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Dialogical Relationships and the Bear in Indigenous Poetry
in Sibirica
Author:
Stephan Dudeck
Stephan Dudeck
Independent Scholar sdudeck@eu.spb.ru
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Abstract
The essay provides a review of a small but remarkable book on the work of two important Native American and Siberian poets, Meditations after the Bear Feast by Navarre Scott Momaday and Yuri Vella, published in 2016 by Shanti Arts in Brunswick, Maine. Their poetic dialogue revolves around the well-known role of the bear as a sociocultural keystone species in the boreal forest zone of Eurasia and North America. The essay analyzes the understanding of dialogicity as shaping the intersubjectivity of the poets emerging from human relationships with the environment. It tries to unpack the complex and prophetic bear dream in one of Vella’s poems in which he links indigenous ontologies with urgent sociopolitical problems.
Contributor Notes
Stephan Dudeck is an anthropologist who conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork with Siberian reindeer herding communities. He completed his dissertation on the persistence of reindeer herders’ lifestyles in Western Siberia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, in 2011. His research deals with practices of hiding and avoidance; the relationship of indigenous people and oil companies; and the preservation of indigenous languages and traditional knowledge, oral history, Khanty bear ceremonialism, and human–animal relationships. E-mail: sdudeck@eu.spb.ru