James Baquet Few people today remember that the 49th U.S. state, Alaska, was once in the hands of the Russians. When its 1,518,800 square kilometers were purchased in 1867 at a cost of US$7.2 million, it nearly doubled the size of the country. (It didn’t become a state, though, until 1959.) Today, Russia and the U.S. are separated by the Bering Strait, which is only 82 kilometers at its narrowest point. The area had been occupied by native peoples for millennia when the Russians established their first temporary colony in the 17th century. Three years after the first expedition returned with otter pelts in 1741, the first permanent settlement was established. From then until 1800 the Spanish unsuccessfully attempted to assert their control over the area. The Russians, in fact, at one point penetrated all the way to northern California. However, things were not easy in those rough-and-tumble days. In 1784, at the ironically named Refuge Rock, a Russian trader named Grigory Shelekhov took 130 armed men and attacked a tribe called in their native tongue the Qik’rtarmiut Sugpiat’d. The Russians slaughtered approximately 200 to 500 men, women and children, though some sources set the number massacred as high as 3,000. Five decades later, an old man who survived the slaughter told a Finnish ethnographer, “The Russians went to the settlement and carried out a terrible blood bath. Only a few [people] were able to flee...Since then the island [where it happened] has been uninhabited. After this every chief had to surrender his children as hostages; I was saved only by my father’s begging and many sea otter pelts.” Though the slaughter was not repeated, the people were subjected to harsh conditions tantamount to slavery. In under a century – from 1741 to 1834 – the native population of the Aleutian Islands was reduced from 8,000 to 2,000 people. The massacre itself has been called “the Wounded Knee of Alaska,” equating it to the slaughter of several hundred Native Americans (almost half of them women and children) by U.S. troops in South Dakota in 1890. Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. journey made for a specific purpose 2. equivalent to; the same as 3. forced to undergo 4. people held as a guarantee 5. characterized by violent, disorderly activity 6. small, aquatic, fur-bearing mammal 7. from Finland 8. one who studies individual cultures 9. animal skins 10. not occupied | 