|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |
|
|
The sometimes predictable, often
unexpected encounters that arise on voyages leave room for
misinterpretation and misunderstanding. In the unfamiliarity
of a novel situation at a new landing, a gesture, a minute
facial expression, a tone unmeasured and controlled, or a
question taken out of context may offend when it was meant
to engage. As a professional ethnographer deeply schooled in
the traditions of long-term fieldwork, I felt ambivalent
about the prospect of the short-term visit that a cruising
ship would provide. What can one learn or understand of a
place and the people who live there in a matter of
hours? When the original Harriman
Expedition went up the coast of Alaska, the Native peoples
and cultures were threatened by land seizure, violence,
disease, and alcohol. Since the time of the Harriman
expedition, the greatest political-economic contrast between
the Russian Far East and Alaska has been in the nature of
human relationships to the land. The Gold Rush was a social
and political event premised on ideas of private land
ownership and individual rights to extracted wealth and
upheld by a government dedicated to both of those ideas. Native Life Inside the
Soviet Union Menovshchikov's narrative is the
story of local Soviet institutionalization and heroism, a
tale of a disabled man who saw opportunities in the promised
Soviet way of life and became a local leader. It shows
Matliu working against local "backward" beliefs and against
the exploiters who held to them. Reproducing in native
microcosm the grand Marxist myth of the overthrow of
capitalism by the proletariat, this heroic narrative applied
here even to whale hunting. The story of the Soviet period
was the story of the increasing organization of the
productive aspects of people's lives. Men were organized
into hunting brigades, and their catch was measured and
distributed according to a numerical scheme. Rationalized
labor entered the lives of women as they too became sewing
factory workers. On the Alaskan side, in contrast, a
parallel rationalization and administration of traditional
Native subsistence practices took place only in fishing.
Alaskan traditional subsistence remained consciously outside
the sphere of industrial development and became an
increasingly significant marker of Native identity (Hensel
1996). The legacy of subsistence practices is an important
component of today's Native rights controversy in
Alaska. The Post-Soviet
Era
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu
Expedition
Log
Yet as we disembarked from the Odyssey to head for the
island of St. George in the Pribilof Islands, I was
intensely curious about the current situation of its Aleut
population. I knew something of the history of their
resettlement there by Russians as a labor force to harvest
fur seals. I had heard only vague accounts of the forced
evacuations during World War II. My understanding was that
there were still a significant number of speakers of the
Aleut language. I wondered about the parallels to the
histories I knew of Itelmens and other Native communities in
Russia. Indigenous peoples in the Soviet Union were forced
to resettle beginning in the 1950s, and the evacuations from
villages contributed greatly to the feeling of cultural
loss.
Waiting for us as we arrived on shore in our flotilla of
Zodiacs was a set of cars waiting to take us to various
destinations. Among the drivers were researchers and
government employees recently arrived on the island, others
were born and raised there. One of the locals had introduced
himself to a group and was talking to them about life on the
island as I approached. I listened for a while as he talked
about cars and weather, eager to hear more about local
cultural and political aspirations. During a pause, as some
of the listeners walked away, I asked, "Are there any
speakers of Aleut on the island?" He looked at me with a
disdainful expression and, it seemed, a touch of
exasperation, as if my question were politically naïve,
and one that had often been asked before. If he hesitated,
it was only momentary, and he responded with sincere pride:
"Aang."
I was caught off guard, clumsily trying to parse the sound I
had started to interpret as English and a little unsure to
know how to react to the offense, however slight, he had
taken to my question. I thought I perceived his cultural
political interpretation. The politics of cultural
legitimacy in the United States, as in Russia and elsewhere
in the indigenous North, is often very closely tied to the
cultural status of language. He might have taken my question
as a judgment of cultural denial, as negatively implying
that there was little left of Aleut culture and, therefore,
of Aleut political status, because the language was dying or
gone. Not knowing immediately how to counter this
interpretation, I stumbled on, with an overeager question
that only dug me in deeper: "Oh...are you a speaker?"
