Awa'uq Massacre

Since 1775, Shelekhov had been trading with Alaska Natives in the Kuril and Aleutian islands of present-day Alaska. In April 1784, he returned to found a settlement on Kodiak Island and the coast of the mainland. According to Shelekhov, the Koniag Alutiiq had driven off previous landing attempts by the Russians in 1761 and 1774, but this time he had 130 armed Russians at his disposal.^[6]

The people occupying the area attempted to drive off the Russian landing attempt, and fled to the secluded stack island Refuge Rock (Awa'uq in Alutiiq language, approximate meaning 'where one becomes numb'^[7]) of Partition Cove on Sitkalidak Island. It was across Old Harbor in the Kodiak Archipelago.^[8]

The Russian promyshlenniki attacked the people on the island by shooting guns and cannons, slaughtering an estimated 200 to 500^[9][2] men, women and children on Refuge Rock. Some sources state the number killed was as many as 2,000,^[1] or 3,000 persons.^[3] Following the attack of Awa'uq, Shelekhov claimed to have captured over 1,000 people, detaining some 400 as hostages, including children.^[1] The Russians suffered no casualties.^[3]

This massacre was an isolated incident, but the violence and taking of hostages resulted in the Alutiiq becoming completely subjugated by Russian traders thereafter.^[10] Qaspeq (literally: "kuspuk"), was an Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) who had been taken as a child as a hostage from Kodiak; he was raised in servitude by the Russians in the Aleutians. Having learned Russian, he became an interpreter for them with the Alutiiq. Qaspeq had once betrayed the location of a refuge island just offshore of Unalaska Island.^[11]

More than five decades after the massacre, Arsenti Aminak, an old Sugpiaq man who had survived the massacre, reported his account of these events to Henrik Johan Holmberg (sometimes known as Heinrich Johann) (1818–1864), a Finnish naturalist and ethnographer.^[12] Holmberg was collecting data for the Russian governor of Alaska.^[13]

Aminak said:

The Russians went to the settlement and carried out a terrible blood bath. Only a few [people] were able to flee to Angyahtalek in baidarkas; 300 Koniags were shot by the Russians. This happened in April. When our people revisited the place in the summer the stench of the corpses lying on the shore polluted the air so badly that none could stay there, and since then the island has been uninhabited. After this every chief had to surrender his children as hostages; I was saved only by my father's begging and many sea otter pelts. ^[14]

The years 1784–1818 were called the "darkest period of Sugpiaq history," as the Russians treated the people badly. They also suffered high mortality from infectious diseases unwittingly introduced by the Russians. In 1818 there was a change in the management of what was then known as the Russian-American Company, referring to Russians operating in North America.^[15]

In 1827 collection of yasak (ясак) tax was banned by Catherine the Great.^[13]