Letters to the Editor

Letter: Alaska history needs revision

In defense of professor Steve Haycox, I would like to affirm that Alaska's history needs revision. The first volume of our story was published by Hubert G. Bancroft in San Francisco, a decade after Alaska became a U.S. territory. All the archives, diaries, reports and documents were, at that time, in Russian. Bancroft did not know Russian and never came to Alaska. He depended on Ivan Petroff to provide translations from Russian archives, but Petroff gave him forgeries, Englsh "translations" of documents for which there are no Russian originals.

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have Russian Alaska historical documents been made available to American scholars. We are discovering that a majority of the "Russians" who came to Alaska were in fact Native Siberians; that Russians were forbidden to settle permanently here and Alaska Natives had to be trained to run the colonial schools, churches, hospitals and ships; that some tribes had a higher literacy rate than European Russia; that while the sea otter population had been decimated, the fur seal harvest on the Pribilof Islands was still producing millions of dollars in profit.

They sold sovereignty (the right to rule) Alaska to the U.S. to keep it out of British hands and insisted the land belonged to the Natives who lived here, resulting in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 104 years later. The Creoles (of mixed Siberian and Alaskan ancestry) were an important element in the development of the territory for a century after the 1867 sale. Our old Bancroftian histories need radical revision.
Thank you, Dr. Haycox.
— Rev. Michael J. Oleksa
Anchorage

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