His reply came almost as if he had expected and set up my
response: "Aang." Hoping to explain that the my question's
intent was just the opposite of what he might think, I said
that I had been working with Itelmens in Kamchatka and had
recently been helping with preparation of language
preservation materials. I wanted him to know that I at least
thought I knew about the meaning of language politics and
the implications for local identity politics. He then told
me, yes, there were a number of speakers; he was one of the
younger ones. He added wistfully that young people today are
not really learning the language. His pride in knowing the
language seemed closely tied to his lament that it was not
being learned.
Simple answers to simple questions. In retrospect, I might
well wonder whether my interpretation of the exchange was
correct. I was sensitive to the issues of language and
identity because they can have important economic
significance in Russia today. Many Russians who have settled
in Kamchatka, for example, think of the Itelmen people as
either dissolved into the Russian community or without a
language of their own and hence fully assimilated.
Assimilation, by the logic of empire, means lack of distinct
political standing. In Kamchatka, as elsewhere in the
indigenous world, distinct political standing bears directly
on rights to natural resources. In the early 1990s, Native
peoples were given the opportunity to establish kin communes
(rodovye obshchiny) that would permit them to engage in
economic activities involving the use of traditional
resources for both subsistence and commercial purposes.
Those who did not have Native status did not have this
opportunity.
More recently, the politics of indigenous survival in the
Russian Far East has become related as well to environmental
conservation. Local, long-term residents are seen to be the
best guarantors and protectors of healthy ecosystems.
Survival of indigenous groups has been shown to be not only
analogous to, but closely interrelated with survival of
ecosystems and species. Both linguistic and cultural loss
correlate highly with losses in the natural environment,
with declines in biodiversity and damage to natural
environments (Maffi 2001).
Environmental, economic, and cultural politics have been
intertwined with the lives of indigenous peoples of the
North Pacific since at least 1899. George Bird Grinnell
noted the destructive effects that the Gold Rush land-grab
would have on the Eskimo peoples the Harriman expedition
members met:
The outlook for the
immediate future for these Eskimo is gloomy. Hitherto
they have been well cut off from civilization, meeting
only the whalers, who are few in number and are under a
certain rude discipline. But a change has come for the
Eskimo and this year of 1900 has already witnessed a
melancholy alteration in their condition. The rush to the
coast gold fields has brought to them a horde of miners,
who, thinking only of themselves, are devoid of all
feeling for others of their kind. There is no law or
government in the land, the commanders of the few revenue
cutters along the coast being the fountainheads of
authority and having extensive areas of sea and land
under their jurisdiction. White men, uncontrolled and
uncontrollable, already swarm over the Alaska coast, and
are overwhelming the Eskimo. They have taken away their
women, and debauched their men with liquor; they have
brought them strange new diseases that they never knew
before, and in a very short time they will ruin and
disperse the wholesome, hearty, merry people whom we saw
at Port Clarence and at Plover Bay (p. 183).
For the people of Plover Bay who encountered the Harriman
expedition, the Soviet government was still more than a
quarter-century away. When Soviet power did arrive, it came
with an ideological focus entirely contrary to the
individualist wealth seeking of gold rush Alaska. The
destructive forces impinging on the lives of the Native
populations of Alaska, if checked occasionally by
humanitarian interventions, were haphazard and not centrally
planned. Soviet interventions, on the other hand, were
carried out with the grand humanitarian ideology of
socialist reform, which transformed in stages into the
turning screw of Soviet domination.
Industrialization came to both sides of the Pacific with the
particular characteristics of the capitalist and
anti-capitalist, modernist governmental structures under
which they were created. Soviet industrialization at first
aimed at rationally organizing traditional production. Sea
mammal hunting and the catching of fish went from production
and distribution systems centered around families and
neighbors to "artels" and brigades that established
bureaucratic accounting and distribution procedures. A
Native Kamchatkan elder once recounted to me that at the age
of 12 he was tapped for work because of the math skills he
had demonstrated in school. He was assigned the task of
keeping the books for the fishing brigade that his father
headed. When he delivered the books to the regional center
at the end of each season, indigenous economic activity
could numerically be encompassed in the bureaucratic
hierarchy of the total Soviet economic system.
