UC Davis

Abstract

This dissertation performs and demonstrates how Unangax̂ ways of doing histories with, by, and for Unangax̂ serve as a radical and relational methodology that centers Unangax̂ concepts, analytics, ethics, and protocols, and as a method for uplifting Unangax̂ cultural and linguistic resurgence. I am uniquely positioned to do this work as an Unangax̂ woman and tribal member who is supported by higher education institutions and resources. This work centers around a rematriation project for my great aunt Sophia Tetoff and my attempts to more fully understand the historiographic and structural inequities that enabled her to be stolen away from her home community on St. Paul Island, Alaska, carcerated in a Church-run (Jesse Lee Home) and government-run (Carlisle Indian Industrial School) Native American boarding Schools, and allowed to perish and interned in a children’s cemetery over four thousand miles away from her Peoples. Chapter 2 addresses Unangax̂ values and practices of self-determination despite the gradual Russian, European, and American incursions, with a specific focus on the emergence of a specifically Unangax̂ articulation of Russian Orthodox Indigeneity. Chapter 3 reconsiders some key moments in Unangax̂ history through an Unangax̂ lens to better understand colonial, imperial, capitalist, and racist structures imposed by Russians and Americans on Unangax̂ Peoples, lands, waters, and more-than-human relatives. Chapter 4 looks more closely at how these structures operated within Church- and government-run Native American boarding schools in the United States from the 1890s to 1970s, specifically through documents relating to Sophia’s kidnapping and carceration. In Chapter 5 I offer a hybrid narrative: a fictionalized telling of Sophia’s journey interpolated with details of my community-led rematriation project and processes. Throughout this research, I pay close attention to evidence of and discourse surrounding crimes of genocide against stolen Indigenous children. The first part of my conclusion places my project into conversation with a growing international reckoning with the role of church- and government-run boarding schools in crimes of genocide against Indigenous children. More specifically, I explain why I take issue with uses of the phrase “cultural genocide.” I discuss how we should think and discuss what happened to thousands of Indigenous children who were stolen from their homes, and who never made it home again. I argue that is not enough to call this a cultural genocide, but rather genocide, full stop. To more fully situate Unangax̂ Peoples in relation to global human rights discourse, I interweave tribal and community histories with terminologies and languages outlined across numerous international legal movements including: the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (OHCHR); the Genocide Convention, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, (ICESCR); Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery; the Slave Trade; Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1956); and the United Nations Universal declaration of Human Rights (UNHR). The second part of this conclusion discusses the significance of emerging traditions of Unangax̂-led research with and through the works of fellow Unangax̂ scholars who earned research doctorates. Our collective work is contributing to Unangax̂ futurities on our own terms. I also reflect on the implications of rematriating stolen relations for home communities.