Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

Product Description

From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia’s only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed “kreol” community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia’s modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people. In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia’s North Pacific venture.
Although Russia’s Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers―Spain, England, Holland, and France―started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the “discovery” and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia’s Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller’s attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

Review

“By focusing on the periphery of a great empire, Miller raises the problem of the dialectic between the periphery and the center. She views this problem through the prism of the Kodiak colony as the link between the two poles, the contact zone where they interacted with each other.Kodiak Kreolis a productive attempt to reconstruct the entire imperial project through the effects it produced on the periphery, using sociological, anthropological, and gender perspectives, and comparing this case with other colonial encounters.” — Monica Cognolato,
Ab Imperio

“On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s book, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire…. Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the ‘crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact.’… Peopling the eastward course of empire through Russia’s expansion into the North Pacific with figures such as the ambitious fur trader Grigorii Shelikhov and the young Kreol students who traveled to Saint Petersburg, Miller succeeds in illuminating another, very different colonial story.”,
William and Mary Quarterly

“Gwenn A. Miller has constructed a brilliantly conceived and elegantly written book that considerably heightens our understanding of the fur trade in Russian America and how the unique interactions of peoples at Russia’s first and only overseas colony, Kodiak, Alaska, matured into a hybrid community distinguished by a complex blending of cultural elements…. Anyone with an interest in the fur trade, indigenous societies, Alaska history, and Russian colonial and missionary history, will find Kodiak Kreol a fascinating and rewarding study.” — Cary C. Collins,
Canadian Journal of