Day 5: Tripping on the Alaska Marine Ferry to the Aleutian Islands

Akutan and Dutch Harbor

Aleuts sea otter hunting in drawing by H.W. Elliott, courtesy NOAA.

We were curious about what we would find in Akutan, another tiny Aleutian city that sprang up in the late 1800s to exploit the sea otters and the skills of the native Unangax people who hunted the marine mammal.

Russian traders shipped hundreds of seal pelts out of Akutan yearly. By the early 20th-century, the otter population had been decimated and the Unangax suffered. D.P. Foley, who worked for the U.S.Revenue Cutter service became their advocate for better services, writing in 1910: “The village of Akutan…is probably the most wretched in all the Aleutian Islands.”

Alexander Panteleev, an Orthodox priest who documented the living conditions of the Unangax, visited Akutan around 1910. Photo courtesy: Alaska State Digital Archive.

Scholars with the National Park Service have described the impact of the loss of a dietary staple of the Unangax: “A people who had fashioned a world of plenty from the sea were destitute. Not only were sea otters gone, but that vital subsistence mammal the sea lion was disappearing from locations near villages. The sea itself had become impoverished. “

Even worse than the loss of the sea lions and otters, the forced removal of the Unangax people of Akutan during World War Two eroded their ability to…