Unalaska, Alaska: memory and denial in the globalization of the Aleutian landscape

Abstract

This paper explores the history and globalization of the landscape of Unalaska, Alaska, an island in the Aleutian chain. The history of the area is characterized by successive waves of occupation and resource extraction by the geopolitical powers of Asia and North America, which began with Russian colonization. Unalaska's landscape is littered with World War II debris that still echoes of Japanese attacks and the bitter memory of US-ordered evacuation and relocation to distant interment camps of the entire indigenous Aleut population. Unalaska's adjacent Port of Dutch Harbor has grown to become the Nation's busiest commercial fishing port, ironically due to the demand of the Japanese market for fishery products and substantial investment by Japanese companies. Applying post-colonial theory to Unalaska's history suggests that territorial acquisition has been succeeded by the dynamics of economic globalization in this American periphery. The Aleutian landscape is shaped by its history of foreign and domestic exploitation, wartime occupation and displacement, economic globalization, and the historical narratives and identities that structure the relationship of past and present through place.

Introduction

Unalaska, Alaska, is a place shaped by the ironies and contradictions of globalization. In the shadow of local Russian Orthodox Churches, World War II debris still litters the landscape of the Aleutians, from crumbling concrete bunkers to unexploded ordnance. The partially sunken, rusted hull of an American ship damaged by a Japanese air strike in 1943 now harbors the crab pots of local fishermen who are bent on securing their resource rights and economic participation in a global industry dominated in Alaska by Japanese processing companies. These traces of historical events undeniably shape the physical and social landscapes of Unalaska. However, as we explore in this article, these memories and remains also become tools—raw materials for productive practices and discursive materials for framing identity through particular historical narratives. The anthropogeneity of place entangles past and present in a landscape of presences and absences.

With just over 4000 people, Unalaska (from Ounalashka) is the most populous settlement in the Aleutian archipelago. More than 300 volcanic islands span over 1200 miles of remote, stormy seas between Alaska and Russia to form the Aleutians. As their geography entails, they are a fragmentary articulation between Asia and North America with the history of the islands and their Native inhabitants acutely structured by that global position.

The Aleutian Islands have a long history of human occupation, which in the last several centuries has been heavily impacted by successive territorialization and resource extraction by geopolitical powers in Asia and North America. In an early manifestation of global trade and conquest in the region, Russians arrived to the Aleutians in the mid-1700s, renaming the indigenous Unangan people Aleuts. The Aleut population was decimated by early contact including enslavement for fur trade labor, attacks, and disease. The enduring effects of this period included the disruption of Aleut social life and kinship ties, the introduction of the Russian Orthodox religion, and the near extermination of fur-bearing mammals in the region for international trade. In Unalaska, a Russian settlement was established in 1772, and a church built in 1825.

Since the Russian occupation and fur trade, the region of Unalaska has experienced successive waves of colonial contestation over the other resources of these strategically located islands. As this essay explores, these histories have fundamentally shaped the landscape and community. However, rather than determining the physical and social dynamics of Unalaska, these histories contribute to the making of place in more complex, socially nuanced ways.

Anthropological engagements with place have prompted ways of evaluating anthropogenesis through considering place as a social relationship (Gupta and Ferguson 1992) and analyzing how transformations of the landscape derive from shifting values and regimes of territorialization (Vaccaro 2006). Raffles (2002) describes this social relationship as a series of ‘intimacies’ between humans and the non-human world. While affective, these intimacies still exist within power relationships as “sites where the politics of space are practiced: where places, regions, and localities get worked through, made, and grounded, literally”. Similarly, Rodman (1992) discusses place as more than a mere setting for social action or template for territorial identities, writing: “we can look ‘through’ these places, explore their links with others, consider why they are constructed as they are, see how places represent people, and begin to understand how people embody place”. Extending to the specific context of globalization, studies of place-attachment stress the interconnectedness of places and the ways in which they are embedded in contestations over history and identity in the search for rights, particularly in the face of instabilities caused by economic transitions (Sivaramakrishnan and Vaccaro 2006).

These processes take shape through memories of violation and displacement as well, in ways that suggest the need to attend to the political meanings carried by place and place-based identities. In this context, it is also necessary to consider how memories of loss operate alongside and even give shape to material traces. As we will explore in this paper, it is material and symbolic processes that shape the social landscape of Unalaska and become subject to the mutual reworking of place and history.

