[LINK] "Amid US-Russia chill, Natives struggle to connect across Maritime border"

[rfmcdonald]

Al Jazeera America's Ryan Schuessler notes how the Aleuts of the Bering Strait area, who in the two decades after the end of the Cold War began to restore their ties, are now facing division as Russian-American relations deteriorate.

Patricia Lekanoff-Gregory remembers when a delegation of American Unangax flew to Russia’s Komandorski Islands to meet their kin in the early 1990s.

Lekanoff-Gregory’s father made the journey to Russia as the global euphoria at the end of the Cold War reached far north, into the Bering Sea. She said her father, who is elderly and asked her to speak for him, said the Russian and American Unangax were sitting on either side of a room, staring at each other in silence, told to wait for the official interpreters to arrive. But they couldn’t wait. Soon enough, the two groups were shouting words in their native language to each other. “Seal.” “Table.” Hugs. Tears. The two communities had not met in decades.

Lekanoff-Gregory has traveled to the Komandorski Islands five times since her father’s journey. She’s hoping to go again in the coming months to help teach Russian Unangax traditional hat making.

“They’re just finding out they’re Native again,” she said of the Russian Unangax, citing the cultural damage from the oppression they faced during the Soviet era. “But money is harder to get, and it’s getting more expensive [to go there] now.”

While some other Native communities that straddle the Russia-U.S. border have protections that allow for direct visa-free travel between the countries, no such arrangement exists for the Unangax. The efforts to reconnect Unangax communities across the border in the remote North Pacific remain at the mercy of deteriorating relations between Moscow and Washington, and locals say it’s getting harder to keep the cultural exchanges going.

“Bringing a couple of people [from Russia to Alaska] is an expensive proposition,” said Jim Gamble, the executive director of the Aleut International Association. “And one that we can only do once in a while when we gather enough funding together. And it’s similar going the other way.”