a climate that could affect the migration routes of game and otherwise deplete a food source for a time. The Sivokakmete of St. Lawrence Island hunted walrus from November through March, as well as seals, fish, and birds. The whales ran there in April and May. From June through October, when the pack ice left the island, they might hunt spotted seal, fish, and birds, and gather roots, greens, berries, seaweed, and bird eggs.9 Point Hope, Cape Prince of Wales, and Point Barrow depended on whales, which ran in early spring; they got a second chance in the fall, when the whales migrated south again, except at Point Barrow, where the whales turned to return south and which had only one annual whale run. Before U.S. whalers came, people as far north as Point Hope could catch walrus in late spring. In summer and fall, they hunted caribou, salmon, sea trout, beluga whales, ducks, and eggs; by late October or November, the shore ice would be firm enough to hunt seal; after December, women and old people might “jig” for tomcod through the ice.10
Salmon ran on the lower Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers in late spring and summer. In fall and winter, riverine Yu’pik hunted caribou, moose, or fish and trapped inland. They hunted caribou and birds at spring camps, trapped, fished, and gathered berries. On the coast of the Seward Peninsula, the main foods were walrus, seal, whales, and ducks. By the 1890s, the caribou had left, creating a niche for the reindeer.11
The inland caribou hunters had intensive, communal caribou drives in late spring, when the caribou migrated through the Brooks Range. The Nunamiut also hunted foxes, wolves, wolverines, Grizzly and Polar bears, and a variety of seals.12
Women, girls, and older people also had specific gathering tasks in each locality, fishing and gathering plants and berries. In the spring, families might travel to fish or hunt. In the summers they met to trade with other groups. Everyone needed seal and walrus skins for boat covers, waterproof clothing, and boots. Everyone needed caribou skins for clothes and bedding, and seal and whale oil for fuel and for fat. Coastal mammal hunters traded with inland caribou hunters; St. Lawrence Island traded with Siberians for caribou skins and fat.
These diets were very high in protein. Seal and whale oil are rich in vitamins and minerals and are polyunsaturated to boot. Survival depended on all available food sources and a flexible toolbox of skills. Adult men and sled dogs could eat seven or eight pounds of meat a day, particularly while doing hard work in winter. A family of ten with eight dogs would need 125 pounds of meat daily.13 The labor required to get so much food varied by task and by place. Communal walrus hunting at Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, whaling at Barrow and Point Hope, and caribou drives in the Brooks Range were important socially and religiously as well as for pooling skills and labor.
Social status was achieved through wealth in food, skins, and other needed goods, but only if that wealth was distributed generously. Acquiring the food to share required the support and cooperation of kin, so family, wealth, status, and generosity were all intertwined. The word “kamookbrook,” which means “flesh,” connoted both food and close kin.14 The word for orphan was the same as the word for poor—to be without kin was to be poor. Sharing food with kin was a fundamental obligation, generosity a basic value.15 The word for “rich and powerful person” was “oomalik,” which literally meant “boat owner.” An oomalik had to command the loyalty of a crew composed largely of kin, support his kin and crew, distribute his first catch throughout the village, and give food to anyone who asked for it.16 Cooperation and group survival were more important than individual achievement.
A lot about Alaska Native life might have perplexed Sheldon Jackson. Survival required diverse skills, not specialization. Kin, skill, and community relations determined identity and social standing, not one’s profession. There were no full-time religious specialists or priests. Marriage was easily contracted and easily dissolved. Sex was natural, carried no special moral implications, and might be involved in long-term trading partnerships.17 In some villages, men spent most of their time in a men’s house, or kashigi, and households consisted of women, and boys under age twelve.18 There was no school, no church, no state.
Jackson found much of this barbarous. His mission, he said, was:
[T]o establish English among a people the larger part of whom do not speak or understand the English language. . . .to instruct a people, the greater portion of whom are uncivilized, who need to be taught sanitary regulations, the laws of health, improvement of dwellings, better methods of housekeeping, cooking, and dressing, better methods of labor, honesty, chastity, the sacredness of the marriage relation, and everything that elevates man. So that, side by side with the usual school drill in reading, writing, and arithmetic, there is the need of instruction for the girls in housekeeping, cooking, and gardening, in cutting, sewing, and mending, and for the boys in carpentering, and other forms of wood working, boot and shoe making, and the various tasks of civilization.19
The civilizing influence of the schools, Jackson believed, would instill desires for American material goods and technologies. New industries must be established, because: “The income that was sufficient when the family ate off the ground without dishes, cooked over a fire without a chimney, and slept on the floor under skins of wild beasts, is not sufficient to purchase cook stoves, dishes, tables, chairs, bedsteads, &c.” The schools were “not only to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also how to live better, and how to utilize the resources of the country in order to make more money.”20 There should be instruction in forestry, agriculture, and commercial fishing; girls should learn how to be housewives.21
Of all Jackson’s “civilizing” educational agenda, only housewifery might have worked in northwest Alaska, a place hardly hospitable to forests, agriculture, or sustainable commercial fisheries. Jackson found the solution in 1889, on an inspection tour of Native settlements on the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear. He and the Captain, Michael Healy, observed that the Natives in Siberia herded reindeer, but Alaska Eskimos only hunted them. Domesticated reindeer herding was clearly higher on the ladder of civilization according to the late-19th-century ideology that informed Jackson’s worldview, in which people became more civilized as they progressed from hunting and gathering, to herding, to farming.22 Reindeer herding, Jackson said, was “the only industry that can live and thrive in that region, and take a barbarous people on the verge of starvation, lift them up to a comfortable support and civilization, and turn them from consumers into producers of natural wealth.”23
He raised over $2,000 through appeals in religious newspapers, and in July 1892, imported fifty-three Siberian reindeer and four Siberian herders to establish the first Alaska reindeer herd.24 The next year Congress appropriated $6,000 to fund the venture.25 Between 1892 and 1905, 1,280 reindeer were imported from Siberia, which, with natural increase, numbered 10,241 by 1905. Seventy-eight Alaska Natives were apprenticed as herders at fourteen reindeer stations and earned reindeer each year of their apprenticeships.26 Deciding that the four Siberian herders were themselves “uncivilized,” Jackson arranged in 1894 to hire six Christian Saami from Norway as reindeer instructors. In 1898, another sixty-seven Saami, Finn, and Norwegian families came as contract employees. Eighty-six of the reindeer instructors remained in Alaska, but many became miners, and only eight remained in government service as herders.27
Under Jackson, and even later, there was virtually no distinction among church, state, school, and industrial training. Jackson’s own salary was augmented by mission contributions until 1907.28 Jackson sought teachers who offered examples of Christian home life, and preferred married couples to “unmarried ladies.” In some places, the official missionary and the government teacher were the same person. When a husband and wife worked together as a team, one might officially be the government teacher and the other officially a missionary. More often, when not in the classroom, teachers performed church services and sought converts. They came to teach and convert heathens and didn’t care whether their pay came from the church or the state.
