The Little Ice Age and Colonialism: An Analysis of Co-Crises for Coastal Alaska Native Communities in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Abstract

Native communities confronted Eurasian colonialism in ways that reflected their own unique histories, social organizations and cultural values. In this paper, we are interested in how such legacies shaped Indigenous survivance, the active presence of Indigenous peoples on the landscape or the refusal to disappear or assimilate into settler society. We seek to understand the climate changes that Native Alaskan Sugpiaq people faced during the Little Ice Age (LIA; ca. CE 1400–1850), how they responded to those changes prior to Russian incursion, and how new or renewed climate adaptations shaped Sugpiaq survivance. Drawing insight from a new multi-proxy analysis of climate change, ecological dynamics, human population history, archaeology, and ethnohistory of the Kodiak Archipelago, we argue that changes in climate variance during the LIA contributed to Sugpiaq cultural elaboration in the centuries prior to Russian colonialism. Persistent cultural values and relationships with marine resources, adaptations of those relationships under expanded levels of harvesting, and responses to evolving opportunities and political realities were key legacies carried into colonial circumstances by Sugpiaq people. In addition, we see the foundational role of Sugpiaq women in procuring and sharing subsistence foods and the development of regional Indigenous identities as important factors in Sugpiaq survivance in the Russian colonial period. While colonialism introduced novel threats, Sugpiaq people confronted those challenges with the tools and values they inherited from their past, and they persisted through the active deployment of creative and culturally appropriate responses to the co-crises of colonialism and climate unpredictability.

1. Introduction

Studies of colonialism in the Americas commonly treat contact as a singular and transformative event that eclipses whatever history and heritage Indigenous people may have carried into the new situation [1,2]. Often these accounts present Indigenous communities as passive victims of seemingly inevitable colonial expansion. As such, they strip the native experience of its own agency and history [3]. Despite growing consciousness of Indigenous agency, scholarly treatment of Native American histories, as told by outsiders, mostly perpetuates the sense of discontinuity between “pre-contact” and “colonial” narratives of change. Archaeologists may be particularly guilty of this error for both methodological and conceptual reasons related to the different character of source materials available for “prehistoric” vs. “historic” archaeological narratives. Here we seek to bridge this divide by examining ways that Sugpiaq adaptations to climate changes prior to Russian arrival prepared them to respond to Russian colonial pressures.

The Sugpiaq of the central Gulf of Alaska are a maritime-focused people whose ancestors have been harvesting the natural abundance of the land and seascapes around the Kodiak Archipelago and surrounding coasts for at least 7500 years (Figure 1). They have not only endured but thrived in a region prone to violent storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and climate-induced ecosystem changes [4,5,6]. In the last millennium, the Sugpiaq population on Kodiak had reached at least 10,000 people. They used a range of intensive food harvesting technologies, negotiated far-reaching alliances, waged war on distant enemies, and lived in moderately stratified communities with elite ownership and maintenance of large hunting boats, community structures, and some resource hotspots [6,7].

Russian explorers and entrepreneurs entered Sugpiaq territory for the first time in the mid-18th century CE, establishing their first Alaskan colony in 1784. It is significant that Russian colonization coincided with the later part of the Little Ice Age (LIA: 1400–1850 CE). In the Gulf of Alaska, the LIA manifested as a generally cool period punctuated by intervals of higher and lower variability. Our analysis of climate proxy evidence indicates that, in the century before Russian contact, Sugpiaq people faced a significant climatic shift that would have compelled them to adapt in ways that gave them a measure of resilience to the unanticipated hardships imposed by Russian conquest and control. This paper seeks to understand how this may have played out, using archaeological, documentary, and oral historical information currently available.

This is a study of what Gerald Vizenor [8] termed survivance, the active presence of Indigenous peoples on the landscape or the refusal to disappear or assimilate into settler society [9]. Our goal in this paper is to situate Sugpiaq survivance during Russian colonialism within a longer cultural history of socio-ecological adaptation, inherited Sugpiaq kin structures, and creative resilience. How did pre-contact adjustments, within an enduring Sugpiaq worldview and way of living, influence Sugpiaq responses to colonialism in the late 18th and 19th centuries?

In what follows we construct a ‘historical’ model exploring colonial survivance rooted in Sugpiaq pre-contact history. The model is developed from an original analysis of multi-proxy evidence for climate change in the Gulf of Alaska that is then reflected against evidence of pre-contact and colonial-era developments. In the process, we seek to integrate modes of Western theory and scholarship and traditional knowledge in a novel way by framing this model in terms of core Sugpiaq values. These values are among the most durable cultural constructs and, we argue, least likely to have been altered by waves of colonial impact and cultural change. While elements of the model are hypothetical and should be clarified as more information comes to light, the account presented is scaffolded by multiple lines of available evidence. By framing the discussion in reference to core Sugpiaq values, we hope the analysis is also more culturally coherent than is typical of academic analyses of Indigenous responses to colonialism.

2. The Sugpiat of Kodiak: Indigenous Values as Resilience

The Sugpiat are an Alaska Native people from the central Gulf of Alaska (GoA), which includes the Kodiak Archipelago, Alaska Peninsula, Outer Kenai Coast, and Prince William Sound. Our primary relationship with Sugpiaq communities is in Old Harbor, which is one of ten tribal communities on Kodiak. Today, as in centuries past, Old Harbor residents harvest a variety of coastal and marine foods from the highly productive waters of the region. The Alutiiq1 Tribe of Old Harbor and the Old Harbor Native Corporation (the main Indigenous organizations that represent and support the Old Harbor community) have worked tirelessly to ensure continued access to their homelands for subsistence, ceremony, and economic engagement. We have collaborated with these organizations on projects related to Sugpiaq archaeology and youth education and made many lasting personal and professional relationships. These relationships have shaped our thinking about Sugpiaq pasts by grounding our scholarship in the values that shape community life in the village.