The U.S. government, in contrast, did not dictate Alaskan
economic development from a nationwide plan. Industrial
order came from the patterned logic of factory-organized
wage labor. Alaska's parallel to Soviet industrialization,
the introduction of canneries, brought increased flow of
money and consumer goods and increasing dependency on
wage-labor jobs. The northern Pacific coast of the Far East
was spared the massive industrial development of other areas
of Siberia and in turn spared many of the environmentally
destructive effects. The more significant impacts were
forced migration and immigration. If ideas of private
property were critical to American-style colonization in
Alaska, on the Soviet side, the great influx of outsiders
took place following a plan for public industrialization and
bureaucratized settlement of the Soviet North. The
government provided substantial wage and benefit incentives
to attract the labor force from all over the Soviet Union.
As the example of the Kamchatkan elder demonstrates, the
rationalization of productive activities penetrated to even
in the smallest communities. Work incentives were created
around the quantitative assessment of production quotas and
bonuses that kolkhozes (collective "farms") and local
offices provided to workers.
Both sides of the Pacific suffered the loss of what was
valued as traditional culture. The expanding nations saw it
as their obligation to "civilize" the Native populations by
formal education. In the early days, U.S. Native education
sought to force children into an English-speaking world.
Soviet attempts to befriend the local populations brought
foreign ideas, but, at least at first, in the local
language. Then the Soviet Union too banned teaching in many
local languages and insisted that students learn Russian.
Both countries established boarding schools that took
children away from their families for long periods of time,
breaking their ties with the culture of their parents and
the familiar surroundings in which they were raised (Pika,
Dahl, and Larsen 1996:100).
Although these and other features of transition in the
twentieth century are familiar in Alaska, little is known
outside of Russia of the experiences of the tiny communities
that were brought into the sphere of a tremendous, if
temporary, world power. My aim in this chapter is to provide
a small window onto the experiences of that vast social
experiment that was the Soviet Union. In environments and
small Native communities much like their counterparts in
Alaska, the peoples of the Russian Far East have faced very
different political circumstances with profound
consequences.
Grinnell reported that the settlement they saw at Plover Bay
consisted of about 12 topeks (summer houses) and a series of
dismantled winter houses then in use for storage. The
settlement had approximately 30 inhabitants - not an unusual
size for an Eskimo settlement. How different would
Grinnell's descriptions have been had they landed at the
vast Eskimo site that we saw at Naukan, where once up to 600
people are thought to have lived. It was the center of the
Naukan language of the Siberian Yupik family. The
nutrient-rich currents of the Bering Sea pass by in front of
Naukan, enjoyed by seals, walruses, sea birds and followed
by migrating whales. Clearly it was a favorable place for
humans who knew how to live off this bounty. Stone-lined
house pits and smaller meat caches stretch for over a
kilometer across the sloping faces of hills locally known as
Nasik and K'ina'. It is easy to imagine that what Grinnell
described in Plover Bay once was present here on a much
larger scale: summer huts with roofs of reindeer skins,
loosely attached on top to allow smoke to escape; interior
sleeping apartments with green walrus hide to keep out the
rain; skins hanging and drying everywhere; harpoons, spears,
paddles standing or hanging by houses. None of this
remained, however, because this once bustling center of
Eskimo life had been closed down for more than forty
years.
In the period between the Harriman Expedition and its
retracing, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had come
into being, become one of the two world superpowers, and
dissolved into historical ignominy. Today, the evidence of
contrasting Eskimo and Soviet cultures is spread across
Naukan. Collapsing Soviet administration buildings stand out
in the landscape. Near what once was the school, an exposed,
rusting set of uneven bars speaks to the tremendous reach of
the idea of Soviet culture. From participation by Soviet
gymnasts in the Olympics to gymnastics programs in the most
remote of Eskimo villages, the Soviet government replicated
its vision of what it was to be a Soviet citizen in the
modern world.
