Chugach Erotic

The Chugach are the Sugpiaq people of Prince William Sound and the outer Kenai Peninsula coast in southcentral Alaska. They form the eastern edge of a sea-based culture that also includes the Alutiiq of Kodiak Island and the Alaska Peninsula. Water shapes almost everything about them. Their country is a maze of fjords, tidewater glaciers and spruce-covered islands, and for thousands of years life has depended on boats. Hunters once went out in skin kayaks and now go out in aluminum skiffs, after seals, sea lions, salmon, herring and shellfish. Sugpiaq means roughly real person. Many elders grew up calling themselves Aleut, a name Russian traders spread along the coast, and people still use it today.

Their language is the Chugach dialect of Alutiiq, which its speakers call Sugt'stun. It belongs to the Yupik branch of the Eskimo-Aleut family, and that put the Chugach on a sharp language border. To the east lived the Eyak, whose language is a distant relative of the Athabaskan languages, and past them the Tlingit. Inland and around Cook Inlet lived Athabaskan-speaking peoples, the Ahtna and the Dena'ina. Relations with these neighbors ranged from trade to raiding. Most fluent speakers today are elders, and village programs are working to pass the language on.

Outsiders arrived early, and the damage was heavy. James Cook sailed into the sound in 1778. Russian fur traders followed, built a post at Nuchek on Hinchinbrook Island and pulled Chugach hunters into the sea otter trade. Epidemics, including smallpox in the late 1830s, sharply reduced the population. Russian Orthodoxy has lasted long after the Russians left. Orthodox churches are still at the center of village life in Tatitlek, Nanwalek and Port Graham, and Orthodox Christmas in January brings starring, when people carry a spinning star from house to house and sing carols.

The twentieth century brought two more disasters. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake sent a wave through the village of Chenega that killed about a third of its people and destroyed the settlement. Survivors waited twenty years before rebuilding at Chenega Bay. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef, not far from Tatitlek, and spilled oil onto the shores and waters Chugach families rely on for food. Chugach Alaska Corporation, created under the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, now holds regional land alongside village corporations and tribal councils. Chugach people live in their home villages and in Cordova, Valdez, Seward and Anchorage, and many still put up salmon, seal oil and berries every year.