Cama'i America: Alaska Natives, Narrative, and the Spaces of Empire

• Main Author: Swensen, Thomas Michael
• Other Authors: Biolsi, Thomas J
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 2011
• Subjects: Ethnic studies; History; Literature; Alaska Natives; Art; Imperialism; Russia; United States; Visual Culture; Bering Strait; Luke; aleut; alutiiq; Athabascan; Bering Strait Yupik; tlingit; Yupik; Alaska
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5zk010k2

The word "cama'i" in the title, pronounced cha-my, is the Alutiiq word for "hello." Given that in the nineteenth-century Alutiiqs, working in California, passed the word on to Kashaya speaking Pomo whom still presently use the greeting in their language today, I use the term to underscore global geopolitical articulations in the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. The first chapter, "Cama'i America," examines oral narratives by conscripted Alaska Natives and colonized Kashaya Indians at the village of Metini, California during the Fort Ross trading period in the early nineteenth-century. The second chapter, "Citizens/Subjects in the Last Frontier," analyzes Alaska Native citizenship during the movement that resulted in statehood in 1959. This chapter focuses on the textuality of the Alaska flag, adopted in 1927, and how images and representations of Jon "Benny" Benson, the flag's Alutiiq designer, and the children of Athabascan Chief Luke, relate to the perceived incorporation of the region's indigenous people into the nation's racial culture and gender hierarchy. The third chapter, "Impossible Sovereignty," reads the indigenously-produced films Our Aleut History: Alaska Natives in Progress (1986) and Aleut Story (2005) as indigenous heritage recovery projects with contrasting goals, covering twentieth-century enslavement, World War II internment, and United States citizenship. Chapter four, "Of Displacement and Domestication," turns to the play River Woman as Tlingit writer and Alaska politician Diane E. Benson's dramaturgical response to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The final chapter, "The Ends of Imperialism," articulates the Bering region as an indigenous cultural center reading the Cold War-era politics of transcontinental Yupik culture through the work of "American" and "Russian" Bering Strait Yupik women writers.