Vashchenko, Alexander and Claude Clayton Smith, editor and translator, with a foreword by N. Scott Momaday. The Way of Kinship

The reader is taken on a journey through uncharted territory that both broadens his/her knowledge of indigenous peoples and preserves in print information concerning their disappearing traditions.In his "Foreword," Momaday argues that indigenous peoples everywhere are being robbed of their traditions (xi).The "Introduction" by Alexander Vaschenko gives a brief sketch of tsarist and Soviet influences on the native peoples of Siberia.History is fraught with a clash of worldviews and the resultant abuses perpetrated on indigenous Siberians.Underlying the poetry, art, and prose of the native writers and artists represented in the anthology is the idea, even the ideal, of familial, tribal, and universal kinship.The editors offer The Way of Kinship for use in courses in crosscultural and ethnic studies (xxiii).The volume is framed by an "Evenk Invocation for Good Fortune.""To Nature When the Earth Turns Green," in which the Evenk request nourishment, is placed at the beginning of the volume, and "To Nature, When the Green Recedes," in which the Evenk thank Mother Nature for the autumn bounty, closes the anthology.Writers represented come from hunting, fishing, and reindeer tending cultures.The destruction of native livelihood and the native way of life through the industrial rape of the land, which is driven by greed, is a major theme.At times the theme has political overtones, as it does in the works of Khanty Yeremei Apin, who has supported Khanty interests in the Writer's Union, of which he is a member.In "The Earth's Pain," a mother teaches her son that if he hurts the Earth, he must heal her wound immediately because without Earth there is no life.Khanty poet and storyteller Maria Vagatova echoes Apin's complaint in a poem titled "Dirge for the Land of the Khanty," in which Mother Earth wails and there is nowhere for the Khanty to go.In Apin's "Selections from Morning Twilight: A Novel of the Khanty," the author laments the destruction of villages, deer, and the food supply by oilmen who exploit the land and leave it in ruins.Apin's bleak picture is softened by the humor of Taiga Nenets Yuri Vaella, who relates the story of two old men, a Nenets and a Khanty, who are so absorbed in their storytelling that they loop around a river several times in their boat, making no progress.In his poetry, however, Vaella ruminates over his "lost people" (83).In "News from Vatyegan Camp," he tells about an old man who fell through the ice into an oil spill with his reindeer.The reindeer died, and the old man went blind.The persecution of shamans, native religious leaders, and well-to-do native people is chronicled by Apin in a fragment from Morning Twilight.A government official nicknamed Bloody Eye, believing that a local shaman is hoarding gold, threatens his family until the shaman commits suicide.Evenk Galina Keptuke illustrates the cleverness of a persecuted shaman in "A Discovery" from her novella, On the Banks of the Jeltula.The shaman Sodorchan is imprisoned

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