there were some exceptions, however (see Anderson and Orekhova 2002). This region served as a point of exile for priests in disfavor with the church hierarchy.18
While the church did not avidly promote conversion, it gained some converts through its role as an interlocutor between the Russian government and the indigenous population. Thus by the mid-eighteenth century, tribute requirements for indigenous Siberians were reduced if they converted to Russian Orthodoxy. For instance, in November 1855 a priest sent a request to Irkutsk that tribute not be demanded from a certain “Tungus” for a period of three years because he had converted. Even with this inducement, however, few members of the indigenous population converted.19
In 1868 the Russian Orthodox Synod announced the possibility for clergy to receive a medal of “Saint Ann, of the third order” for good works dealing with education in general. In August of that year the Turukhansk church received word from the Enisei diocese that they should open a seminary and a school for indigenous students.20 In the same period, missionaries were sent out from Turukhansk to outlying regions, including to what are today towns in the Evenk District. In 1892 one of these missions founded Saint Basil’s church in Essei, the most northern village in the Evenk District, which is located on the border with the present-day Sakha Republic (see Anderson and Orekhova 2002). Although in 1913 the priest counted 1,562 Evenki and 1,328 Iakuty (Sakha) who lived in the region, few were drawn to attend church or send their children to school there. Although the mission was nearly abandoned by the time the Soviets arrived in the early 1920s, its former presence was recalled by several Evenki and Sakha living in Tura in the early 1990s.21 One woman recalled that in her childhood her grandparents kept a Rus-sian Orthodox icon beside the shamanic bundles and talismans safeguarded in their chum in the taiga.
Evenki and Trade in the Early Twentieth Century
The Russian Orthodox Church briefly located in Essei was strategically established along one of the major routes traversed by Sakha and Evenki in the course of their yearly trade. In the Soviet period, the 1926 Household Census of the Arctic North (Pokhoziaistvennaia perepis’ pripoliarnogo Severa) also took note of the key role that trade played in the life of indigenous Siberians in the region. In particular the census carefully documented the degree to which various indigenous Siberians, including the Evenki, were acquainted with Russian goods. In the early twentieth century, Evenki in this region attended an annual fair where they encountered Russians and traded sable pelts and fish for textiles and beads, metal, guns, and foodstuffs, including tea, sugar, salt, flour, and vodka.22
In addition to Russian Orthodox and Russian trader influences, over time the Evenki have had a wide range of cultural contacts. For instance, in the late 1990s collections at the Evenk District Regional History Museum (hereafter Evenk District Museum) reflected the longstanding Evenk trade links with China. Artifacts on exhibit included Evenk garments with buttons and ornamentation made from Chinese coins dating from the eighteenth century. Trade ties with the neighboring Sakha were also evident in the museum’s collection of ornate silverwork and iron acquired by Evenki to create buttons, tools, sled details, and icons. The Evenki have a long-standing interaction with the Sakha, historically a sizable seminomadic group living to the north and northeast of Lake Baikal. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Sakha already lived as pastoralists with semipermanent residences. They had considerable knowledge of metal forging, and unlike the Evenki, they could make metal out of iron ore (Forsyth 1992: 56). Since this metal was particularly prized by the Evenki, those living in regions bordering the present-day Sakha Republic would travel ten to forty days to trade with the Sakha. As one elderly Evenk woman described to me, intermarriage between Sakha and Evenki in these same neighboring regions was also common. In her mother’s youth, in the 1940s, people would travel days to arrange marriages between Evenki and Sakha.
For hundreds of years the Evenki have interacted with different groups, including with representatives of established nation-states. Only with the onset of the Soviet era in the North, however, did Evenki begin to experience a radical transformation of their way of life.
“Modernization,” Sedentarization, and Sovietization
Evenk lives within Russia today have significantly changed from how they were lived even fifty years ago. Forced sedentarization began in the 1930s when Soviet cadres fundamentally reorganized production among indigenous Siberian groups. As among other indigenous Siberian groups like the Nivkhi (Grant 1995a: 91), Soviet cadres introduced what were called “simplest hunting units” arteli for short, and convinced Evenki to combine their reindeer herds into larger collective groups for “production.” This new organization of herding was meant to create joint use of herding equipment and techniques, but it was also meant to diminish the ties of clan-based social organization. One source claims that by 1937 through the “voluntary socialization” of reindeer herding there were thirty-two of these arteli in the Evenk District and eighty-six percent of the entire Evenk population was involved (Vasilevich and Smoliak 1964: 652). My interview material suggests that this wide scale collectivization was not particularly voluntary and probably did not encompass as much of the reindeer as officially recorded. One woman said that when Soviet officials targeted her father’s herd of 600 reindeer in the early 1930s he first attempted to hide them in another area of the taiga before he finally gave in and relinquished them during the state’s wholesale collectivization of reindeer a few years later (see Chapter 3). David Anderson points out that, with their specialized knowledge of the environment of the region and its rugged valleys, herders were able to hide portions of their herds while offering up some for the official count (2000: 47).
Soviet agencies charged with the task of collectivization intensified their efforts in the late 1930s in converting former arteli into kolkhozy (kollektivnye khoziaistva), or collective herding enterprises, in which many of the original Evenk herders remained primarily in charge of their former herds with minimal direction from the state. With the changes in organization, reindeer herding units came to be called “brigades.” As discussed further in Chapter 3, by the late 1930s and in a reorganization in the late 1950s to the 1960s, indigenous Siberian men were consolidated in state cooperatives where they continued to herd reindeer, hunt, or fish and turn over the end products to the state. This pattern officially continued until 1992 with the breakup of the Soviet system of state-organized production. In the post-Soviet era, Evenk clans vied for decollectivized land and control over herding and hunting territories, and by 1998 most of these had been predominantly claimed. As David Anderson notes (2000: 160–70), however, in some areas the decollectivization or privatization of state cooperatives has not taken hold because of local circumstances where territory bounded by the earlier Soviet state designations has continued to be politically beneficial for many.
In some cases in the Evenk District, clans have recently established claims to territory that formerly included Soviet villages. In conjunction with collectivization of herding and the restructuring of social relations, in the early 1930s these villages began to be targeted as “lacking prospects” or “inefficient” (neperspektivnye); they were gradually shut off from the broader network of Soviet bureaucracy by the 1950s. By the end of World War II, one half of the former settlements established in the Evenk District in the early twentieth century no longer existed. In the Illimpei region alone the small enclaves of Vivi, Amovsk, Agata, and Kochumdeisk were officially closed and lost their doctor’s assistants, veterinarians, and trading posts, all frequented by Evenki. In the 1990s, however, many families continued to return seasonally to these areas to fish and hunt.
In restructuring and consolidating the settlements, the Soviets not only streamlined production (and the supply of “producers” with foodstuffs) but also forced indigenous peoples into closer interaction with the central bureaucracies. This effort to consolidate villages and towns and resettle populations was part of a broader trend repeated throughout Russia in the 1960s as sovkhozy (sovetskie khoziaistva), or state agricultural cooperatives, replaced
