Hannan introduced a bill to protect the Funter Bay cemetery in last year’s Legislature. Kito passed the issue along to Hannan when she was elected. Not a lot of people know about this history, which is why the group Friends of Admiralty Island sought legislative action to protect the graves. They went to their Juneau representative at the time, former Rep. “The men placed in internment in Funter Bay (were) still forced to return to the islands in the summer to seal for the government and told, ‘If you don’t do this, we’ll never let you return home,’” Hannan said. government forcing the Pribilof Unangax̂ to hunt the seals. The Russians enslaved them, forcing them to relocate to the then-uninhabited Pribilof Islands to hunt seals for fur.Ī couple hundred years later, it was the U.S. The Unangax̂ people interned at Funter Bay were some of the first Unangax̂ people to come into contact with Russians. “This camp in particular, you know, it’s just a compounding of errors of history,” Hannan said. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, who sponsored the bill. The bill - House Bill 10 - would protect the graves of the Unangax̂ people who died in Funter Bay, said Rep. They were held there for two years under inhumane conditions: They weren’t provided with basic necessities including clean water.Ībout 10% of people died at the Funter Bay internment camps, most of them children and elders. government forcibly removed Unangax̂ people from their homes and their region and relocated them to two internment camps in Southeast Alaska. When the Japanese military invaded the Aleutians during World War II, the U.S. (Juneau-Douglas City Museum)Ī bill protecting the graves of Unangax̂ people removed from the Aleutians and forced to live in internment camps in Funter Bay in Southeast Alaska passed the state Legislature on May 17. A recent photo of the Unangax̂ cemetery at Funter Bay.
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