2.1. Kodiak Sugpiaq History

Archaeologists typically subdivide Kodiak history into four or five periods (

Table 1. Cultural traditions of the Sugpiaq region (after [6]).

Named Traditions	Time Range	Primary Characteristics
Ocean Bay	7500–4000 cal BP	Small and seasonally mobile groups who hunted sea mammals and harvested fish and other marine resources. Early Ocean Bay people may have lived primarily in tents and specialized in chipped stone tools. They armed their darts and spears with microblades made by a technique reminiscent of terminal Pleistocene traditions in Alaska and Siberia. Later Ocean Bay groups commonly lived in small sod houses and their lithic industry became dominated by ground slate tools.
Kachemak	4000–700 cal BP	The first durable villages appear at the start of this period. Labor-intensive net fishing and processing strategies for the first time make it possible to store summer harvests for consumption in the winter lean season. Around 2500 years ago, increased crowding may have promoted growing social unrest and political competition. People started marking status with conspicuous displays of art (e.g., elaborately decorated stone lamps) and jewelry made from exotic materials. The earliest defensive sites appear a few hundred years before the end of this period.
Koniag	700 cal BP to CE 1784	The apogee of Kodiak Indigenous political development and population growth, this period saw the expansion of sod-house villages to unprecedented size (50+ houses not uncommon), gradual transition to multi-room houses and co-residence of extended kin groups. Heads of large families emerged as influential chiefs who directed the labor of kin and slaves captured in war-raids against distant enemies. Russians make first contact in 1763, but have limited influence on Kodiak people until they return 21 years later.
Russian Colonial Period	CE 1784–1867	Many Sugpiaq people were defeated at the Awa’uq defensive site in Southeast Kodiak and villages around the archipelago were coerced into hunting sea otter and fur seals for the Russian fur trade. Sugpiaq men were conscripted into work parties and sent ever greater distances to harvest furs. Women were often compelled to provide food, clothing, and services for the Russian fur traders and many married Russian and Siberian colonists. Native populations plummeted through harsh treatment, disease and relocation. By 1840, only 7 Native villages remained out of well over 100 before contact.
U.S. Colonial Period	CE 1867-present	The U.S. purchase of Alaska in 1867 led to fevered exploration of the territory for exploitable raw materials. Around Kodiak, salmon and remaining sea otters drew intense interest. Commercial fishing, canneries, and hatcheries were established around Kodiak by the 1890s. Through the mid-20th century, boom and bust fishing fortunes flooded communities with cash then crippled them with unemployment. Political organization at local, state, and federal levels settled land claims in 1971, and Native Corporations were formed to develop the resource capital of allocated lands. Cultural heritage is playing a strong role in revitalization. Archaeology, language revival, and oral history have become tools for restoring Sugpiaq pride.

): Ocean Bay, Kachemak, Koniag, and Alutiiq/Sugpiaq, which may be divided, as here, into Russian and U.S. colonial periods. Ethnographically, Kodiak communities were traditionally matrilocal, with husbands moving into the villages of their wives (a tradition still common today) [10] (p. 72). Elder Sugpiaq women were typically the owners of their family sod house, wherein resided several generations of their descendants, and these women controlled the processing and distribution of food [11]. Village life was structured by ranked relations of relative power and influence. Families competed to amass surplus stored food and other items to share in competitive feasts. Village chiefs came from the more powerful/wealthy families, a role that was bestowed upon men by Elders (likely the female heads of matrilineages). Chiefs maintained the most productive resource hotspots for their families and initiated war raids. Early on, these raids targeted neighboring families, but by the 16th and 17th centuries, regionally allied war parties traveled hundreds of kilometers to attack enemies in the eastern Aleutians and Southeast Alaska. Raids gave warriors opportunities to earn status while capturing women and children to contribute as slaves to family surplus production back home. Large populations were fed by a combination of extensive and intensive harvesting on the open ocean, shores and rivers. These included fishing from numerous riverine and intertidal weirs, using infrastructure that expanded dramatically in the Koniag period [6] (p. 67).

Sugpiaq peoples first interacted with Russians in late 1762 and early 1763, when a Russian ship overwintered in southern Kodiak. Organized military resistance rebuffed the Russians, earning Kodiak Islanders a reputation as formidable defenders [12]. This reputation kept other Russian vessels away until 1784, when Gregorii Shelikhov, seeking to profit from the sea otter wealth of the islands, loaded his merchant ships with cannons and launched a surprise attack on the southeastern side of the archipelago [12,13,14,15]. This attack resulted in a massacre of Sugpiaq peoples at a defensive site on the outer coast of Sitkalidak Island [16]. Following this traumatic event, Shelikhov and his subordinates used continued violence to take political control of the archipelago. Shelikhov’s men took wives and children of village leaders as hostages to gain compliance, if not loyalty, following a common practice from the Russian conquest of Siberia [17]. Shelikhov then extracted tribute of marine mammal skins and food. Under colonial conditions of violence and starvation, the Sugpiaq population declined from the first decades of colonial encroachment [18] (p. 193) [19] (p. 123). A particularly devastating turn was a smallpox epidemic from 1837 to 1838, which reduced the Native population across Alaska to a small fraction of its size at contact [20] (pp. 58–60) [21].

The first center of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company (predecessor of the Russian American Company) was set up on southeast Kodiak in Three Saints Bay. That settlement was not far from the modern village of Old Harbor, where we collaborate with Sugpiaq residents to better understand their rich history and heritage through archaeology, oral history and documentary analyses. The epicenter of Russian American colonial intervention soon moved away from Old Harbor, first to Kodiak (Saint Paul’s Harbor) in 1792 and then to Sitka (New Archangel) in 1804, but Sugpiaq people from the Old Harbor area and around Kodiak remained entangled in colonial power.

