MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
As the United States celebrates 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we've been exploring how the American experiment has lived up to its promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today, that journey takes us to an island in the Bering Sea, where one community has spent centuries fighting for self-determination. Here's Theo Greenly from member station KUCB in Alaska.
THEO GREENLY, BYLINE: This story starts in Anchorage with the most American of pastimes.
(SOUNDBITE OF BAT HITTING BALL)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Foul ball. Foul ball.
GREENLY: It's perfect weather for a ballgame. Still, though, grade-schooler Chloe Zacharof is trying not to panic.
CHLOE ZACHAROF: Stressing.
GREENLY: All of the players here are from St. Paul, a tiny island midway between Russia and Alaska, home to an Alaskan Native community of about 300 people.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Strike 2.
GREENLY: Every June, they commemorate a baseball game from over 80 years ago. In the spring of 1942, the second world war reached Alaska. Japanese forces bombed a naval base and occupied the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska for nearly a year. The United States responded by sending over 100,000 troops to the Alaska territory.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GREENLY: There's a reason this music sounds a little bit like "Looney Tunes." Warner Bros. produced this training film for newly arrived military personnel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The Aleutians are a string of island bases extending over 1,000 miles westward from the Alaskan Peninsula.
GREENLY: The government evacuated about a dozen island communities, but only Alaska Native residents were forced to leave. Non-Native residents in the region could stay. On June 14, the people of St. Paul were in the middle of a baseball game when a U.S. Army ship arrived on their shore.
CARLEY BOURDUKOFKY: We were just enjoying our time playing ball, and they came in and told us to pack one bag.
GREENLY: Carley Bourdukofky's grandfather was one of roughly 300 Unanga residents ordered onto the ship.
BOURDUKOFKY: They didn't even let them finish the game. It was abrupt (laughter).
GREENLY: It dropped them off at an abandoned fish cannery over 1,000 miles away. One historian described the conditions as worse than those provided for German prisoners of war held in the United States. The evacuees lived in the rotting and squalid camp for nearly three years. By the time they were allowed to return, 1 in 10 had died. And that's why Olga Zacharof, Chloe's mom, helps organize this annual remembrance game.
OLGA ZACHAROF: To make sure, you know, our kids and the future generations know, like, what happened to our people 'cause you're not going to find this kind of history in history books.
GREENLY: To understand what happened in 1942, you have to go back much further. The people of St. Paul's fight for self-determination began during the Russian Empire, when Unanga people were forced to harvest seals for the fur trade. Then the United States purchased Alaska. It took over the fur seal industry and continued the same labor system. This was in 1867, two years after the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery in the United States. But something similar to slavery was happening in St. Paul.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GABE STEPITON: We were dominated. You couldn't even think for yourself. You couldn't speak for yourself.
GREENLY: That's former St. Paul Mayor Gabe Stepiton (ph) in a 1982 interview on Alaska's public television network.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEPITON: Some of our letters used to be censored. White people weren't allowed to associate with the elders. We weren't allowed to associate with the white people.
GREENLY: During the evacuation, some Unanga people visited towns near the camps. For the first time, they saw fellow Americans choosing where they lived, where they worked and how they built their lives. Many of them started lobbying for their constitutional rights when they returned to St. Paul after the war, but nothing changed. Robert Melovidov grew up on the island during that period, and he started laboring in the government seal harvest as a teenager, just as generations before him had done.
ROBERT MELOVIDOV: Early spring, they hang up a list - all the people that signed up and what they're assigned to do. So we'd all - us teenagers - go running down to the store and hurry up and look at the list and see what your job was going to be for the summer.
GREENLY: But by the '70s, public attitudes toward fur had begun to sour, and the seal harvest was becoming less profitable. In 1985, the federal government officially ended commercial sealing in St. Paul. For the first time in generations, the people were free. It should have been cause for celebration, but Robert Melovidov remembers how difficult that time really was.
R MELOVIDOV: This is new to us. You know, we've been run by the government since forever. Everything we do here would have to be, you know, approved by the government. So this is a whole new concept. You know, we're going to be on our own here. So we have to start coming up with creative ways to just have an economy and survive.
ZINAIDA MELOVIDOV: The government's pulling out. What are we going to do?
GREENLY: That's Robert's cousin, Zinaida Melovidov, but everyone calls her Kooka Z (ph). Kooka means grandmother.
Z MELOVIDOV: I cooked.
GREENLY: Melovidov had worked in the government harvest. When it shut down, she went to work as a cook, something she still does today.
Z MELOVIDOV: We're making million-dollar soup in fried bread. Alatix (ph). Fried bread - alatix.
GREENLY: Today, Melovidov and her granddaughter are cooking for Aleut Independence Day, which marks the end of the government seal harvest and the beginning of freedom.
DESTINY BRISTOL KUSHIN: The government gave everybody money, and they called it corned beef money.
GREENLY: Her granddaughter, Destiny Bristol Kushin, says they used that money to start a new industry.
BRISTOL KUSHIN: A lot of people in my family grew up fishing. I learned how to fish from my dad and my uncles.
GREENLY: Bristol Kushin now works for the tribal government. She's part of a younger generation helping to carry St. Paul into its next chapter. Melovidov checks on the soup and fried bread.
Z MELOVIDOV: You watching both alatix, girl?
BRISTOL KUSHIN: Mm-hmm.
Z MELOVIDOV: OK.
GREENLY: Melovidov looks satisfied. After a life shaped by the seal harvest and the long fight for independence, she lets her granddaughter take the lead.
For NPR News, I'm Theo Greenly in Alaska.
(SOUNDBITE OF STEVE GUNN'S "VARIATION II") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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