U.S. MILITARY TO OFFER HISTORIC APOLOGY TO KAKE FOR DEVASTATING 1869 BOMBARDMENT
Tribal leader hopes gesture will lead to healing of intergenerational trauma
Sept. 16, 2024
The United States Navy will formally apologize to the village of Kake this month for its devastating bombardment of the Southeast Alaska town and its associated sites more than 150 years ago.
The attack was launched in January 1869 and destroyed homes, canoes and food supplies during winter, which led to many deaths in the aftermath, especially among children and Elders who starved or died of exposure, according to Kake oral histories.
In the many decades that followed, Tlingit leaders from Kake appealed in vain to the military for an apology and reparations.
The recent news of an imminent apology surprised some Kake leaders who were under the impression that such a gesture was out of reach.
“It’s a long time coming,” said Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake (OVK), which is located on Kupreanof Island. “We weren’t at war with the U.S., they declared war on us. It was never anything other than the military coming and bombarding our village—there was no war. They need to make it right.”
Much of the history written about the bombardment omits Tlingit oral histories and relies on the military’s accounts. The village is developing curriculum to teach children about the event and to set the record straight.
Jackson hopes the apology will be a first step toward healing the intergenerational trauma caused by the military’s violence.
“A lot of our people don’t even talk about it. We need to start talking about it, because we need to start healing,” he said.
The event is scheduled in Kake at 1 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Kake Community Hall. Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) will provide live stream coverage of the ceremony on its YouTube channel.
The communities of Angoon and Wrangell have also sought apologies for many years from the military for the destruction of their villages that occurred in 1882 and 1869, respectively.
Recent Advocacy
In recent years, some military leaders have expressed interest in making amends after SHI President Rosita Worl, Ph.D., gave a presentation at the Alaska Federation of Native’s Joint Alaska Native Military Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2019. During the presentation, “Indigenous Values Strengthening Resiliency in Arctic and Rural Communities,” she reported on the bombardment of Angoon.
After her talk, Lt. Gen. Thomas A. Bussiere of the United States Air Force approached Worl to express interest in working on an Angoon apology. Worl advised Bussiere that the military had also bombarded Kake and Wrangell in the 1800s.
That led to a historic meeting at SHI in 2020 between clan Elders and other tribal citizens from Angoon, Kake and Wrangell along with Bussiere and his aides to discuss possible ways to reconcile and to heal.
“What might be a path forward in opening the dialogue with a purpose of healing and a deeper understanding?” Bussiere asked tribal citizens at the time.
After Bussiere’s departure from his post in Alaska, Worl continued to work with his successors and community leaders to secure apologies.
About the Kake Bombardment
The military action against the Kake Tlingit began in Sitka when armed soldiers insulted three clan leaders—a Chilkat, a L’uknax̱.ádi and an Áak’w Ḵwáan— and accosted one of them. After a scuffle, the Chilkat leader, Colchika, went away with the sentry’s rifle, which prompted the fort’s commander, Army Brevet Maj. General Jefferson C. Davis, to send a detachment into the Native village demanding his surrender, with the threat of a military attack on the village. The clan leader surrendered in order to stop the village from being shelled by artillery.
The next morning, as three Kake Tlingit were attempting to leave Sitka, an army sentinel shot and killed two of them. The survivor, a clan leader, asked for trade blankets and goods as compensation for their deaths in accordance with Tlingit law, but the general refused.
A month or so later, a party of Kake Tlingits came across four trappers on Admiralty Island. They killed two of the trappers as compensation for the loss of two of their clansmen for which no payment had been made. When the general learned of the deaths, he ordered Navy Cmdr. Richard W. Meade of the USS Saginaw to Kake to “seize a few of their chiefs as hostages till they [the accused] are given up” and then to “burn their villages.” In January of 1869, three Kake village sites and two forts were totally destroyed by the military. After the shelling, the soldiers went ashore and found each site to be deserted. They proceeded to set fire to the villages and destroyed all the canoes and food supplies.
Tlingit elder Henry Davis stated in a 1974 interview that “destroying their homes, their canoes, their caches, their food is the worst of all activities that the U.S. armed forces took to burn their provisions. As result there were many deaths, especially among the children and women.”
At an OVK tribal council meeting on June 24, 2011, when the Bombardment of Kake became a topic of discussion, council member and Elder Lincoln Bean summarized oral histories about how the soldiers “put chemicals on the food, which poisoned some who died.” And although an exact number of those killed has not been documented, Bean added that oral history recounts that a number of children and Elders died from exposure and starvation as result of the attack.
Although there are a number of factors that strained Tlingit and American relations during this period, the three most prominent causes for this conflict amounted to the following: 1) the Tlingit did not recognize the sale of their ancestral lands by Russia to the United States in 1867, 2) the U.S. government and the Tlingits failed to accept each other’s legal systems and worldviews and 3) the Army had a policy and practice of using or threatening to use lethal American military technology against Alaska’s Native peoples.
OVK is the federally recognized Tribal Government for Kake. Its core purpose is to strengthen tribal community and cultures. Its core values are respect, collaboration, endurance, safety and security. Its goals are to enhance the quality of life of tribal citizens through economic enterprises and social programs, to preserve and sustain cultural traditions and to advocate for the protection and preservation of customary and traditional areas and gathering practices important to their subsistence activities.
CONTACT: Joel Jackson, President, Organized Village of Kake, 907-518-1592, president@kake-nsn.gov; Julianne Leinenveber, Environmental Public Affairs Specialist, Navy Region Northwest, 360-867-8525, julianne.e.leinenveber.civ@us.navy.mil; Kathy Dye, SHI Communications and Publications Deputy Director, 907.321.4636, kathy.dye@sealaska.com.
Caption: Unexploded ordnance from the military’s bombardment of Kake in 1869. The shell was featured in SHI’s 2019 exhibit “War and Peace,” which delved into traditional Tlingit laws, the consequences for breaking them and the complex peace ceremonies that ended conflicts and restored balance. Photo courtesy of Sealaska Heritage Institute. Note: Media outlets are permitted to use this image for coverage of this story. For a higher-res image, contact kathy.dye@sealaska.com.
This account is based on SHI’s upcoming Box of Knowledge book on the bombardments of Angoon, Kake and Wrangell by the U.S. military in the 1800s. The book, written by Zachary R. Jones, Ph.D., is scheduled for release in 2024.