2 Bombers and bunkers

For many years at the center of trade between large, geopolitical powers in Asia and North America, World War II put the Aleutians at the center of a military conflict. As early as 1902, the US Navy had developed an interest in Unalaska and the adjacent port of Dutch Harbor as part of Alaska's larger strategic position in national defense, although no sizable US military expansion was completed on the Aleutian Islands until much later (Rourke 1997; Wright 1999). Alaska and, in particular, the Aleutian Islands, were vulnerable to attack largely because of their distance from the mainland and proximity to Russia and Japan.

It was not until 1939 and the threat of war with Imperial Japan that the military build-up of Unalaska/Dutch Harbor began, with the initial construction of a weather station by the US Navy. Very quickly the community transformed into a massive military hub. Construction began in 1940 on US naval and army facilities and barracks in Dutch Harbor. American troops began to arrive to the islands the following year, swelling the population of what had been a small village of 300, mostly Aleut (Rourke 1997), to as many as 70,000 people (AWCRSA 2000). Along with demographics, the landscape of Unalaska changed dramatically, as bunkers, barracks, ship facilities, fuel tank farms, gun mounts and a POW camp were all constructed to defend against an anticipated Japanese invasion of the islands, which could be used as stepping stones to an eventual invasion of North America.

On 3 and 4 June 1942, Japanese air forces attacked Dutch Harbor. Japanese forces then invaded the islands of Kiska (capturing a ten-man US Navy weather detachment), and on 6 and 7 June, they invaded Attu (where all 42 Aleut residents were taken prisoner) (Rourke 1997). Accounts of American casualties from the Dutch Harbor attack range from 43 to 78 with comparable numbers of wounded (Morgan 1980; Cohen 1981). The air strike damaged a number of military facilities, including the SS Northwestern (a ship being used for contractor barracks), a warehouse, hangar, barracks, a few Quonset huts, fuel tanks, and a radio station (Rourke 1997). The Alaska Indian Service hospital was destroyed (Kohlhoff 1995).

It is commonly believed that these attacks were a diversionary tactic with which the Japanese hoped to lure the US Navy north to defend the Aleutians. These plans were intercepted, however, and the attempted strategic diversion was unsuccessful. The primary military confrontation between the two powers occurred much farther south at Midway Atoll. Nonetheless, the defense of the Aleutians involved tens of thousands of troops, millions of dollars in installations on dozens of islands, and the displacement of the Aleut people.

3 Aleutian exile

The incarceration of nearly 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, beginning in February 1942, is a well-known part of World War II history. In the summer of 1942, a less known internment of American citizens occurred; the entire indigenous population of the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands was forcibly evacuated and relocated to internment camps 1500 miles away from their homes (Madden 1992). This history is described here in some detail, in part because it is so little known. Nine villages inhabited by 880 Aleuts were removed (see Table 1). These displacements transformed Aleutians as much as the military build-up, though largely through absences and lacunae.

Table 1. Evacuation, internment, and repatriation of Aleut villages during World War II.

Village	Population before WWII	Forcible evacuation	Internment	After WWII
Akutan	41	6 July 1942	Ward Lake, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp	Repatriated 1945
Atka	83	12–14 June 1942	Killisnoo, an abandoned herring and whaling saltery. Village burned to the ground by US Navy	Repatriated 1945, including compulsory resettlement of villagers from Attu
Attu	42	Occupied by Japan on 7 June 1942	Prison camp in Otaru, Japan	Repatriation denied, villagers sent to Atka
Biorka	18	6 July 1942	Ward Lake, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and then at Burnett Inlet, a burned and abandoned cannery site	Repatriation denied, villagers sent to Unalaska
Kashega	20	6 July 1942	Ward Lake, a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp and then at Burnett Inlet, a burned and abandoned cannery site	Repatriation denied, villagers sent to Unalaska
Makushin	8	6 July 1942	Ward Lake, a Civilian Conservation Corps Camp and then at Burnett Inlet, a burned and abandoned cannery site	Repatriation denied, villagers sent to Unalaska
Nikolski	72	6 July 1942	Ward Lake, a Civilian Conservations Corps camp	Repatriated 1945
Saint George	183	16 June 1942	Funter Bay in a gold mine facility	Repatriated 1944, some men allowed to return earlier to conduct fur seal harvesting activities
Saint Paul	294	16 June 1942	Funter Bay in an abandoned cannery	Repatriated 1944, some men allowed to return earlier to conduct fur seal harvesting activities
Unalaska	110	22 July 1942	Burnett Inlet, a burned and abandoned cannery site	Repatriated 1945, including compulsory resettlement of villagers from Biorka, Kashega, and Makushin
Source: Information compiled from Kohlhoff (1995).

