GLC@Lunch: “Trade in Women, Concubinage, and Marriage: Relations Between Russian Colonizers and Indigenous Women in 17th-Century Eastern Siberia”

Angelina Kalashnikova (GLC Visiting Fellow; Kiel Training for Excellence Fellow, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel)

This presentation introduces a book project on the first decades of Russian colonization in Eastern Siberia, present-day Yakutia. Rather than framing colonization solely as a process of conquest and political alliance-building, the project foregrounds intimate and gendered entanglements between Russian newcomers and Indigenous communities. Russian fur traders, trappers, and military servitors typically arrived in the region without families and encountered Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir, and Even populations. The resulting gender imbalance among settlers quickly made the trade in Indigenous women a profitable enterprise. At the same time, commercial transactions sometimes culminated in Orthodox marriages, blurring the boundaries between coercion, commerce, and social integration. By examining these practices, the study explores how racial, cultural, and religious boundaries were negotiated in everyday interactions between Russian colonizers and Indigenous societies in seventeenth-century Eastern Siberia.

Image credit: Two Yukaghir girls, Siberia, 1894-1909, American Museum of Natural History https://digitalcollections.amnh.org/asset-management/2URM1THQEBM1?&WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP