Guest Editor's Introduction: Individuals and Groups of Mixed Russian-Native Parentage in Siberia, Russian America, and Alaska

The four articles in this collection address the historical and cultural causes and consequences of intermarriage among Russian men and native women on the Russian colonial frontier in northeastern Siberia and Alaska. Bringing together a historian, three anthropologists, and two linguists, these works examine this issue in diachronic as well as synchronic perspective. The impetus for this project was a special session of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory organized by me and titled “Creating Creoles and Being Creole in Siberia, Russian America, and Alaska.” The idea of having such a session seemed quite timely: in the prior decade there had been a fair amount of important new research by historians and anthropologists on the racially/ethnically and culturally mixed social group composed of the descendants of Russian promyshlenniki (fur traders, fur trade workers) and Native Alaskan women, a group who came to be known as “Creoles.”1 This work, however, has largely escaped the attention of scholars working on interracial mixing and mixedrace populations in the Canadian fur trade and elsewhere in the New World.2 My attempts to find articles in this journal dealing with the Alaska Creoles did not yield results, either. In our opinion, this is a significant oversight. After all, the Russian expansion into Alaska is part of the colonial history of North America and must be incorporated into both its grand narrative and its theoryinspired analysis. Moreover, the Russian encounter with Native Alaskans, with its unique characteristics as well as important similarities to other colonial projects (especially the Hudson’s Bay Company case), offers an excellent opportunity for scholars interested in comparative ethnohistorical research.