7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderful overview of Siberian history and native groups, May 17, 2003
This review is from: The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia (Hardcover)
This is a well written, sometimes humorous, book on the indigenous peoples of Siberia, groups of people that I, like many, have never heard of. Peoples possessing their own rich cultures, who have suffered under the Tsars, under Stalin, and even today face hardships.
It's difficult to comprehend just how vast Siberia is, the Russian-ruled territory east of the Ural Mountains and bounded by the Arctic and Pacific Oceans, five million square miles of northern Asia, larger than the US. However, out of this vast territory the native groups are a minority, a mere 1.6 million out of a Siberian population of 32 million.
Though the origins of the Russians push into Siberia are disputed, dating back to the days of the 16th century and Tsar Ivan IV (the Formidable to the Russians, the Terrible to English speakers), from the beginning she chronicles a sometimes depressing history of abuse of native peoples, pushed aside by Russian settlers, maltreated by Russian and later Soviet administrators, their traditional ways of life and religion attacked, decimated by disease, forced to produce vast amounts of sable and other furs or other onerous tasks. Petersburg and later Moscow were less interested in native peoples than the use of Siberia as a land of exile, a place where criminals, prisoners of war, and political exiles were sent to, the land that "was the death of hope, the unhappiest of endings." Even those who sought to protect the native peoples often had little success thanks to corrupt and often very isolated officials; in some cases Reid writes the round trip time for communications during the days of the Tsars was two years!
The best part of the book though is the many fascinating native groups of Siberia. We meet the Khant of the river Ob region in western Siberia. Called sometimes by the Russians the Ostyaks (a term they generally consider derogatory), they are related to the Finns and Estonians, and lived lives of fishing and hunting, their most complicated artifacts their massive bows and highly specialized arrows. Their language, sadly now largely gone, was wonderfully precise, with no general word for instance for fish or bird, but only words for specific species, and amazingly their vocabulary was over 80 percent verbs, with different words for sitting on the ground, sitting on a log, and sitting on a stump. Their religion has virtually vanished too, one that involved feasts honoring bears that they hunted.
Along the Russian-Mongolian borderland she introduces us to the Buryat, a Mongol people who roamed as nomads a Sweden-sized mix of forest and steppe. Possessing written language, firearms, tribute-paying vassals, and vast livestock herds, they were among the most powerful nationalities encountered by the Russians in Siberia, subdued only after a series of wars that lasted some 30 years. Their rich Buddhist legacy was nearly annihilated under the Soviets much like the Chinese have done in Tibet, with temples destroyed or converted to other uses, lamas hunted down, and sacred relics burned.
Then there are the Tuvan, famed for their throat-singers. Their region sometimes called "Russia's Tibet" not only for the ethnic problems it poses to the capital but also for its rich Buddhist legacy (which as with the Buryat was largely destroyed), this region on the Mongolian border was nominally independent between the world wars; regrettably Stalin in 1948 formally announced the annexation of this country, five times the size of Belgium. Today the only region in Siberia where the indigenous people are the majority, it faces an uncertain future.
Northeastern Siberia is home to the Sakha. Found along the Lena River region, they were called by the Russians the Yakut, or "horse people." Despite similarities in physical appearance to the Japanese and living in pine forests on permafrost, they speak a Turkic language and herd horses rather than reindeer. Thought to perhaps have been displaced by the vast movements of Genghiz Khan, they were noted for their use of iron, shamans, and their olonholar, epics poems tens of thousands of verses long performed entirely from memory, as they were illiterate. Though Sakha is rich with diamonds, producing more than $1.5 billion a year, is increasingly ethnic Sakha as Russians emigrate, and is eleven times the size of Britain, it is still unlikely to chart its own course as independence would produce huge problems.
The far eastern island of Sakhalin - thought a peninsula well into the 19th century was home to the Ainu, now only found in Japan, and the Uilta or "reindeer-men," the latter reduced to less than 200 people. More common on Sakhalin are the Nivkh (or to Russians, Gilyaks), noted for fishing, using god, and holding bear feasts. They were also noted for a complicated language (one with over 26 different methods of counting) and a highly complex kinship, where siblings of the opposite sex could not look at each other or even talk to one another except through a third person. Today some 2500 strong, the Nivkh have seen penal colonies and the Japanese come and go, and today try to cope with fish quotas and pollution from petroleum production.
The final ethnic group she looks at the Chukchi, at the very limits of northeastern Siberia, closely related to the Eskimos. They were a stone age people up into 18th century when the Russians first encountered them, inland tribes herding deer, the coastal tribes hunting whales and walrus. Though apparently "primitive" the Chukchi managed to avoid direct Russian rule until well into the 20th century; after a series of failed attempts to subdue them in the 18th century forced Petersburg to make peace, the only northern natives able to win a formal truce.
Reid admits she doesn't cover all of the "Small-Numbered Peoples" in her wonderful book, one that attempts to cover an area of over thirty nationalities, but it is a book I highly recommend.
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