captioning made possible by the annenberg/cpb project [radio] 20 in a row of alaska's great country. 650 ky... [narrator] even today, many people regard alaska as the last frontier-- an unsettled wilderness covered by snow,

inaccessible and remote. a harsh, empty land where only the hardiest of pioneers would venture. hope, a small town on the kenai peninsula, symbolizes the frontier spirit of alaska. it was the location of the first significant gold discovery in alaska in 1896. gold provided the foundation of the alaskan economy. the gold rush drew other prospectors far into the vast open spaces of the interior

and spurred the building of railways to bring out minerals. more recently, extraction of oil has become the mainstay of the alaskan economy. alaska is not an unsettled wilderness. in fact, it's the longest-occupied part of the americas. the continent was settled as people moved across the bering land bridge from siberia to alaska at least 15,000 years ago. today's inuit and yupik eskimos and inland athabaskan cultures are the successors of native peoples who coexisted with the environment over very long periods. alaska has also been part of the international economy since european ships visited in the 18th century. this is apparent in the range of european place names, but especially in the enduring influence of the russians, who first settled here 200 years ago. the russians first came to alaska to exploit the land for its natural resources.

they established trading posts initially to collect the skins of sea mammals, such as seals and sea otters. the russians remained for over a century before selling the state to the united states in 1867. [choir singing] a large number of alaskans are still russian orthodox, and the diverse population is reflected in the congregation at the russian orthodox cathedral in anchorage as easter is celebrated. native alaskans have found ways of blending russian religion with traditional practices. they are also beginning to reclaim their history and their relationship to nature. for the native peoples of alaska,

the wilderness has never been empty. when the national parks and wilderness areas were created, the people who created them behaved as if alaska was empty, and most of the land was divided up between federal agencies, ignoring the indigenous inhabitants. don follows was sent to alaska in the 1970s by the national park service to establish a national park on the kenai peninsula, a remote fjord area on the south coast of alaska. i actually designed the proposal to kenai national park around a market study that i'd seen that had been done to try to find out what the alaskan mystique was, so there were six things that came out of that survey. there were so many of them that fit the kenai fjord-- things like coming up to alaska to see glaciers and fjords, seeing wildlife in their natural habitat, getting to see mount mckinley.

people wanted to dine on alaskan king crab. they wanted to visit people in small communities, have an opportunity to see that part of alaska before it changed, and the last thing on this particular survey was sport fishing. my job was basically to try to change public attitudes, to become an expert in the resources there, because no one had really been on the ground that much, and then to try to convince people that perhaps this should be a new national park someday. [narrator] when the kenai fjords national park was finally created, local people had rarely ventured into the fjords, and knowledge of historic settlement in the area was very fragmented. one explanation is that the fjords attracted few mariners and adventurers. english explorer captain james cook described it as a barren, stormy wasteland devoid of any habitation or interest,

which faded in and out of view as the fog set in. he didn't even attempt to go ashore. [man] where we're heading for is the south end of three hole bay. from there, we go to cape aialik. it's gorgeous up here. even days like today, i like to come out. it can get miserable when the wind comes up. it's not much fun n metimes, but it's never boring. [narrator] even for expert navigators like bill stevens, the coast is still difficult to navigate with hidden offshore pinnacle rocks. with the help of the national park service, archaeologists have now begun to research this area and found that in fact there's been a very long history of settlement. [man] we knew this site was here. it hadn't been that well described, but it was found by some archaeologists

who were working for the state of alaska following the exxon valdez oil spill, and there was great concern that some of these areas that were being impacted by the spill had archaeological sites on them that no one had looked for and that could be damaged by the oil directly or by clean-up activities, and one of the results of the spill was that almost 1,000 new archaeological sites were discovered. when alaska was purchased by the united states, they instituted the census every 10 years, and the first one in 1880 recorded a few people living in one village out on the coast, and by the next census in 1890, there were no native alaskan settlers out here. they had in the meantime resettled in english bay because of the effects of deprivation under the fur trade system, which was really one of forced labor,

or probably a substantial impact from smallpox and other diseases. eir population had dwindled. they went to english bay, collected there, and there was a church there. the russian orthodox priest wanted them to come there and settle at one centralized location. [narrator] today english bay is only accessible by boat or plane. when people moved here from the kenai fjords area, it would have taken several days. linda cook is researching the migration of the people who moved from the kenai fjords. [linda cook] english bay originally-- the name is now nanwalek-- was a summer seasonal camp, and the russians were along this coastline in the late 1700s. with the coming of the americans in 1867,

the village reverted to american hands. there were somewhere probably in the neighborhood of 80 people here in 1880, and since then, the village has remained relatively insular. the 1880 census indicated that most people were eskimo with what were then a very low percentage of creoles, who were russian and native alaskan composition. [man] we at english bay think this is what it was like before the russians came in, when they gathered for community dinners and had only the beat of the drum. [drum beating] and after hunting, they would gather together, bring out the fiery vodka, and get the natives to entertain them, and here's the version of the seal dance.