2.2. Kodiak Sugpiaq Values

To this day, Sugpiaq people articulate a series of values that guide their sense of relation to each other and the ecology of their region [6,22]. Like other people of the boreal and Arctic regions, the Sugpiaq worldview sees human and non-human beings in kinship relations [23]. As such, humans are understood to have moral responsibilities within the social and natural environment to other humans and to non-human kin. These responsibilities can be divided into three broad values, which have been shared with us through many conversations about harvesting, food, and village life with Sugpiaq community members living in Old Harbor. These values are stewardship, reciprocity, and gratitude.

Good stewardship ensures the health of relatives (particularly non-human ‘kin’) so that they will continue to thrive and return to bring sustenance to Sugpiaq communities. Stewardship involves supporting the wellbeing of valued species through habitat enhancement (improving habitat, culling predators, weeding) or increasing capture reliability to minimize waste (e.g., construction of intertidal and riverine weirs). It involves taboos against hunting breeding females or harvesting before enough animals have reached their spawning/nesting grounds or rookeries (e.g., escapement monitoring, first salmon ceremonies timed after enough fish have made it to spawning grounds). Knowledge of these practices is preserved in Gulf of Alaska Native traditional knowledge today [24,25,26,27,28].

Reciprocity encompasses the ethic of relationality, or the understanding that all beings are interconnected. In relation to kinship, reciprocity involves obligations to ‘share with’ and ‘give back to’ kin (human and non-human) who have shown kindness over time [29]. The primary strategy for resilience that emerges from reciprocity is sharing. Families and communities shared (and share) resources with one another and even shared beyond their immediate communities during winter feasting events [4,6]. This reciprocity ensured that people had enough to eat and discouraged the hoarding of resources in times of stress. It also served as a primary currency for negotiating status between communities and productive kin groups.

Ceremonies for giving thanks to non-human kin are an important part of Sugpiaq cosmology and are rooted in a deep respect for the natural world that sustains human life. Gratitude undergirds stewardship and reciprocity-based strategies for resilience. It facilitates the formation of moral relationships between human and non-human kin. It also provides checks on the power of elites, who are held to high standards of prosocial behavior expected of good leaders.

While colonial impacts on Kodiak are known to have caused widespread loss of traditional knowledge [30], the spiritual/sacred nature of these values suggests deep roots in the ancient past. We believe that they served as core touchpoints used to navigate the ever-changing socio-natural world. Efforts to respond to difficulties in the past would have been grounded in these values [24]. Here we draw on these Sugpiaq values to frame our interpretations of Sugpiaq histories. In doing so, we attempt to engage directly with the ethical concepts through which Sugpiaq peoples understand their world. We also highlight the continued presence of Sugpiaq philosophies and use them to demonstrate continuity from the past to the present day.

3. Adapting to Uncertainty and Taking Sugpiaq History Seriously

It is our contention that understanding Sugpiaq survivance in the face of Russian colonialism requires attention to the social conditions, cultural practices and societal norms practiced in the centuries before Russians arrived. Archaeological information on pre-colonial lifeways provides relevant cultural information that can be supplemented with ethnohistoric reports documenting traditional Sugpiaq practices “at contact.” We are interested here in going beyond a static representation of the pre-colonial “ethnographic past,” to consider the ways life changed in those centuries in response to both climate and social developments. As our attention is specifically focused on the legacy of climate adaptation, in this section we start with an analysis of Kodiak climate and ecological change. We then draw on concepts from ecological anthropology to understand the dynamism of Sugpiaq history in the centuries preceding Russian arrival on Kodiak. In Section 4, we turn to consider the implications of that history for the Sugpiaq response to and survivance in the face of the Russian colonial presence.

3.1. Climate and Ecological Change in the Gulf of Alaska

Despite decades of paleoecological research to document past climate change, we still have relatively poor understanding of Alaskan Quaternary climate, especially in the Holocene and at spatial and temporal resolutions relevant to human ecological histories [31]. Fortunately, a robust and high-precision tree-ring climatology exists for the northern Gulf of Alaska (GoA) covering the past 1200 years [32] (Figure 2a). This record, compiled by Wiles and colleagues, tracks annual fluctuations in tree ring growth in forests on the eastern side of the Gulf. Tree ring widths in these stands have been shown to correlate with the average surface air temperature during the growing season (February to August) in a relationship that allows them to be converted to temperature estimates and projected back over the length of the record. This data set has the advantage over other proxies of annually resolved calibration to calendar years. The result is a proxy series with unusual chronometric resolution and an ideal source of information for the last millennium, from before the Medieval Warm phase (MWP; ca. 945–975 CE), through the Little Ice Age (LIA; here dated between 1400 and 1850 CE) and into the 20th century transition to industrial global warming. While less precise, oxygen isotope records from lake and ice cores show grossly correlated trends in precipitation [33]. These patterns have been linked to synoptic shifts in storm patterns of the North Pacific Aleutian Low (AL) weather system. Hemispheric warming strengthens temperature gradients, accelerates the circulation of currents around the Gulf of Alaska and bends stronger storms originating off East Asia on a more eastward trajectory, into the GoA. In the process, warm conditions deliver more rainfall (Figure 2b) [34,35,36]. Colder intervals generate weaker storms that track further north into the Bering Sea.

On the annual trends shown in Figure 2a, we have added a stepped regime shift trend (red line) that identifies intervals over which the multi-year average temperature remained relatively stable, even if individual years may have seen large temperature anomalies. These intervals are punctuated by jumps or steps that indicate points in time when the trending multi-year average jumps to a new position.2 The regime shift method provides a consistent way to visualize trends in decadal and longer climate patterns. We use it in tandem with the underlying, interannual data to describe the changing character of regional climate that Sugpiaq people had to manage.

The regime shift analysis exposes a few patterns not readily evident in the background data. First, from the start of the record until just after 1500 CE temperature ‘regimes’ shift every few decades, with temperatures varying up to 2 °C annually, and regime-defining averages moving as much as 2 °C per century. In one case, ca 965 CE at the end of the Medieval Warm Period, the average temperature dropped 4 °C from one year to the next, the most extreme change in the 1200-year record! The Medieval Warm Period itself was an unusual warm interval lasting only about 30 years (yellow bar in Figure 2a) that capped a half-century of warming. From that high mark, the trend shifts cooler, but not consistently so, and it is only after 1400 CE that we might recognize the start of a persistently colder than average climate (the LIA).

