By CIRI Historian Alexandra J. McClanahan

Ninilchik circa 1952. Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum of History and Art

Descendants of Ninilchik’s first settlers in the 1840s have begun a major oral history project in the hopes of identifying people whose memories and recollections will provide the community with ties to its unusual and rich cultural heritage. The Cook Inlet Region village today has a population of 772 people and lies on the west coast of the Kenai Peninsula on the Sterling Highway. It is 188 miles from Anchorage and 38 miles southwest of Kenai. In the beginning, the village had only a handful of people, and even as late as 1930, the population was 124 people. While other villages in the Cook Inlet Region have ties to the Dena’ina Athabascans, whose history stretches back in the region for hundreds of years, Ninilchik was colonized in the 1840s by Russians who had married Native women. Many of the descendants are directly related to Grigorii and Mavra Kvasnikoff. Grigorii was a Russian Orthodox missionary from Moscow, and Mavra was a Russian-Sugpiaq from Kodiak. Her parents were Efin Rastorguev, a Russian shipbuilder, and Agrafena Petrovna, a Sugpiaq from Kodiak.

“Our oldest living elders are five generations removed from the two Alutiiq-Russian families who established the village in the mid-1800s,” states a grant proposal prepared by the Ninilchik Native Descendants organization, which was incorporated as a non-profit on Feb. 27, 1998. “These are the last individuals to have been born and raised in the original townsite, the last ones who remember the old ways of living.”

Joann Jackinsky, project director, said funding sources for the project include The CIRI Foundation, the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Ninilchik Traditional Council, the Ninilchik Native Association and in-kind donations by NND. “Our plan is to contact and interview as many elders as we can,” Jackinsky said. “We’ve lost so many in the last couple of years, and when they are gone, their memories are lost with them.”

The oral history interviews and photographs of the elders will then be printed in regular newsletters, published as part of the project. According to Jackinsky, a great deal of research has been done in the past on Ninilchik’s history, including the key reference, “Agrafena’s Children: The Old Families of Ninilchik, Alaska,” edited by Wayne Leman. In addition, the village’s history as a retirement settlement for former employees of the Russian-American Co., is discussed in the book of anthropological papers, “Adventures Through Time,” edited by Nancy Yaw Davis and William E. Davis. The Ninilchik paper is entitled, “Released to Reside Forever in the Colonies: Founding of a Russian-American Company Retirement Settlement at Ninilchik, Alaska,” by Katherine L. Arndt.

Despite the work that has been undertaken, there is still much that will be lost if elders are not interviewed, Jackinsky said. “This project entails recording, documenting and making available to others the history of Ninilchik Village as told through the stories, accents and pictures created in words by our village elders. Plied together, these separate strands of stories and life events offer future generations a strong connection to their past and an anchor for the future,” the grant application states.

Jackinsky said Ninilchik’s unique history, with its unusual blending of Russian and Sugpiaq traditions, must be preserved. Even the Russian language spoken by elders is unusual, Jackinsky said, noting that they use words borrowed from the Kodiak dialect spoken by her ancestors or words that are no longer in use in modern Russian. Although she is not fluent in Russian, she learned many words in the language from her father, Edward Jackinsky, who is now 88 years old and still lives in the village.

Jackinsky said in talking to modern-day Russian speakers she has learned that they are unfamiliar with a number of words used in the village, such as “nooshnik,” the word used for “outhouse.” Some of the Russian words or expressions used in Ninilchik were “frozen” into the language and date back 150 years.

Jackinsky said NND believes through elders' memories, a pattern will emerge that is still evident today in the lives of descendants. The grant proposal states: “Identifying, documenting and sharing those timeless similarities is an avenue for building pride among descendants, a basis for relating with others in Alaska's Native community, and awareness and appreciation among more recent village residents.”

Anyone interested in learning more about the project may contact the NND office and leave a message at (907) 567-1055 or email project writer Mckibben Jackinsky at writer@ptialaska.net. Several web sites offer information about Ninilchik, including www.kenaipeninsula.com; www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/4416; and www.geocities.com/Heartland/Hills/4414.

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