John C. Kirtland, council for the Aleutian Pribilof Island Association, testified to the mercilessness of the evacuations at the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC 1997):

Atka was the first village evacuated by naval forces. The village was torched presumably to keep the houses out of enemy hands. However, four houses were not burned. The Aleut church was burned which held priceless 17th and 18th century icons. Pribilovians were given 24-hour notice and each person allowed one suitcase. The evacuation was chaotic. Neither the Pribilovians nor the captain of the transport vessel knew where the voyage would end. (Testimony by John C. Kirtland at CWRIC, 15 September 1981)

Other villages fared no better. Although only Atka was burned, no provisions were made to secure the homes in other villages from weather or looters. Although the relocation plan had been debated for months by government officials in the military and the Department of the Interior, the Aleut people had not been involved in the discussions. Records indicate that government motivations for the Aleut internment did not overtly include references to their heritage, or fear they might be subversives, or they might assist the Japanese. Rather, Aleut homes in the Aleutians and Pribilof Islands were located in the potential combat zone and a paternalistic attitude of protection towards Native people along with an autocratic position on the supremacy of military convenience over Native rights framed the policy discussion.

The unequal treatment of Natives and non-Natives residing in the Aleutians confirms that race was the driving factor of the evacuation and relocation policy. However, the US Government's commission designed to investigate the policy nearly thirty years later stated that they “found no persuasive showing that evacuation of the Aleuts was motivated by racism or that it was undertaken for any reason but their safety” (CWRIC 1983: 10). Captain Hobat L. Copeland, an army officer involved in the evacuation of Unalaska, recalled that “all natives or persons as much as one-eighth native blood were compelled to go” (Madden 1992: 61). The blood quantum policy allowed for non-Aleuts to stay in their homes while their Aleut neighbors were removed. All the civilians forcibly evacuated from Unalaska were Aleuts. The Caucasian males, including Charles Hope, whose Aleut wife was evacuated, were allowed to remain (Madden 1992). A former internee whose father was allowed to stay on in Unalaska because he was Caucasian, recalled the uncertainty and disruption of the evacuation of Unalaska; she explained that her mother dressed her in her Sunday best for the forced journey, making her wear her black ‘church’ gloves, which she had kept to this day (Malcolm 2005). The former internee explained: “They did not know how long they were to be gone or where they were going. However, the general feeling was it would only be for short time”.

It was not only the evacuees who lacked knowledge about their destination. As the ships sailed, not even the ships’ captains or officials of the Interior Department knew the ultimate location of the internment camps. Although the need for safe and adequate relocation facilities had been recognized and discussed four months prior to the bombing of Dutch Harbor, the locations of the evacuation camps where the Aleuts would be kept for the coming years had not been determined, nor had plans been made for their protection or care (Kirtland and Coffin 1981).

4 The relocation camps

Abandoned industrial locations in Southeast Alaska were hastily arranged to accommodate the Aleuts. These facilities were dangerous places, unsuitable for human habitation. For example, in the cannery at Funter Bay where villagers from Saint Paul were held, the water system was inadequate for fire protection and could only provide water in summer. In place of a sewage disposal system, three outdoor toilets sat on piles slightly below the high tide line, dependent on the action of the tide to remove waste. Laundry had to be done by hand and bathing facilities were non-existent.

At the Funter Bay gold mine facility, where the Pribilof Islanders from Saint George were held, Fish and Wildlife agent Daniel Benson arranged to construct new buildings for white employees. The crowded, dark and unheated quarters of the Native internees were out of the question for the white employees to live in with winter approaching (Kohloff 1995).

The Ward Cove camp was near the large town (about 5000 people) of Ketchikan and housed the Aleut people of Nikolski, Akutan, and the three small Unalaska Island villages, Biorka, Kashega and Makushin (Madden 1992). The Aleuts came from small villages that consisted for the most part of kinship groups. As expressed by Akutan chief, Mark Petikoff, the villagers became victims of ‘‘bootleggers and white exploiters”, and they fell prey to epidemics of venereal disease and alcohol abuse (Kirtland and Coffin 1981: 57). The death rate at Ward Cove was the highest of all the Aleut relocation camps. One Aleut community member in Unalaska summed up the internment this way:

Come to find out there was German prisoners in Southeast that were treated better than the evacuees. Basically [the Aleuts were] dumped in old abandoned canneries, with nothing. Just dumped them there and pretty much left them. (Package, Field Interview 2002)

5 Repatriation and reparations

By 1943, the immediate military threat to Alaska had disappeared (Conn 1964). With the exception of fur seal harvest needs in the Pribilof Islands, there was no urgency from the US Government to return the Aleuts to their homes. The Pribilof Aleuts remained in relocation camps until May 1944. The other Aleuts remained in the camps until April to June 1945.