The majority of the LIA is characterized by unusual stability in mean and variance compared to the rest of the record. Perhaps the most striking development is the persistence of a single regime from 1500 to 1700 CE, when temperatures hovered around 7 °C varying little more than 1 °C around it. Defined by its low variability, we choose to include the previous century in this phase, despite moderate shifts in decadal averages (regimes). Similarly, we exclude the last 40 years of the 17th century (1660–1700) for its large, interannual fluctuations. The interval of climate stability then stretches from 1400 to 1660 CE and would have presented uncharacteristically predictable conditions for more than 9 generations of Sugpiat. As we will see, that interval was unusually productive ecologically, demographically, economically, and culturally.

High interannual temperature variability jumps markedly again after 1660 CE, and, from 1700 CE, interdecadal shifts like those prior to 1400 become commonplace again. Despite the fluctuations, temperatures remain relatively cold until 1900. The return to an unstable climate after 1660 is important because it represents what must have been a surprise to Sugpiat who, by then, were many generations removed from the experience of such unpredictability (in weather, seasonal change in plant and animal distributions, etc.). While we do not believe that the new climate dynamics were in any way as debilitating to Sugpiaq communities as forced subjugation to Russian control, it is an important element of what Sugpiaq people would have been adjusting to when the Russians arrived more than a century later. To explain why, we need to look at how climate is related to the ecosystems that Sugpiaq people depend on.

The development of commercial fisheries in the Northeast Pacific starting at the end of the 19th century and the growth of western science-based management of those fisheries in the second half of the 20th century brought big changes to the marine ecosystem and economies of the Gulf of Alaska. These industries also increased the observational data available to better understand the functional relationships between climate, ecosystems, and fisheries. Historical analyses have identified multi-decadal oscillations in sea surface temperatures and storm patterns that correlate with shifts in the composition and functioning of North Pacific ecosystems. For example, from the mid-20th century, salmon abundance and total commercial harvests have increased in the Gulf of Alaska when temperatures trend warmer, while gadids (Pacific cod and pollock) do better when temperatures are colder [37,38]. The mechanisms driving these patterns are only partially understood, but scholars have projected analogous ecological relationships to temperature changes revealed in paleo-proxies [39]. We are not convinced that temperature alone drives these ecological shifts. Paleoecological data as well as trends in the past two decades violate that expected relationship [40,41,42]. Nevertheless, supported by available data, we assume that temperature variability is a reasonable proxy for ecological change, whatever the specific driver or direction of relationships.

Fortunately, we have paleoecological evidence to track at least one valuable subsistence species. A nitrogen isotope proxy from cores in two of Kodiak’s most productive rivers (Karluk and Red) follows trends in sockeye salmon abundance over the past 2200 years CE [41] (p. 320) [43] (Figure 2c), with peak productivity spanning the cool second millennium. At century scales, the entire second millennium shows incredibly high productivity compared to most of the first (Figure 2c—inset). At decadal scales the second millennium trend shows modest declines in the mid-12th and late-13th centuries, and from ca. 1720–1750 and ca. 1790–1835 CE [41] (Figure 1 and Figure 2). During the two and a half centuries of cold and stable climate, stocks appear to have been robust, despite moderate short-term variability. The two intervals of stock collapse, several decades before Russian arrival and again during the first half of Russian colonial occupation, should be important in considering food security and the overlapping challenges facing Sugpiaq people before and during the Russian interval.

At present we do not know the extent to which the fortunes of other valued marine, river and land species follow those of sockeye salmon, though certainly other predators of the fish would have been affected. Declines in salmon could be balanced by increased availability of other foods, like cod. It seems likely, in any case, that regime shifts not only changed the menu, but also impacted the overall size of the feast. If Koniag communities were large enough to have strained their resources in lean times, as they may have been when climate stability gave way to instability after 1660 CE, then food insecurity and the effective stewardship of ‘kin-species’ would have become issues of concern. We anticipate that many of the more specific conservation strategies reported in Alaska Native oral histories from around the GoA emerged or were elaborated in response to recognition that care should be taken to avoid harming fish populations in these lean times [24,25,26,27,28].

Finally, we include a Kodiak human population proxy model in Figure 2d, depicting approximate patterns of changing occupation intensity across the archipelago. The proxy is generated from cumulative archaeological radiocarbon dates, and interested readers are referred to the following articles for more on the method and its limitations [40,44,45].3 The model captures the final stages of a two-and-a-half-millennia growth trend that began around 700 BCE [44]. The growing population continues through the Late Kachemak to Developed Koniag times and may start to decline around 1700 CE. Interestingly, the human population trends appear to correspond inversely to regional temperature and in approximate tandem with salmon abundance. If true and causally related, we could infer that colder climates have been significantly more productive than warm ones for the foods traditionally harvested by Sugpiaq ancestors. This would be an important insight, as archaeologists have previously assumed that Kodiak residents had a harder time under LIA conditions [46] (p. 745). A second interesting feature is the significant population decline, here shown accelerating after 1600 CE. If the old wood correction is properly calibrated, this would indicate that Sugpiaq people were already experiencing a demographic crisis when Russians arrived. A case can be made, however, that the population curve should be adjusted further forward in time (see note 3) [47,48,49], where it may instead document the precipitous decline from colonial diseases and violence.

3.2. Risk, Resilience and Koniag Historical Ecology

Anthropological archaeologists have long recognized the importance of ecological uncertainty in human decision making and cultural adaptations [50]. Among subsistence communities, a major tradeoff is expected between maximizing harvests and minimizing risks. Among hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, risk minimizing strategies may include mobility, storage, passing on knowledge about infrequently needed survival foods, and maintenance of social networks to transmit information, resources, and aid in times of need [50,51,52,53]. In some cases, especially where inequality is marked, families may indenture themselves to more secure patrons to mitigate their greater exposure to risks of starvation [54].

