The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid
Once during my “strategic consultant specializing in Asian-Russian trade and investment” days, I spoke to a Hong Kong investment bank (since gone spectacularly bust) about why their Asian funds where not buying shares off the Vladivostok Stock Exchange.
“Because Russia is Europe,” I was told. “We buy Asian shares.”
I had a similar discussion, in reverse, with the Russian head of the Vladivostok Stock Exchange. Asia, it seemed, ended at the Amur and Ussuriy Rivers.
12% of the world’s landmass
Anna Reid’s book The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, recently released in paperback, shows how nonsensical this point of view is, not just from the point of view of geography (Siberia’s 5 million square miles makes it considerably larger than China) as well as culturally: Siberia’s indigenous peoples are about as Asian as they come.
This is a marvelous book, a combination of history, anthropology and travel book, erudite and witty, weaving four centuries of history with present reality, into a readable and educational narrative.
But it’s a sorry story: Siberia’s indigenous peoples have suffered from political and financial oppression, discrimination, disease, cultural and territorial disappropriation since Russians crossed the Urals more than 400 years ago. Cultures, languages and peoples were wiped out; those that remained ended up, in the main, impoverished, ravaged by disease, alienation and alcoholism.
Reid shows how wide and varied Asia’s cultural and linguistic traditions are. The Khant, based around the River Ob, are related to the Finns and Estonians (and hence the Hungarians). The Buryat speak Mongolian while the next-door Tuvans speak a Turkic language. Both follow Tibetan Buddhism. The Sakha speak a Turkic language, have proverbs about leopards and camels and apparently hail from Central Asia. The languages of the Ainu, Chukchi, Nivkh and other peoples seem to be more or less unique.
Reid is British and perhaps had to be; an American writer would almost be required to draw the all too obvious parallels with the treatment of the native Americans. Indeed, it is hard for this American to read the book without cringing. Unlike the United States, however, some peoples—the Buryat and the Sakha, for example—seem to have been able to resurrect at least their language and some political power to a greater or less extent. In some parts of Siberia, native peoples are least now being oppressed and manipulated by their own kind for a change.
Anecdotes and comic relief
How does one convey a sense of sense of this vast expanse of space and cultures? Reid does this through carefully selected historical and modern anecdotes. Here’s one: no one (except the inhabitants and some Russians who treated the information as a military secret) knew that Sakhalin was an island until 1855, when a Russian frigate escaped from its British pursuers out of Hong Kong in the Asian theater of the Crimean War (didn’t know there was one, did you?).
Reid has a keen eye for both modern and historical incongruities and absurdities. “On the road out of Kyakhta,” a town on the Mongolian border, “a shabby metallic Lenin, canted forward as into an ocean gale, extends a hand towards the fatigue-brown swell of Mongolia.” But it was not always like this:
Once, Kyakhta was Russia‘s window on China. Founded under the terms of a Russo-Chinese Trade treaty in 1728, it was one only two points on their long border at which trade was legal, making it, for about a century, one of the richest towns in the empire.
Kyahkta had log houses and golden-domes churches; across a strip of no-man’s land and behind a high screen was the Chinese town of Maimaichen, with shrines, tea-stands, paper lanterns and merchants in pig-tails.
Some time earlier, in response to a request for the gift of a dwarf from the Ubashi of Tuva, Tsar Mikhail replied:
There is none in our empire at present. One was brought here, indeed, from abroad, but he is dead; we breed no such people in our country, nor do those imported live long.
In the late ‘20s, the capital of Tuva (nominally an independent country then) “consisted of two streets of wooden huts. ? The town’s one newspaper was written in Mongolian, which almost nobody (Tuvan being a Turkic language) understood, and in the evenings the electricity stayed on only when there was a film showing at the cinema.” And during close-up, movie-goers would exclaim “We paid full-price. We want to see a whole person!”
Siberia can be a dreary place even when one is not looking for the bedraggled remnants of once-proud peoples. Alcoholism isn’t funny and modern-day comic relief seems to be rather rarer.
Reid seems to have gotten through it by letting down her sense of professionally detached observation from time to time, especially when she can poke fun at Russians. She recounts the 18th century defeats of Dmitry Pavlutsky at the hands of the stone-tipped spear wielding Chukchi (in Russia’s Far Eastern Arctic) with barely disguised glee. In the end, the Russians gave up and left Chukotka pretty much alone for the better part of two centuries.
To be fair, Reid makes fun of Americans as well. American oilmen in Sakhalin:
were plump and moved slowly. They said ‘howdy‘, had round, mild faces and wore extremely clean pastel clothes. In their placid, masticating groups they resembled hippopotami, or one of the herbivorous species of dinosaur.
Her contact at the oil camp, one Kerry, “did not like me much, perhaps because of my snooty accent, perhaps because I was not the one stuck in Siberia.” Kerry doesn’t have much sympathy with indigenous peoples, because back home in Oregon, she had an Indian reservation complete with casino.
‘My mother goes there every night. I‘m sending her money, so I‘m, like, put it down for an apartment or something, puh-leez!‘
Reid does not present this an anthropological text and sociological treatise (thank goodness) and so criticisms about completeness are out of place. However, I personally question her use of shamanism as a sort of proxy for cultural health: in each place she asks about and seeks out the local shaman—if there is one to be found. This is a curious metric: I would have chosen language. To expect any people to continue to embrace shamanism in the 21st century is a little like trying to deny them television. After all, no one looks for druids in Wales.
The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia is an excellent book about a part of Asia that few people know anything about. Siberian peoples are not the only “Small Number People” (to use the Soviet phrase) than have been decimated by dominant cultural majorities: every country has skeletons in that particular closet, some even less known about.