Jackson placed missionaries from only one denomination in each village, a policy that avoided inter-denominational rivalry and led to a religious mosaic of Alaska villages.29 Point Barrow and St. Lawrence Island became Presbyterian; Point Hope, Episcopalian; Cape Prince of Wales, Congregational; Kotzebue, Quaker; Teller, Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran; Golovin, Swedish Evangelical Lutheran; Bethel, Moravian, and so on. Until 1907, the missions supervised the reindeer enterprise: the local missionary was also the local Reindeer Superintendent. Jackson considered the missionaries “the most intelligent and disinterested friends of the Natives,” and believed “that the Natives who most completely come under the mission influence, civilization, and education are the coming men of affairs among their own people, and therefore are also the best men to lead in a new movement.”30 The reindeer, he thought, would attract Alaska Natives to the villages and give the missionaries a way to reward “those families that give evidence of being teachable, advancing in civilization, attentive to the instruction of the mission and exemplary in their lives by establishing them in the reindeer industry.”31
After Jackson retired in 1908, responsibility for the reindeer was transferred to the teachers, but that didn’t change much, since if the teacher and missionary were not actually the same person, they shared similar values and goals. Missionaries and teachers came as representatives of the U.S. government, and of God and Santa Claus, as well.32 The Gambell mission herd actually had two reindeer named Donder and Blixen.33
The government and missionaries imported the “5 R’s” to a place already reeling from change. There were many more sea mammals before White men hunted the walrus for ivory, seals for pelts, and whales for oil and baleen. It is estimated that the Pacific walrus population fell from some 200,000 in the 17th and 18th centuries to at most 45,000 by 1920. The decline most affected villages on the fringes of walrus migration, but it did not seriously affect the Bering Sea islands, where walrus was a crucial food.34 The number of whales plummeted, and it was reported in 1897 that no whales were taken at Point Hope, where they were a primary food.35 Whalers operated in Alaska waters from the 1840s through 1908. They established whaling and trading stations along the arctic coast, brought new goods, like guns and whaling tools, and traded for caribou, disrupting trade between the coastal and inland Inupiaq.36 Still no area suffered a significant depletion of all its game, and it does not appear that starvation was in fact imminent. But the whalers also brought alcohol and diseases that affected the ability to hunt more than any shortage of game.
The diseases devastated Alaska: smallpox, chicken pox, whooping cough, influenza, tuberculosis, measles, and syphilis claimed a third of the population between 1850 and 1900.37 Inupiaq have lived at Point Hope for at least a thousand years; archaeologists uncovered 500 houses in one site there. From 1880 through 1970 the population hovered between only 200 and 300 people, the devastating result of diseases the whalers brought.38 A measles epidemic in 1900 took at least half the Native population of the northern Pacific, Bering Sea, and Arctic regions. In 1902 alone, Point Hope lost 12 percent of its population when a whaler brought measles to the area. Whole villages died on the lower Kuskokwim River. By 1911, 90 percent of the Alaska Natives on the lower Yukon River had tuberculosis. Then came the 1918 influenza epidemic.39 It is difficult to imagine the pain and devastation the survivors endured.
To all this turmoil, add gold rushes to the Klondike in 1896 and Fairbanks in 1902; add 40,000 prospectors who swarmed to Nome beginning in 1899. Short-lived booms brought more social turmoil while they created temporary markets for reindeer meat and freight reindeer.40
Wallace Olsen, my Alaska anthropology professor, reminded his students repeatedly that “Cultures do not meet; people do.” American culture did not meet Alaska Native cultures; specific Americans met specific Alaska Natives. The available sources offer only glimpses into the human beings who were connected through the reindeer enterprise. There’s a bit more personal information about the missionaries in government reports, enough to show that though they shared some common goals, they were personally a diverse lot. There was no “typical missionary.” A few brief biographies suggest the diversity of those who devoted their careers to the “civilizing projects” of religion, education, and reindeer herding.
The missionaries were as culturally diverse as the Alaska Natives. They included John Henry Kilbuck, a Delaware Indian converted and educated by a Moravian missionary. Kilbuck married the missionary’s daughter, Edith, and the Kilbucks helped found the Moravian mission in 1885 at a new town on the Lower Kuskokwim they called Bethel. Kilbuck served in Alaska as a missionary, teacher, and Superintendent of Education for the Western District until he died of typhoid in 1922.41
The Reverend Tollef Brevig, a Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran missionary at the Teller reindeer station, was himself an immigrant to the United States. Born in Norway, Brevig came to the United States at age ten. He graduated from Luther College and from Theological Seminary, married Julia Johnson, and in 1894 was hired as minister for the Saami herders at Teller. He became the government teacher there, and manager of the Teller reindeer herd in 1897, then returned to the U.S. where he lectured on behalf of the Alaska mission most of the time until the spring of 1900. The Brevigs returned to Teller amid the flu and measles epidemics and immediately opened an orphanage at the station. After that, the Eskimos called Reverend Brevig “Apaurak,” “the Father of All,” and Mrs. Brevig “Amarora,” “the Mother of All.”