Resilience is a more recently theorized concept in ecology and anthropology that also taps into the concept of risk. A resilient system, community, or culture is one that can recover from a preponderance of shocks that might otherwise trigger lasting change [55,56]. Risk mitigation strategies are the tools used by communities to increase their resilience to ecological and social threats. Those tools are not without costs as, to varying degrees, they require time, labor, resources, and infrastructure that could have been directed otherwise. As a result, we expect risk mitigation approaches to languish when unneeded over long intervals of time. Stability should allow for longer planning horizons, opportunities to invest in specialized infrastructure to increase harvest yields, and investments in the production of surpluses for use in fueling non-subsistence activities. On the flip side, growing unpredictability (increased incidence of shocks or surprises, bad years or decades) should inspire renewed efforts to develop (or recall) strategies for dealing with unpredictability.

Data from Transitional Kachemak, Early Koniag, and Developed Koniag phases have accumulated rapidly in recent decades. Evidence shows changes in site diversity, site size and configuration, house form, subsistence, trade, and conflict that paints a picture of uninterrupted change towards increased organizational complexity, social differentiation, scales of political alliance, long-distance trade, and military conflict [4,5]. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that population on Kodiak grew dramatically over the past two and a half millennia, reaching a peak in the Developed Koniag phase [5,40,44].

We expect that high interannual temperature variability from 900 to 1400 CE encouraged active risk mitigation. From year to year and decade to decade, people did not know if their non-human relatives would favor them with generous harvests, whether they would need to put up extra sea lion skins to repair deteriorating watercraft, or if a hungry neighbor would raid their winter stockpile. They likely ate well in good times and made do in bad, eating more shellfish, kelp and other low ranked foods to get them through hard winters. Those facing similar insecurity would share resources when they had them, reflecting deep seated generosity and reciprocity. People may have invested more effort in maintaining contacts with friends and relatives in distant communities, both for back up food security and as an outlet to escape tensions with neighbors. Where consistently productive and defendable harvesting patches were present, but limited on the landscape, some families may have been better able to secure their wellbeing by claiming and defending access to those patches. This created the conditions for the growth of patronage in return for services and the establishment of small-scale inequality [57]. In other cases, where productive hotspots were themselves less predictable and subject to failure, families would have less reason or leverage to draw others into their service.

By 900 CE trade networks had expanded significantly both within and beyond the Kodiak Archipelago. The expansion may have started in an effort to build more security through social networks. There is some indication that Kodiak residents from the west and north identified more with cousins on the Alaska and Kenai Peninsula, respectively, than they did with each other [58]. Partners on the Alaska and Kenai Peninsulas would have access to caribou, moose, and other game not available on Kodiak, and in return, Kodiak Islanders may have started harvesting and processing marine mammal and fish products for trade. Marriages likely followed these networks, initiating a process of cultural hybridization that was the basis for later social interaction, alliance, and military expansion during the Koniag period.

From 1000 to 1300 CE, populations continued to expand, perhaps rebounding from the strain of the warm interval in the mid-10th century (Figure 2c). Residential structures in what is called the Transitional Kachemak were reorganized with subterranean features (sleeping and storage rooms) arranged around small central depressions, where food processing and tool making took place. This was the precursor of larger multi-roomed houses in the later Koniag period. Steffian and colleagues [6] suggest that the new housing configurations were a response to the defense of family stores and the first manifestation of social competition. Climate variability remained high throughout this phase and storage would have been a response both to inconsistent foraging returns and the emerging social risks related to theft and violence. While status differentiation remains unmarked in this phase, the increasing atmosphere of competition, doubtless set the stage for emerging differentiation in the Early Koniag.

The Early Koniag is characterized by points with diamond cross-sections, stemmed ulus, and diagnostic engraved pebbles that depict stylized people dressed for ceremony, wearing feathered regalia and jewelry [59]. More recent investigations have shown that people were already building large, multi-family sod houses in the Early Koniag [60]. Side rooms in those houses were used for nuclear family bedrooms, steam baths, and storage chambers. Main rooms contained numerous large pit features, storage features and large roasting pits suggesting communal use for internal food processing and storage of large quantities of fish [5]. These house and storage features continue through the Developed Koniag phase and well into the colonial era [61].

Notably, the Koniag house represents a major change in community organization. Whereas Transitional Kachemak houses were the first to feature multiple connected rooms or structures, they remained too small to house more than nuclear family sized groups. Within the Early Koniag, the multi room structure became a communal dwelling and workplace for extended family groups and enslaved workers captured in raids. This development appears to relate to the expansion of the domestic unit of production, where kin lived and worked together to out-produce other families in status competition. The abundance of processing and storage features in Koniag houses speaks to the importance of these activities throughout the Koniag Phase.

Unique diagnostics of the Developed Koniag phase include the introduction of clay pottery technology from communities on the Alaska Peninsula, and barbed points with endblades, interpreted as weapons of warfare [46] (pp. 237, 735–738). While small and more locally oriented defensive sites are dated to the Late Kachemak phase, large defensive sites positioned on islands facing the open coast emerged only in the Koniag and perhaps primarily the Developed Koniag phase [4] (p. 196, Table 8.6). Several winter villages also appear on the outer coast at this time, associated with access to defensive sites and whale hunting.

Other Koniag developments are not specific to phase. Koniag villages expanded greatly in size, many with over 50 houses. Across villages, variation in house size indicates the formation of communities structured around ranked household differences in productivity [4] (pp. 201–210). Labrets (facial jewelry worn in holes in the lower lip or cheeks) worn right up to Russian contact were often so large that they would have made eating and drinking a challenge. These are thought to have been worn predominantly by Sugpiat with high status and may have required the hosting of large ceremonial potlatch-like feasts to justify the wearing of ever larger labrets. Generous feasts sponsored by productive families would serve to support those less fortunate while literally wearing the principle of gratitude and reciprocity, all while simultaneously competing for power and status [4,6] (p. 69).

