Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

"In this fascinating book, Gwenn A. Miller skillfully explores the Russian colonization of Alaska, one of the most neglected stories of the early American past. Using Russian-language sources, Miller focuses on the intimate bonds that formed between Alutiiq people and newcomers. She not only shines light on the complex history of the Pacific Northwest but also offers a much broader analysis of how colonialism shaped family and gender relations."---Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia, author of Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

"Kodiak Kreol offers a nuanced and engaging account of the first years of contact between Russians and native peoples off the Alaskan coast. Miller's portrait of the intimate history of relations on Kodiak Island---between men and women, children and parents, priests and their flocks---is truly original."---Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati, author of Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe

"Most Europeans reached the Americas from across the Atlantic Ocean. The Russians, in contrast, approached North America from the west, having already acquired extensive colonial experience in Siberia. Their first---and only---overseas colony was in Alaska. In Kodiak Kreol, Gwenn A. Miller offers a new geographic and imperial perspective on colonial encounters in early America. Specialists in other empires in the early Americas and beyond will find this fascinating work rich in comparative perspectives and insights on a host of subjects, including labor, marriage, religion, sexuality, and, above all, the Kreols---the mixed-race children of Russian men and indigenous women---who are the special focus of this book."---Alison Games, Georgetown University, author of The Web of Empire; English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660

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.

Gwenn A. Miller is Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.