Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
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that could be transformed for instrumental purposes.
Given that possibilities for pursuing education were expanded if one was considered “indigenous,” in the realm of education identities tended to be especially fluid. In the 1990s entitlements for “indigenous peoples” (korennye narody) seeking higher education continued to exist at a number of levels. While places in Russia’s elite institutions—the Moscow State University, the Peoples’ Friendship University of the Russian Federation, and the Leningrad State University—were the most sought after, there were slots reserved in regional institutions as well.30 Slots were generally reserved for a set number of students from specific administrative areas, including the Evenk District, and were available for students majoring in humanities and increasingly in social sciences and medicine.
In 1993 the elastic nature of identities in the Evenk District was underscored when students in Tura were applying for university. In the first instance, a young woman, usually self-identifying as Russian, was accepted to study at a major university in Moscow at the expense of the Russian government. Given that the Russian government allotted the Evenk District five slots in Moscow universities for “peoples of the North” (that is, indigenous Siberians), this hopeful student successfully emphasized her previously downplayed Evenk heritage—her grandmother was “pure” (chistaia) Evenki and her mother considered herself one-half Evenki. Although neither the student nor her mother spoke Evenk, they mobilized this aspect of their multidimensional identities to secure educational opportunity. In a second instance, a member of one of the few remaining “German” households, in which both parents were of German descent, was admitted to study in a university in Moscow in one of the slots reserved for peoples of the North.
Typically degrees of authentic ethnic identity were not the deciding factor in granting opportunities for higher education. The real focus was on the likelihood that the young people who were given this opportunity would return to these regions that suffered from the loss of highly trained newcomers. Those considered sufficiently local, not newcomers that is, became “peoples of the North” for the purposes of sending students for academic training that could later result in fortifying local professional ranks. Thus regional administrations selecting students for scholarships chose to reinterpret central government affirmative action policies to suit local needs.
In the cases where Evenk families moved out of the district, usually to the southern city of Krasnoiarsk, students would often return to the Evenk District to take qualifying exams for the university. Sometimes the students had never attended elementary or high school in the district but would arrive for the exams in early summer. By taking entrance exams in the Evenk District as “peoples of the North,” students were automatically considered for the reserved slots in the institutions of higher learning. They could take the exams in the southern cities, their primary residences, but then they would not be able to vie for the reserved slots. Only in rare cases did students choose to study in disciplines or institutions in which there were no special allotments for indigenous Siberians.
What it means to be Evenki has transformed significantly over the past fifty years as Evenki have come under the purview of the state and now find themselves in a post-Soviet state with new configurations of power. Evenk identities have not just been defined, however, in a top-down manner; Evenki have also been active participants in negotiating situational identities. In addition to these renegotiations around ethnic identity, in the Soviet and post-Soviet era other aspects of identity have also been significant. As the next section discusses, Soviet identity was “performed” in contexts like the House of Culture. For many, the House of Culture was a site embodying Soviet cultural practice, and in the 1990s it was also the site for government-sponsored cultural revitalization programs and a meeting place for the new religious organizations taking root in Tura.
The House of Culture and Ritual Life Reassessed
State-sponsored “cultural work” (kul’turnaia rabota) was central to the Soviet project extending throughout Siberia (Bloch and Kendall 2004). These state-supported cultural revitalization efforts often are reminiscent of similar efforts across the world in which invoking tradition is closely linked to legitimating state or regional power (Handler 1988; Watson 1995; Kaplan 1994). In the context of an indigenous community in the 1990s, however, state-sponsored cultural revitalization, or “cultural invention” (Linnekin 1991; Conklin 1997), was not simply the Soviet state’s construction of a distinct indigenous identity as something to be contained in museums, performed, and studied as part of the past. As I also explore in Chapter 7, the Evenki I knew who were involved in performing tradition in the form of dance, song, and handicrafts did not see these acts as “inventing” culture. Being part of a folk dance troupe, singing, or sewing warm fur clothing was instead part of daily life and sociality. The state created institutions and funded organizations, but the revitalization of Evenk cultural practices that was busily taking place when I first arrived in Tura in 1992 and continued in various ways throughout the 1990s involved people who themselves breathed life into these sites and found meaning in them. In the 1990s, Turintsy continued to value Soviet institutions such as the House of Culture, but many also began to look to new or renewed forms of sociality such as organized religion and healing practices.
In Tura, as in other Soviet towns and villages, the “House of Culture” (Dom kul’tury or “De Ka” as young people called it) was the primary center of organized social life for much of the Soviet period. While in cities these social centers were sometimes called “Palaces of Culture” and in fact were housed in former tsarist-era palaces, in Tura the House of Culture was a cavernous, rather unappealing two-story structure of grey concrete built in the 1980s in the town center. This institution sponsored events throughout the year to mark holidays such as the “Day of the October Revolution,” New Year’s Eve, and “the End of Winter.” It also housed various clubs such as a chess club, a sports club, a rock music group, and the Evenk folk dance group (Osiktakan), and hosted a weekly discotheque for teenagers. Moreover, the House of Culture served as the site for civic events. It was a polling site for the election of local and federal representatives and was used for public send-offs for young men entering the army. In the post-Soviet era indigenous groups in some parts of Siberia established separate cultural centers they viewed as distinct from the more orthodox, state-sanctioned House of Culture (see Gray 1998: 297; Khelol 1997). Throughout the 1990s, however, the Evenki in this region had not created such alternatives, and in fact, in Tura many Evenki, as well as other town residents, continued to frequent the House of Culture as an important gathering place, both for civic events and for entertainment.
Most significantly for Evenki, in conjunction with the residential school, the House of Culture was a place where Evenk identities were bolstered through state-financed means. The various clubs housed within the House of Culture and the holiday events celebrated there focused around reproducing what were referred to as “traditional” (traditsionnye) Evenk songs, dance, and clothing. For instance, in 1993–94 the House of Culture had an Evenk folk music ensemble consisting mostly of elderly women who sang songs in Evenk and Russian; the songs featured lyrics about life in the taiga. The Evenk folk dance ensemble also performed a number of choreographed pieces that invoked shamanic practices and were accompanied by the steady beat of a hide drum. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this was a popular group for youth to belong to; the troupe traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, as well as abroad, and it was also considered a source of employment for those principal dancers who were paid by the Department of Culture. In the 1990s, in addition to the dance and music groups, the House of Culture also housed a “methodological center,” where three women were employed in crafting the details of traditional, material culture for set design, costumes, and ritual events. By the late 1990s the growing demands of the Evenk District Sakha community for greater government recognition and a corresponding allocation of resources were also evident in the House of Culture, where a Sakha drama group was briefly established.
The majority of educated Evenki in the Evenk District in the early 1990s were employed in the sphere of “culture” as “cultural workers” (kul’turnye rabotniki) in institutions such as the residential school and the House of Culture. The concentration of Evenki in these spheres ensured that they were steeped in this enterprise of producing