Space-Time Colonialism

Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements

Juliana Hu Pegues

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469656199
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As the enduring "last frontier, " Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire. In this richly theorized work, Juliana Hu Pegues evaluates four key historical periods in U.S.-Alaskan history: the Alaskan purchase, the Gold Rush, the emergence of salmon canneries, and the World War II era. In each, Hu Pegues recognizes colonial and racial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants. In the midst of this complex interplay, the American colonial project advanced by differentially racializing and gendering Indigenous and Asian peoples, constructing Asian immigrants as "out of place" and Alaska Natives as "out of time." Counter to this space-time colonialism, Native and Asian peoples created alternate modes of meaning and belonging through their literature, photography, political organizing, and sociality. Offering an intersectional approach to U.S. empire, Indigenous dispossession, and labor exploitation, Space-Time Colonialism makes clear that Alaska is essential to understanding both U.S. imperial expansion and the machinations of settler colonialism.

CHAPTER ONE

Settler Orientalism

The Asian Racialization of Alaska Natives

I have always been glad that good luck gave me Mr. Young as a companion, for he brought me into confiding contact with the Thlinket tribes.… It was easy to see that they differed greatly from the typical American Indian of the interior of this continent. They were doubtless derived from the Mongol stock. Their down-slanting oval eyes, wide cheek-bones, and rather thick, outstanding upper lips at once suggest their connection with the Chinese or Japanese.

— John Muir, Travels in Alaska

The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.

— Edward Said, Orientalism

The landbridge will not be forced

to function

by what you find familiar

on either side.

— James Thomas Stevens, “(dis)Orient”

In 1890, South Carolina author Septima Collis published her travel narrative A Woman’s Trip to Alaska. Collis’s account of her Alaskan trip culminated in a stop to the territorial capital Sitka where she encountered “the most interesting experience of my whole trip,—certainly one that has made an everlasting impression on my mind.”¹ Invited by missionaries, she and other tourists first stopped at the Tlingit village on the outskirts of town, known by non-Native people as the Ranch or Rancherie. Walking into Tlingit people’s homes unannounced, tourists bore witness to their colonial notions of the primitive other, what Collis categorized as “savage” and “uncivilized ignorance.” From there, tourists proceeded to the Sitka Industrial and Training School, a boarding school run by the Presbyterian mission, where they were treated to gendered demonstrations of industrial education that evoked, in Collis’s mind, “deportment” and “domestic felicity.”² Rehearsing a civilizational narrative of the late nineteenth century, Collis employed the vernacular of her time, naming the boys she saw at the school “Siwash,” a denigrating term from the colonial trade language known as Chinook jargon used to refer to Native men, thought to derive from the French “sauvage,” or savage.³ But Collis also invoked and enmeshed a different racialized construction when she praised the intelligence of the students’ “Mongolian faces,” adopting the social Darwinist term to denote those from Asia, a racial taxonomy that included Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid.

Collis’s invocation of a Mongolian racialization was neither unique nor coincidental, but a contribution to a larger discourse of Asian origins for Alaska Native peoples concomitant with Alaska’s purchase and incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. The formulation of this linkage is an important facet in the genealogy of the Bering Land Bridge theory and, more broadly, elucidates the colonial articulations of the related racial and gendered constructions of Alaska Natives and Asian Americans. This chapter is not a scientific study of the Bering Land Bridge, recognizing that the theory is both supported and contended within a variety of fields such as anthropology and geology.⁴ Similarly, within Alaska, different Native peoples hold origin stories that alternately coincide with or contradict anthropological hypotheses about the first peoples of the Americas.⁵ Rather, I seek to understand the widespread desires by non-Natives in the late nineteenth century in their imagining Native origins in Asia, and the particular place Alaska holds in that imaginative construction. In articulating this settler orientalism located in the U.S. acquisition of Alaska, government officials constructed a kinship between Alaska Native peoples and their perceived Asian ancestors. This conceptualized familial and biological linkage is conjured by the collective colonial imaginary of a variety of government actors and colonial proponents. In examining the work that such an imagined relationship produces and enables, I am building off the contributions of American Indian studies scholars who demonstrate that the discourse of Asian origins discounted (and continues to discount) Native claims to land and territory, while Native epistemological claims that locate alternative origins are dismissed as falling outside of accepted history or science.⁶ In the case of Alaska, a conglomeration of government officials, tourists, missionaries, and ethnographers repeatedly constructed Alaska Native peoples’ ancestry as, to use the parlance of the time, “Asiatic,” “Mongolian,” or “Oriental,” to justify fluid and overlapping imperial and settler colonial ambitions for Alaska as a territory and future state.

