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ICASS VI
Session 06.02. World history of the last century reflected in life stories
of autochthonous minorities in the North

Chair: Olga Kazakevich, Lomonosov Moscow State University,
kazakevich.olga@gmail.com
Co-Chair: Svetlana Burkova, Institute of Philology, Russian Academy of
Sciences, Siberian branch, burkova_s@mail.ru

The texts in the languages of autochthonous minorities of the North
linguists and anthropologists record during their expeditions are
interesting not only as linguistic phenomena, but also as documents of the
epoch. In the life stories of the people living in the far tiny villages
surrounded by the taiga and tundra the life of a person or of a family
appears to be represented against the background of the events relevant for
the whole countries. The stories give us a new dimension in understanding
our history. They make us better understand how the decisions of the
politicians in the centre of the countries influence (or not influence) the
life in their far-away corners. It seems it could be fruitful to join
presentations on the topic from different parts of the Arctic and to see
what elements of the country policy mostly affected the life of the
Northern people from their own view-point. Along with the content analysis
a discourse analysis of the texts could be presented, so that the form of
life stories in different languages and the ways of presenting historical
events in them could be compared.

ABSTRACTS
of the Session Presentations

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE VOTIC ETHNOS AS REFLECTED IN THE LIFE STORIES OF
THE LAST VOTIC SPEAKERS

Tatiana Agranat, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciuences
tagranat@yandex.ru

The Votes are among the oldest inhabitants of Ingria, the historical
province in the vicinity of the present St. Petersburg. For the first time
the ethnonym "Votes" appeared in Russian chronicles in the 11th century,
and from the first evidence this ethnos has been always mentioned in the
historical documents in connection with wars. During the history the west
Ingria was almost the permanent arena of the battles in which the Votes had
to participate. Due to wars, famines and epidemics the Votes have never
been numerous, however they succeeded in remaining a viable ethnic group
and surviving their language until the middle of the 20th century. World
War II became the fatal event for the Votic people and their language owing
not only to objective causes - indeed many of the Votes have perished, but
also to subjective ones. Now the Votic language is spoken only by a few
people borne before World War II, and they could not transmit the language
to their children. The majority of life stories I have written down during
my field work tell us about the events of World War II as the Votic
speaking people remember them. They contain information concerning Votic
ethnos disappearance as well as the direct or indirect information
concerning the Votic language and the subjective causes of its death. In my
paper I shall analyze the collected texts from this point of view.


CULTURAL REVOLUTION, COLLECTIVIZATION AND WORLD WAR II THROUGH THE
BIOGRAPHY OF A KHANTY SHAMAN

Natalya Koshkareva, Institute of Philology, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Siberian Branch, koshkar_nb@mail.ru

The presentation is based on field materials, collected in 1989-1991 at
the Surgut District of the Khanty-Mansijskij autonomous region from Ivan
Stepanovich Sopochin (1910-1992), an outstanding Khanty epic-singer, healer
and fortune-teller.
The most important of them are stories about his persecution as a shaman
during the cultural revolution in late 1930th, imprisoning, miraculous
escape of execution and the following nominating "the red shaman" since it
turned out that he never took money for healing people. He was released on
the condition that he would practice shamanism only for his own family
members. But he secretly practiced shamanism in every-day life not only for
his family's weal, but was also the last and the only shaman who addressed
Khanty deities on behalf of the Khanty community in 1980th, in spite of his
fear to be punished again. The struggle against shamanism as a form of
religion has tragically influenced all his life.
The other stories are dedicated to the fate of his three younger
brothers, who were taken into the Soviet Army during the World War II for
being experienced hunters and sharpshooters. They never returned home and
nobody knows what happened to them, for they did not know Russian, and Ivan
Stepanovich wondered how they could understand what they were expected to
do.
The other historical event which has greatly influenced the life of all
native people of the former USSR was collectivization, the consequences of
which are reflected in life stories and more ironically in personal song of
the Surgut Khanty.


CHANGES IN RUSSIA IN 1920-50s THROUGH FOREST NENETS LIFE STORIES

Svetlana I. Burkova, Institute of Philology, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Siberian branch, burkova_s@mail.ru

