The Pribilof Islands: Two Centuries of Captive Labor

The Russian hunters reached the Pribilof Islands in seventeen eighty-six and found something they had not expected: the largest northern fur seal rookery in the world. Saint Paul and Saint George Islands held millions of seals. The Unangan people did not live there permanently, but they knew the islands and their waters.

The Russians brought Unangan workers from the Aleutian communities to the south, first voluntarily, then by coercion. By the early nineteenth century, the arrangement had calcified into a system of captive labor. Unangan workers were required to harvest seals for the Russian American Company. They could not leave the islands without permission. The pelts they processed enriched a colonial corporation headquartered in Saint Petersburg.

When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in eighteen sixty-seven, it purchased this system along with the land. The Treasury Department retained control over the Pribilof Islands and contracted seal-harvesting rights to the Alaska Commercial Company, which maintained the same structure: Unangan workers, required to remain on the islands, paid government-set wages that bore no relationship to the value of what they produced. The contract passed to other private firms over the following decades. The formal end of federal control over Unangan lives on the Pribilof Islands came in nineteen eighty-three.

That is one hundred ninety-seven years of successive regimes, Russian and American, organized around the extraction of wealth from a captive workforce.

The nineteen forty-two wartime internment, when eight hundred eighty-one Unangan people were removed to deteriorating camps in Southeast Alaska and between ten and twenty-five percent of them died, was the most violent episode in this longer history. It was not the only one. When historians describe the Pribilof Unangan experience as an extended colonial captivity, they are describing the full arc, not just its most dramatic moment.

A federal apology came in two thousand seventeen. The Unangan communities of Saint Paul and Saint George Islands remain, small and remote, at the northern edge of the Pacific.