It was perfect weather for a ballgame. Still, grade-schooler Chloe Zacharoff was trying not to panic.
“I’m stressing!” she said, as she headed back to the dugout at Anchorage's Delaney Park.
All of the players on the field were from St. Paul, home to an Unangax̂ community of about 300 people.
Every June, St. Paul residents commemorate a baseball game from more than 80 years ago.
In the summer of 1942, World War II reached Alaska. Japanese forces bombed the Dutch Harbor Naval Operating Base and U.S. Army Fort Mears, and occupied the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska for nearly a year. The United States responded by sending more than 100,000 troops to the Alaska Territory.
The Aleutian Campaign lasted for more than a year, and it was the only WWII theater fought on American soil.
The federal government evacuated about a dozen island communities during the war. It said the evacuation was for residents’ safety, but only Alaska Native residents were forced to leave ; non-Native residents in the region could stay.
On June 14, 1942, the people of St. Paul were in the middle of a baseball game when a U.S. Army ship arrived on their shore.
“We were just enjoying our time playing ball, and they came in and told us to pack one bag,” said Chloe Bourdukofsky-Price, whose grandfather was one of roughly 300 Unangax̂ residents ordered onto the ship.
“They didn’t even let them finish the game,” she said. “It was abrupt.”
The ship took them to an abandoned fish cannery more than 1,000 miles away. One historian described conditions there as worse than those provided for German prisoners of war held in the United States.
The evacuees lived in the rotting, squalid camp for nearly three years. By the time they were allowed to return, one in 10 had died.
That is why Olga Zacharoff helps organize the annual remembrance game.
“To make sure our kids and the future generations know what happened to our people,” Zacharoff said, “because you’re not going to find this in history books.”
200 years of settler colonialism
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 Unangax̂ 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.
That was in 1867, two years after the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery in the United States. But on St. Paul, a coercive system of federal control persisted.
“We were dominated,” former St. Paul Mayor Gabe Stepetin said in a 1982 interview on Alaska’s public television network. “You couldn’t even think for yourself. You couldn’t speak for yourself.”
Stepetin said residents’ lives were tightly controlled.
“Some of our letters used to be censored,” he said. “White people weren’t allowed to associate with the Aleuts. We weren’t allowed to associate with the white people.”
During the evacuation, some Unangax̂ 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 began lobbying for their constitutional rights when they returned to St. Paul after the war.
But little changed.
Robert Melovidov grew up on the island during that period and started working in the government seal harvest as a teenager, just as generations before him had done.
“Early spring, they hang up a list of all the people and what they’re assigned to do,” Melovidov said. “We, as all those teenagers, we go running down to the store and hurry up and look at the list and see what your job is going to be for the summer.”
By the 1970s, 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 on St. Paul.
For the first time in generations, the people were free.
It should have been a cause for celebration. But Melovidov remembers how difficult that time was.
“This is new to us, you know,” he said. “We’ve been run by the government since forever. Everything we do here had to be approved by the government. And so this is a whole new concept. We’re going to be on our own here. So we have to start coming up with creative ways just to have an economy and survive.”
A NEW INDUSTRY
Zinaida Melovidov remembers the same uncertainty.
“Government’s pulling out,” she says. “What are we going to do?”
Melovidov had worked in the blubbering shop during the government harvest. When it shut down, she went to work as a cook, something she still does today.
Melovidov is standing in the kitchen at St. Paul’s school. She and her granddaughter are making million-dollar soup and fry bread for Aleut Independence Day, which marks the end of the government seal harvest and the beginning of freedom.
“We’re making million-dollar soup and fry bread,” she says.
Her granddaughter, Destiny Bristol Kushin, says the soup is tied to the money the federal government provided after it withdrew from the island.
“The government gave everybody money, and they called it corned beef money,” Bristol Kushin says.
She explains that the community used that money to help build a new industry around fishing.
“A lot of people in my family grew up fishing,” she says. “I learned how to fish from my dad and my uncles.”
Bristol Kushin now works for the tribal government. She’s part of a younger generation helping carry St. Paul into its next chapter.
As the soup and fry bread cooks, Melovidov checks on her granddaughter, who is tending the fry bread.
“You watching both hladdix, girl?” Melovidov asks.
Bristol Kushin says she is, and Melovidov looks satisfied. She takes a step back.
After a life shaped by the seal harvest and St. Paul’s long fight for independence, she lets her granddaughter take the lead.
