"And So Dies My Clan": Reading Indigenous Literature and Politics Through Trauma Time

• Published in: Acta Biologica Sibirica
• Main Author: Charles Gleek
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Jenny; Moreton; Visser; khanty; Siberia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17613/M6ND4P

The interdisciplinary study of indigenous literature and politics is fertile ground for inquiry into understanding how each discipline can inform the work of researchers, practitioners, and students within the humanities and social sciences. Yeremei Aipin’s "And So Dies My Clan" (2010) offers an opportunity to explore the intersection of pluralistic approaches to trauma theory as a way of engaging Siberian indigenous literature. Relying on Jenny Edkins’ (2014) frame of “trauma time” and her four-fold conceptualization of “missing persons” during traumatic experiences, I suggest that Aipin’s essay offers the reader an opportunity to locate specific instances of disruptive events experienced by both individuals and groups in the story with the sociopolitical record of Khanty people's interactions with corporate and state actors in the 20th and 21st century. Characters in Aipin’s essay experience the trauma of property theft, economic disenfranchisement, are subject to asymmetric economic development, and untimely death, which combined with the appropriation and spoiling of sacred, traditional territory and the forced assimilation of Khanty cultural practices, easily connect readers to contemporary political events --including violations of human rights --and social justice concerns for Khanty people in Western Siberia. This approach of linking the study of literature and politics aligns with calls for expanding the intellectual domains of both trauma theory (Rotherberg 2014; Visser 2015) and critical indigenous studies (Moreton-Robinson 2015), and can serve as an epistemological model for future comparative, cross-disciplinary research.