Reading postcolonial and Indigenous critique in conversation is important to examining the overriding discourse of Alaska Natives as independent from American Indian peoples within what would become the contiguous United States, while also placing them as inferior to and innately separate from white Americans, a double move made through a constructed racial intimacy with Asian peoples. If Edward Said’s foundational postcolonial scholarship argued that the construction of the Oriental revealed little about the actual lives of people in the Arab and Asian world and instead represented the logics and desires of European colonialism, how does the formulation of the Alaska Native in relation to a different notion of Oriental inform the contours and intent of American colonialism?⁷ How are racialized and gendered constructions central to the colonial and settler colonial project in Alaska? Conversely, how are Western knowledge and the construction of race and gender informed by the historical demands of empire and settler colonialism? This chapter attempts to think alongside Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd’s formulation of transit of empire, wherein Indianness functions as an imperial sign that facilitates colonial incorporation while simultaneously reiterating the “lamentable but ungrievable” figure of the Indian.⁸ In the case of Alaska, however, Indianness is, at some times, overlaid with and, at others, oppositionally juxtaposed to an abstract and signifying Asianness. This is not to refute Byrd’s theorization, as I remain firmly invested in her locating the origin of U.S. empire with the birth of the nation-state and its prior and continuing colonization of Indigenous peoples, lands, and knowledges. Likewise, Byrd compellingly demonstrates that U.S. overseas empire from the 1890s to the present transfers a paradigmatic Indianness onto the colonized to justify and naturalize a notion of colonial benevolence over the constructed backward and uncivilized “Natives.” In conversation with Byrd’s scholarship, I’m interested in the U.S. imperial project in Alaska as another dense transfer point that complicates and deepens the interplay between primitivist and orientalist discourses, between notions of internal and external consolidation, and, ultimately, witnesses the deferral and disavowal of Alaska Native peoples’ claims to indigeneity through a temporal and spatial separation enabled through the sign of the Asian other.

During and following the acquisition of America’s first noncontiguous territory, Alaska was alternately configured as either an imperial or a settler colonial space through the emphasis on Alaska Natives peoples as distinct and exceptional, racial notions that hinged on Asian lineage. Government officials proffered racial categorization, albeit shifting and uneven, of Alaska Native peoples as Asian in arguing the case for Alaska’s purchase. This fictive kinship was extended to Indian affairs, setting a precedent for Alaska Native exceptionalism that rendered illegible nation-to-nation status in favor of limited rights gained through assimilated individualism. The colonial imaginary that linked Asians and Alaska Native peoples through a racialized intimacy was fortified and extended through a broad compendium to the state archive, authored by a diverse group of informal actors including missionaries, ethnographers, and tourists. The commencement of Alaskan tourism in the 1880s cemented this racial construction within popular culture. Thousands of wealthy passengers made the journey each year, and by 1890, 5,000 tourists visited Alaska during the summer season.⁹ The profuse publication of travel guides, memoirs, and adventure narratives brought Alaska into the national imaginary and configured Asian ancestry for Alaska Natives as common sense to a broader American audience.¹⁰

Women tourists in particular highlighted the missionary project of assimilation and gendered domestication within the racial and colonial logics of American empire, as women touring Alaska located the success of the recently acquired territory upon the premise and promise of normative race and gender. Septima Collis and writers like her highlighted that colonialism is always a racial, gendered, and sexualized project, specifically one that must repeatedly bolster white supremacy, heteronormativity, and heteropatriarchy in order to assert the sovereign claims of settlers. As Nez Perce literary scholar Beth Piatote’s study of the assimilation period demonstrates, the coercion needed to enforce boarding school attendance reveals not a break between removal and assimilation policies but, rather, a continuation of military violence marked by the withholding of food and rations and the threat of imprisonment. Removal from national space shifts to removal of Native children from their families, facilitated by what Piatote, in engagement with postcolonial feminism, terms “foreign domesticity,” or how assimilation policies strive for the elimination of Indigenous sovereignty through legal and discursive ideology dependent on notions of Native family and kinship as childlike, aberrant, and nonnormative.¹¹

