Presentation for the session “Mapping Indigenous Peace-building Today : Research and Policy.” April 11, 2024 Institute of Peace First Global Summit on Indigenous Peacebuilding
“Action Anthropology, Indigenous Rights and Changing Agendas in Siberia”
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Georgetown University [email protected]
Introduction
In the 1990s, Siberian leaders and First Nations activists learned from each other through MacArthur Foundation cultural exchanges in Russia, the US, and Canada that I helped organize. It was an early effort at international peace strategizing, focused on defending and protecting Indigenous rights to land and resources. This Institute of Peace Summit continues that legacy in a bigger way in these perilous times. The mantra of ‘nothing about us without us’, spreading globally among Indigenous communities in the 20th century, has led to reassessments of how educated Indigenous leaders interact with those who come to study their societies. Basic respect and rapport centred on what issues local communities themselves consider urgent are keys to new approaches to research and policy, especially concerning war, interethnic tensions and peace building. Burning concerns in Siberia, in the context of Russia’s increasingly dangerous and destabilized society, include: “Who owns Native culture?”, “Can protests help peace efforts?” , and “How do intertwined and economically dependent Indigenous communities become post-colonial?”
The most rewarding of my fieldwork in the republics of Sakha, Buryatia and Tyva has been collaborative, including co-authorship and co-theorizing, especially with one of the founders of ethnosociology in Sakha Republic — Uliana Vinokurova. Uliana in the post-Soviet period was a member of the Sakha parliament, called Il Tumen, “Meeting for Agreement”, itself a notable marker of Indigenous consensus values. She’s a well-known Sakha defender of the republic’s over seven Indigenous communities and was a speech writer for the first post-Soviet Sakha president of the republic. As one of the authors of the republic’s sovereignty- oriented 1992 Constitution, she participated in one of the early post-Soviet efforts at bringing democracy to her republic, in the process blowing all sorts of stereotypes about Indigenous peoples. The professionally diverse members of the committee spent a year reading every constitution they could to choose how they wanted to construct their own state-within-a-state. For Uliana, peacebuilding with Moscow was based on ideals of nested sovereignty, non-chauvinist nationalism for everyone, and negotiated, real federalism. One of her important lessons has been: “Never declare separatism or independence for anyone until they do so themselves.” However, in the context of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, and the disproportionate mobilization of non-Russian Siberians to fight and become cannon fodder, some Indigenous Siberians are indeed becoming independence minded, are reconfiguring definitions of civil war, and are fleeing Russia into increasingly politicized Siberian diasporas.
Background for post-Soviet Indigenous Research and Policy Empowerment
In Russia in the 1990s, the activist group RAIPON [Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North] was able to help shape pressing legal and research agendas, but after 2011 it was disempowered.[1] This sad history is appropriately told by one of the key activists, Pavel Sulyandziga, then-Vice-President of RAIPON, who is present at our Summit. A collaborative community monitoring Indigenous rights and urbanization trends has been exemplified by Pavel Sulyandziga, Mikhail Todyshev, and Ol’ga Murashko (2002), Rodion Sulyandziga, Dmitri Berezhkov, and the work of Russian legal anthropologist Natal’ia Novikova with Nenets scholar Yelizaveta Yaptik (2018). Sensitivity to changes in Russian laws and to issues of cultural appropriation was also reflected in anthropology of Siberia projects funded internationally during and after Soviet Union disintegration. Legal, economic, and ‘action’ anthropology, including issues of ecology, sovereignty, identity, and de-escalation of interethnic conflict characterized a range of collaborative projects sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation.[2]
Among the most sensitive issues are contested sacred lands, especially sacred burial grounds. In addition to dangers of non-consensual industrialization, climate change, forest fires, and earthquakes, threats from archeologists loom large in many Indigenous worldviews. All have converged in the Altai, where the renowned Scythian (Pazyryk) mummy of a resplendent female was discovered in 1993 on the Ukok Plateau. Indigenous protests have galvanized local communities against the unearthing of the ‘Altai princess’, her scientific examination in multiple countries, and her museum incarceration in Gorno-Altaisk, in a glass-enclosed pseudo-tomb, most outrageously paid for by the state-affiliated energy company GAZPROM.[3]
Collaborative Work with Uliana Vinokurova
Concerns about the shifting dynamics of self-determination, identity and interethnic peace have dominated my work with Uliana. One year, while in Alaska on one of the MacArthur Foundations exchanges, I asked her what she thought my fieldwork focus for the next summer should be. She quipped “why don’t you find out why these pesky Evangelical missionaries from the US think there’s a spiritual vacuum in our republic?”