Through most of 1903–1904 the Brevigs and two of the orphans lived at their farm in Stanwood, Washington. They returned to Teller in July 1905. Brevig’s journals are peppered with concern about his wife’s illnesses and those of their children, two of whom died in Alaska. Mrs. Brevig died in 1908, no doubt in part from the rigors of managing a household in the Arctic for over thirty orphans and her immediate family, while bearing seven children and burying two. Brevig took his five surviving children back to the Washington farm, then returned to Teller in 1913, with his daughter Dagny, who taught while the Norwegian Evangelical Board of Missions paid Brevig. They left for good in 1917.42
The local community adopted Brevig. He was allowed in the kashigi to see ceremonies not ordinarily open to Whites.43 His opinions of his neighbors, though, were not entirely positive. He found the stench in Native homes unbearable. He consciously worked at not acting superior and sought Natives’ confidence to help him win their souls. A much beloved representative of the U.S. government, Brevig was not a native-born citizen. He preached that World War I violated the spirit of the Gospel and was punishment for sin.44
The teachers at Cape Prince of Wales, Harrison Thornton and Thomas Lopp, suggest the importance of personality in establishing trust among the Natives they came to serve.45 The two men applied independently to establish a contract school and founded the Congregational mission at Cape Prince of Wales in 1890. Thornton left for eight months in 1891–1892 and returned with a wife and with a new teacher, Ellen Kittredge, who married Lopp in August 1892. In an “improved and extended” curriculum, “the two ladies organized classes of Eskimo girls to receive instruction in the domestic arts.”46
Lopp, who rivaled Jackson’s influence on the reindeer project, was remembered as a quiet, peaceful man, called “Tom Gorrah,” or “Tom, the Good Man.” He initiated the plan to train apprentices in reindeer herding and to distribute reindeer to them. Lopp learned to speak the Native languages, and the Natives’ regard for him helps explain the success of the reindeer experiment at Wales. Though Lopp represented the Congregational Church, he was not a minister and often relied on Reverend Brevig in some religious matters, though they represented different denominations.
Except for an occasional year-long furlough, Lopp worked in Alaska until 1925. He served as a missionary at Wales until 1905, except for a year when he supervised the U.S. reindeer station at Teller. From 1904 to 1909, he was superintendent of the government schools and supervisor of the reindeer stations in the Northern District. Then, from 1909 until 1925 he was Superintendent of the Alaska Division of the U.S. Bureau of Education, with authority over all the schools and reindeer herds. He established the United States Reindeer Service and secularized the reindeer project, moving control from the mission schoolteachers to school superintendents employed by the Bureau of Education. He broke up the larger government herds and transferred some reindeer to more remote villages to get more reindeer into native hands. Lopp left Alaska in 1925 and worked for two years for the Hudson’s Bay Company as reindeer expert for Baffin-Land and Norway, before he retired in 1927.47
Thornton’s service did not last as long, nor did Thornton himself, who was much less popular than Lopp. In 1893 he won the dubious distinction of being the only missionary who Alaska Natives killed. No sources I have found explain why three Native men killed Thornton. The murder was reportedly mourned in the village, and the murderers were executed by their next of kin, following the obligation to take responsibility for the actions of their kin.48
Finally, Dr. Edgar Omer Campbell, who from 1901 to 1911 was the government teacher at Gambell on St. Lawrence Island. Campbell found his calling in 1892 when he attended a YMCA convention where he met “the picked young men of the West—strong, manly, vigorous, both mentally and physically, the future lawyers, doctors, merchants, ministers, manufacturers, and leading men wherever they should make their homes.” He became convinced of “the manliness and need of an out-and-out life work for the Lord Jesus Christ.”49 Campbell earned his MD and spent a year at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago before Sheldon Jackson recruited him to St. Lawrence Island in 1901. On the way to the Island, Campbell and his wife visited the Brevigs at Teller to observe the reindeer and their management.50
Arriving at Gambell, they rang the school bell to summon the clan leaders. “We told them,” Campbell wrote, “we had come to stay with them, to live for them, and to help them in every way we could.”51 It isn’t clear in what language Campbell made this introduction, or how it was received. Although officially a government teacher, and never paid by a missionary society, Campbell’s chief aim was to civilize and convert heathens. He wrote: “The $1,200 offered me as a teacher to a lonely, isolated village of 250 dirty, greasy, polygamous Eskimos in Bering Sea, with only one mail a year and no companion but my wife, would never have induced me to leave the practice of my profession” but for “the opportunity to do missionary work.”
Without, as far as I know, infringing upon the duties devolving upon me through my commission by the Bureau of Education, I have, as missionary and representative of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, treated the sick (using my own instruments, medicines, and hospital supplies), conducted an orphanage with four inmates in my own rooms, married those who were inclined, baptized the believing, buried the dead, cherished the faint, comforted the sorrowing, and preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to all who would listen.52
The Campbells made the school and mission central village institutions and helped the villagers start a cooperative store in 1910. After they left in 1911, no missionaries stayed long, and many converts returned to their Native religions. By the 1920s, only one or two men were still practicing Christians. Some returned to the Church after a few men requested a missionary. By 1940 the village was about evenly split between people who practiced the old ceremonies and those who didn’t.53
The missionaries as a group were both diverse and incredibly similar. Representing an impressive variety of backgrounds, ethnicities, educations, and denominations, they shared a common sense of mission. They believed in good works, not the Social Gospel. Some believed in a kind of reform Darwinism; most advocated individual effort and evangelical Christianity. They were certain it was their Christian duty to change the Alaska Natives, to teach that their ceremonies, marriage customs, and many subsistence and living habits were sinful and repugnant. They were certain that salvation was necessary and directed their religious teachings to rebirth after death.