[narrator] the people who live in nanwalek are known as the chugach eskimo. they are one of the most numerous and diverse of all eskimo populations. they occupy almost the entire south coast of alaska. they've sustained their lives and culture by gathering, hunting, and fishing-- hunting arctic marine mammals such as otters, which is the resource which first attracted the russians to the area. [woman] they're all russian trading beads, all found here in the village, and i do know that they traded the... like these... like these for sea otter pelts. [cook] the oral history that is passed

between generation to generation in villages, especially within alaska, is the record that never got written. it's what's been associated and how people perceive the events within their own language, and if the historian is sensitive enough and willing enough to spend the time with the people, that story can be re-created and reexamined in a different time and space and told a different way from a different angle. hi, frisky. how are you? that's a good boy. juanita is one of the oldest individuals in the village of nanwalek here. she has ties to some of the outer villages that existed along the coast at some point but that no longer exist here. she's also an extremely interesting and wonderfully welcoming person to talk to. anahonaks came from aialik... and so are tanapes and kenaibacks, i think.

and those were particular families? people, yeah. i'm in my 70s. last year, i found my birthplace, which i never used to know. they were logging there. and my son came. he said, "mom, come and see your beautiful place where you was born." he took me on a skiff, and we went down, and i thought it was pretty. my grandpa john-- he was the first church leader here, and he asked them if they were christians. they didn't know what he meant, so he baptized them and let them become orthodox christians-- russian orthodox. lots of people were thankful because they didn't know. they thought the raven was their god. [cook] sometimes what you find historically can be reaffirmed by what people remember,

by who's in the cemetery, and a lot of times what has happened in historical record is people weren't asked. people are not oblivious to their surroundings or their own events, and by tapping that resource, you can make history belong to those people as well as to the record of history. [speaking foreign language] the village is named by the sukpik. this place was nanwalek, and then the russians code-named us alexandrovsk, and then somehow there was a map mix-up, and we became english bay after a while. then just a couple of years ago-- last year--we decided to go back to nanwalek because we feel like we want to try to save our language. we know that there's just a few of us left. anyway, after the americans came in, when they built the schools here,

we were told not to speak our language. we didn't know how to speak english, and we had to learn it when we came to school. after that we learned english, and then we started forgetting sugtestun a little bit. [speaking sugtestun] a way sometimes that we think about our culture and how it ties in with us as we-- like, you can imagine a table, and here's the table top, and that will represent all of us people, and what holds us up is our beliefs, our culture. we have all these things like the tv and music and all these nintendo coming onto this table, holding pressure on these things that are trying to hold us and keep us together, and that's really making it hard. it's really a tough, trying time for us

because part of us want to say, "no, i'm sukpik. i'll stay that way," or "i want to be a little modern." you get pulled in two ways. it's really hard. it causes a lot of, uh... i don't know, just confusion. [narrator] the people of nanwalek have survived the onslaught of russian and then american control. the people here are beginning to reclaim their history. they have not suffered from modern problems, such as alcoholism, that many other small communities across alaska have. some communities on the kenai peninsula were virtually destroyed, their memories obliterated. one such group is the kenaitze indian tribe. they are dena'ina people-- a branch of the athabaskan native americans. it was his job to teach me to hunt. i was born in kenai right here in 1923-- born and raised here.

[narrator] clare swan is chairperson of the tribe. i just looked back at my roots and began to put them together and realized really how much of that was important to me, and i had tried to, like everyone else, change that because in order to fit-- there was a time when it wasn't fashionable to be native. you were lucky if you were blond and you were light enough that you could pass. no one was allowed to speak the dena'ina language. they didn't allow it in schools, and a lot of the women had married non-native men, and the men said, "you're american now, so you can't speak the language." so we became invisible in the community, invisible to each other, and then because we couldn't speak the language-- what happens when you can't speak your own language is that you have to think with someone else's words,

and that's a dreadful kind of isolation. [narrator] today the kenai river has become a tourist destination. tourists are drawn here for the same reasons that the native alaskan inhabitants came-- the abundant fish and game. it was a migratory route which led from cook inlet up the kenai river to the russian river. today the area is marketed to tourists as wilderness. [man] they come to fish, to see the game. alaska is probably the last place in the northern hemisphere where things of those sights in nature are road accessible. there's still the wilderness in siberia and that, but it just isn't accessible for people. alaska's a very special, unique place. i can go over these mountains, and it's just like it was a thousand years ago.

