Through the Colonial Lens: Images of Alaska Native Peoples in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

In the late twentieth century Alaska Native people became politically involved in a major land claims movement, leading to a renaissance in traditional music and dance practices. Today, in the twenty-first century, there are two strong revitalization movements – Indigenous languages and body art. As Alaska Native people shed the Western neoliberal and neocolonial vestiges of the past, the use of body art and regalia are central to the Indigenist postcolonial twenty-first-century lived experience. As Indigenous scholars revisit eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents written during the colonial period, it is evident that major changes took place due to colonization. In particular, the erasure of body art and traditional body decoration and clothing. The collection of paintings, engravings, and etchings of Indigenous peoples made by Russian artists such as Mikhail Tikhanov (1789–1862) illustrate the body art, clothing, and hairstyles from the early nineteenth century. The colonial portraits provide a window onto the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual images of several different Alaska Native communities. After the 1867 Treaty of Cession, in which Russia “sold” its Alaskan holdings to the United States, American Christian missionaries, epidemic diseases and boarding schools began to further erase language(s), body art, and ceremony. The paper incorporates the impact of colonialism on Alaska Native people and how this impacted cultural practices, such as body art, and the current re-emergence of traditional body art in the twenty-first century.