Uliana was born into a large, loving, hospitable Sakha family in the northern region of Sredniaia Kolyma, in a village of Sakha, Yukaghir, and Ėveny. Her education in psychology and sociology served as springboards for a worldview she calls ‘ecosophy’ and advocacy for what she terms Indigenous methodology.[4] When she twice won as deputy to the Il Tumen(1992-2003), some in the republic perceived her as Ėvenki, or as mixed ethnic, in part due to her vigorous defense of legislation promoting the economic well-being of ‘small-numbered’ peoples in the Sakha Republic. When occasionally she was called a ‘Yakut (Sakha) nationalist’ in Moscow, Uliana countered any false impression of chauvinism with charm and humour, saying ‘all Russians are welcome in our republic, as long as they treat her as a mother to be cherished and not a mother-in-law’.[5]
In the chaotic emergence of debates about nationalism and transparency over ethnic tensions, the MacArthur Foundation project ‘Ethnic Conflict in the post-Soviet World’ was created and led on the Russian side by Leokadiia M. Drobizheva.[6] At my request, Uliana and I were matched for a 1993 Prague conference and 1996 book. We saw the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) as a major ‘swing’ territory (one-sixth of Russia), of enormous diamond and other mineral wealth with sustainable development potential, that could become unstable or could emerge from Soviet-style resource-extraction colonialism into a multi-ethnic federal republic (Balzer & Vinokurova 1996).
We argued that to stabilize the society, past interethnic tensions needed to be exposed and analysed rather than propagandized out of existence with ‘brotherhood of the peoples’-type slogans. Given Chechnya’s declarations of secession, and Tatarstan’s unrest, some outside analysts were overgeneralizing about domino-like secession movements in Russia. Uliana explained that the Sakha Republic could ill-afford to secede and risk the well-being of ‘already ailing Northern Natives’, the Ėveny, Ėvenki, and Yukaghir. She declared Russian-led regions deserved as much self-rule as ethnic-based republics, and that Russia could be viable with multi-leveled patriotism in a matrioshka federal state structure. Fascinated by Yael Tamir’s (1993) concept of ‘liberal nationalism’, she also insisted that ‘for many, the appetite for greater sovereignty has grown in the eating’, and that the republic’s peoples had the right to their own constitution, passed before Russia’s was ratified.[7]
Our activist anthropological approach, which included trends in Sakha cultural revival politics, was meant to balance the rights to cultural assertion and self-rule, a degree of sovereignty, with understanding of economic and strategic realities inherent in negotiated federalism. We presaged the concerns of a budding ecology movement by warning that a ‘psychology of immediate gratification has led to terrible ecological destruction in mining and lumbering areas and to ethnic tension’, and we concluded that ‘the best antidote against virulent forms of nationalism is a well-managed federalism’ (Balzer & Vinokurova 1996: 164, 173).
Reflecting many years later on the anniversary of the 1992 Sakha Constitution ratification, a jubilant moment in Sakha history when celebrants poured onto Yakutsk streets, Uliana explained that despite the unfulfilled hopes for greater sovereignty after 2000, the 1990s represented an important period when Sakha were able to better understand their history of self-awareness as a people with legacies of literacy and leadership dating to the early 20th century. ‘The value of sovereignty itself became a spiritual basis for the self-identity of the Sakha people’ (email, 12 December 2021).
Anti-war Activism and Peace-building
Since February, 2022, when Russia’s army invaded Ukraine in a full-scale illegal attempt to absorb a neighboring country, conditions for Indigenous Siberians have worsened considerably. They were already among the poorest, and thus most likely to be tempted by higher salaries offered by the army. When the war began, non-Russians were mobilized in high numbers, trained inadequately, forced to provide their own equipment and clothing, and sent to the front lines. Consequent casualty rates have resulted in highly disproportionate numbers of Siberians being killed in Eastern Ukraine.[8] This is shown by a well-researched BBC/Mediazona map indicating first year casualties [9] that reveals Tyvans, Buryats and Sakha, to be the groups with the highest mortality rates. In contrast, Moscow and St Petersburg have less than 0.7 deaths per 100,000. The map uses official statistics; actual casualty numbers of minorities are even higher. The pace of non-Russian, especially Buryat, deaths has accelerated since then.[10]
Siberians such as Buryats and Tyvans often combine Buddhist values with beliefs inherited from pre-Buddhist and pre-Christian spiritual values and upbringing.[11] These Buddhist and shamanist traditions mean that Siberians have been brought up with strong non-violent or “ethics of balance” beliefs concerning killing of humans or hunting of non-human persons. It is extremely difficult for many Siberians to condone Russia’s violent aggression and continued war in Ukraine since it runs against their non-violent understanding of best-practice human relationships and human interactions within the natural world. The Ukraine war is painfully against the Indigenous values that many consider their true heritage, and I therefore do not trust public opinion data from the republics that indicate a majority are pro-Putin and pro-war. Protests in the form of public prayers have occurred in Buryatia and Altai.