The paper deals with life stories of Forest Nenets documented during the
expeditions in Yamal-Nenets and Chanty-Mansi Autonomous Areas of Russia.
Some texts reflect personal experience and the others are based on elder
relatives' evidences.
The analysis of Forest Nenets' life stories shows that their content and
discursive features correlate primarily with gender differences. For women
the changes in the life of Northern population caused by social and
political reforms serve only as a background information for description of
everyday problems of a separate family. On the contrary, in the men's
stories the political and social changes constitute the foreground of the
narration. The men's stories highlight the problems of destruction of
traditional nomadic life and deer farming which constitute the essence of
Nenets ethnic life, as well as conflicts with representatives of Soviet
officials.
It is also interesting to analyze the evaluations of the described events,
which were given by informants 50 years later and thus influenced by their
personal experience accumulated. The Soviet policy in the North in 1920-50s
is evaluated as ambiguous. It is reflected in the Forest Nenets' comments
as having both positive and negative consequences. The women estimate the
described events mostly as negative but inevitable ones. In the men's
stories the comments are more differentiated - from direct blame of
officials' actions to the blame of Nenets for their misunderstanding of the
reforms, some of which had positive results.
The paper also discusses some specific discourse features of Forest Nenets'
life stories.


THE HISTORY OF RUSSIA REFLECTED IN LIFE STORIES OF THE KET, SELKUP, AND
EVENKI

Olga Kazakevich, Lomonosov Moscow State University,
kazakevich.olga@gmail.com

The paper presents some results of the ongoing project "The Changing Russia
in life stories of the Ket, Selkup, and Evenki" which is being realized at
the Laboratory for Computational Lexicography of the Research Computer
Centre, Moscow State University, with financial support from Russian
Foundation for the Humanities, grant 07-04-00332a.

The objective of the project is the processing, grammatical indexing,
discourse and content analyzing, and preparing for publication (both as a
book and as an Internet resource) of Ket, Selkup, and Evenki life stories
recorded during the linguistic expeditions to the Upper- and Middle Taz and
the Middle Yenisei basins led in 1996-2007. By now we dispose of three text
corpora (Ket, Selkup and Evenki), containing over 100 life stories. In the
paper the content of the texts will be in the focus. Our informants were
people of different age (from 25 to 89) and sex. They told us about their
lives sometimes mentioning family stories related to them by their parents
or grandparents. The historical events form the background of personal life
stories, and we can see these events from the view-point of the story-
tellers, thus getting a new dimension in understanding the history of our
country. The main periods reflected in the texts of our corpora are: 1) the
life before the collectivization (only in the stories of very elderly
people), 2) the collectivization of the 1930s, 3) World War II, 4) the life
after the World War II, 5) perestroika (reorientation) and the first steps
of neo-capitalism in Russia, 6) the present-day life. The leitmotiv of the
majority of life stories, especially told by elderly people, can be put as
"So we lived, so we suffered". The evaluation of the present-day life by
our informants varies from absolutely positive to definitely negative.


Far (to the North) from political centres: The Nganasans and the Soviet
history

Maria Brykina, Lomonosov Moscow State University mashukm@mail.ru
Valentin Gusev Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
vgoussev@yandex.ru

It comes as no surprise that history at the periphery proceeds in very
special ways compared to political and economic centres, and looks quite
different from the point of view of the local inhabitants. The consequences
of the events of global importance often reach the outlying districts with
considerable delay, and political decisions taken in capitals are sometimes
confronted with local reality.


From such a perspective we will consider the history of the Nganasans
during the Soviet period as it can be seen from the stories told by the
Nganasans themselves. The Nganasans (the northernmost people of Eurasia)
live in the remote inner regions of Taimyr peninsula, on the permafrost
territory difficult of access, far away from both Russian and foreign
political centers (unlike, for example, Russian Far East, which is located
much further from Moscow but still plays a key role in contacts with China
and Japan, giving access to the Pacific Ocean).


Some of the historical events of major importance, such as Civil War in
Russia, World War II, and mass repressions in the Soviet Union, had almost
no influence upon the life of the Nganasans. Most of the political
decisions had to be adapted, if at all applicable, to the local
peculiarities (shamans, for example, were pursued by analogy with Orthodox
priests). At the same time some events and processes, not widely known
outside Taimyr, have drastically changed the life of the Nganasans. The
most important event to be mentioned is the change from nomadism to
sedentary life initiated by the government (which, along with other
factors, actually entailed the loss of traditional Nganasan culture). The
nomadic way of life (at least in Avam Tundra) was completely abandoned
after all of the domestic reindeers, gathered into huge kolkhoz herds, had
died during an epizooty.

In our presentation we will look in more detail at these and some other
events which the Nganasans mention while talking about their own history.