To some extent they, too, changed. They adopted some Native survival practices; they were all touched by the solitude of Arctic villages. They had to learn to live there, to get wood and water, drive dog teams, hunt, fish, and run households on limited goods and inspiration. If their yearly shipments didn’t make it, they, like all Arctic dwellers, had to rely on the environment and on their neighbors for material assistance, companionship, and help in emergencies. Their children grew up influenced by Native playmates, speaking Native languages. Some took up their parents’ callings, like missionary daughters Ruth Kilbuck and Dagny Alaska Brevig. Some developed profound respect for Native peoples, but that did not extend to approving of Native morality, family practices, or religion. They tried, at considerable sacrifice, to help people they thought needed them, physically, morally, and spiritually.54
Just as the missionaries accepted some local customs and rejected others, Alaska Natives took what they needed from the missionaries and left the rest. Which brings us, finally, back to our reindeer, last seen in 1892 on their way from Siberia to save Alaska Natives and turn them into self-sufficient nomadic herders, a nation of civilized, converted, specialized, and self-sufficient Christians. The reindeer, it turned out, were much less effective than the missionaries.
Before 1909, two major policies and rationales supported Native ownership. The reindeer were first intended as a major new subsistence source to help a starving population in an area with depleted game. After gold was discovered in Nome and elsewhere in the late 1890s, the emphasis shifted. Eskimos were not to be self-sufficient herders. Rather, they became important but subservient assistants to White development. Jackson wrote, “the Eskimo, trained as a herder or teamster, will prove valuable to the white man, and the white man, in turn, as director and employer, will be valuable to the native.”55
That policy worked best on the Seward Peninsula, with local markets but few caribou, site of the first reindeer industrial school at Teller, and of some of the first herds loaned to missions. Apprentices were supported at the stations for two to five years, and then got a small number of reindeer and were loaned additional reindeer to start their own herds.56 By 1904, thirty-nine Alaska Natives had completed apprenticeships; they employed sixty-one apprentices in their own herds. The government estimated, incorrectly, that at least 400 Native herders, apprentices, and their families got support from reindeer.57 After 1908, when Jackson retired, to be replaced by Lopp in 1909, government policy emphasized greater proportionate ownership of reindeer by Eskimos, rather than the government or missions. The program control became more secular; control of reindeer passed from the missionaries to teachers, but in practice this was a distinction without a difference. Natives were not allowed to sell female reindeer to non-Natives, to prevent their herds from reproducing and growing large enough to become competitors.58 After 1909 Natives could buy reindeer without serving apprenticeships, and Lopp emphasized more extensive Native ownership, because he feared the control of a few powerful Native families. By 1916, almost 1,300 Alaska Natives owned reindeer.59
In 1909 the Reindeer Service arranged for the export of reindeer meat, hides, and horns, and in 1911 the first reindeer meat left Nome for Seattle.60 Lopp and the Barrow teacher, Walter Shields, decided that outside markets required White interest and capital. That opportunity attracted Carl Lomen, who had come to Nome with his father Gudbrand Lomen in 1900 to take advantage of the Nome gold rush. Gudbrand Lomen, a Norwegian immigrant, had, coincidentally, attended college with Tollef Brevig. Shields helped Carl Lomen buy out a Saami herder whose contract ended in 1914. Unlike Alaska Natives, the Saami could sell female reindeer to Whites. By 1929, the Lomens had bought over 14,000 reindeer from Saami and from the Golovin and Teller missions.61
The Lomens quickly worked to dominate the commercial reindeer market, building cold storage facilities and working to generate markets for reindeer meat and bi-products in the Lower 48. Within two years, Carl Lomen had organized Lomen Reindeer and Trading Company, which owned 40,000 reindeer and had over $1.5 million in stock. The Lomens hired some Natives to work with their herds and promised to focus on the export market, leaving the local markets for Native owners. By then, the gold excitement had passed and there was virtually no local market to exploit. 62
The Lomens’ commercial control of the reindeer markets may have influenced Thomas Lopp by the 1920s to change the emphasis on Native ownership of small herds and instead to encourage the consolidation of native reindeer into cooperatively managed or “corporate” herds.63 By then, both the Native owners and their reindeer were adjusting to yet more difficult challenges. The 1918–1919 influenza epidemic had again devastated the Native populations, the local market for reindeer had virtually evaporated, and the reindeer themselves were running out of range to graze as their numbers increased.
The highest estimates placed 640,000 reindeer in Alaska in 1930; that number was probably inflated. Only 250,000 were counted in 1940, which plummeted to 2,500 in 1950. By 2003 there was a modest recovery to 15,000.64 Many reasons are posited for the decline: overstocked ranges, lack of close-herding, predators, and wholesale losses to migrating caribou.
Part of the answer can be found in changing patterns of ownership. I focused on the individual herds Eskimos owned through 1911, especially herds established by 1905, when the government published brief biographies of some of the herders and apprentices. I combined herd histories with all I could learn about their owners: how they managed their herds; relationships with family, mission, and home village; their responses to American religion and education. This information is incomplete, and suggestive at best. There was no information for some apprentices in 1905, nor for many owners after that. Each official reported different information and probably over-represented the herders most influenced by the missionaries. With these caveats, what I could learn about fifty-four Native owners provided a window into different strategies employed to manage the reindeer and incorporate them into Native subsistence and economies.
Because the data are incomplete, each figure about the fifty-four herders should be preceded by “at least.” At least twenty-three of the fifty-four (43 percent) were involved in a family reindeer operation; at least fifteen (28 percent) had other people managing their herds at least part of the time; six (11 percent) were fairly certainly oomaliks; three (6 percent) were children of oomaliks. At least twenty-three (43 percent) were married; eleven (20 percent) had living children; fifteen (28 percent) supported immediate family; nineteen (35 percent) supported extended families. In a period marked by disastrous epidemics, seven (13 percent) inherited their reindeer from a parent; three (6 percent) from husbands. At least eighteen (33 percent) performed some money-making activity; at least eight (15 percent) engaged in subsistence activities like hunting or fishing; thirteen (24 percent) worked for the government or a mission. At least five (9 percent) were Christians; two (4 percent) were definitely not Christians; two (4 percent) were orphans for whom the missionaries had cared; and three (6 percent) were married women for whom they had cared. Five (9 percent) died before 1905. Forty (74 percent) stayed in the reindeer business after 1905; four (7 percent) may have had family connected with reindeer after 1945.
