Prehistory Because the islands stretch like a broken bridge from the continent Asia to the continent North America, many anthropologists hypothesize they were a route of the
first human occupants of the Americas. However, the earliest known evidence in public
recorded history of human occupation in the Americas is found much farther south. The early human sites in the Bering Sea were probably submerged by rising waters and sand during the current
interglacial period. People living in or on the Aleutian Islands developed skills in hunting, fishing, and basketry. The baskets were woven with shredded stalks of beach rye.
Russian period ian man with a
Creole woman in the Aleutian Islands , Aleutian Islands Explorers, traders and missionaries arrived from Russia beginning in 1741. In 1741 the
Russian government sent
Vitus Bering, a Danish-born Russian, and
Aleksei Chirikov, a Russian, in the ships
Saint Peter and
Saint Paul on a voyage of discovery in the Northern Pacific. After the ships were separated by a storm; Chirikov discovered several eastern islands of the Aleutian group, and Bering discovered several of the western islands. Bering was shipwrecked and died in the Komandorski Islands (
Commander Islands); one of which now bears his name (
Bering Island), along with the surrounding Bering Sea. The survivors of Bering's party reached the
Kamchatka Peninsula in a boat constructed from the wreckage of their ship, and reported the islands were rich in fur-bearing animals. Within a generation, the day-to-day administration of the Russian-American colonies was largely in the hands of native-born Alaskans. Reversing the usual trend in colonization where indigenous technologies are replaced, the Russians adopted the Aleut kayak, or
baidarka, sea otter hunting techniques, and the working of native copper deposits. The Russians instituted public education, preservation of the Aleut language through transliteration of religious and other texts into Aleut via an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet, vaccination of the native population against
smallpox, and science-based sea mammal conservation policies that were ahead of their time. By 1760 the Russian merchant Andrian Tolstykh had made a detailed census in the vicinity of
Adak and extended Russian citizenship to the Aleuts. During his third and last voyage in 1778, Captain
James Cook surveyed the eastern portion of the Aleutian archipelago, accurately determined the position of some of the more important islands, and corrected many errors of former navigators. The U.S. Navy, having broken the
Japanese naval codes, proceeded as if this was just a diversion, and it did not expend large amounts of effort in defending the islands. More than 90 Americans were taken to Japan as prisoners of war. The United States moved most of the remaining civilian population (over 800) of the Aleutians and Pribilovians to camps in the
Alaska Panhandle. In May 1943, American forces invaded Japanese-held Attu and defeated the Japanese. In August 1943, American and Canadian troops launched an invasion of
Kiska, in which 34,426 men composed of both Americans and Canadian participated; however, Japanese forces had already evacuated the island, ending the campaign in the islands. The invasion was an embarrassment for the Allied forces as the entire Japanese force of 5,183 men had left the island on July 28 without the Americans noticing; however, the Americans suffered significant casualties during their "invasion"—313 men died as a result of accidents, with many dying due to accidental fire. President Roosevelt visited Adak in 1944, meeting with commanders and eating with soldiers of the garrison. This was his first and only trip to the Aleutian Islands and Alaska as a whole. A rumor spread that FDR had accidentally left his Scottish Terrier "Fala" on one of the Islands and had to send a destroyer to retrieve the dog, costing taxpayers several million dollars. The President made fun of these rumors during a talk with the Teamsters Union in Washington DC, now known as the "Fala Speech". At this speech the President joked with the crowd saying, "Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them!" June 3, 2002, was celebrated as Dutch Harbor Remembrance Day. The governor of Alaska ordered state flags lowered to half-staff to honor the 43 Americans who died during the two-day Japanese air attack in 1942. The
Aleutian World War II National Historic Area Visitors Center opened that month.
Statehood era The U.S. conducted
underground tests of
nuclear weapons on
Amchitka Island from 1965 to 1971 as part of the
Vela Uniform program. The final detonation, the
Cannikin, was the largest underground
nuclear explosion by the U.S. The
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act became law in 1971. In 1977, the Ounalashka Corporation (from Unalaska) declared a
dividend. This was the first village corporation to declare and pay a dividend to its shareholders. The Aleutian Islands were designated a
UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1976. The Aleutians were one of 17 biosphere reserves in the United States withdrawn by request of the U.S. government from the programme in June 2017. ==Russian Aleutians==