Filipinos in Alaska
[1] Filipino seamen are recorded as having contact with Alaska Natives as early as 1788, and Filipino immigrants continued to arrive as workers in Alaska's developing natural resource industries: as sailors on American whaling ships; as ore sorters for gold mines in Juneau and Douglas Island; and as salmon cannery workers (called Alaskeros).
[3] Filipino Americans are the largest racial minority in the city of Anchorage, and also have large numbers in the Aleutians and Kodiak Island.
[4]Due to Manila's status as an entrepôt under Spanish imperialism, Filipino seamen found their way onto European ships crossing the Pacific to Alaska beginning in the late 18th century.
An unnamed "Manilla man" was a crew member on the British merchant ship Iphigenia Nubiana, which bartered for sea otter furs with Alaska Natives.
While in Yakutat Bay, a Filipino man from the expedition caught the attention of several Tlingit, who allegedly believed that he was one of them for his physical resemblance and begged him to remain with the tribe because they wondered if he had been bought or captured by the Spanish.
Filipino cableship crews possessed unique technical expertise from their experience laying cables in the Philippines, which was being developed under the management of the U.S.
[2]: 39 Starting in the late 1920s, the discovery of gold deposits in Douglas Island and Juneau represented an industrial development that drew many Filipino laborers to Alaska.
[5] Because cannery jobs paid well, high compared to what a worker could earn in the Philippines, the limited-English population of Alaskeros was vulnerable to labor exploitation.
[2]: 50 Cannery crews traveled to Alaska in extremely poor conditions; over 200 workers were packed in ships only meant to hold 150, and given meager provisions of mostly rice and fish.
[2]: 53 As migrant workers, Alaskeros worked in salmon canneries during the summer, and lived in Washington, Oregon, or California during the rest of the year.
[10] Despite centuries of Filipino presence in Alaska, an Alaskero named Johnny Oleta may have been the first to establish year-round residency around 1910, when he settled in Ketchikan following the cannery season.
[2]: 66 Because industrial laborers like Alaskeros were primarily men, they married and started families with women who were African American, Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida, Aleut, and Yupik.
Some of these new generations of multiracial Filipino Americans became part of Tlingit family structures, wherein children of sisters are considered to be siblings, not cousins.
