Preface

      For many indigenous Siberians, the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR) has brought about hardships resulting from the breakdown of government infrastructure such as state farms, medical units, and rural schooling. At the same time, the new era has also presented possibilities for self-representation and self-determination that were absent during Soviet times, and now people are immersed in reconfiguring relationships to local and translocal identities. This book focuses on the experiences of a community of Evenki, an indigenous Siberian group concentrated in central Siberia, to consider how the institution of residential schooling has influenced lives in the Soviet and post-Soviet era. Residential schools established in the 1920s brought indigenous Siberians under the purview of the state, and more than any other institution, came to define the identities of the Evenki. In the post-Soviet period, the relations of power in this central Siberian community, and by extension in broader Russia, are vividly refracted through the lens of the schooling system.

      This is an ethnography that weaves together portraits of several layers of community in a central Siberian town to provide insight into a time of jarring social change. I take the residential school as the central axis for considering a range of ways Evenki are redefining their relationships with the post-Soviet state. I consider the place of the residential school from a contemporary as well as historical perspective, because the school continues to be an important