Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
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revitalization. In these pages I seek to provide a sense of the considerable diversity in Evenk perspectives regarding the impact of Soviet cultural practices and institutions on their lives. I examine how Evenk identities were taking shape in the 1990s in conjunction with a wide range of factors, including regional, political, and generational affiliation as well as household strategies for economic survival. Given that Evenk women in particular have been caught between Soviet cultural practices of the past and the emerging market trends, a gendered perspective extends through the chapters. For almost all Evenk men and women, however, the experience of residential schooling is one they share with their children, parents, and sometimes grandparents. Residential schooling continues to be a significant defining feature of what it is to be Evenki.
Children have been taken away from parents to attend residential schools across the globe in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, parts of Africa, China, and Russia, but their plights have been quite different according to the contexts in which the schools have operated. In some cases, students suffered psychological, physical, or sexual abuse, as recent accounts increasingly indicate. At the very least, no matter what type of ideology existed, many students were homesick, anxious about being in an unfamiliar setting, and numbed by institutional homogeneity. For the indigenous Siberians I came to know, there was a wide range of perspectives on residential schooling, some negative but also many positive; residential schooling has continued to be one of the common factors defining indigenous Siberians even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
It is difficult to overemphasize how the attendance of more than three generations of indigenous Siberians at boarding schools from age six to sixteen affected their sense of identity. This schooling was not just a matter of learning to read and write; in fact, in the early years when policymakers were involved in crafting the Soviet residential schooling system for indigenous Siberians there was widespread debate about the exact purpose of the institution. Some firmly believed that the schools should refrain from disrupting the native subsistence patterns, while others saw this as the primary purpose. In the early to mid-1920s, many of those cautioning against assimilation were ethnographers working as advisors for the newly created Committee of the North (Komitet Severa) that was charged with overseeing the economic and sociopolitical transformation of indigenous Siberian communities.1 In a 1926 meeting in Moscow where a program of study for indigenous Siberians was being created, an established Soviet ethnographer concluded:
It would be a grave mistake to think that the aim of our work is to transmit our ways to the natives.… We should approach the tranquility of the natives’ lives with great care. It’s not hard to destroy these ways, but this will only lead to sure death.… The school … should only educate natives in such a way that they will not be torn from their way of life. They should not become unfamiliar with their regular subsistence activities. (Leonov 1928: 120)
Ultimately, other positions had more weight. By the early 1930s, the proponents of the residential school as a place to inculcate Soviet values were in charge of designing the residential schooling programs. The residential school system that developed in the 1920s throughout Siberia served as the key element in indigenous Siberians’ fundamental shift away from subsistence lifeways. By the late 1980s, only a portion of Siberian indigenous communities continued to live lives primarily based on hunting and gathering, reindeer herding, and fishing; most increasingly found themselves living with strong ties to new industrial-based Soviet cultural practices such as wage labor, biomedicine, and formal education.
As the Russian Federation moved toward a market-based system in the 1990s, the government-financed education system came under increasing threat.2 This crisis coexisted with growing efforts to dispense with the government supports that had existed for decades to promote indigenous Siberian representation in government, education, and medicine. In this context the residential schools sometimes became important loci for indigenous intellectuals’ attempts to reinvigorate native languages and knowledge of local heritages.3 In examining these identity politics, this ethnography privileges the experience of people over dense theorization on so-called “nationalism” among indigenous Siberians. “Education,” per se, is also not the focus of this work.4 What this book does is examine several aspects of the negotiations around Evenk identities in the mid-1990s and the continuing salience of shared Soviet cultural practices and ideas about belonging to a collective. With the residential school as a key axis of these identity politics, the book explores layers of historical consciousness among a variety of people—elders, students, reindeer herders, entrepreneurs, and nurses, among others—in the central Siberian town of Tura.
In 1995, Evenki in Tura officially comprised about 700 people, over 15 percent of the town’s population of about 6,000 people. (This figure, however, included only those who were registered with the town passport bureau.)5 In the mid-1990s, in addition to permanent households, there were also many individuals temporarily residing in Tura. By 1998 the proportion of Evenki to non-Evenki in Tura was growing steadily as some Evenki left their villages, which had been virtually abandoned by the regional government, and more and more Russians left Tura to seek work in southern urban centers. This was not the first time Tura’s population had undergone rapid change.
After World War II the population of Tura grew rapidly as local Evenki came for veterinary and medical assistance, as well as schooling, and Katanga Evenki from the neighboring region and Russians found positions as doctors, educators, administrators, and service personnel. Volga Germans and Baltic peoples were also exiled to the region (Habeck 1997).6 In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was again a population boom as extensive Soviet natural resource exploitation expanded in the North (Miller 1994: 340–42). Several thousand people (mostly Russian and Ukrainian men) were drawn to the Evenk Autonomous District (Evenkiiskii Avtonomnyi Okrug) as well-paid employment opportunities in the oil and mineral exploration outfits sharply increased in the area. By the 1970s a type of welfare state colonialism had developed in which prized natural resources such as coal, oil, quartz, and timber were extracted from these areas in exchange for state-guaranteed provision of subsistence needs, schooling, health facilities, and some political representation. Evenki were virtually guaranteed a living wage as members of the state bureaucratic infrastructure, either as members of “collective farms” (state cooperatives for hunting, fur processing, and reindeer herding) or as recipients of entitlements (such as pensions and child benefits). The “newcomers” (priezzhii), mostly Russians and Ukrainians, who came to the area for work received two to three times the local wages as hardship pay. This all changed in the early 1990s as political power at federal, regional, and local levels was contested and instability became a defining feature of daily life throughout Russia.
Political-economic autonomy in the Evenk Autonomous District (hereafter Evenk District or Evenkiia) in the 1990s was multilayered and interwoven with issues of regional autonomy and Evenk claims to subsistence land. The administrative configurations within the Russian Federation remained largely as they were in the Soviet period, with the same town government structures, the same regional parliament, and a parliament or Duma at the national level. Beginning with the elections held in December 1993, however, there was a range of parties competing during each of the campaigns to fill elected offices. Significantly for many regions of Siberia like the Krasnoiarsk Territory and the Evenk District, jurisdictional hierarchies did shift.7 Since the early 1990s, regions, territories, and republics have had equal access in appealing to Moscow, rather than relying on a intricate hierarchy of chains of command, as they did in the Soviet period.8 Beginning in the early 1990s, many Evenk and newcomer politicians sought to place the Evenk District directly subject to Moscow bureaucracies instead of it remaining under the sovereignty of the Krasnoiarsk Territory. Bureaucrats and common people alike often thought that this new arrangement would allow the district organs of power to have direct control over the exploitation of the region’s natural resources and also allow the district to receive government subsidies and supports without Krasnoiarsk bureaucracies siphoning off a portion.
In conjunction with questions of regional governance, indigenous land claims became a key issue in the Evenk District in the 1990s. As the Russian Parliament considered propositions for privatizing lands, district level administrations attempted to temporarily regulate land use (Fondhal 1998). An uneasy balance existed between private interests renting land from district administrations