Kaniagmiut

The Kaniagmiut, or Koniag, are the Alutiiq people of the Kodiak Archipelago off the southern Alaskan coast, speakers of a Yupik dialect. Their ancestors have occupied the archipelago for more than seven thousand years. They took fish, seals and whales, and wintered in semi-subterranean houses called ciqlluaq.

Russian fur traders reached Kodiak in the 1780s: Grigory Shelikhov founded the first permanent Russian settlement at Three Saints Bay in 1784, the same year his men killed hundreds of Kaniagmiut at the Awa'uq Massacre on Refuge Rock.

The post moved to the site of the later town of Kodiak in 1792 and became the first headquarters of Russian America, whose rulers conscripted Alutiiq hunters under hostage-taking and quotas for sea-otter pelts. Orthodox monks arrived in 1794, beginning the spread of Russian Orthodox Christianity among the islanders.