Date 14 August 1784 4,000 130 | none Grigory Shelikhov 500 ~ 2,000 or 2,500–3,000 killed no casualties | |
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Location Sitkalidak Island, Alaska, Russian America | ||
The Awa'uq Massacre or Refuge Rock Massacre, or the Wounded Knee of Alaska, was an attack and massacre by Russian fur trader Grigory Shelikhov and 130 Russian armed men and cannoneers of Shelikhov-Golikov Company against the Qik’rtarmiut Sugpiat tribe of Koniag Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people of Kodiak Island in 1784 in Russian-controlled Alaska.
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Massacre
It occurred on the secluded stack island Refuge Rock (Awa'uq in Alutiiq language, approximate meaning 'where one becomes numb') of Partition Cove on Sitkalidak Island, near and across Old Harbor, in the Kodiak Archipelago, Alaska. The Russian promyshlennikis slaughtered 500 men, women and children on Refuge Rock, though some sources state the number was 2,000, or between 2,500–3,000. Following the attack of Awa'uq, Shelikhov claims to have captured over 1,000 people, detaining 400 as hostages. There were no Russian casualties. This massacre was an isolated incident, and the Alutiiq were completely subjugated by Russian traders thereafter. One interpreter, Qaspeq (literally: "kuspuk"), was an Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) who had been taken as a war captive from Kodiak as a child and raised in servitude in the Aleutians. Qaspeq had once betrayed the location of a refuge island just offshore of Unalaska Island.
Aftermath
The years 1784–1818, called the "darkest period of Sugpiaq history," ended with a change in the management of the Russian-American Company.
Over a half century later, an old Sugpiaq (Koniag Alutiiq) man, Arsenti Aminak, reported his own recollections of the same events to a Finnish naturalist and ethnographer Henrik Johan Holmberg (sometimes known as Heinrich Johann) (1818–1864) collecting data for the Russian governor of Alaska. Arsenti Aminak (his memory of Russian conquest at Awa’uq that Aminak survived as a young boy) said:
The Russians went to the settlement and carried out a terrible blood bath. Only a few [people] were able to flee to Angyahtalek in baidarkas; 300 Koniags were shot by the Russians. This happened in April. When our people revisited the place in the summer the stench of the corpses lying on the shore polluted the air so badly that none could stay there, and since then the island has been uninhabited. After this every chief had to surrender his children as hostages; I was saved only by my father's begging and many sea otter pelts.
In 1827 collection of yasak (ясак) tax banned by Catherine the Great.