Those repatriated to their home communities struggled to begin life in villages that had been transformed by misuse and neglect. Aleuts returned to find that their homes and other property had succumbed to weather or had been used and vandalized by personnel of the US Armed Forces (Kirkland and Coffin 1981). Consequently, many returned villagers lived for the first year in temporary buildings shared by numerous people. As one Aleut resident of Unalaska remembered:

And just one day they say you're going home. In 1945 in April. So we came home. On a liberty ship, named U.S.S. Branch. And you had people from Akutan, the next island east of here and people from Umnak and you had people from Atka, on that ship… They put us up in these buildings, they fed us. And then, I think with the second or third day they let us come to town to look at our houses. Of course the houses were all busted into. And the places were all a mess. (Package, Field Interview 2002)

While those who were repatriated to their home communities faced challenges in rebuilding their livelihoods, many Aleuts were forced to relocate entirely. The US Government refused to allow or fund restoration of four communities after the war. The residents of Attu, Kashega, Makushin and Biorka were resettled elsewhere (see Table 1). The Department of the Interior declined to rebuild their home villages and provide schools and other support systems (Kohlhoff 1995). As Unalaska resident Philemon M. Tutiakoff testified, “When we returned home we had to embrace people displaced from Biorka, Kashega and Makushin. They only got two 20×16 cabanas to replace the homes they lost in their villages” (CWRIC 1981). The Attu villagers who had been incarcerated in Otaru, Japan, were freed in the fall of 1945 and were resettled with the Atkans, an Aleut people with a different dialect and with whom there had been ancient tensions and rivalries (Kohlhoff 1995).

Forty-three years after the evacuation, on 10 August 1988, the Aleut people received an apology from the US Congress and the President on behalf of the people of the United States with the passage of Public Law 100-383 “Restitution for World War II Internment of Japanese-Americans and Aleuts”. Financial restitution included a $5 million fund administered by the Aleutian and Pribilof Island Association to benefit Aleut internees and their descendants. Compensation for damaged or destroyed church property was provided and Aleuts who suffered in the internment camps were awarded $12,000 each for “damages for human suffering” (Public Law 100-383).

6 World War II legacy in the landscape

The legacy of World War II in the Aleutian landscape is two-fold. The physical landscape comprised of natural areas and human settlements has been altered, sometimes substantially in the course of the war. Additionally, there is the social landscape, the relations between and among people that were also re-cast by the war.

6.1 The physical landscape

Much of the physical landscape was destroyed or lost during the wartime internment period, particularly Aleut homes and businesses. This destruction extended to Aleut community churches, with many eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian Orthodox icons destroyed or stolen. The villages of Biorka, Kashega, Makushin, and Attu were never reconstituted.

However, just as significant as loss in shaping the physical landscape are the many things the US military left behind. From unexploded ordnance that can make it unwise to hike off-trail to the myriad bunkers and buildings that were left behind to sink into the ground, there are many places in the Aleutians where there is some visible physical reminder of the war (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.  Abandoned World War II bunker and gunmount, Unalaska 2002.

An Aleut returnee described how the military “just left everything intact” (Package, Field Interview 2004). The residents would go through the buildings looking for canned rations, ammunition, clothing, and guns. By the ammunition dump there were boxes and boxes of hand grenades, which the local children used to throw into the bay for entertainment. The physical debris abandoned by the military in the landscape became a new resource for Aleut villagers seeking to rebuild:

The people of Unalaska [were] breaking into them [abandoned military buildings], salvaging the lumber so they can repair their buildings, or houses that are standing. The government wouldn't let you have them. Wouldn't they rather burn them down than to let the people salvage them. But we did anyways. After ten, fifteen years nobody really didn't care one way or the other. (Package, Field Interview 2004)

Also left behind from World War II was the rusted hull of the Northwestern, where eight people were killed in the air strike. The ship was towed out from its original location in Dutch Harbor and dumped in Captain's Bay where it remains partially submerged. As with other abandoned military debris diverted by locals for their own uses over time, the Northwestern has also been appropriated. It is used as an unauthorized staging ground for fishing gear, such as crab pots (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.  Unalaska/Dutch Harbor crab pots stored in 2002 on the rusted hull of the SS Northwestern, bombed by Japanese during World War II.