By what means did the Soviet government come to plant itself
in these regions? How did changes take place, and what were
the experiences in the territories opposite Alaska (Chukotka
and Kamchatka)? What effect did the importation of a
political-economic system defined by its opposition to
capitalism have in this land of sea mammal-hunting, berry
gathering and reindeer herding?
The village of Chaplino was just up the coast from where the
Harriman Expedition stopped and a little south of our
landing points in 2001. In Chaplino they spoke the same
language as their Alaskan relatives and neighbors on St.
Lawrence Island, Chaplinsky Siberian Yupik. When the
representatives of the early Soviet government arrived,
their message was one of befriending and aiding the Native
peoples of the North and Far East. They sought to show these
most distant members of the empire how their lives under the
tsarist regime were deficient or bad and to offer
improvement. At that time, fur and fish (in Kamchatka) were
the only resources in which the government showed
significant interest. Government policy focused on human
resources and the reorganization of social life and
productive activities.
The tale of political intervention of the Soviet government
began in this area of Chukotka in 1927. The following
account of the arrival of Soviet representatives was written
by Georgi Menovshchikov, a Soviet linguist who did extensive
research with Siberian Yupiit (Asiatic Eskimos) in the 1950s
- 1970s. His narrative of the early days in the village
stressed the democratic ideal of local elections and the
cultural-political grounds on which the Soviet government
would assert political authority. According to a schema to
be replicated across the Soviet North, local people would
take up the cause of socialist reform and assure more
equitable distribution of natural resources.
In the fall of 1927,
two bearded Russians arrived from Uelen [north coast
of Chukotka]. They were emissaries of the young
Soviet government who were to organize Native Councils in
the larger population centers along the coast of
Chukotka. It was rare that strangers came to the old
village. However, the coastal inhabitants knew that
Soviet power had been established and that the people
themselves were to elect local governments.
" Who is your elder (leader)?" asked one of the bearded
ones turning to the hunters.
& A stocky hunter with a cataract on his left eye
stepped forward and in broken Russian translated what was
said.
& [After translating the man introduced
himself.] "My name is Matliu. I know a little
Russian. I traveled as dogsled driver with the Russian
administrators. Earlier I worked with the chaplinsky
priest. I know a little English. I worked as a harpooner
on an American hunting schooner, I was a translator from
Chukchi and Eskimo languages when American and Russian
traders came. I traveled a lot in Chukotka, I've seen a
lot. I was a delegate at the First Congress of the Native
Populations of the Far East.
*****
A meeting was held on the second day in the empty
warehouse of the production post (faktoria). Matliu was
named the first candidate to the Council. The hunters
spoke admiringly of him, about his wise advice for the
village in all affairs. Matliu was elected president of
the village Native Council.
A persistent and difficult struggle for better ways of
life, for equitable distribution of the hunting catch
among hunters, a struggle with superstition and shamanism
took place at this time. The young Soviet government was
still weak economically and could not guarantee distant
northern regions all necessary goods, materials and
hunting equipment. One had to know how to explain this to
people and find a solution to the difficult
situation.
*****
Matliu obtained long-term credit for every family so that
all of his fellow villagers had necessary hunting
equipment and as well clothing, tobacco, sugar, and tea.
The village Council, under Matliu-direction used all
means to extract from whaleboat owners a fair
distribution of the hunt. If before, the owner of a
whaleboat could take for himself the lion's share of the
whale baleen, walrus tusks, and sea mammal hides, now the
catch was divided among the hunters according to the role
of each: shooters and harpooners received the majority,
rowers received less (Menovshchikov 1977:57).
