Frank Churchill's 1905 Audit of Alaska's Reindeer Service and His Photographs

In 1905 Congress sent a Department of the Interior agent, Frank C. Churchill, to Alaska to audit the U.S. Reindeer Service. Some members suspected that the program was neither helping Alaska's Indigenous peoples nor giving the government a good return on its money, and was only generating income for missionary societies. Churchill and his wife Clara spent four months on the trip. He came back with a report to Congress and 285 photographs, now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).

Three authors read the photographs against that 1906 report and the logbook of the ship that carried him, the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear: Amber Lincoln of the British Museum, and Varpu Lotvonen and Patrick Plattet of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Their article in Alaska Park Science explains what Churchill was looking at, and what he missed.

Reindeer herding has a long history in Beringia and, the article says, continues in Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (NPS photo).

Why Congress wanted an audit

Reindeer had been herded in Alaska for twelve years by 1905. In 1892 domestic reindeer were brought from the Russian Far East to the Seward Peninsula through the efforts of Sheldon Jackson, General Agent of Education and a Presbyterian minister. He argued that herding was worth more than subsistence hunting and would improve the economic and social welfare of Alaska Natives. An attempt to have Chukchi herders mentor Iñupiat did not succeed, so Sámi herders from Norway were recruited in 1894 and again in 1898 to teach herding to Alaska Natives.

Reindeer numbers grew, but Alaska Native ownership did not. By 1904 missionary societies owned the vast majority of the 10,234 reindeer, because Jackson had given those societies two jobs at once: delivering education and managing reindeer operations. The Secretary of the Interior wanted to know whether loaning government reindeer to missions set the missions in competition with government and Indigenous herding. Churchill was to audit the reindeer stations, assess the territory's schools, record conditions and document how Alaska Natives were profiting.

The 1905 voyage

From Seattle the Churchills went to Nome, arriving in July, and boarded the Bear. The ship made a brief stop in Chukotka, then travelled back to Alaska along the Alaska Peninsula and Kotzebue Sound and as far north as Utqiagvik (Barrow). Churchill visited six of fourteen reindeer herding locations: Teller, Deering, Kivalina, Point Barrow, Gambell and Golovin. What were called reindeer stations varied widely; most were simply camps and rangeland.

Figure 1 of the article: the sea route Churchill followed in the summer of 1905, which he drew on a Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System map (from his 1906 report).

He tried to count herds, record the names and backgrounds of owners and apprentices, and judge how the service was run. He corresponded with reindeer agents, teachers, missionaries and postal agents, and the most influential was William Thomas Lopp, a teacher and missionary in Wales from 1890 and, by 1904, superintendent of government schools and reindeer for the northern district. The authors cannot tell how much Churchill spoke with herders themselves: officials are quoted in his report, but Alaska Native and Sámi herders never are.

The authors say his views, typical of his time, were ethnocentric and hindered his investigation, yet his report was sympathetic to the concerns of Alaska's Indigenous peoples and critical of both the missionary societies and the Bureau of Education's handling of schooling and reindeer.

Three stops, three problems

The authors add that the Bureau tended to put schools and reindeer stations in the same places, so some schools were built where no children lived and some stations near poor rangeland. The two Kivalina herders, they point out, were doing well with no mission or Bureau infrastructure around them, which cut against Jackson's claim in Bureau reports that herds and schools succeeded only under missionary management.

What the report changed

Churchill wrote that the number of deer in Alaska, where they were and who owned them could not be given in exact figures, either by local custodians or by the Bureau's annual tables.

He still backed the program. His report favoured getting the animals into Alaska Native hands as fast as their ability to care for them could be developed. He did not think herding should replace hunting and fishing as the main way Alaska Natives lived: nobody, he wrote, believed that possible or desirable, since fish, blubber, oil and wild fowl were necessary Arctic foods. He advised Congress to end loans of reindeer to missionary societies and to remove them from reindeer management.

Under new regulations recommended to Congress in 1906, missionary societies were no longer allowed to profit from reindeer herding, and they were removed from managing both Alaska Native territorial schools and the Reindeer Service. The report had an immediate impact, the authors write: it resulted in a complete overhaul of the U.S. Reindeer Service and the Alaska Bureau of Education, carried out by Jackson's successor, Lopp. Whether it led to Jackson's resignation as General Agent for Education in Alaska is unclear.

The photographs

The NMAI collection holds 285 photographs Churchill took between June and October 1905. It also has 44 prints by William Hamilton of the Bureau of Education, who sailed on the Bear from July to September 1905, and 71 prints Lopp took in 1906 and 1909-1910, which show herding activities the Churchills could not see in one short summer. The pictures show herders and their families, herding activities, seasonal camps and reindeer stations, early territorial schools and government buildings, and life aboard the Bear. A smaller group from East Cape, Chukotka shows village life, including butchering reindeer and unloading freight.

The authors think it very likely that Churchill took the photographs to jog his memory when he wrote his report. Several show government-funded buildings, which mattered because Congress had complained that money meant for schools and reindeer stations had not been spent on them. In 1905 Alaska's schools were segregated under the Nelson Act: non-Native students attended locally run schools, Indigenous students federal schools run by the Department of the Interior.

Clara Churchill used the photographs to make annotated albums whose personal captions suggest they were keepsakes. One, Reminders of the Cruise of U.S.S. Bear 1905, went to the ship's captain, O. C. Hamlet, and is now in the Bancroft Archives at the University of California Berkeley Library.

The authors argue that the archive adds a critical view of government programs and missionaries and sheds light on the history between Alaska Natives and U.S. government administrators, which they say still frames their relationships.

Sources

• Amber Lincoln (The British Museum), Varpu Lotvonen and Patrick Plattet (University of Alaska Fairbanks), Frank Churchill's 1905 documentation of the Reindeer Service in Alaska, Alaska Park Science 20(2), National Park Service, supported in part by the Shared Beringian Heritage Program; rewritten in hubnx's own words.