These incomplete figures suggest that reindeer were incorporated into the Native Alaska economy much as other subsistence animals had been—through enterprises comprised of extended kin, often headed by an oomalik already established by skill, kin support, and generosity. I found at least nine discernible extended family herding groups who kept and owned reindeer together, and groups of wealthy men who owned reindeer and supported non-kin as apprentices for their herds. These groups involved thirty-six, or two-thirds of the fifty-four owners.65
It is likely that all owners were also involved in traditional subsistence. It does not take very sophisticated math to know that other food sources were needed. An adult reindeer weighs at most 250 pounds, much of which is bone.66 A man accustomed to eating over five pounds of meat a day would eat at least ten to twenty adult reindeer a year. If he were supporting a family, he might have to kill most of his herd to feed them, too. Most estimates suggest that it would take from 1,000 to 2,000 reindeer to support a family, but that would not allow for supplying village needs, an essential obligation in Native villages.67 In 1905 the largest herds had fewer than 400 reindeer; most people owned fewer than fifty.68 Only one herd in 1911 exceeded 1,000 reindeer.69 Clearly, if reindeer owners were supporting entire extended families, they weren’t doing it on reindeer alone. They all needed some other form of support: traditional foods; wages earned as a government or mission herder, teamster, or mail carrier; independent commercial activity like freighting or selling meat and hides; support from kin; or partial support from a reindeer station during apprenticeship.
The herd sample suggests four broad patterns of reindeer involvement: owners who used reindeer as one resource to buttress their leadership positions; those who herded reindeer as their contribution to supporting extended kin; orphans dependent on the missionaries who supervised the reindeer enterprises; and owners who became government employees and remained primarily tied to the reindeer enterprise.
The first group used their reindeer as oomaliks used other resources: to extend wealth and to offer greater generosity to kin and community. Oomaliks’ statuses were more secure the greater their sources of wealth. Their reindeer helped consolidate their positions of leadership. But reindeer alone could not make an oomalik. Far from making specialized herders of Eskimos, reindeer became one more resource for Native leaders. Two men, Takpuk and Charlie Antisarlook, exemplified this pattern.
To dispel doubts among Natives that they would ever get their own reindeer, in 1895 the government loaned a herd of about 100 reindeer to Charlie Antisarlook, who was well respected from Wales to Cape Nome, and who joined the Teller herd in 1894.70 Antisarlook died in the 1900 measles epidemic, and his widow, Mary Antisarlook, inherited 379 reindeer. Known as “Reindeer Mary,” her 404 reindeer constituted one of the largest herds in 1911.71 The Antisarlook herd extended through a wide network of kin. In 1900 six kin, including the widow of Charlie’s brother, kept reindeer with Mary Antisarlook’s herd. Charlie Antisarlook’s nephews, Sagoonick and Anikravinik, herded for her. In 1911 the family herd included Simon Sagoonick’s sixty-seven reindeer, Fred Anikravinik’s 101, Charlie’s brother Angolook’s 132, and 106 that belonged to another brother.72 Mary Antisarlook eventually remarried but managed her herd and shared its benefits widely with family and friends. Though childless, she raised at least ten children. In January 1939, inflated records numbered her reindeer at 5,000; in 1945 she owned only 234, but still owned reindeer in 1951.73 She earned some profits selling sled reindeer to Nome miners.74 Sagoonick carried the mail between Unalakleet and Kaltag for a time.75 Koktoak, Charlie Antisarlook’s younger brother, freighted awhile for miners, but the herd was never the sole means of support for any of the family.76 They prospected at Nome, went sealing and whaling, and various apprentices and Lapp herders cared for the herd at times.77 A final fact about Charlie Antisarlook. Not only was he an oomalik helping a large extended family; he was a shaman as well. Brevig reported in the Teller station log, “The leading shaman had a confab with the spirits to-night. . . .Four new doctors were with him, guarding the fires; Charley was one of them.”78 Charlie Antisarlook, like an unknown number of the apprentices, never converted to Christianity. It would be consistent with Yup’ik and Inupiaq values of non-aggression and conflict avoidance not to disagree openly with a missionary, but simply to do what was necessary to live at a reindeer station, without relinquishing traditional values and spiritual practices.
Takpuk, the second successful oomalik owner, began his apprenticeship at Barrow in 1898. By 1911 he owned 161 reindeer. He combined his herd with that of his adopted son, Panigeo, who cared for his own reindeer, his father’s, and the reindeer that belonged to James Brower, the son of local trader Charles Brower and his Inupiaq wife. “Tommy Brower” owned an estimated 1,250 reindeer at Point Barrow in 1948.79 Takpuk owned a frame house, supported his family, a large whaling crew, and a workforce of men who trapped for him. He helped the Barrow missionary supervise the local reindeer. In 1909 the Barrow teacher reported that one of his most promising students married the daughter of “our richest Native, Takpuk, who has somewhere around $14,000 worth of whalebone in the storehouse this year, and is our biggest reindeer owner.” Of the thirteen whales caught at Barrow that year, Takpuk’s crew caught four.80 Perhaps Takpuk wanted reindeer to increase his sources of wealth; perhaps he accepted them and helped the Barrow missionary and trader because they could provide access to other resources useful to his village and kin.81
The second group of owners were people who herded to contribute to the support of an extended family group, who received help from kin for taking that responsibility, and who might be relieved from time to time to do other things. Takpuk’s son, Panigeo, and the apprentices who cared for Mary Antisarlook’s herd, exemplify this pattern. At Cape Prince of Wales and on St. Lawrence Island, families enrolled young boys in the apprenticeship program, planning for them to contribute support to their family, or, on St. Lawrence Island, their clan. Those two herds were among the most successful and most integral to their village economies, so this herding strategy seems significant, especially since the two villages were dissimilar in other respects.82
The third group consisted of orphans who came under strong mission influence, and who were most dependent on the missionaries for education, identity, and support. This pattern was most common where kin support was least dependable, as was the case in the new settlements at Teller and Bethel, and places especially hard hit by the 1900 measles epidemic. Several of the Teller herders had close ties to the Brevig family, especially Ablikak, son of an apprentice who died in the 1900 epidemic, leaving seventy-five reindeer. His widow gave Brevig her twelve-year-old son to raise, and the reindeer as well. Ablikak lived with the Brevigs, accompanied them to Washington for two years, then returned to Washington in 1905 to attend parochial school. His herd increased steadily, though he did little to manage it. In 1911, when he was twenty-three years old, he owned 420 reindeer, one of the largest herds in Alaska.83 Mission support and the chance to earn reindeer offered extraordinary assistance and access to a comfortable living for youngsters who had no kin and were therefore poor.
