History & Visual Culture Seminar

Abstract: At the time of their initial encounters with the expanding tsarist empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Yakut, Iukagir, Kamchadal, and other Indigenous populations of the frozen reaches of Siberia were forced to sign the tsar's tribute rolls, swearing to bring furs to fill the sovereign's treasury. With small pictorial signs--depictions of reindeer, bows and arrows, shamans' drums, or arctic foxes--they inscribed themselves into the empire. Although the sketched signatures were coerced, they effected subtle but meaningful changes on the mighty Muscovite administration. Identifying themselves with collectivist, spiritually charged clan marks, the people of the north demanded recognition as members of collective lineages of humans and their animal progenitors. Through these images, an expansive vision of nature and of human society crept into the narrow heart of Muscovite bureaucracy. The great machine of tsarist red tape bowed (ever so slightly) before local visual practices, acknowledging them and accepting them as legally binding. Taking the visual record of non-Russians seriously, this discussion gives voice to the people of the Arctic, who are rarely acknowledged by history.