Historical events of the last century in russia in life stories of the
settled Koryaks

Alla A. Maltseva, Institute of Philology, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Siberian Branch, alla.maltseva@mail.ru

The Koryaks is the ethnos submitted by local groups living in the north of
the peninsula Kamchatka and an adjoining part of the continent. The Koryaks-
normads represent the cultural and the language unity. The Settled Koryaks
of both Kamchatka coasts, on the contrary, live as several local groups,
each with its own dialect and subdialects.
There are four main socio-political processes which are reflected in life
stories of the settled Koryaks:
1) collectivization in the 1930th when the Koryaks were bereft of all their
property including reindeer herds;
2) amalgamation of collective farms into bigger units in the 1950-1960th
when the Koryaks from small villages were compulsory moved to big
settlements, even from one coast to the other;
3) "religious wars" between traditional idolatry and Christianity: in the
1940th it was only orthodoxy; today in Kamchatka there are a lot of
different Christian sects, and the situation got even more complicated;
4) obligatory secondary education in Russian: until the 1990th Koryak
children have been separated from the families, lived in boarding schools,
and had no opportunity to use their mother tongue.


UPPER KUSKOKWIM ATHABASKANS: PERSONAL, ETHNIC, AND NATIONAL HISTORY

Andrej A. Kibrik, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences,
kibrik@comtv.ru

Upper Kuskokwim (UK) is a small group of Athabaskans (no more than 200) of
central Alaska, living primarily in one village of Nikolai. The language is
highly endangered, the number of speakers does not exceed 30. UK documented
history begins in mid-19th century when the people were baptized into the
Orthodox faith by Russians. Nowadays the UK people remain devout Russian
Orthodox. The heritage of Russian America is still alive in the language in
the form of several dozen loan words. Example: the word for any white
person is jisik, derived from Russian kazak 'cossack' via a complex
sequence of phonetic changes. The ethnic group being so small, the history
of the people amounts to a collection of life stories. The stories
collected from most proficient language speakers shed light on the key
events of UK history during the 20th century. Before WW2, most UK lived in
small families, scattered in the woods and sometimes not meeting any other
people for years. During and after WW2 many men got involved in industrial
production and became familiar with technologies, often leading to
injuries. In 1948 the school, opened in Nikolai, ended the nomadic
lifestyle. It also had a devastating effect upon the UK language: those who
went through the school experience later refused to speak the native
language to their own children. The older generation of the UK people has
lived through a remarkable social transformation. One of the consultants,
as a child, was hunting birds with bow and arrows when the family was short
of nutrition, while now he owns a hunter-guiding business, probably worth
some million dollars.


INUIT VOICES IN THE MAKING OF NUNAVUT

Thierry Rodon, UniversitÈ Laval and Carleton University
thierry_rodon@carleton.ca
Louis McComber, Nunavut Arctic College, l.mccomber@sympatico.ca

Inuit Voices in the Making of Nunavut, is a collaborative research aimed at
documenting and publishing the life stories of five Inuit leaders (Abe
Okpik, John Amagoalik, Paul Quassa, James Arvaluk and Peter Ittinuar),
involved to various degrees in the negotiations leading to the creation of
the new territory of Nunavut in 1999.

After a brief introduction to the project and a discussion of the
importance of documenting Nunavut history from an Inuit perspective, a
presentation on the different methodologies used within the project will be
made. Cross-cultural issues in collaborative research and training will
also be discussed.

This research stems from an oral history project funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through its
"Aboriginal Research" pilot program and involving researchers and Inuit
students from the Nunavut Arctic College and Nunavut Sivuniksavut and a
team of researchers from Laval University in QuÈbec.

Note: pending to funding we intend to bring some students from the Nunavut
Artic College who have participated in the project and one of the Inuit
leaders who has been interviewed.


SOCIAL CHANGE IN SàPMI FROM A NATIVE PERSPECTIVE

CoppÈlie Cocq, UmeÅ University, coppelie.cocq@samiska.umu.se

In my presentation, I propose to investigate how SÀmi storytellers choose
to relate to their context and traditions through narrative strategies.
With the example of Johan Turi (1854-1936), storyteller and the first SÀmi
writer, we will approach the materialization of socio-political topics in
narratives. Turi gives us his version - sometimes in disguise thanks to
skillful narrative strategies - of the social changes his community was
concerned with (Turi, 1910). At the turn of the 20th century, the
minorities of Scandinavia faced many challenges, triggered by nationalism,
colonization and discriminating minority politics (Elenius, 2006; Lundmark,
1998). A critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992) from a folkloristic
perspective with focus on the narrator highlights the many ways in which a
so called "tradition bearer" emerges as an empowered social agent through
storytelling.
Elenius, Lars. 2006. Nationalstat och minoritetspolitik. Samer och
finsksprÅkiga minoriteter i ett jÄmfÆrande nordiskt perspektiv.:
Studentlitteratur.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Lundmark, Lennart. 1998. SÅ lÄnge vi har marker. Samerna och staten under
sexhundra År. Stockholm: RabÈnPrisma.
Turi, Johan. 1910. Muittalus Samid Birra. Stockholm: AB Nordiska Bokhandel.