3.3. Evaluating the Climate Predictions

In the previous subsection, we highlighted a number of ways that Late and Transitional Kachemak may have dealt with the relatively high level of climate stochasticity that characterized their times. With settlements already filling the coasts and some rivers, increased home storage and trade may have provided alternatives for addressing unanticipated shortfalls. These and less visible strategies seem to have been successful in aggregate, since the population continued to grow (Figure 2d). Friend networks over distance provided social support but also opened Kodiak communities to exotic raw materials, new ideas and marriage alliances from other parts of the Gulf of Alaska. These developments paved the way for expanding ‘internationalism’ in the Koniag period. Significantly, we see the start of institutionalized violence at relatively local levels. Such violence might have occurred when tensions flared following a particularly bad harvesting season or the end of long winters, when those facing starvation may have sought support. Strategies for defending stores and harvesting patches from those more impacted by downturns could have included physical protection of harvesting locations, setting up defensive sites as deterrents, and appeals to spiritual guides. Probably most would-be conflicts were deflected with Sugpiaq generosity, acts that might have established social debts and could have provided the seed for expanding inequalities in the Early Koniag period.

The settling down of climate variability right around the shift into Early Koniag may or may not have been a factor in the changes observed. Certainly, increased predictability would have reduced the need to maintain many strategies for ‘bad years’ (at least against ecological threats), but social strategies developed previously to manage those threats in an egalitarian milieu created their own opportunities for the expansion of social competition and alliance during the Koniag. Without needing to maintain as diverse a suite of foraging strategies and tools for risk-reducing pursuits, families could focus on applying their productive energies to harvesting the most productive resource with greater intensity.

In the Early Koniag, seasonal and even year-round settlement expanded along the major salmon rivers. The same settlement expansion happened on the outer coasts of the east side of the archipelago, where whaling was practiced. The development of new fishing technologies, such as composite bone harpoons used to fish on a proliferation of stone weirs constructed across rivers like the Karluk and Ayakulik, may have been attractive, in part, to help families expand their production of surplus in a good-natured competition for status with their neighbors. Not all social competition was peaceful, however, and the more localized violence from Kachemak times took on a new significance as social interactions at all scales became increasingly driven by the goals of surplus production. Defense also ceased to be an optional strategy, as challenges from distant competitors (Tlingit, Unangan, and others) would have compelled communities to meet hostilities in kind. The ability to capture slaves from raids to expand the family’s productive labor would have helped to rationalize the further institutionalization of warfare. Over time, alliances united large numbers of regional villages, who would have supported each other reciprocally in defense from raiders.

Turning to more quantitative data on subsistence [60,62,63], here we look at evidence documenting changes in the relative importance of sea mammals, salmon, and marine fish in the economies of the last millennium. While the data come from a small number of sites in different locations around the archipelago, the sample sizes at each site were large, and consistent trends emerge in their comparison. The Late and Transitional Kachemak sites (Uyak and Crag Point) fall squarely in the ‘unpredictable’ interval before the start of the LIA. The Early Koniag falls on the boundary between these intervals. The Developed Koniag, in turn, straddles the 1680 CE boundary from predictable to unpredictable climate dynamics. Fortunately, our main source of archaeological data about the Koniag period, the Kal’unek site, contains distinct floors and middens, most of which can be assigned to one side or the other of the 1400 CE climate boundary. We have less data to work with in the critical century between 1680 and 1784 CE just before Russian arrival. Kal’unek’s House Floor 1 is the best candidate for an occupation in this interval, while House Floors 2 and 3 may or may not fall in the earlier interval of greater stability.

Partlow [60], Kopperl [62] and West’s [63] faunal analyses collectively show that salmon, cod, and marine mammals (Steller sea lion, harbor seal, northern fur seal, and sea otters) were among the most important stable foods harvested in the pre-LIA assemblages, in that order of relative abundance. These marine food species always outrank land mammals, of which there are few on Kodiak. By the Early Koniag, sea mammals had almost disappeared from the fauna at Settlement Point and declined at Kal’unek in parallel with a reduction in sea mammal hunting tools relative to fishing gear (especially nets floats and sinkers which grow in significance in the more recent floors) [46]. Comparing salmon and cod from Settlement Point [60] and Kal’unek [60,63], Partlow and West independently demonstrate a dramatic growth in the predominance of salmon in house storage assemblages compared to cod and other marine fish. For the rest of the record, salmon dominates the faunal assemblage. This development supports our hypothesis for specialization during more predictable intervals. Kal’unek was perhaps the ideal place to practice this specialization, since it is located at the mouth of one of the most productive salmon streams and was occupied during a time of high salmon abundance (Figure 2c). Hundreds of other families seem to have followed suit, as indicated by the miles of wall-to-wall Koniag settlements along the banks of the Karluk River from Kal’unek to Karluk Lake.

We conclude this pre-colonial review with the following observations. The available evidence supports the idea that Sugpiaq people took advantage of the Little Ice Age cold phase, with its attendant reduction in temperature variance before 1680 CE, to ramp up the production of surplus by specializing in the harvesting of resources most abundant where they lived. On the Karluk system it was salmon. Such intensification would have brought the peak Sugpiaq population as close as it might come to impacting salmon populations, if not careful. It is in this context that we would expect communities with deep and observant relationships with their surroundings to recognize impending problems and expand their formal strategies for stewardship. The combination of high human population density (Figure 2d), intensive harvesting technologies, and the re-emergence of environmental fluctuations would be a time when innovative stewardship practices were needed. While we lack specific documentation of stewardship practices on Kodiak, there is now significant evidence from other Alaskan and western Canadian Indigenous peoples documenting deep and robust traditional knowledge about ways that their ancestors stewarded fish and other non-human kin [24,64]. We argue that Sugpiaq ancestors in the Koniag period would have developed similar strategies. Those strategies should have mitigated, but not neutralized, the impacts of the unpredictable climate dynamics that persisted through the Russian occupation.

