This article deals with "Old-Settler" communities in northeastern Siberia that were founded by Russian settlers in the course of the seventeenth century. Left to their own devices by a distant colonial administration, many of them married native women and adopted local subsistence techniques and other elements of spiritual and material culture. These processes led to the emergence of new group identities, that is to communities that distinguished themselves both from Russians and from native groups. The article provides a brief history of such communities in northern Siberia, to set the regional context, before characterizing the three study communities as experienced by the authors during fieldwork in the late 1990s. In addition, we will briefly introduce the case of the Alaskan Creoles for comparative purposes, to contrast colonial regimes and attitudes to "ethnic mixing." This will enable us to return to the title question and to reverse it, that is, to focus on the factors that led to the emergence of Creole status in Alaska. We will argue that changing colonial policies of the Russian state need to be taken into account in order to understand why there were no Creoles in Siberia.
Recently broadened fieldwork opportunities in Siberia have not only enabled the study of current social and cultural processes, but also facilitated a re-assessment of previous periods of rapid social change. One of those was, undoubtedly, the decade following the Russian Revolution, when Russians and other outsiders significantly increased their impact in many areas of Siberia. Fieldwork conducted during the 1990s has provided evidence of a previously unrecognised phenomenon, namely the existence of a syncretistic system of worldview and ritual practice in the Siberian Yupik village Naukan. Similar to so-called “revitalisation movements” elsewhere, it can be interpreted as a reaction to increasing Russian colonial pressure. The present paper attempts to situate the Naukan movement in its cultural and political contexts, in order to provide a post-colonial reading of early 20th century transformations.
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