Welcome to Lost Anchorage, where crude investigates the mechanisms of crime and violence in Anchorage,

in Anchorage, Alaska. My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host. Through research and interviews with professionals, law enforcement, and those affected by crime, I hope to build a better understanding of whether or not Anchorage is in fact becoming more dangerous.

By the end of this series, I hope to create a portrait of crime in our city for better or for worse. You're going to be here. My name is Aaron Leggett. I'm the curator of Alaska History and Culture at the Anchorage Museum.

I'm also the president of the Native Village of Aclutna and

I've done a lot of studying about the history of Alaska Native people through the centuries and my background is in anthropology.

So in the course of this series,

I've talked with a number of people who have

pointed to colonization as one factor or reason for crime in Alaska.

But before we get into that, I think it would be helpful if you explain what life in Alaska looked like before colonization?

Well, before contact occurring in 1741

through the Russian period through most of the mid to late 18th century into the 19th

century in 1867 the United States purchased Alaska from Russia or Russia's interest.

Pre-contact you had 20 Alaska Native languages spoken divided among two major language families and

the impacts from colonization occurred through both acts of physical violence and also mental violence.

Could you explain one or both of those a little bit more?

Yeah, so like you know the,

the found. like you know the the founding of America through manifest destiny Alaska's a northern extension of that effects So you had things like outright extinction of people. You also had impacts like disease, loss of language, introduction of new food materials, and all these things

add up to radically shift a people who had primarily lived from the land

seasonally and shifted political alliances. It really had a destabilizing effect.

So I did some reading and it looked like the earliest colonizers to Alaska came around the

mid-17 hundreds. colonizers to Alaska came around the mid 1700s and that was the British, the French, the

Spanish, and the Russians. And they all came here to trade first, correct?

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