The contrast between these remains and the remains of the other Japanese attack on the territorial US during World War II seem significant. The highly developed memorials at Pearl Harbor, which include the dramatic USS Arizona Memorial built at sea over the sunken battleship, indicate how events there have been assimilated into the national memory. In the Aleutians, the war is not so much represented by constructed memorials as it is by abandoned and appropriated debris.

6.2 The social landscape

The period of Aleut internment in Alaska led to the death of almost 100 people, or about one in ten internees (Madden 1992). In Japan, about half of the Aleut prisoners died (Malcolm 2005; cf. Kohlhoff 1995). Those unable to survive the harsh conditions of the camps were mostly Aleut elders and infants. The death of so many Aleut elders led to an irretrievable loss of Aleut knowledge and culture (Madden 1992). Indigenous knowledge is locally situated in the sense that it is closely tied to specific environments (Kirsch 2001: 173). The Aleuts whose villages were not resettled lost their connection to a specific place, but not the identity of belonging to that place. Survivors still desire to return ‘home’. A former villager of Makushin has visited his childhood home on occasion. He wishes to be buried there. Even though the buildings have fallen down, he crosses himself when he stands upon the grass-covered site where the church once stood (Malcolm 2005). In the demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic realms, the post-World War II Aleutian landscape was one of absences, ghosts, and denial.

The post-war level of denial could be characterized as a kind of social absence. Both the US Government and the Aleut people spent a number of years trying to erase what had happened by ignoring it, though clearly with different motivations and consequences. The events of the evacuation and internment of the Aleut people remained not only largely unknown to the American public, but also unspoken by community members for a long period of time. One Aleut resident of Unalaska remembers that he did not know about the evacuation for much of his life:

I didn't even know about the evacuation until I was ten, eleven, twelve years old because nobody talked about. They just didn't want to talk about it. So it was a real hard thing. And nobody really talked about it until 1992 when you had the reunion of the Air Force people, or Army and Air Force and Navy guys that came out. Then we got some of the elders to talk about the evacuation and everything. (Package, Field Interview 2004)

Eventually, silence has begun to give way to representation. The Dutch Harbor Naval Operating Base and US Army post Fort Mears on Amaknak Island were added onto the National Register of Historic Landmarks in 1985 and the USS Northwestern Shipwreck Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The Aleutian World War II National Historic Area was established by Congress in 1996, which preserves the fort above Dutch Harbor. Administered by the National Park Service, the National Historic Area is described as the stage for “two American tragedies”, the loss of servicemen in the campaign and the internment of the Aleut people (NPS 2007). A Visitor Center, operated by the Ounalashka Native Corporation, opened in 2002. The Visitor Center is dedicated to the history of the Aleut people and the role of the Aleutians in World War II. The first Dutch Harbor Remembrance Day, declared by the State of Alaska, was celebrated on 3 June 2002 to honor the Aleutians Campaign, the soldiers who died in the attack on Dutch Harbor, and the inhabitants of Attu and Kiska.

As memorialization has gained ground over denial as the accepted accommodation of this history, state and non-state actors are co-creating narratives of history that structure the relationship of past and present through place. As we shall explore next, economic and demographic transition in Unalaska entwines these historical narratives with discourses of identity and positionality in competitive access to resources in the modern context.

7 Modern globalization

The Aleutian Islands’ role on the global stage did not subside after World War II. The two things that kept the archipelago enmeshed in global affairs were the same as in the eighteenth century–the strategic location of the islands between Asia and America, and the rich marine resources of the Bering Sea. Except in today's world, the coveted marine resources are fish, not fur, and the military presence is more technology-based than troop-based.

The US made significant use of several Aleutian Islands during the cold war and continues with military activities today. Bases were established in a number of locations including a Coast Guard LORAN station on Attu, an Air Force Base on Shemya, and a Naval Air Base on Adak (closed in 1997). Amchitka Island was the site of three underground nuclear tests in 1965, 1969 and 1971, including America's largest ever underground test (Kohlhoff 2006). In 2007, Adak received the enormous Sea-Based X band radar system of the Missile Defense Agency, successor to the Strategic Defense Initiative popularly known as ‘Star Wars’.

