Old Chenega is a historic village at the head of Chenega Cove on the southern tip of Chenega Island in western Prince William Sound, about 82 miles (132 km) west-south-west of Cordova and 40 miles (64 km) south-east of Whittier, Alaska. Chenega Island is within the traditional territory of the Sugpiaq Chugach people. The name “Chenega” means “under the mountain” and was first reported by Ivan Petrof in 1880. A post office was established there in 1946 but discontinued after the 1964 earthquake destroyed the village and the population moved to the village of Chenega Bay on nearby Evans Island. The geology of Chenega Island represents the Orca Group, a formation of sedimentary and volcanic rocks that developed during the Paleocene to Eocene periods, 59.2 to 38 million years ago. The formation surrounding Chenega Cove is mostly sandstone, siltstone, mudstone, conglomerate, and limestone. The sandstone is composed chiefly of quartz and plagioclase, and the conglomerate is mainly felsic porphyry and granite.

The Sugpiaq Chugach are an Alutiiq-speaking people, and one of nine Alaska Native peoples that include Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian and several northern Athabaskan cultures. The archaeological record suggests the Sugpiaq Chugach have inhabited the coastal environments of south-central Alaska for over 4,400 years. Their traditional homelands include Prince William Sound, the outer Kenai Peninsula, the Kodiak Archipelago, and the Alaska Peninsula. The Sugpiaq Chugach share many cultural practices with other coastal peoples, particularly the Unangan Aleut of the Aleutian Islands and the Yup’ik of the Bering Sea coast, and they probably share a common ancestry. At the time of European colonization, there were distinct regional groups of Sugpiaq Chugach people, each speaking a slightly different dialect of the Alutiiq language. The people of Chenega spoke a dialect called Suqcestun. The Sugpiaq Chugach traditionally lived a coastal lifestyle, subsisting primarily on ocean resources such as salmon, halibut and marine mammals hunted from skin-covered boats. They supplemented these maritime foods with berries and land mammals. Before contact with Russian fur traders, they lived in semi-subterranean homes called ciqlluaq or barabaras.

Old Chenega village was the oldest continuously inhabited community in the area and had a population of about 68 residents. The infrastructure consisted of over a dozen buildings, a wharf, a Bureau of Indian Affairs office, a Russian Orthodox church, a general store and a small schoolhouse on top of a hill. The March 1964 Alaska earthquake was the strongest earthquake in American history, measuring 9.2 on the Richter scale. The quake triggered a tsunami that inundated the village to a depth of 50 feet (15 m), destroying the wharf and all the buildings except the schoolhouse and killing 26 people. In 1971 Congress enacted the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, granting the original residents of Chenega title to over 70,000 acres (28,328 ha) of land in Prince William Sound and paving the way for the Chenega Corporation, which was established in 1974. Although other communities hit hard by the disaster were rebuilt, the survivors of Chenega relocated to Sawmill Bay on the east coast of Evans Island and started the village of Chenega Bay. The ancestral home at Old Chenega village was never rebuilt. A film was made in 1964 about the village and can be seen here and a shorter version here. Read more here and here. Explore more of Old Chenega and Chenega Island here: