The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia

Russia invaded Siberia in the 16th century, extracted wealth, planted forts and settlements and, mostly, ran roughshod over the indigenous people living there over the next two centuries. It's not a pretty picture of conquest and empire-building that forced tribute quotas on native people while infecting them with deadly Western diseases they had no immunity against. And the major role fur-trapping played in the enormous wealth the Russian Empire gained at the Siberian people's expense is clearly set forth."The Shaman's Coat" is an exploration of that sorry Russian/Soviet history, focusing on eight distinct indigenous tribal cultures and their environments- large and small- and each's adaptation to or rejection of the colonialization and repression brought to bear on the native cultures.Anna Reid asks: "Where did the real Siberians, the native people, fit into all this (history)? The answer, usually, was nowhere very much. Russians' perceptions of them progressed through familiar stages. For the Cossacks, they were an economic resource; for Enlightenment scientists, natural curiosities; for Romantics, noble savages; for empire-builders, an excuse-- so as to rescue them from cruel Chinese or Japanese rule-- to conquer new territory, and a canvas on which to display civilizing prowess. Pre-revolutionary travel writers usually only featured them as a side-show... There were exceptions. Condemned to remote settlements for years on end, nineteenth-century exiles often staved off despair by turning themselves into ethnographers. Outcasts themselves, they empathized with their subjects."One significant literary (1900) and film (1975) representation was Vladimir Arsenyev's "Dersu Uzala", a very sympathetic portrait of a seasoned native hunter/tracker whose skills and survival wisdom saves a Russian military contingent in the Siberian wilderness. I highly recommend both the book and Kurosawa's film adaptation.Reid draws upon varied sources, letters and records to capture these perspectives on the Khant, Buryat, Tuvans, Sakha, Ainu, Nivkh, Uilta and the Chukchi, moving from the Urals eastward to the Pacific. The book has very useful maps to orient the reader. Reid, herself travels to locations throughout Siberia to try to interview remnants of the cultures she investigates as well as observe their Post-Soviet status, economic prospects, and -if possible- cultural vitality.The concept of Shamanism as an authentic unifying thread among various tribal cultures is posited as a link that, she finds, has been rooted out, degraded or commercialized by waves of assaults on native faith practices over the generations. "The state of Siberian shamanism, I thought when embarking on this book, would be an indicator of the extent to which the indigenous peoples had preserved their identities under Russian rule. The tsars tried to replace shamans with priests. THE communists ostracised and imprisoned them, and under Stalin shot them or threw them out of helicopters, saying that if they could fly, now was their chance. If shamanism had survived all this, other aspects of native Siberian culture probably had too."In closing, she concludes that shamanism "like broader native identity, it had been stripped down to the essentials by Russian rule and especially by Communism, reduced from a detailed, consistent way of apprehending the world to a rag-bag of vague, disconnected beliefs and rituals. It was now in the process of reconstruction, with spare parts from the West."

I was a little afraid that the book would be, well, woo-woo. I didn’t want (and don’t like to read) was a thin veneer of New Age wibbly-wobbly painted over a shell that sort of looked like Siberia if you squinted. I was very glad that although Reid does touch on this from time to time – she visited a self-styled shaman in California at the beginning, and came away rather revolted, as I would have – she mostly sticks to the tales of the people she meets as she travels across a vast expanse of land.There was much in here I enjoyed, but the flip side of the story in this book is that there is little left of the natives who once inhabited the far north, after generations of forcible intervention by Soviets whose intentions ranged from extracting wealth in the removal of oil or diamonds, to the Soviets who firmly believed that all people were equal, and should be relocated from their homes to tiny farms, ignoring that in the capricious north you can barely garden, let alone grow potatoes, until all the people starved and died. It is ultimately a tragic tale (aren’t all Russian stories thus?) and one I had to put down from time to time and take a break. Find some hope and sunshine and hug my kids…It’s worth reading, if you are at all curious about the history of Siberia. It’s written well, easy to read in style, and offers a glimpse of fascinating what-might-have-been alternate history timelines. I’m not going to explore those, but they do leave you wondering.Oh, and the Shaman’s Coat? She didn’t find one, in the end, as she came to the waves of the Bering Strait. All that were left were the cold rocks and empty booze bottles that had drained away the hope of a once-fierce people.

This is a most fascinating book. When one hears the word Siberia, what usually comes to mind is "gulags" and "ice." But, author, Anna Reid, in The Shaman's coat reveals the real face of Siberia, its surviving native peoples. Anna Reid's description of this vast and thinnly populated region had me unable to put this book down. It is a great place to start if you want to go beyond the usual stereotypes about Siberia. But, this book is more than a historical and anthropoligical study, it is a study on how the worst of a dominating culture can aggresively and even passively destroy a competing or primative culture. Russian domination of Siberia was hard enough on Siberia's native peoples, but once Russiafication was driven by marxist ideology it was deadly. It basically left stone age and ancient peoples empty. Peace for these people, here in the 21st century, is usually found in a full vodka bottle. My only negative about the book is that the author, Anna Reid, feels the answer lies in Russia and the native population of Siberia adopting PC western attitudes. My only question here would be, why trade one form of social dysfunction for another? Maybe, this is just a British trait, a kind of motherly post-colonialism. The author hails from the UK. But, I suspect materialistic feminism would not serve the Buryat, Tuvans, Chukchis or any of the other Siberian natives any better than marxism. And to be fair, the author's suggestion is only found in the afterword of the book. Overall this is a great read.