The final group consisted of government employees hired to supervise herds, who remained tied to the reindeer enterprise. There is much less personal information available about them or how the reindeer affected them. Their fortunes changed considerably after 1909, when herd supervisors began being paid in reindeer rather than in cash or supplies. The number of apprentices fell then, and it is likely that the supervisors’ herds were not large enough to support apprentices.
Before 1910, a few Alaska Natives got most of their support from work with reindeer. After herd supervisors began receiving pay in reindeer rather than currency, fewer people wanted the jobs, and there was less opportunity for government work than when the industry was new.84 This pattern emphasizes that a specialist in the Arctic needed to be tied to an outside agency for support. There weren’t many jobs for reindeer specialists, nor many ways to subsist on reindeer alone.
Instead of becoming reindeer specialists, the Native owners used reindeer to supplement and stabilize existing food supplies, following a basic rule of Arctic survival: never depend on a single food source. Reindeer themselves were subject to unpredictable disease and problems of winter pasturage. Few people could devote all their energy to a supplementary activity, so herd owners needed the support of kin or an outside agency. Mission and government personnel complained that the herders wouldn’t spend all their time with the herd and consider it their home. Most remained excursionists with strong ties to villages and kin. Reindeer herding did not necessarily, or usually, change fundamental Native values and practices. The major exceptions were orphans raised at missions, who in a sense followed the tradition of respecting those who extended generosity and cared for them.
The reindeer never became a primary food, but were rather a new source of necessary goods, especially hides. As the inland caribou hunters moved to the northern coast, and as the Seward Peninsula caribou disappeared, reindeer became a new source of caribou products. The St. Lawrence Island herd allowed the Natives there to stop trading with the Siberians, whom they greatly feared.
St. Lawrence, too, illustrates a final point: success with reindeer usually operated separately from the other cornerstones of Jackson’s civilization plan. As elsewhere in the 1920s, ownership changed in 1923 from individuals to a communal joint stock company. A chief herder supervised the operation. Teenage boys worked as replacement herders and remembered the camps as “lot of fun.” The three annual reindeer roundups were major social events. The Reindeer Company merged with the Gambell and Savoonga stores on the Island to form a single cooperative; in 1925 there were 4,629 shares of reindeer stock, and shareholders could claim a ten percent annual dividend, or one reindeer for each ten shares. As elsewhere, the herd began to decline by the 1940s. There was no herding for at least five years: the range was overgrazed, and the animals starved. St. Lawrence Island, unlike the mainland, had no ready access to markets, and no caribou, so its herds didn’t run off with wild reindeer. And, despite Jackson’s dreams for his “5 R’s”, the period of greatest reindeer success came in the 1920s and 1930s, after most of the Natives had left the Church.85
The 1920s were also a turning point on the mainland. Many established owners died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Mining declined, most Whites left, and the local markets shrank. Because the Lomens controlled the export trade, they began buying reindeer at their trading posts on the Seward Peninsula, which functioned like company stores. By 1933, reindeer owners owed the Lomens $45,000, and the Lomens began offering $2 a reindeer to liquidate the debts.86 By the 1930s, fur trapping was more profitable than reindeer, and more compatible with seasonal subsistence rounds. The reindeer exceeded the carrying capacity of the range, and Natives began using them for trap bait. In 1937, when the Reindeer Act restricted ownership of domestic reindeer to Alaska Natives, it became clear that there had been large losses or wildly inflated herd estimates on the books of the Native ownership associations.87
The reindeer could be incorporated into traditional subsistence arrangements but could not easily transform them. They succeeded best when they were incorporated into extended kin operations and declined after the decision to undermine the powerful reindeer families. As part of a kin network, a herder could leave the reindeer and participate in village life and other activities. After the responsibility passed to hired herders with no other stake in the animals, the herders sometimes abandoned the herds, which was when large losses occurred.
Success in herding, as in all else, required kin support and generosity. Oomaliks did a better job with reindeer than the joint stock companies did. Most of the Native owners remained Yup’ik or Inupiaq first, responsible to kin and the village community. Most of the missionaries left Alaska. The reindeer owners maintained their herds only so long as they served their basic obligations to village and kin. Many reindeer became good Alaskans—they followed the pull of kinship to join their wild caribou cousins.
Notes
I spent several weeks during 1972 in Nulato, an Athabascan village on the lower Yukon River, visiting a friend who served there in the Teacher Corps. I am grateful to the people of Nulato for their hospitality and for the opportunity briefly to experience winter in a bush village. This essay is excerpted from a much longer, 210–page study submitted in fulfillment of a degree requirement for the University of Michigan Program in American Culture. I did the primary research during the summer of 1972, when I studied Alaska anthropology and history at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. It owes a great deal to my anthropology professor, Dr. Wallace Olsen, and to Dr. Herman Slotnick, my professor in History of Alaska. I was fortunate, as well, to learn from Alaska Native students at the U of A, and from members of the distinguished Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan, particularly Mick Taussig, my Social Anthropology professor, who supported my sojourn in Nulato in the middle of his course, and Joseph Jorgenson, who read my paper and offered comments. I’m grateful to all, none of whom are responsible for my work. I’m grateful, too, to John Heaton, who invited me to speak at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2019, for the opportunity to revisit Fairbanks and for his gracious hospitality.
