Roxanne Willis

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Roxanne Willis | A New Game in the North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1890–1940 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.3 | The History Cooperative

A New Game in the North: Alaska Native Reindeer Herding, 1890–1940

In the early 1890s, the missionary Sheldon Jackson brought domesticated reindeer to Alaska for the ostensible benefit of northern Native communities. What started as a small government program to feed and civilize the Natives, however, soon became a large industry controlled by the Lomens, a powerful gold rush family who sought to make reindeer herding the answer to Alaska's undeveloped economy.

ON 4 JULY 1892, the United States Revenue Cutter Bear landed on the shores of Port Clarence, Alaska. Amidst vigorous flag-waving and patriotic cheering, the captain of the Bear, Michael Healy, delivered 171 reindeer to the newly-minted Teller Reindeer Station. The following year Healy returned to find that three Natives had murdered Harrison Thornton, a teacher and missionary at a nearby village, partially over his enthusiasm for the presence of the reindeer. Fortunately for the government workers at the reindeer station, the conflict never spread, in part because the Inupiat Eskimo community took it upon themselves to execute the three murderers. With this execution, the Natives demonstrated to the government that they had decided to accept the presence of the reindeer rather than fight it. While their enthusiasm for these animals would never be profound, in a few decades, the Eskimos of northern Alaska would be fighting to keep reindeer part of the Native way of life.

Alaskan reindeer herding—conceived by the Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson—started in the early 1890s as a modest plan to import small herds of reindeer from Siberia to feed the Eskimos of western Alaska, whom Jackson mistakenly believed were facing starvation. The idea soon grew far beyond its original scale, however, as Jackson and his sympathizers began imagining a vast reindeer industry in which whites and Eskimos would work together to make Alaska's northern land profitable. In addition, Jackson believed that the herding program would gently, but thoroughly, "civilize" the Natives, changing hunters into capitalist entrepreneurs. Jackson modeled his vision on the reindeer industry of Scandinavian Lapland. He was mistaken, however, in assuming that the industry of one northern climate could be seamlessly transferred to another—too many natural factors were different in Alaska. In addition, the Natives, on which the success of reindeer herding depended, transformed the program in entirely unexpected ways. By the late 1930s, the Eskimos of Alaska had taken both legal and cultural control of what was originally designed to be a project of assimilation.

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