4. Russian Colonialism and Sugpiaq Survivance

We now turn to the colonial period and consider the implications of Russian colonial enterprises for Sugpiaq communities already facing the crisis of climate instability in the Little Ice Age.

4.1. Indigenous Approaches to Climate Change and Colonialism

Indigenous climate change studies [65] and survivance [8,9] give us another dimension with which to examine Sugpiaq resilience strategies before and during the Russian colonial period on Kodiak Island. Kyle Whyte studies the intersections of climate change and colonialism. He argues that 21st-century climate change is an extension (and intensification) of colonialism and that we must study climate and environmental change using Indigenous heritage and living intellectual traditions to best investigate how humans can live respectfully with dynamic ecosystems [65]. Colonialism, particularly settler colonialism, altered the ecological conditions that support/ed Indigenous peoples, and settler governments have/had many strategies to sever relationships between Indigenous peoples and their environments. These strategies include the relocation of Indigenous communities, the extirpation of key animal species, and preventing Indigenous peoples from practicing traditional ceremonies, among others. Whyte’s scholarship is future-oriented. He seeks to bolster contemporary resilience by drawing on Indigenous knowledges and practices that re-establish or reinforce healthy (or “moral,” see [66]) human-environment relationships.

We apply Whyte’s framework to the study of climate and environmental change in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Russian colonialism. Whyte and colleagues [67] discuss three aspects of colonialism that, in particular, reduce the flexibility of Indigenous communities (see also [68]):

a.

Procedural injustice (Indigenous communities having diminished say in development decisions),

b.

Containment (restricting Indigenous mobility), and

c.

Settler centralization (making colonial needs and desires the focus of activities, creating dependence on colonial institutions or distributors).

These impositions “[...] inflict anti-adaptation against Indigenous peoples” [67] (p. 327) within environments and lands to which they had developed specific adaptations to thrive. We see all three of these aspects at play during the Russian colonial period on Kodiak, as we will describe in the following subsection.

Whyte’s future-oriented environmental work meshes well with the concept of survivance as it has been used in archaeological scholarship. Derived from the work of Anishinaabe literary scholar Gerald Vizenor, survivance became a key critical framework for archaeologists, especially those practicing Indigenous-centered archaeologies or archaeologies of colonialism [69]. Survivance has forced archaeologists to consider the ways that their discipline contributed to narratives of Indigenous disappearance and how they can instead look for evidence of Indigenous presence and cultural innovation [70]. Importantly, a survivance framing also calls on archaeologists to reevaluate their methodological practices and engage collaboratively with Indigenous communities in ways that consider multiple ways of knowing and researching [16,71,72,73]. We draw on survivance and its accompanying practices to frame our argument about the continuity of Sugpiaq histories and the agency of Sugpiaq ancestors in the face of the intersecting challenges of the Little Ice Age and Russian colonialism.

4.2. Enacting Sugpiaq Survivance During the Russian Colonial Period

Russian colonialism was anti-adaptive for Sugpiaq communities. Colonial newcomers did not have established relationships to the lands and waters of the Kodiak Archipelago, nor were they familiar with the societal values of stewardship, reciprocity and gratitude that Sugpiaq peoples had cultivated over many generations. In fact, Russian depredation of the North Pacific Ocean in search of profitable marine mammal pelts led to the extinction or extirpation of numerous marine mammal species, with cascading ecosystem impacts [74]. Russian fur traders inserted themselves into the managerial echelons of Kodiak society and organized Indigenous labor to meet their needs [75]. Following Whyte and colleagues [67], these tactics involve procedural injustice and settler centralization, in which Russian decisions about the economy, the environment (and, eventually, its conservation; see [76]), religion, and education were the central forces shaping Kodiak society, while Sugpiaq (and other Alaska Native) contributions were sidelined. A consequence of this procedural injustice was that Sugpiaq stewardship strategies were no longer practiced on a regional or larger scale. Instead, Russian resource managers and naturalists, who had different understandings of the ecology of the Gulf of Alaska than Sugpiat or Creoles [76], were responsible for setting policies related to hunting, fishing, and conservation. Although the LIA was an ongoing hardship for the Sugpiat when the Russians arrived on Kodiak (Figure 2a), the colonial threats to Sugpiaq lives and sovereignty likely superseded Sugpiaq concerns about climatic instability. Yet the risk management strategies Sugpiaq people developed in response to climate change after 1680 CE primed them to respond creatively to colonial challenges as well.

A major feature of Russian colonialism in Alaska was conscripted service to the Company by Alaska Native peoples, which can be understood as containment [67]. Russian fur traders conscripted Sugpiaq and Unangaxˆ (Aleutian Islanders) hunters to go on seasonal (and longer) hunting trips to harvest fur-bearing marine mammals. These expeditions removed able-bodied men from their villages and from their roles as the primary hunters and fishers for their families during harvest seasons. Through the compulsory efforts of the hunting parties, the waters around Kodiak were soon depleted of sea otters [75], and subsequent hunting expeditions had to travel further and further from home. By the early 1810s, Sugpiaq men were sent as far away as the California Channel Islands and the Kuril Islands north of Japan in the pursuit of the valuable pelts. The work of hunting sea otters and other marine animals was dangerous, and many men never returned home, either due to death at sea or permanent relocation to other Russian outposts [77].

While conscripted hunters were primarily men, Sugpiaq women and Elders of both sexes were also forced into the service of Russian enterprises to produce gut and bird skin parkas, skin boat covers, and dried salmon for the Russian American Company (RAC). Conscription, while undesirable, gave Sugpiaq people from many villages the chance to congregate. These circumstances facilitated construction of broader kinship networks and strengthened shared ethnic and class identities [78,79]. Those new social connections facilitated reciprocity (i.e., sharing of knowledge and resources), which supported community resilience across the archipelago and the GoA region. This social support network became especially important following the smallpox epidemic of 1837 to 1838, when the RAC consolidated the surviving Indigenous population from what had been 65 villages into just seven, all located near Russian outposts [75] (p. 39). The pre-established regional identities and social networks would have made this transition more manageable and facilitated the maintenance of Sugpiaq traditions and values through storytelling and shared cultural practices [29].

