ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- On Oct. 26, 1882, shells fell on an Alaska Native village as winter approached, and then sailors landed and burned what was left of homes, food caches and canoes. Conditions grew so dire in the following months that elders sacrificed their own lives to spare food for surviving children.
Now, 142 years later, the perpetrator of the bombardment, the U.S. Navy, was set to say sorry to Angoon, a Tlingit village of about 420 people in the southeastern Alaska panhandle.
Rear Adm. Mark Sucato, the commander of the Navy's northwest region, planned to issue the apology during a ceremony Saturday, the anniversary of the atrocity. While the rebuilt Angoon received $90,000 in a settlement with the Department of Interior in 1973, village leaders for decades sought an apology, beginning each yearly remembrance by asking three times, "Is there anyone here from the Navy to apologize?"
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The attack was one of a series of conflicts between the American military and Alaska Natives in the years after the U.S. bought the territory from Russia in 1867. The U.S. Navy issued an apology last month for destroying the nearby village of Kake in 1869, and the Army indicated it plans to apologize for shelling Wrangell, also in southeast Alaska, that year, though no date was set.
The Navy acknowledges the actions it undertook or ordered in Angoon and Kake caused deaths, a loss of resources and multigenerational trauma, Navy civilian spokesperson Julianne Leinenveber said in an email. "An apology is not only warranted, but long overdue," she said.
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