Additional Sources: Most of the literature on Alaska reindeer concerns the reindeer themselves. Much less has addressed the social agenda that brought them to Alaska or the human and social outcomes of the reindeer project. A good example is David R. Klein, “The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island,” The Journal of Wildlife Management 32:2 (April 1968): 350–67. The most important recent contribution to that literature was published just months before my 2007 lecture: Roxanne Willis, “A New Game in the North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1890–1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 37:3 (Autumn 2006): 277–301. I cite it in this article but do not highlight Willis’s analysis of the increasing economic power of the Lomen family in the marketing and capitalist control of the reindeer. Sveta Yamin-Pasternak and Igor Pasternak, “Cooking and Commensality Along the Bering Food Bridge,” Études Inuit Studies 45:1–2 (2021), 259–82, records a story from Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island, that indicates that reindeer fat and reindeer meat remain a part of the local diet. Apparently, there are still reindeer on the Island, and they remain a part of the diet there (260–61). The article does not address how the reindeer are owned or managed.
1 The preferred term for the indigenous people of Alaska is Alaska Native, or simply Native.
2 For more on Jackson’s career, see John Thomson Faris, The Alaskan Pathfinder: The Story of Sheldon Jackson (New York: F. H. Revell, 1926); Robert Stewart, Sheldon Jackson: Pathfinder and Prospector of the Missionary Vanguard in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 2nd ed. 1908); J. Arthur Lazell, Alaskan Apostle: The Life Story of Sheldon Jackson (New York: Harper, 1960); Norman J. Bender, Winning the West for Christ: Sheldon Jackson and Presbyterianism on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, 1869–1880 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); Karl Ward and Karl Wood, “A Study of the Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 33:4 (December 1955): 229–37; Karl Ward, “A Study of the Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska—II,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 34:4 (December 1956): 245–56.
3 The Organic Act of 1884 provided for an appointed governor and a U.S. federal district court. Class notes, History 341, Alaskan History, Professor Herman Slotnick, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, summer, 1972; Claus M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, eds., Alaska: A History of the 49th State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 73; Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso, eds., Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), xxii. In 1905, Alaska became a territory and gained a Congressional Delegate; the 1912 Second Organic Act created a territorial legislature with sharply restricted power. For a readable introduction to these periods of Alaska history, see Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York: Random House, 1957), chaps. 2 through 5.
4 Preferred ethnic terms change historically. When I was in Alaska in 1972, the preferred terms were Inuit and Yuit; Eskimo was not considered a racial insult, as it is in Canada. In my 2007 lecture, I used Yuit and Inuit. In 1977, delegates to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference officially rejected the term “Eskimo” and adopted “Inupiaq” as their preferred designation. Unlike the Arctic Peoples of Canada and Greenland, Alaskan Natives have continued to use “Eskimo” rather than “Inupiaq,” in both written and oral language. Here I have used the terms preferred on the website of the Alaska Federation of Natives, https://www.nativefederation.org/, accessed August 9, 2021. I also sometimes use Natives or Alaska Natives to connote, in this case, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Yupik. I use Eskimo at times to connote all three groups and because it was a term in common use in the period of this study. It was the common form of self-reference in 1972, when I was in Alaska, and continues in common usage.
5 In American slang, the “Three R’s,” which constitute the building blocks of education, are reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. Add religion and reindeer, and you have the Five R’s.
6 The suffix “miut” or “mete” means “of” or “from” some place.
7 Margaret Lantis, “Introduction of Reindeer Herding to the Natives of Alaska,” in Human Problems in Technological Change, ed. Edward H. Spicer (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1952), 127–48.
8 Wendell H. Oswalt, Alaskan Eskimos (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1967), xii; Charles Campbell Hughes, An Eskimo Village in the Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), 1.
9 See Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 102–7, 115–17, 131; James W. Vanstone, Point Hope: An Eskimo Village in Transition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 40–57; Robert F. Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo: A Study in Ecology and Society (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959), 177–82.
10 Vanstone, Point Hope, 28–64; Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 26; Sheldon Jackson, Thirteenth Annual Report on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904), 112–13. (This report and all others will, after the first citation, be called by the year of the report, i.e., “1904 Report”; when that year differs from the publication year, the reference is to the year the report was submitted).
11 Wendell Oswalt, Mission of Change in Alaska (San Bernardino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1963), 117–27.
12 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 33.
13 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 142–43; Vanstone, Point Hope, 69.
14 Charles D. Brower, Fifty Years Below Zero (London: Robert Hale, 1942), 184.
15 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 38.
16 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 147–58, 171–81; Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 103–6; Vanstone, Point Hope, 38–58.
17 For marriage practices, see Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 44, 77–79, 84–85, 87; Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 38, 245; Vanstone, Point Hope, 77; Oswalt, Mission of Change, 139; Harrison Robertson Thornton, Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, 1890–93; edited and annotated by Neda S. Thornton and William H. Thornton, Jr. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1931), 100, 107.
18 Throughout most Alaskan Inupiaq and Yu’pik communities, but not on St. Lawrence Island, the men’s house was an important village institution, variously called kashim, kaszgi, kashigi, karigi, etc., depending on the locality. These were centers of male activity, where boys learned skills and were initiated into male roles. On the lower Kuskokwim, the men lived in the kashigi, moving in when they were about twelve years old; an orphan might move in earlier. Men might visit their wives and children during the day and might leave the kashigi late at night to sleep with their wives, returning in early morning. A household usually consisted of a maternal line of women and male children under twelve. See Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 44 and Oswalt, Mission of Change, 51–58, 135–39.
19 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Education in Alaska (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1886), 22–23.
20 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Education in Alaska, 30.
21 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Education in Alaska, 30–31.
22 Sheldon Jackson, Introduction of Reindeer Into Alaska: Preliminary Report of the General Agent of Education for Alaska to the Commissioner of Education, 1890 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 9–10, 13–14 (hereinafter “1890 Report”). For press support of the project based on Darwinian theory and the ladder of civilization model, see Ward, “Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska—II”, 250.
23 Sheldon Jackson, Introduction of Domestic Reindeer Into Alaska 1893 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 16.
24 1890 Report, 6, 27.
25 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer Into Alaska 1895 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 13.
26 Sheldon Jackson, Fifteenth Annual Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1905 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 8, 10–11.
27 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1897 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 10; Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1898 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 14; Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1899 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 11; Dean F. Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen: A Study of Native Management in Transition (College, AK: Institute of Social, Economic and Government Research, University of Alaska, 1969), 10–11.