With colonial conscription of Sugpiaq labor, communities faced a reduced capacity for harvesting and storing traditional foods during the summer, and many villages suffered starvation in the lean winters and early springs [75,80]. This was an intentional strategy on the part of the Russian mercantile administration. The RAC wanted to control food distribution to ensure Sugpiaq dependence, so they removed most qayat (kayaks) and all the angyaat (open skin boats) from villages when hunters returned from their summer voyages [80] (pp. 46–48), [81]. Without access to their watercraft, Sugpiaq people could not effectively hunt for food or trade goods with other Indigenous communities. Cumulatively, these changes limited Sugpiaq peoples’ participation in their traditional economy. Despite these hardships, initial archaeological evidence at the Ing’yuq Village site on Sitkalidak Island indicates that Sugpiaq diets did not change dramatically from the late Koniag to the colonial period, other than a greater reliance on shellfish, which likely sustained people during the late winter and early spring when food reserves dwindled and bad weather inhibited travel [61]. We suggest that Sugpiaq women and the matrilocal kinship structure are responsible for this stability.

In the late Koniag period, able-bodied men frequently left on trade or raiding parties for weeks to months at a time during the spring and summer. Some never returned home. With this context, the absence from the home village of a segment of the male population on Russian-conscripted hunting trips was not exceptional, and Sugpiaq women would have been accustomed to managing harvesting, stewardship, reciprocity, and foodways in their villages. In fact, we expect that Sugpiaq women took on more responsibility for food procurement (including hunting) when the environment became less predictable after 1680 CE, as men spent more time on unpredictable marine mammal catches and regional warfare. This experience prepared women, and Sugpiaq communities more generally, for the hardships of the colonial period, during which women carried on provisioning their communities, albeit with some of their labor also lost to Russian conscription. The anti-adaptation inflicted by Russian colonialism, not the failure of village communities, thus accounts for the starvation that many villages experienced in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and this is clear in the continuity revealed at the Ing’yuq village site from pre-colonial to colonial times [61].

In the face of colonial assaults on their lifeways, Sugpiaq communities built upon the flexible harvesting strategies that they created in the late Koniag period and their strong matrilocal foundations to persist physically and culturally during the Russian colonial period. While Sugpiaq governance structures and trade networks were largely dismantled by the RAC, Sugpiaq communities responded by creating extended social networks centered around a shared Sugpiaq identity. These new social networks supported their expanded community by carrying out practices of stewardship, reciprocity, and gratitude, thus maintaining these values for the generations to come. Cumulatively, these adaptations and practices facilitated Sugpiaq survivance.

5. Conclusions

In this paper, we have explored how Sugpiaq peoples on Kodiak drew on their pre-contact experiences with climate change and their longstanding cultural values to persist through the Russian colonial period. Prior to Russian arrival in the region, Sugpiaq ancestors developed technologies to maximize food harvests (especially fish), the yields of which bolstered their population and led to the emergence of influential families and marked social inequality. These practices were honed during the previous centuries in the context of climate dynamics both before and during an unusually long period of cold, but relatively stable, climate from 1400 to 1680 CE. A new climatic regime after 1680, with rapid and high amplitude shifts in temperature and storminess, presented renewed challenges for the Indigenous populations of the Gulf of Alaska. While evidence at a chronological resolution sufficient to observe this shift is sparse, we suggest that these less predictable conditions would have demanded greater flexibility in harvesting activities, intensified practices for stewarding vulnerable resources, and required the expansion of reciprocal social networks for both trade and warfare.

The subsequent period of Russian colonialism was anti-adaptive for Sugpiaq communities, as Russian officials sought to control Sugpiaq labor and land. While Kodiak suffered accelerated population losses in the decades following contact, Sugpiaq values, traditions, and stories survive to the present. We argue that flexible food harvesting strategies, the foundational role of Sugpiaq women in procuring and sharing subsistence foods, and the development of regional Indigenous identities collectively supported Sugpiaq survivance. The success of Sugpiaq ancestors is evident in contemporary Sugpiaq communities.

Having explored the interrelated histories of climate and colonialism on Kodiak in this paper, we see several areas for future archaeological research to further explore these issues. These include:

• Refinement of chronological precision in archaeological dating over the past millennia to clarify the timing of social and cultural changes in relation to climate regime shifts. This is coupled with the need for more archaeological data, in general, from Developed Koniag period sites.
• Evaluation of possible stewardship strategies developed by Sugpiaq ancestors both during the interval of peak population (when productive habitats would have experienced their highest rates of harvest) and under the increasingly unpredictable climates in the century before Russian arrival. Clearly resolving uncertainties surrounding the old wood offset in the paleodemographic population model is needed to determine when the population decline truly started—either before or at the inception of Russian colonization.
• Clarification of the evolving role of women in Koniag and colonial-era Sugpiaq villages, in terms of their flexible engagement in harvest and processing activities.

Today in the Kodiak Archipelago, six Native villages and the town of Kodiak are home to 1800 Sugpiaq people. Sugpiaq identity is strong in Kodiak and in diasporic families from Anchorage and Fairbanks to Seattle and beyond [82]. Yet, the colonial strategies of settler centralization and procedural injustice continue, and Sugpiaq fishers continue to be pushed out of the commercial fishing industry in the Gulf of Alaska [83]. These practices of exclusion were initiated by the RAC’s rejection of Indigenous knowledge in conservation policymaking [76] and have been continued and expanded by the State of Alaska and U.S. federal fisheries management practices. Despite these ongoing anti-adaptive structures, Sugpiaq communities today are guided by their values to continue the fight to assert their sovereignty and steward their non-human relations in sustainable ways.