Alaska Flag on Our Flagpole

Alaska – The Last Frontier

Juneau
Juneau

The Alaska Marine Highway provides a vital surface transportation link throughout the area, as only three communities (Haines, Hyder and Skagway) enjoy direct connections to the contiguous North American road system.

Interior:

The Interior is the largest region of Alaska; much of it is uninhabited wilderness.

Fairbanks is the only large city in the region.

Fairbanks
Fairbanks

Denali National Park and Preserve is located here.  Denali is the highest mountain in North America.

Denali
Denali

Southwest:

Southwest Alaska is a sparsely inhabited region stretching some 500 miles inland from the Bering Sea. Most of the population lives along the coast.  Kodiak Island is also located in Southwest.  The massive Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, one of the largest river deltas in the world, is here.  Portions of the Alaska Peninsula are considered part of Southwest, with the remaining portions included with the Aleutian Islands.

North Slope:

The North Slope is mostly tundra peppered with small villages.  The area is known for its massive reserves of crude oil, and contains both the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska and the Prudhoe Bay Oil Field.  The city of Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, is the northernmost city in the United States and is located here.

Utqiagvik
Utqiagvik

The Northwest Arctic area, anchored by Kotzebue and also containing the Kobuk River valley, is often regarded as being part of this region.  However, the respective Inupiat of the North Slope and of the Northwest Arctic seldom consider themselves to be one people.

Aleutian Islands:

More than 300 small volcanic islands make up this chain, which stretches over 1,200 miles into the Pacific Ocean.

Aleutian Islands
Aleutian Islands

Some of these islands fall in the Eastern Hemisphere, but the International Date Line was drawn west of 180° to keep the whole state, and thus the entire North American continent, within the same legal day.  Two of the islands, Attu and Kiska, were occupied by Japanese forces during World War II.

History:

Pre-Colonization:

Numerous indigenous peoples occupied Alaska for thousands of years before the arrival of European peoples to the area.  Linguistic and DNA studies done here have provided evidence for the settlement of North America by way of the Bering land bridge.  At the Upward Sun River site in the Tanana River Valley in Alaska, remains of a six-week-old infant were found.  The baby’s DNA showed that she belonged to a population that was genetically separate from other native groups present elsewhere in the New World at the end of the Pleistocene.  Ben Potter, the University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist who unearthed the remains at the Upward River Sun site in 2013, named this new group Ancient Beringians.

Tlingit Art
Tlingit Art

The Tlingit people developed a society with a matrilineal kinship system of property inheritance and descent in what is today Southeast Alaska, along with parts of British Columbia and the Yukon.  Also in Southeast were the Haida, now well known for their unique arts.  The Tsimshian people came to Alaska from British Columbia in 1887, when President Grover Cleveland, and later the U.S. Congress, granted them permission to settle on Annette Island and found the town of Metlakatla.  All three of these peoples, as well as other indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, experienced smallpox outbreaks from the late 18th through the mid-19th century, with the most devastating epidemics occurring in the 1830s and 1860s, resulting in high fatalities and social disruption.

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