After the war, with military activities focused elsewhere in the Aleutians, Unalaska reverted to a quiet Native village of about 200 people. However, the rapid expansion of the king crab industry in the 1960s once again attracted outsiders (fishers and processors), who squatted in abandoned military barracks and bunkers during the crabbing season. Lawlessness, drugs, money, alcohol, and bar-room disturbances put the name Dutch Harbor (as the town became known among fishermen) on the map as the farthest corner of a new American Wild West.

The role of processors in the community of Unalaska grew along with the industry, and companies such as Aleutian King Crab, Inc. began providing local services and access to imported goods. The head of this company, Captain Niels Thomsen, became the mayor of Unalaska in 1967, setting a precedent for the strong (but sometimes contentious) role of processors in the political life of the city (Lowe 2006). King crab fishing and processing brought a wage economy to a largely subsistence-based community, and by 1967, it had become a multi-million dollar industry. This industrial surge increased through the 1970s. In 1979, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) named Unalaska/Dutch Harbor the top fishing port in the nation in terms of both pounds landed and value.

In 1982, the king crab stocks dramatically collapsed, threatening to return the port to relative obscurity. However, with processes set in motion by the Magnuson Fishery Management and Conservation Act, the status of Unalaska/Dutch Harbor soon returned to the top fishing port in the US. The Act's exclusion of foreign fishing vessels from within 200 nautical miles of US coastlines radically restructured the groundfish fishery. The new ‘Americanized’ groundfish fleet in the eastern Bering Sea had previously been comprised of Russians, Portuguese, Koreans, Poles and Japanese. The new shoreside processing industry was concentrated in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor.

While the fleet was becoming ‘Americanized’, the processing industry and the labor and consumer markets for the fishery were becoming globalized as never before. Japanese corporations invested heavily in Unalaska's shoreside processing industry, where plants turn walleye pollock into surimi or pre-surimi white fish blocks bound for Japanese markets. The largest processors in Unalaska have huge Japanese parent corporations, such as Nissui and Maruha. One Unalaska resident describes this transformation as the Act's intent, interpreting that it “basically told the Japanese companies, ‘If you want to have access to groundfish—pollock, cod, other species—bring your technology and your checkbook’. And the Japanese companies came into Unalaska and made investments” (Sepez, Field Interview 2002). Japanese capital investment in the means of production has kept Unalaska/Dutch Harbor as the top US fishing port (by volume) for many years.

Japan also dominates the market for consumption of Unalaska/Dutch Harbor's seafood production. The Unalaska/Dutch Harbor Chamber of Commerce (2007) lists the following foreign markets for their seafood: Japan, Korea, Norway, Taiwan, China, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Denmark, UK and Malaysia. According to US export records between 1983 and 2006, Alaska pollock was actually exported to 99 different countries on six continents. Of these, Japan is by far the largest market, importing more than 1 billion pounds of Alaska pollock during that time period—more than twice as much as the next import country and about equal to all other importing countries combined. Almost all of this fish was taken from Aleutian Island waters or the adjacent Bering Sea. Figure 3 displays export data for 2006, showing a global network dominated by the connection between Anchorage and Tokyo.

Figure 3.  Alaska Pollock exports go all over the world, but are dominated by Japan. (Figure by Michael Dalton, Alaska Fisheries Science Center.)

The labor market draws on a completely different global network. Transnational migratory laborers come to Unalaska for seafood processing jobs often considered too unattractive for citizen workers. Of the 4283 residents reported by the 2000 Census, only around 50% of these applied for the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which has stricter criteria than the Census for Alaska residency (AWCRSA 2000). Another sign of Unalaska's transient work force is the fact that almost half the official population is domiciled in group quarters (dormitory-style housing provided by companies). The structure of the population resembles the typical ‘labor shape’ (Package and Sepez 2007) seen in seafood processing communities in Alaska, characterized by a noticeable bulge of working age males (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.  The population structure of Unalaska shows the typical ‘labor shape’ of communities with onshore seafood processing facilities that attract transient labor. Source: Census 2000 data.

Also indicative of the global labor market are the dispersed origins of Unalaska's current population, quite different from the 250 Aleuts and 50 Caucasians that lived there before the war. According to the 2000 Census, about 26% of the total Unalaska population (1118 people) in 2000 reported being foreign-born. Of those, approximately 72.4% were born in Asia (Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam), 21.4% were born in the Americas (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru), and the rest in Africa, Europe and Oceania. The largest national contributors to the Unalaska labor pool were the Philippines at 25% of the total recorded foreign-born population, Vietnam at 18.4%, and Mexico at 17.4%. The main wave of arrival for foreign-born Unalaska residents was 1985–1994 with more than 65% entering the US during that time.