The Soviet government thus proceeded by recruiting local
people to participate in construction of the new state. The
political-economic challenge was to convince local
populations that its system of organized (administrable)
work brigades would serve them better than the traditional
system of family-based production and distribution. The
transformation came about in Chaplino in the wake of a
tremendous local tragedy.
In the spring of 1931
the Chaplino hunters decided to organize a production
artel. The government...gave artels credit for obtaining
motors and other production equipment. Motorized
whaleboats lightened the work of hunters greatly and
allowed for hunting sea mammals at greater distance than
was possible by rowing.
There had been discussions of forming an artel earlier
but the actual decision was prompted by an event that
shook Chaplino villagers and other surrounding
communities. In February 1931, nineteen of Chaplino's
better hunters were carried off on a piece of ice that
broke away. At that early time in the Chukotkan north,
there was no aviation, and people carried off by the sea
usually died. Not one of the hunters returned to shore.
Everywhere along the coast there were shortages of meat.
Chaplino residents and hunters from other villages were
forced to go out on thick ice in the harsher winter
months with the hope of killing a seal to feed their
families.&
At that time the shamans from Chaplino and Yanrakinot
spread the rumor that Matliu, by his agitation for
organization of the artel, his speaking out against the
shamans and the observance of Soviet laws, had offended
the "sea god" who, as a punishment to Chapliners, killed
their better hunters. Many inhabitants of Chaplino
believed the shamans' slander and wouldn't agree to join
the artel. But young hunters who had studied under the
anti-illiteracy (likbez) program came to Matliu's aid.
They had heard much interesting about the Soviet people
and the greater world.
*****
Simultaneously with the organization of collective sea
mammal production by the artel, a sewing factory was
opened for the making of fur clothing, footwear, and fur
bedcovers. Women were the first to be attracted to
collective useful work. The artel quickly gathered
economic strength.
The spring hunt turned out to be successful. All member
families of the artel were supplied with meat. With the
profits from fuel oil, hides and sewing products, the
artel paid off its debts to the government store.
There were many applications from hunters to become part
of the artel. (Menovshchikov 1977:58-60)
The transformation of people's lives in eastern Chukotka
took place in stages. In the 1940s, the government organized
the earlier mentioned kolkhozy (singular., kolkhoz), or
"collective farms." In Chukotka and Kamchatka these were, of
course, not for the most part farms but increasingly
segmented and specialized versions of traditional harvesting
activities: reindeer-herding, sea mammal-hunting, and
fishing. Eventually, the government also industrialized
animal-processing. Some of the people in Plover Bay who were
young when the Harriman expedition visited could have
witnessed the construction of the Plover sea
mammal-processing plant in 1948. It produced sea mammal
meat, hide, tusk, fat, and fish products from the catch
provided by the local kolkhoz (Piliasov 1998:59).
Reindeer-herding was similarly collectivized, with the more
profound effect of settling the formerly nomadic herding
populations. Perhaps the greatest disruption to the lives of
the indigenous peoples of the Russian North Pacific region
came not with collectivization, but with resettlement. The
disruption came in part because the new villages were not
sited for their capacity to sustain traditional subsistence
practices. The kolkhozy that had been profitable when they
were located near procurement territories soon showed losses
as transportation costs increased (Piliasov 1998:60).
The Cold War also played a role in the lives of Eskimos near
the coast. The government closed villages and created
multiethnic towns with the intention of interrupting
historical ties with related villages in America (Piliasov
1998:60). The government also sought to introduce new,
bureaucratized productive activities and curtail "risky"
subsistence practices. Reindeer herding was considered more
profitable (and closer to the agricultural model on which
the kolkhozes were built nationwide) and support for sea
mammal subsistence decreased. In the early 1960s, there were
nearly 700 hunters in 96 brigades involved in sea mammal
hunting; by the end of the 1960s there were only 357 sea
mammal hunters in 63 brigades (Murashko 2000).
