One hundred and fifty years ago today, Marietta Davis stood in the cold and gray Sitka rain.
She wasn’t born in Alaska, but her story is that of many others. She came here for family. She had a hard time adjusting to the rain and the early sunsets of fall. She didn’t like the remoteness. She had a hard time finding housing.
And yet, she found a way to make it work anyway. She made friends and made Alaska her home. The wife of Gen. Jefferson Davis, she became Alaska’s first “first lady.”
Davis was one of the few dozen people present in New Archangel, now Sitka, on Oct. 18, 1867, when the U.S. government took possession of Alaska from Russia.
In the 150 years since that day, Alaskans have achieved great things. We have built and fished and farmed and mined, and even ventured into space from launchpads near Fairbanks and Kodiak.
Marietta Davis didn’t know, on that soggy day, what would come.
She wasn’t impressed, her letters say, as she stood in the rain and watched the Russian flag come down and the American flag go up.
There were others alongside and watching from a distance, and they weren’t much impressed by that cold and gray day, either.
Unfortunately, we don’t have much to go on. The U.S. government did not bother to record in detail the thoughts of the Sheet’ka Kwáan who have lived in Sitka since before written records.
One of the few direct quotes comes from Gen. Lovell Rousseau, one of the Americans overseeing the cession.
“True, we allowed the Russians to possess the island,” he quotes an unnamed Tlingit chief as saying, “but we did not intend to (allow) any and every fellow that may come along.”
The few Russians who lived in Alaska were allowed to become American citizens at the transfer. Alaska Natives didn’t get that right. They had to navigate a labyrinthine process enacted later.
It wasn’t until 1924, 57 years after the transfer, that all Alaska Natives automatically became American citizens.
The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal. On that first Alaska Day, and for decades afterward, they weren’t treated equally.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the transfer, and many of us will use this holiday to look backward and marvel at how far we’ve come since Marietta Davis stood in Sitka’s rain.
Alongside the pipeline and the railroad, we have civil rights and equality under the law. As Sitka hosts its Alaska Day celebrations (which it has done every year since 1949), it also hosts the Sharing Our Knowledge Clan Conference. There is room enough for both.
There is also room for improvement.
Just last week, we were told by the state that in Alaska, a Native child is four times more likely to die in infancy than a white child. Native adults die younger on average than white Alaskans. They are less likely to graduate from college and more likely to earn less.
As we celebrate Alaska Day, we shouldn’t forget any of this. In the next 150 years, we must turn a state where all men are created equal into one where no person is treated like they’re not.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40473970?seq=8#page_scan_tab_contents
http://juneauempire.com/art/2017-06-27/treaty-cession-tlingit-knew
http://juneauempire.com/art/2017-06-15/fainting-princess-maksutova