Pollock fishery changes in the mid-1990s that stabilized harvest patterns by limiting vessels and allocating shares have had a stabilizing effect on the community. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of females living in Unalaska increased from 29 to 34%, while the percentage of minors below the age of 18 increased from 12 to 15% of the population. These increases in family indicators signify a more permanent (though still seasonal) workforce with stronger community connections.

8 From contested lands to contested landscapes

According to some theorists of colonial studies, globalization may be understood as a kind of ‘postmodern colonialism’ (Silbey 1997: 207). Under this interpretation, the mercantile enterprise of globalization resembles colonialism except that “control of land or political organization or nation-states is less important than power over consciousness and consumption” (Silbey 1997: 219) or their corollaries, dissemination and production. A primary aspect of this theory is that colonialism, with its costs of military occupation, administration and other responsibilities, can be an expensive way to maintain control over resources (Chen 1997). Thus, nationalist independence movements provided a way for colonial powers to move from conquest to appropriation, or as Chen (1997: 86) describes it, “from territorial acquisition to ‘remote control’”. Economic globalization extends the means by which it is possible to co-ordinate capital, labor, and markets for production and consumption practices that devitalize national boundaries.

These ideas from the literature of decolonization are usually applied to former European colonies that comprise much of the developing world. They have not been constructed with places such as the American Aleutians in mind because they are jurisdictionally part of a great power. However, the Aleutians’ geographic and developmental placement at the farthest reaches of US territory embodies an often overlooked marginality that may also be found in the ‘hinterlands’ of other developed countries (Vaccaro 2006: 361). In this post-modern colonial hinterland, the would-be occupier turned appropriator is Japan. The failure of the Japanese military to occupy more than two of the most remote islands during the war has been succeeded by the phenomenal success of peaceful Japanese economic interests in the shore side seafood processing industry. The irony of the Japanese military attack on Unalaska/Dutch Harbor having been surpassed by a lucrative transnational co-operation in fisheries can be read as either the epitome of the peaceful benefits of globalization, or the exploitative tendencies of globally mobile capital in a market system that benefits elites, regardless of the country. Many social scientists view the global fishing economy in the Aleutians as a ‘third wave’ of foreign domination (Corbett and Swibold 2000; Reedy-Maschner 2002).

These dynamics are not lost on local residents, though they would certainly cast them in different terms as they draw on the material legacies in the landscape to legitimate particular historical narratives. Vaccaro (2005): 6) notes that “The landscape is at the center of a political process in which social actors collide in their discursive and practical quest to obtain comparative advantage”. As disputes over place in Unalaska suggest, globalization, even in its neo-colonial guise, never happens as a smooth and predictable economic progression. Instead, these new processes of industrial globalization encounter cultures in remote Unalaska that have been “shaped and transformed in long histories of regional-to-global networks of power, trade, and meaning” (Tsing 2005: 3). Consequently, the ensuing debates over place, identity, and history in the context of the globalization of Unalaska's fishing industry become sites of what Tsing describes as ‘friction’: “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing 2005: 4).

The discourse in the fisheries arena can be extremely confrontational and blunt, deploying place, memory, history, race, and nationalism as tropes in the battle for discursive ground. At a meeting of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in 2002, a fisherman arguing for harvester interests made reference to the Japanese attacks of 60 years earlier as having occurred ‘‘right on this spot’’ while others, associated more with processor interests, walked out in protest of such “racism” (Sepez, Field Interview 2002). Invoking memory of the war, or denial of its applicability, is less about whether history will be relevant to modernity than about whose history will frame the debate. Nationalism is also deployed. In testimony to the Arctic Research Commission, a fisherman from the Unalaska Native Fishermen's Association asserted a nationalist economic paradigm to challenge processor interests, asking “How can the United States Government give away a national resource to foreign owned companies?” (ARC 2004). But the very name of the Unalaska Native Fishermen's Association invokes a mantel of indigeneity to promote local small-boat fishermen (some of whom are not Aleut in their ethnic heritage), competing for harvest resources. Indigeneity tracks with small and local, although in fact the large landholding Native Corporations enable the distribution of benefits from economic activity to their exclusively Aleut shareholders. History, indigeneity, and nationalism provide complex discursive material for negotiating identity and position along the frictional interfaces of economic globalization.

