Sarah Simeonoff

The Alutiiq people – ancestral and future stewards of Alaska’s Kodiak archipelago – have a deep time relationship with the landscape. As Alutiiq legends note, the Kodiak landscape was created by Alutiiq people and in its creation, so, too were Alutiiq people. Although this knowledge is embedded in Alutiiq communities, it has yet to be meaningfully applied to the archaeological record. I propose to do this through the application and expansion of persistent place theory. As currently conceived, persistent place theory centers the relationship of people to place from the past to the present moment. I propose that an expansion of this theory to include the mutuality of the people/land relationship and a consideration of the future life of these landscapes better captures Alutiiq ways of knowing. Broadening persistence in this way foregrounds Indigenous understandings of the relationships between people and places and increases the relevancy of archaeology by mitigating future risks to culturally significant landscapes. To do so, I will identify archaeological examples of persistence, document modern Alutiiq views, and create a culturally-informed risk assessment model to understand and preserve Alutiiq landscapes in the future, particularly those subject to anthropogenic climate change.