East of Dreams

"After working in Alaska with the Gwich'in people, Nastassja Martin crossed the Bering Strait to begin comparative research in Kamchatka. During the Soviet era, the Even, a nomadic reindeer herding people, were settled on collective farms. After the fall of the regime, many continued to herd reindeer that no longer belonged to them, the herds being in the hands of private companies. Since the opening of the region in 1991, the former kolkhozes of Kamchatka have been transformed into tourist platforms. In 1989, just before the fall of the Soviet Union, an Even family reportedly decided to return to the forest, to recreate an autonomous way of life based on hunting, fishing and gathering. Was it a legend? How did a small collective, abused, dispossessed, and enslaved by the colonists before being forgotten by the great history, seize the systemic crisis to regain its autonomy? How did it manage to reconnect the tenuous threads of the daily dialogue that linked it to animals and elements, without the help of the shamans eliminated by the colonial process? What ways of life did the Even of Icha reinvent, to continue to exist in a world rapidly transformed by the battering rams of extractivism and climate change? In this book, where performative dreams and mythical stories respond to assimilation policies as well as to the disruption of ecosystems, the author brings colonial history and indigenous cosmologies into dialogue by restoring their power to the multiple voices that give the world its vitality"-- Provided by publisher.