Material artifacts, such as rusted ship hulls and bunkers, recall militarization in defense of Japanese invasion, and provide a means for local fishermen to stake their membership within and protection by the US national polity and economy in response to a potential loss of autonomy through deepening processes of economic globalization. Trouillot (1995): 29) observes on the making of history: “What happened leaves traces, some of which are quite concrete—buildings, dead bodies, censuses, monuments, diaries, political boundaries—that limit the range and significance of any historical narrative”. However, these objects are not an open text; they “embody the ambiguities of history” (Trouillot 1995: 30) insofar as they remain embedded within the workings of power that produce silences and absences—those processes and events that did not leave a material trace and that may recall alternative stories.

The experiences of making history and landscape in Unalaska reveal the manifold ways that loss and memory imprint themselves on the activities and stories told about tangible remains. As community members reappropriated the material remains of military artifacts in order to construct new lives in the face of loss, they also reappropriated the symbolism of physical remains in order to assert claims to economic and political rights based on identity, history, and belonging. After all, it is not just the facts of militarization, forced migration, and Japanese invasion, but the ways in which these events are couched in memories of loss and histories of inequality that provide a means for making these broader claims accountable. It is through these processes that place (through remains and through new construction as we explore in the conclusion) becomes a medium for community members to struggle for rights, reclaim resources, and negotiate the ways in which the community connects to a global industry—building bridges both materially and symbolically.

9 The Bridge to the Other Side

There is a wooden bridge between Unalaska Island and Amaknak Island, where Dutch Harbor is located. Built in 1979 and known locally as ‘the Bridge to the Other Side’, it was intended to host 400-500 crossings per day. With the phenomenal success of the commercial fishing industry, by 2002 it was being crossed more than 4200 times a day. As with many of the unexpected changes that industrial fishing brought to the small community, the scale of the global trade and its pressures on the existing landscape was incongruous with the scale of the old community (Sepez et al., 2006).

A nearby site was selected by the Federal Highway Administration for a new bridge, which would have an appropriate carrying capacity for a global port, but would cut through a 3000 year old ancient village site that had been partially excavated (Knecht and Davis 2004). In an eerie echo of the removal and internment of living Aleut villages during the war, an agreement was reached between multiple parties (including Aleut representatives) to remove the ancient village from its place to a fenced site owned by the Ounalashka Native Corporation. The controversy inflamed intra-community oppositions that regularly occur along typical social fault lines. At issue was how to accommodate contested claims of memorialization and productivity in the landscape when they are imbricated with identities of indigeneity, which is tied closely to place, and global modernity, which is characterized by hyper-mobility (Sivaramakrishnan and Vaccaro 2006).

The Bridge to the Other Side is emblematic of a complicated and sometimes uncomfortable interarticulation of history and modernity in the social landscape, in which one thing is always built on another and identities are not autochthonous, but compiled from history, experience, and position. If all landscapes are anthropogenic, then all construction will involve appropriation, literally and figuratively. The phenomenal success of the Port of Dutch Harbor is built in part on the military infrastructure created by the war. The Russian Orthodox Church of Unalaska was refurbished with funds from Congress in partial reparation to the Aleut community for the evacuation and internment. At the bridge site, the ancient village yielded ground literally to the connectivity needs of the global village.

Almost everywhere in the landscape, there is something of the human past. Where there are no tangible remains, there are absences, memories, or opportunities, which may also take on a social dynamic in subsequent negotiations of community, identity, and place. At the crossroads of North America and Asia, the Aleutian landscape is littered with the debris of successive waves of human occupation from both directions, while new material markers continue to be built, and old conflicts find new territory. Through this lens, the anthropogeneity of the landscape itself is a bridge to the other side of history.

Acknowledgements

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or positions of the National Marine Fisheries Service. The authors would like to thank the residents of Unalaska/Dutch Harbor for interviews and assistance with this research, Dr. Paul Trawick of the University of Kentucky for organizing the Reading History in the Landscape session at the American Anthropological Association Meetings, and Dr. Palma Ingles of NMFS, Southeast Region, for research and support in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor that contributed to this article. Special thanks go to Dr. Michael Dalton of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center for providing the figure and analysis of Alaska's global seafood trade, Ron Felthoven of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Ben Muse of NMFS, Alaska Region, Ismael Vaccaro of McGill University, Leila Sievanen of the University of Washington, and several anonymous reviewers.