The sovkhoz era, a new phase in both political and
economic development, brought more changes. The government
introduced livestock-, fur-, and chicken-farming, and with
this new economic infrastructure came a huge influx of
settlers. The aim was to create a total
industrial-agricultural economy combining local and imported
activities. The positive side, temporarily at least, was
that government services followed, including medical and
consumer services, communications, and transportation.
Unfortunately, this development also made villagers highly
dependent on the government for communications and supplies
of food, fuel, and animal feed.
After the Soviet regime collapsed in the early nineties,
many communities found themselves in difficulties, living in
homes that use electricity for cooking, and oil, gas, or
firewood for heat and relying on state stores for staple
foods-resources no longer available to them. The flow of
medical supplies nearly stopped; the rate of alcoholism, a
problem across much of Russia, increased as high-profit
activities associated with sale and production of alcohol
thrived. Some villages have tried with difficulty to return
to traditional subsistence. The distance between the
villages and subsistence harvest areas that was brought
about by the earlier resettlements made that problematic.
Fuel for transportation (not to mention heating and cooking)
had quickly become difficult to obtain. The only communities
that are doing well are ones that can produce necessary food
for themselves, thanks to sufficiently diversified economic
opportunities and access to resources.
As we approached the village of Lorino, one of the border
guards on our ship told me that it was, among all the
villages of the region, the only one that was doing
reasonably well. He did not say why, but our conversations
with villagers indicated that it was the diversity of their
economic activities that was fueling the local economy.
Lorino had sea mammal-hunting, fishing, reindeer-herding,
fur-hunting, and a still-functioning fox farm. The first
three provide food, and all can provide raw materials for
marketable products.
Perhaps the enduring positive legacy of the Soviet Union
could be seen in the festive performances that we witnessed
on the beach in Lorino and in the grassy field below
Yanrakinot. They were both Soviet and post-Soviet in
character. The Soviet Union had put significant effort into
providing indigenous groups with channeled outlets for
cultural expression. Local people were trained in the
organization of public festivities that included Native
dance and song, speeches, and sports competition. The formal
group dances that we saw on the white sand of the Lorino
beach were a combined product of traditional dance forms and
Soviet cultural performance training.
Such dancing is post-Soviet in that performance groups have
taken on a life of their own with new meaning in the new
era. Although some groups still receive support from the
government, the main goals of these new groups are in most
cases ethnic self-identification and presentation. People
are now proud of their ancestral heritage, and the dancing
has become a way to express that pride. In this, Soviet
culture stimulated a cross-culturally recognizable form of
expression with which indigenous identity can now be
publicly maintained. While it is likely that some of the
languages of the region will disappear over the next
century, this public form of presentation can serve to
counter the negative politics of language loss. As the
people of Russia's Far East struggle to survive in the harsh
economic situation of the post-Soviet era, they are counting
on their rights to the diverse range of local natural
resources. Respect of indigenous cultural heritage and a
commitment to economic development that preserved the
diversity of their resource environment seem likely to be
keys to a healthful post-Soviet transition.
REFERENCES CITED
Hensel, Chase,
1996. Telling our selves : ethnicity and discourse in
Southwestern Alaska. New York: Oxford University Press.
Maffi, Luisa, 2001. On biocultural diversity: linking
language, knowledge and the environment. Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press.
Menovshchikov, Georgii Alekseevich, 1977. Na chukotskoi
zemle. Magadan: Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.
Murashko, Ol'ga, 2000. Chukotka: proshloe, nastoiashchee i
budushchee okhotnikov na morskogo zveria. Zhivaia Arktika
2:55-57.
Pika, Alexander, Jens Dahl, and Inge Larsen, 1996. Anxious
North: Indigenous peoples in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
Selected documents, letters, and articles. In IWGIA
Document. Vol. 82. Copenhagen: IWGIA.
Piliasov, A. N, 1998. Ot paternalizma k partnerstvu:
stroitel'stvo novykhy otnoshenii narodov severa i
gosudarstva. Magadan.
Home | 2001 Expedition | 1899 Expedition | Maps | Log | Educators and Students | Film | Century of Change | After Expedition | About This Site