Paul Goble
Staunton,
August 16 – The 350 Aleuts living on Russia’s remote Bering Island, only a handful
of whom still speak their native language, are gearing up to fight, possibly
with the violence of a last stand, against Moscow’s plans to confine them to a
reservation where they will be forced to give up their traditional way of life
and thus put on the road to disappearing.
Three
aspects of this situation make it noteworthy. First, a central meme of Russian
propaganda is that Moscow unlike Western countries has never confined one of
its minorities to a reservation. But this move, coming after the Russian
government gathered together most of the country’s 500 Aleuts into a single
place shows that is not true.
Second,
because all the decisions about the Aleuts and their lives are being made
thousands of kilometers away by bureaucrats who know little or nothing about
the peoples they are control but assume a one-size-fits-all approach is
invariably the correct one, this numerically small people may soon disappear, something
some in Moscow say doesn’t happen in Russia.
And
third, insisting that “we don’t want to be put in a reservation,” the Aleuts of
the village of Nikolskoye “have begun a revolt,” which some of their number say
may soon turn violent as their last stand against the all too real danger that
this latest Moscow move will lead to their destruction (snob.ru/entry/181323/).
Snob correspondent Darya
Milokaychuk tells the sorry story of official high-handedness and local resistance
and leaves no doubt that unless the Moscow officials change course, “the only
village of Aleuts in Russia may disappear” as a result of actions that are
completely unnecessary and completely avoidable.
Two
generations ago, the Soviet authorities concentrated the Aleut in Nikolskoye,
wiping out many of the smaller villages in which that people had traditionally
lived. Now, the Russian authorities want to include that village within the
confines of a national park where the Aleut will be unable to practice their
traditional way of life.
In
fact, Nikolskoye is already within a national forest where the traditional
hunting and fishing rights of the Aleut aren’t supposed to be practiced; but
for the last 20 years, Moscow officials have looked the other way as the Aleut have
continued to live and work as they did. Now. Moscow wants to enforce the rules
without exception.
They
Aleuts have fought Russian rule many times before, most recently in the 1990s, and
today they are “inclined aggressively,” saying “there will be much blood and a
war,” if Moscow ignores their needs in the name of standardization, Mikolaychuk
reports. The reason for their passion is
that they see the Russian authorities as taking away their future.
At
present, there are only about 500 Aleuts in Russia as a whole. (There are about
2,000 more in the United States.) They
have already seen their language put on the way to disappearance: At present in
Nikolskoye, there are only two Aleuts who speak it: one is 83 and the other is
92.
Russia’s
Aleuts live so far away from any urban center and can be reached only by air much
of the time and sometimes not even by that given the weather; and they do not
understand why their hunting and fishing practices need to be destroyed along
with their language in the name of fulfilling the plans of officials who know
nothing about them.
“Now,”
the Snob journalist says, the Aleuts in Nikolskoye “are awaiting a
commission from the Presidential Administration” that will determine their
fate, one that may even include forcibly resettling them somewhere else. “As
always,” she writes, “the decision of several people will decide how things
will go with the [Aleut] language and culture.”
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