Natalia Fomina recently hosted an event at the Aleutian local museum in Nikolskoye on the Commander Islands. Students (age 11-15) were invited to the event, and Natalia shared information about the links between the Commander Islands and the Pribilof Islands. Thank you for hosting this event, and sharing the below write up, Natalia.
The event dedicated to the Pribilof Island was held on Saturday, March 27, for the commander’s schoolchildren. This meeting at the museum was the result of the pen-pals between Commander’s (Russia) and St. Paul’s Island (USA, Alaska) students.
In the northern part of the Pacific Ocean, there is a small archipelago discovered by navigator Gabriel Pribilof on the ship of Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov in 1786. Four small islands with countless herds of northern fur seals later became part of Russian America. A Russian-American company brought Aleuts in the 1820s to run the fur trades on the Commanders and the Pribilof Islands. In 1867, after Alaska was sold, the Pribilof Islands become the territory of the United States, and the Commander Islands remained with Russia.
The exchange of the local people between the Pribilof and the Commander Islands continued until the end of the 19th century.
The reason for the meeting was the package that the Aleut schoolchildren sent to the Commander’s Island students.
The methodologist of the museum N.S. Fomina introduced the children to the Russian-American project “Sea Birds”, in which their older brothers and sisters took part since 2014. As a result of the project in summer 2017 the Commander Island students traveled to the Pribilof.
Students from the Nikolskaya secondary school watched with great interest a presentation about the Pribilof Islands, the towns of St. George and St. Paul, and got acquainted in absentia with their American pen-pal and the work of the children’s ecological camp “Sea bird Youth”.
At the end of the meeting, all participants received small gifts sent by students from the Aleut Islands and sweet gifts from the Museum.