For some Sakha, especially a group of women activists, pacifist values were expressed in a 2022 protest demonstration in the main square of their capital, Yakutsk, expressed quite dramatically in the form of a chant-dance called okhuokhai. This powerful expression of creative politics was traditionally used to chant improvisational poetry in honor of the summer solstice, often in the contexts of major ceremonial meetings of numerous Sakha clans, including for meetings of negotiation and agreement concerning inter-tribal relations. It resulted not only in a protest that was viewed on non-official social media all over the world, but also in a serious crackdown and arrest of nearly all the protesters.[12]
Conclusions
Despite the high costs, I believe the courageous Siberian protests that have resonated especially with the non-Russian communities and republics in all of Russia, have significance as models exemplifying hopes for a better, less racist and more democratic society. Whether ultimately, Indigenous communities choose secession, despites threats of crack-downs and civil war, will depend on them and the urgent need for their traditions of calm negotiation and consensus building to be re-activated. This requires brave leadership, especially including women. In the last two years, a fascinating set of creative protests using traditional cultural idioms — Buddhist prayer, okhuohai, camel sacrifice – has meant that Indigenous leaders sometimes signal one message to insiders (the need to stop the Ukraine war and bring sons home) and another to outsiders in Moscow (we are patriotic and support our fighting sons).
Research and policy decisions must be driven by Indigenous leadership. For non-Native “ally” researchers, personal values, compatible worldviews, rapport, and similar research goals are interactive, growing during collaboration. Environmental activism based on principles of ecological interconnectedness (ecosophy) has become particularly perilous, as have anti-war stances. Open-minded, equality- based partnership between Western and Indigenous scholars could allow deeper thinking about interactive processes of peacebuilding policies.
[1] RAIPON was founded in the late Soviet period but suspended and then coopted in 2011 (cf. Balzer 2016).
[2] The NSF projects were guided first by Noel Broadbent, and then anthropologist of Chukotka Anna Kerttula. An example is Vera Solovyeva (2021), present here. Issues of land, development, and rights also featured in the early 21st century programme of the Scott Polar Research Institute (University of Cambridge) and the Northeast University of Sakha Republic, led by Piers Vitebsky and Florian Stammler. This programme has resulted in numerous excellent coauthored publications. An example is Habeck and Belolyubskaya (2016). See https://www.s-vfu.ru/en/projects&activities/joint_research/ (accessed 14 September 2022).
[3] See especially Gertjan Plets, Nikita Konstantinov, Vasilii Soenov, and Erick Robinson (2013), a collaborative European-Altaian project; and Tadina (2020). For perspective on “Indigenous methodology”, see Vinokurova 2018b, c).
[4] Uliana A. Vinokurova is Director of the Circumpolar Civilization Research Center at the Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts in Yakutsk. Among her many publications, see Vinokurova (1992; 1994; 2011; 2018a, b, c); Vinokurova, Shilin & Lapina (1995). She published in Marjorie’s journal, influencing themes and introductions, in 1995, 2008, and 2014. For more on our interactions, see Balzer (2011, 2021).
[5] Among the accusers was Director of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology (later of Ethnology), Valery Tishkov, leader of the Academy of Sciences and UNESCO project ‘Ethnicity, Conflict, and Agreement’ that produced significant volumes on many of the republics in the 1990s and was successor to the 1980s’ Social Science Research Council project on ‘Ethnic Processes’ founded by Yuliian Bromlei.
[6] The Prague conference, held in a palace donated by Václav Havel, was the first of several where the coauthors were able to participate as collaborators. The late Leokadiia Drobizheva, then in the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, was known for saying that ethnic polarization begins at the centre, with Moscow policies, rather than in the republics. A mentor of Uliana’s, she trained many prominent sociologists of the republics, especially after she became Director of the Institute of Sociology. U.S. leaders of the MacArthur and IREX-funded project included Women in International Security (WIIS) founder Catherine Kelleher, who later helped Uliana fulfil a dream of taking Native Siberian women leaders on a tour of the United States and Canada to meet Native American women leaders. It resulted in Uliana’s monograph in the Sakha language about First Nation education and self-rule (Vinokurova and Tret’iakova 1999).
[7] Sadly, 1992 Sakha Constitution was later revised to correlate with the 1993 Russian Federation Constitution.
[8] See https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/23/russia-partial-military-mobilization-ethnic-minorities/, last visited March 18, 2024.
[9] Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/11cf11i/new_map_of_dead_soldiers_per_capita_in_russias/, last visited March 18, 2024.
[10] baikal-journal.ru/2023/06/20/u-muzhchiny-iz-buryatii-veroyatnost-umeret-na-vojne-primerno-v-75-raz-vyshe-chem-u-moskvicha/), in part using BBC data from demographic-research.org/volumes/vol48/31/48-31.pdf , last visited March 19, 2024.
[11] See https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo16552160.html, last visited on March 18,2024.
[12] See Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer https://russiapost.info/regions/polarization, last visited April 9, 2024; https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2022/09/25/women-protest-against-mobilisation-in-yakutia-police-break-up-protest-authorities-claim-it-was-held-in-support-of-mobilised-men-news including a video clip of arrests.