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Abstract:

The name ‘Tuoi-Haia’ is familiar to many residents of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) in Russia. Many of them are acquainted with a song festival named ‘Tuoi-Haia,’ which has been held annually in the Republic since 1991. However, most do not know that initially, ‘Tuoi-Haia’ was the name of a village that flooded in the mid-1960s during the construction of the Vilyuy hydropower plant for the needs of the diamond industry in Western Yakutia. The state erased the history of Tuoi-Haia from the official narrative (Trouillot 1995), silencing it for decades. In this presentation, I will illustrate what kind of historical narrative was constructed around the diamond industry of Yakutia and will demonstrate what happened in Tuoi-Haia in the 1960s. After the flooding, the former village residents were resettled in neighboring villages, including Syuldyukar, the Indigenous Evenki community. Ever-expanding diamond mining in the 1970s caused the residents of Syuldyukar to lose their reindeer-herding economy. In the 1980s, they also faced the threat of possible resettlement. Since then, locals have fiercely resisted any talk of their relocation. This is also because the Tuoi-Haia tragedy and its consequences unfolded before the eyes of the locals. The mining industry closely intertwined the destinies of Tuoi-Haia and Syuldyukar. Drawing from the oral history of Syuldyukar and publications by former residents of Tuoi-Haia, I will explore the hidden social and cultural traumas and long-term consequences concealed in these state-led land dispossession projects.