The drama of the Aleutian Islands 


This archipelago, which is composed of 300 volcanic islands covers an area of ​​37,000 km2 and extends 1,900 km from the Alaska Peninsula to the mainland coast of Russia. Its current population is about 17,000 people. In ancient times, because the islands provided few resources, the rats got their food, clothing, and even tools from the adjacent sea. They were excellent navigators using small boats manufactured with seal skins. They fished and hunted marine mammals with harpoons using nautical techniques and hunting of great sophistication.
The arrival of Europeans, particularly the Russian fur traders, radically changed their way of life. Some Japanese castaways who came to Amchitka Island in 1783 found the Russians cruelly exploiting the native Aleuts.
One of them when returning to Japan expressed in his testimony:
"The Russians stole the skins that the Aleutians had. If they got angry or did not give them fur or did not give them enough, the Aleutians were beaten almost to death. If they did not obey the orders, they killed them. "
The production obtained by the skins (seals and sea otters) was divided equally between the employer [1], the workers and the Russian Empire, but the people who obtained the riches were only punished. In successive years, groups of fur traders continued to arrive and gradually the native population decreased until disappearing from Arnchitka in 1832.
Many of the other islands that suffered similar aggressions during the Russian domination also saw their numbers reduced considerably.
From 1867, when the United States bought Alaska and occupied the islands, a breakthrough of intense colonization was unleashed. The Russian imperial authoritarian-bureaucratic system was replaced by a liberal regime that radically changed to a capitalist laissez-faire. The oriental fins were invaded by a flow of Americans seeking to get rich quickly. Excessive hunting ended up extinguishing populations of sea otters and seals before the end of the 19th century. The slaves that had survived were relegated to less attractive jobs and sites.
To complete the bleak picture, in 1971 the United States decided to detonate a nuclear bomb on the island of Amchitka that had been depopulated by Russian exploitation and that since then was uninhabited. This explosion caused pollution on this island and other neighbors, which probably still exists.
Currently the economic activity of the Aleutian Islands revolves around herring and salmon fishing. The main fishing port of the archipelago is Amaknak, located on the island of the same name, which in turn is located in a bay of another major island (Unalaska Island with 2,720 km2).
Today some 10,000 aleuts survive, which have mostly lost the use of their ancestral language that will probably be extinguished in the coming years. There are only a few hundred older adults who still use some of the original dialects.
The tragedy of the Aleutian Islands is one of the least known and most cruel genocides in contemporary history.
From "Chronicles of Human Peripecy", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones