Linked Political Economies of Colonial Exploitation: The Pribilof Islands-San Francisco Bay Area Connection

Zeke Baker, Sonoma State University

This paper analyzes the network of actors, resources, and power dynamics that circulated across two geographically disparate geographic areas--the Pribilof Islands of the Bering Sea and the San Francisco Bay Area of California--from roughly 1850 to 1900. First, I trace the Russian-turned-American colonial exploitation of Unangan (Aleut) labor and the unique ecological richness of the Pribilof Islands (particularly marked by the commercially lucrative Northern Fur Seal). Second, I show how financial and political power, concentrated among San Francisco-based financiers, articulated the US Treasury Department's interests in the exploitation of Pribilovian land, ecology, and native people. Third, I analyze how settler colonialism, which had violently rid California of many native tribal groups, opened up land and resources for commercial opportunity among white investors. Fourth, I trace how money and power gained through the exploitation of Pribilovian labor and nature was, in turn, reinvested in the commercial development of the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly agricultural and early viticultural development of the Napa Valley. I use this case to demonstrate the networked nature of colonial exploitation, in which economic and political resources garnered through exploitation in one location form the basis for exploitation in another. The study draws upon ethnographic fieldwork in the Pribilof Islands and ongoing archival research in California and Alaska. Research efforts and findings are informed by, and designed to inform, contemporary efforts at reconciling indigenous sovereignty with historical trauma among Unangan people and ancestral tribes in California, who both continue to live in light of colonialism but whose struggles are thus far disconnected from one another.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 87. Colonial imperialism, exploitation