o.k. where's my folks? you need a life jacket? look at the little arctic tern there. they have the longest migratory route. what are they? arctic terns. they go down to antarctica. [galbraith] different indigenous people of alaska would migrate to the valley, but the discovery of gold and the russians in the area-- a lot of the indigenous tribes contracted either smallpox or influenza and consequently have disappeared. [narrator] the misconception that the dena'ina had disappeared was reinforced by the fact that they had left little visible sign of their presence. many centuries ago, athabaskan hunters and gatherers migrated here from west of the alaska range, recognized the richness of the natural resources of cook inlet and the kenai peninsula, and became the only athabaskans to adapt to a coastal environment. to ensure the continuance of these abundant cyclic resources, the dena'ina developed clans and a complex system of beliefs,

but this knowledge has been virtually wiped out. albert baktuit is one of the elders of the tribe. [albert baktuit] they knew it was old house pits here, but they didn't want to let the public know about digging it up, and, uh... of course, there's no artifacts where the dena'ina indians were because they burnt everything. everything from the land they burnt and returned to the land, and from the sea, the fish bones and clam shells they'd return to the sea. anything personal that a guy had when he died, they'd burn it up with him because he'd need it on his next voyage, i guess they'd call it. they figured all your game would return plentiful if you took care of it. [narrator] the kenaitze are now trying to find out more about their past and are realizing they could have a very important part to play in managing the environment.

[clare swan] two years ago, people from the park service called me and asked would i look at this place. i said sure. i wasn't really sure what they wanted, but we came up and looked at it. when i came, i looked, and i was just absolutely furious. the house pits were full of garbage, and the trees had been cut down, and people had been allowed to drag their boats across from the road and tie them at the river. i was just astounded, and i said, "what did you want from us?" they said, "we were thinking about closing it in a year or so." i said, "you have to do it right now." [narrator] the area was closed to camping and transformed into an interpretive site with the u.s. forest service in 1992. albert helped to create this footpath, which is one of the main features of the present site.

[baktuit] this house pit here is carbon dated for 450 to 500 years. the entrance is right there, and the fire pit was right here where that stump is, and they'd heat rocks and carry them in the sweat lodges here at the entrance-- right there at that low spot. they'd put it in birch-bark baskets filled with water and then heat it until it steamed, and they'd have a sweat bath. right in back of here is a food cache, which is dug down to 6 foot deep, and they'd layer it with birch bark and moss and then fish eggs and then a layer of fish and so on until it filled up, and that was good for the whole year's supply. the landscape's always changing, the river's changing... [narrator] the experience of running this project made the forest service realize

the potential of historic sites such as these for tourists. their next project-- footprints--is more ambitious. [man] the basic concept we're trying to get is to bring people close to the land much in the same fashion that the kenaitze people lived here many, many years ago in this area, is to demonstrate their heritage, to demonstrate their closeness to the land, to try and get people to understand their culture-- not only their culture, but a native culture in general-- to show how they're linked with the land, the landscape, the vegetation, the water, the seasonal aspects, certain amount of mobility they would use to move to where the resources were at that time of year. the footprints site will be a larger, more developed interpretive opportunity. the real value is tying the prehistoric past

with contemporary people and getting across the idea that cultures aren't static. cultures are changing things just like the landscape is a changing thing. you don't lose the culture that you had in the past. it continues on and gets modified and gets added on to. it doesn't go away. a lot of people have thought for 10, 20, 30 years that the dena'ina athabaskan indian culture was something that was long gone, something you might read about in a textbook or you might be able to go look at a few house pits out in the woods or something, but that's absolutely wrong, because the dena'ina folks are still around. they're still in the area, and their culture's still strong and alive. [narrator] the elders of the kenaitze tribe, whose memories were virtually obliterated, never imagined that their history would survive. peter kalifornsky was responsible for keeping the culture alive

at a time when all the odds were stacked against them. eva is his stepdaughter and remembers the time when he was alive. he never spoke english to me when i went to visit him. he always spoke indian, and i answered him back in english. ha ha ha! before he passed away, he was talking to me about the dances and all the language that he has revived back, and the last words he told me was to keep going to the indian classes and to keep it going so that my grandchildren could at least speak a little bit of the language. he told me so many things. he told me stories when he was married to my mom, and he told me to keep my culture... and told us to try our best to keep it going for the younger generation.

this little place has a great deal of meaning for us because it's something that our ancestors used and walked on, and it's nice to see that other people have begun, for whatever reasons, that they've begun to realize that it's a valuable thing that's disappearing, and that we're the only ones who can really make it whole again. captioning made possible by the annenberg/cpb project captioning performed by the national captioning institute, inc.