tv [untitled] September 19, 2011 7:00am-7:30am PDT
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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[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,
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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--
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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.
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[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.
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[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
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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.
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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--
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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
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