In connecting the removal and assimilation federal policy eras, Piatote is detailing the functioning of what settler colonial studies scholar Patrick Wolfe has termed the “logic of elimination.”¹² Wolfe argues that an eliminatory logic fundamental to settler colonialism remains consistent within this historic shift, that once U.S. territorial acquisition reached the Pacific Ocean, the repeated westward removal of Native people from their homelands gave way to internal national projects that extolled the assimilative possibilities of interrupting Native identities and polities. Wolfe’s highlighting of an assimilative process within the territorial bounds of the United States indexes the rise of temporal discourses over spatial rationalizations; that is, as U.S. policy shifted away from an enunciation of removal outside of national boundaries, assimilationist agendas required a temporal insistence that a generational usurpation of culture and identity ostensibly assured an Indigenous-free future. To be clear, Indigenous territory was taken and collective governance of land was opposed under assimilation-era policies (as seen by the two-thirds decrease in Indigenous-held land from the 1880s to 1930s), but the overriding narratives that justified and facilitated this expropriation increasingly relied on temporal, not spatial, civilizational discourse.¹³ Wolfe marks the first major indication of this transition with the U.S. end to treaty making with Native nations in 1871, a policy shift that was enacted four years after the U.S. purchase of Alaska but was presaged by the Treaty of Cession with Russia and the marked absence of negotiation with Alaska Native peoples or polities. As previously discussed, the treaty with Russia addressed Native peoples through a lens of negation, conferring citizenship only to the not-uncivilized. In this way, U.S. possessory claims to Alaska can be seen as marking this shift in federal Indian policy wherein the absence of formal national recognition via treaty making is replaced by a civilizational discourse. Lacking a prior precedent of U.S. removal or Indian treaty making, Alaska Native peoples were especially affected by the assimilation era of boarding schools: Alaska Native children attended day schools and state boarding schools, and some were sent out of state, most often to the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. As Alaska purchase and U.S. occupation coincided with the shift to assimilation policies, the spatial horizon of colonial acquisition became rationalized and naturalized through an overriding temporal discourse, articulated and fortified especially by women’s travel literature, a corpus of texts that enmeshed primitivist and orientalist discourses.

To close this chapter, I juxtapose the gendered and racial pedagogies expressed by Collis and her cohort with the work of Tlingit author Ernestine Hayes and her memoir Blonde Indian, published in 2006 and the winner of the 2007 American Book Award.¹⁴ While this is an anachronistic choice of texts, I have purposely chosen an Alaska Native author published more than a century after early tourists to Alaska to disrupt the assimilative promise of colonialist desires, to highlight what Anishinaabe scholar and author Gerald Vizenor terms Native “survivance,” Native endurance that refutes civilizational discourses of Native declension and disappearance.¹⁵ As a Tlingit woman writing about her life in the latter half of the twentieth century, Hayes intervenes in ideas of settler orientalist kinship, to show that Asian and Alaska Native peoples were not connected through colonial notions of relation but, rather, share space and time in their materially grounded living conditions under racial and economic oppression. Further, she specifically unsediments the colonial violence of boarding school benevolence, highlighting the gendered and intergenerational trauma that results from forced and reiterative coercion. Hayes makes an especially astute interlocutor for the tourist writers that visited Alaska more than a century ago, as her adult return and reconnection to Alaska is facilitated, in part, by working in the tourist industry. A close analysis of Hayes’s text demonstrates the importance of Alaska Native epistemology generally and Indigenous feminism specifically, a reading practice that continues throughout the book. Hayes refuses colonialist teleology through open and cyclical Tlingit worldviews of time and place, demonstrating that it is not Native people who are arrested in their development; instead, Hayes indicts American colonialism for its inability to account for capacious notions of Indigenous kinship and belonging.

Classification of the State: Colonialization and Emancipation

Although the hypothesis that Asian immigration populated the Americas had been in circulation since the Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta proposed it in 1590, based on his missionary work in Peru and Mexico, the specific idea of Alaska Native peoples’ racialization through Asian origins became prominent through the latter half of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ By that time, Europe and its settler societies had shifted from religious and national origin formations of race to the post-Enlightenment idea of scientific racial difference. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published in 1735, was pivotal in making this shift, providing a single taxonomy for scientific identification and classification of difference. Formulating what Michel Foucault has termed a “science of order,” eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars created a body of scientific racism, wherein totalizing logics naturalized racial hierarchies on a global scale, an intellectual project that worked to explain and justify imperial expansion and exploitation.¹⁷ With the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, scientific notions of difference were placed within a unified progres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Map
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Settler Orientalism: The Asian Racialization of Alaska Natives
• Chapter Two: Fictions of the Last Frontier: Alaska’s Gold Rush and the Legend of China Joe
• Chapter Three: Unbecoming Workers: Asian Men and Native Women in Alaska’s Canneries
• Chapter Four: Picture Man: Photographer Shoki Kayamori and Settler Militarism
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index