HUM 221: Indigenous people in Russia

Some of the history we are studying this semester played out in other nations worldwide as Europeans fanned out over the globe after the 1400s, established colonies and over the centuries dominated the indigenous people -- that is, the people who lived there before. Read this report by British Broadcasting Corp. foreign correspondent Chloe Arnold on what's happening to indigenous languages in Siberia. She sums it up like this:

The vast expanse of the Russian Federation, from the Kola Peninsula in the north west to the Sea of Chukotka in the north east, is home to 41 indigenous peoples.

They have evocative names like the Saami, the Nganasan, the Itelmen, the Ulchi and the Tuvinian Todzhins. The area they have traditionally inhabited makes up more than half of the entire territory of Russia.

But today their numbers are dwindling, and their languages are dying out. Some have never even been written down.

One of the problems is a Russian-only policy in the schools. Arnold continues:

In most of the tribes ... it is now only the older generation that still speaks the language. Over the last few decades, many of Russia's indigenous people have given up their traditional lifestyles and moved to towns and cities instead.

But Rodion Sulyandzige, the director of the support group [mentioned in the BBC report], says that the rigorous education programme of the Soviet period is also to blame for the demise of so many languages.

"At the beginning of the school year, the authorities would round up all the children of the native tribes and pack them off to boarding schools," he told me.

"They had no contact with their parents or their families, and so they quickly lost their mother tongues and picked up Russian instead."

Keep this in the back of your mind as we learn about boarding schools for American Indians and read what American Indian writers have to say about the experience.

The "Beeb" (as the BBC is also known) had a report on Saami people on Kola Peninsula back in December. (Their name is also spelled "Sami," as it is in the December story.) Read it, too, and compare it to Native American peoples. What is the same? What's different?