The Review’s Review: Real-Time Historicization

The K’alyaan Totem Pole of the Tlingit Kiks.ádi Clan, erected to commemorate those lost in the 1804 Battle of Sitka; photograph by Robert A. Estremo, copyright © 2005. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

This week, as Russia formally invaded Ukraine, I thought of the Battle of Sitka, another military operation Russia initiated against a smaller autonomous stronghold, in this case the Kiks.ádi, a clan of the Indigenous American Tlingit people. I learned of the battle in Vanessa Veselka’s essay “The Fort of Young Saplings,” which was published by The Atavist in 2014 (I’d recommend the version printed in their Love and Ruin anthology). Both the Kiks.ádi and the Russians claim that they won the battle. Veselka’s essay investigates the problems this battle raises regarding historicization, the interpretation of events, and national identity formation. (She also questions whether a crucial Tlingit tactic of the Battle of Sitka influenced General Mikhail Kutuzov’s withdrawal from Moscow during the War of 1812, a series of events Tolstoy dramatized in War and Peace.)

The Russians began colonizing Alaska in the 1740s. As they expanded their empire, they trespassed onto Sitka, Kiks.ádi ancestral land. In 1802, the Tlingit, who’d long resisted Russian forces, initiated an attack to draw the invaders back, claiming a Russian fort in the process. “K’alyaán,” Veselka recounts, “a great Kiks.ádi warrior, struck the initial blow, killing a blacksmith and taking his hammer.” Two years later, the Russians returned to Sitka and battled the Kiks.ádi, including K’alyaán and his hammer. The Tlingit built Shis’gi Noow, which translates to “the fort of young saplings,” to ward off the Russians, but ultimately retreated from the fort. Veselka writes:

On the first day of combat, the Russians were soundly defeated … For the next four days, the Tlingit fort was bombarded from the sea by the Neva as emissaries went back and forth. Both sides raised white flags, sometimes simultaneously. At the end of the sixth day, the Russians were in the fort and the Tlingit were in the forest. On these facts everyone agrees.

But the more I learned of the battle, the shakier the claim of a decisive Russian victory seemed. The battle was not followed by an influx of Russian trading posts. The Tlingit did not become slaves, as had other tribes. Although the Kiks.ádi abandoned their position, they did not exactly flee, but instead made an organized retreat, covering their people with a rear guard and taking up a new position on the straits. From there they launched an effective trade embargo to cut off the transport of fur to Russia. The following year another Russian trading post fell to the Tlingit in Yakutat and was permanently abandoned.

The retrospective logic seems to be that since the Kiks.ádi do not run the United States today, they must have lost to the Russians in 1804. Native wins are irrelevant. Native defeats are final. The Russians would inevitably prevail, and if not, it didn’t matter anyway. The Battle of Sitka, the lost posts, the embargo on the straits—these were details.

According to Niall Barr, an expert on European military history, martial victory is typically understood as a fairly simple affair: whoever vacates the fort at the end of the day has lost. But Veselka wonders: “How big is that fort? And how long is that day?”

Like many smart interrogations into history, “The Fort of Young Saplings” is a great detective story, though it subverts any of that genre’s narrative formulas and traditional notions of closure. Like Saidiya Hartman, Veselka interrogates the holes in historical archives, looking beyond facts and figures to both excavate and extrapolate the narratives excluded from canonized accounts. The essay reminds me that the disregard Russia has for the autonomy of the smaller countries it neighbors, including Ukraine and its Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, is part of an ongoing process of colonization that began centuries ago and has never really ended. It’s obvious, but bears repeating: imperialist superpowers, including Russia and the United States, usually begin their dominion by attacking Indigenous nations.

As concerns this year’s nascent Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the war of interpretation has already begun. Earlier this week, Putin gave a speech distorting Ukrainian history: “Modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia, more specifically the Bolshevik, communist Russia,” he said, echoing a five-thousand word essay he published on the subject last summer. Now, news outlets report that President Volodymyr Zelensky has banned Ukrainian males aged eighteen to sixty years old from leaving the country, suggesting conscription is imminent. Ukraine’s own mythologizing has begun as well. Already there is folklore spreading about “The Ghost of Kyiv,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot who is supposed to have taken out six Russian war pilots during dogfights. Social media users uploaded video of what appears to be a MiG-29 jet soaring through the skies over several Ukraine sites. Although their origins and contexts are very different, I wonder if this—likely apocryphal—“Ghost of Kyiv” might function like the very real K’alyaán did for the Kiks.ádi, as an anti-imperialist national hero. Do Ukraine’s landlocked men really believe in him, or does he represent what they can’t do: move freely? What’s old is new again. As in 1804, Russian oligarchs may not totally get their way; embargoes and sanctions are in play. The roadways are clogged, as Ukrainians flee attacks from land, sea, and air; another retreat is underway. Kyiv is at serious risk of being seized. Inspired by Veselka’s incisive questions about the Battle of Sitka — “How big is that fort? And how long is that day?” — I pose other inquiries about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: When does the day begin? And how far do the boundaries of the fort extend to brains, and from brains, into forms of storytelling? —Niela Orr

I’m in the middle of reading Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm by Dan Charnas, one of the most extraordinary music books I’ve ever read. It is a biography of the genius hip-hop producer J Dilla, who died in 2006, after, as the book convincingly argues, changing the way music listeners hear rhythm. Dilla figured out how to imbue sampled beats with the kinds of imperfections and happy accidents that make music played by humans so wonderful. The book is also a thorough, though concise and highly readable, history of rhythm itself in American music, tracing its journey from European classical music through ragtime, blues, jazz, funk, rock, and hip-hop, explaining, sometimes using helpful charts and diagrams, how we hear time. If you care about music and want to experience it more deeply, even if you’re not a hip-hop fan, this book is full of revelations. —Craig Morgan Teicher