28 1886 Report, 30.
29 1886 Report, 34.
30 Sheldon Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1894 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), 14.
31 Sheldon Jackson, Twelfth Annual Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1902 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 24.
32 There is a North Pole, Alaska, a small community in the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
33 1902 Report, 13.
34 Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 143.
35 1898 Report, 95.
36 Class Notes, Wallace Olsen, Anthropology 341, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, August 1, 1972; Vanstone, Point Hope, 21. Baleen imports into San Francisco for selected years were: 1885, 441,400 pounds; 1887, 561,694 pounds; 1889, 291,400 pounds; 1901, 76,550 pounds; 1904, 102,000 pounds; 1905, 38,200 pounds; Vanstone, Point Hope, 24.
37 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 18.
38 Vanstone, Point Hope, 18.
39 Vanstone, Point Hope, 24; Brower, Fifty Years Below Zero, 187–88; Oswalt, Mission of Change, 48, 83–84; Sheldon Jackson, Tenth Annual Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska 1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 9–10. For accounts of other epidemics, see United States Bureau of Education Alaska School Service, Report on Education of the Natives of Alaska and the Reindeer Service, 1910–11 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 10; 1904 Report, 103; Thornton, Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, 25.
40 See for instance Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 26, 38, 71.
41 Oswalt, Mission of Change, 22, 37, 85; 1904 Report, 17; United States Department of Education, Report on Education in Alaska, 1908–1909 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 1348.
42 Dr. J. Walter Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska: Social Pioneering Among the Eskimos (translated and compiled from the records of Reverend Tollef L. Brevig, “Pioneer Missionary to the Eskimos of Alaska from 1894–17”) (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1944), 62, 97, 323–34.
43 Dr. J. Walter Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 69.
44 Dr. J. Walter Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 76, 79, 82, 108–9, 122, 128, 143, 205, 293; 1903 Report, 45.
45 William Thomas Lopp was called Tom or Thomas during his time in Alaska. He sometimes submitted reports as W. T. Lopp. I have chosen to call him Thomas Lopp, as he was known by the Natives he served, and in recognition of their name for him, “Tom Gorrah—Tom, the Good Man.” Roxanne Willis refers to Lopp as William Lopp in, “A New Game in the North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1890–1940,” Western Historical Quarterly 37:3 (Autumn 2006): 277–301. They are the same person.
46 Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 45; Thornton, Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, vii–xiv, xi, xvii-xix.
47 1906 Report, 56-8; Thornton, Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, xix–xx.
48 Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 45, 48; Thornton, Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, xxv.
49 “Annual Report of Gambell Reindeer Station,” in 1902 Report, 67–87.
50 “Annual Report of Gambell Reindeer Station,” 68; 1903 Report, 77; “Annual Report of Gambell Reindeer Station,” in 1902 Report, 173.
51 “Annual Report of Gambell Reindeer Station,” 173.
52 1906 Report, 64.
53 Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 312–13, 323–24.
54 1908–1909 Report, x–xi; 1903 Report, 98, letter dated October 5, 1903; Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 126; 1903 Report 112, 114, and 119; 1896 Report, 47; Report of J. C. Widstead, Superintendent, Teller Reindeer Station, June 30, 1896, in 1896 Report.
55 1903 Report, 21; see also statement of Sheldon Jackson in 1904 Report, 14–15.
56 1895 Report, 67.
57 1904 Report, 16.
58 See 1906 Report, 14–41, 76; Report of W.T. Lopp on “Education of Natives of Alaska, United States Bureau of Education,” Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 13, 1913 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914), 632–42.
59 1908–09 Report, 1322–26; United States Bureau of Education, Report on the Work of the Bureau of Education for the Natives of Alaska, 1915–1916 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1917), 18.
60 United States Bureau of Education, Report on Education of Natives of Alaska and the Reindeer Service, 1910–11 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 24.
61 See Carl J. Lomen, Fifty Years in Alaska (New York: David McKay Company, 1954), 24; Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 13.
62 Lomen, Fifty Years in Alaska, 90. For more on the Lomens’ control of the reindeer industry, see Willis, “A New Game in the North,” esp. 293–99.
63 For more, see Willis, “A New Game in the North,” 295.
64 Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, v, 14–16.
65 Compiled from Sheldon Jackson, Fifteenth Annual Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, 1905 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906), 12, 20–34.
66 1903 Report, 53.
67 Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 119–21.
68 Compiled from Herd Records, 1905 Report, 20–22.
69 Compiled from Herd Records, 1910–1911 Report, 81–91.
70 1894 Report, 14–15, 46, 67; 1896 Report, 14.
71 Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 23.
72 Note the missionary influence on names, using a person’s Native birth name for a surname, and assigning an English name for a first name.
73 1905 Report, 25.
74 1903 Report, 29.
75 1905 Report, 32.
76 1905 Report, 29.
77 1905 Report, 29, Brower, Fifty Years Below Zero,177; 1895 Report, 120, 123–24; 1896 Report, 54–55.
78 1895 Report, 111.
79 Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 70.
80 1903 Report, 58; 1908–1909 Report, III–IV.
81 I am grateful to Dr. Josephine Smart who made this observation in the discussion following my lecture.
82 For the St. Lawrence Island herd, see 1900 Report, 17, 37; 1905 Report, 28, 32; 1902 Report, 80, 131; 1903 Report, 731; 1904 Report, 88; for Cape Prince of Wales, see 1905 Report, 27–29, 31, 33; 1908–1909, LIX; Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 71–73; 1902 Report, 61; 1896 Report, 100; 1899 Report, 109; 1903 Report, 65.
83 Johnshoy, Apaurak in Alaska, 152–53, 226; 1900 Report, 144; 1905 Report, 24.
84 Spencer, The North Alaskan Eskimo, 252–55, 299–306, 310–13; Hughes, An Eskimo Village, 65–70.
85 Oswalt, Mission of Change, 25–29, 35–36, 65–70, 75–77.
86 Oswalt, Mission of Change, 20–22, 24, 37.
87 Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 48–49, 65, 88.