On Oct. 26, 1882, the village of Angoon, was home to nearly 420 Tlingit people in southeast Alaska, not far from the modern state capital of Juneau.
But in an afternoon of shelling, looting and arson, U.S. Navy sailors destroyed the village and left the native community so bereft that many of the Tlingit people died during the subsequent winter months.
This week, the Navy formally apologized for the destruction. Rear Adm. Mark Sucato, commander of the Navy’s northwest region, expressed regret and asked for forgiveness from the Tlingit community on Saturday during a ceremony on the 142nd anniversary of the event.
“As the U.S. Navy acknowledges their wrongful actions of the past that have brought about the loss of life and resources, causing much intergenerational trauma and suffering, and as the Navy repents and apologizes seeking forgiveness, may the Tlingit villages and the clans of Angoon receive this apology begin in the process of healing and catalyzing reconciliation,” Sucato said at the ceremony.
The formal apology was issued to the affected Alaska Native clans “for wrongful U.S. military actions against Tlingit villages in Kake in 1869 and Angoon in 1882,” Liane Nakahara, spokesperson for Navy Region Northwest said.
The official apology for the 1882 attack comes after September when the Navy formally accepted responsibility for a previous attack on the village of Kake in 1869 which destroyed homes, canoes and food supplies during winter, “which led to many deaths in the aftermath, especially among children and Elders who starved or died of exposure, according to Kake oral histories,” the Sealaska Heritage Institute said in a release.
Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington D.C. said the apology is part of the Biden administration’s efforts to right historical wrongs involving the military. Recent examples include President Joe Biden’s formal apology to Native American communities for the government-run boarding schools that forcibly separated children from their parents and the Navy’s exoneration of the more than 200 African-American sailors in the 1944 Port Chicago court martials.
“I suspect what has happened is, the administration is getting all of its apologies out now before the election,” Cancian said.
Accounts on what prompted the Naval bombardment vary between military and native histories but generally cite the accidental death of a Tlingit shaman as a key event that led to the violence. The man died when a harpoon gun exploded on a whaling ship owned, the North West Trading Company. According to an archived letter by Lt. M. A. Healy from the Coast Guard’s now-defunct U.S. Revenue Marine Steamer Thomas Corwin, he wrote that natives seized the whaling boats, demanded hundreds of blankets and took two of the white crew members as prisoners.
A U.S. Navy force soon arrived at the village, under the command of Capt. E.C. Merriman.
“Captain Merriman demanded twice the number of blankets demanded by the Indians, and threatened, in case of refusal, to destroy their canoes and villages. Refusing to pay the amount and remaining defiant, their canoes, to the number of forty, were taken and destroyed, after having selected those which belonged to the Indians who had remained friendly to the white men,” Healy wrote.
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Sucato read the formal apology aloud to the group which acknowledged that after the Angoon villagers delivered 81 blankets instead of 400 that the commander requested as payment on behalf of the trading company, the action was “arbitrary rather than a justified military response.” The villagers were “subjected to shelling from the anchored Naval vessel and a destructive raid by company Marines under the order of Commander Merriman,” which included looting and setting fires. The Tlingit people “did not deserve nor provoke the bombardment and subsequent destruction of their village,” Sucato said.
The attack killed at least six Tlingit children and destroyed tribal houses, ceremonial objects, canoes and left an impact on the villagers who “were stripped of their pride and dignity,” former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond wrote in an executive proclamation, announcing Tlingit Remembrance Day on Oct. 26, 1982. It took five years for “their ancestors to recover to a point that they could begin to rebuild,” according to the proclamation.
In 1973, the village of Angoon received a $90,000 reparation settlement with the U.S. Department of Interior, under former President Jimmy Carter, for the bombardment.
A century after the bombardment, John S. Herrington, former Navy assistant secretary of manpower and reserve affairs wrote in a 1982 letter that, “The destruction of Angoon should never have happened, and it was an unfortunate event in our history.”
“The U.S. Navy hereby recognizes the special legal and political relationship Indian tribes have with the United States and the solemn covenant with the land we share,” Sucato read from the apology.
But community leaders continued to seek an apology for decades, according to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) who recognized a cohort of people from the community who lobbied Congress for years to get the official Navy recognition.
“Some forty-plus years ago, people from Angoon came to the halls of Congress, knocking on doors and received nothing,” Murkowski said at the Alaska ceremony. “Today, on behalf of your delegation and the Congress, I’m presenting you with a United States flag that has been flown over the U.S. Capitol in recognition of a historic apology to Angoon for the U.S. Navy bombardment in 1882.”