Mary Peterson

Mary Peterson (September 18, 1927 – December 5, 2020) was an Alutiiq midwife and healer in the village of Akhiok, Kodiak Island, Alaska who was known for her integration of Alutiiq indigenous and Russian Orthodox traditions into her practice. Early life As a young girl, Peterson picked berries, fished and gained tacit knowledge of ancestral traditions of the region such as basket weaving and drying and smoking fish. Career and culture Peterson was apprenticed within an Alutiiq tradition under the teaching of local midwives including Irene Agnot. She was elected as midwife of Akhiok after delivering 25 babies in the region. Peterson has described her cultural affiliation with the Alutiiq people simply as "Aleut", a name given to the indigenous community by the first Russian traders to Kodiak in the 1700s. Since 1970, the Aleut culture has been officially renamed as "Alutiiq", replacing its other terms such as Sugpiaq Eskimo, Pacific Eskimo, or Koniag. As Mulchay writes in her biography of Peterson, which explores her life as well as the complexity and situational fluidity of her ethic identity: "Kodiak Alutiiqs may identify to varying degrees with the Russian, Swedish, or other European components of their heritage, welcoming rather than explaining away that ancestry." The complexities of Alutiiq cultural life after eighteenth and nineteenth-century Russian colonisation are illustrated in an account of how Peterson commonly sang "Orthodox Christmas songs in Alutiiq and Slavonic".