Unangax

The Unangax̂ — the Unangan of the eastern dialects, commonly called Aleuts — are the Indigenous people of the Aleutian island chain, and this grouping covers the Fox Island communities centred on Unalaska. They hunted seals, sea lions and whales from the covered kayaks called iqyax and wintered in semi-subterranean houses known as ulax.

The Russian fur trader Stepan Glotov reached Unalaska in 1759, and harsh tribute demands provoked an uprising between 1763 and 1766 in which the Aleuts destroyed four Russian ships; a permanent Russian post nevertheless opened in 1774 and later passed to the Russian-American Company.

The Orthodox priest Ivan Veniaminov built the Church of the Holy Ascension in 1825 and devised the first writing system for Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language, while epidemic disease in the later 1830s sharply reduced the population of the island.