The Estonian Indigeneity Card and Post-Soviet International Relations

• In Event: Historicizing Indigeneity: Decolonization, Disciplines, and Politics

Abstract

The 1970s and 1980s established the idea of Estonians as indigenous people. This vision was based on the extensive artistic research and cultural appropriation of the cultural heritage of the Uralic and Samoyedic peoples in Siberia (with whom the Estonian belongs to the same linguistic group) by the Soviet Estonian cultural elites. But this new, indigenous identity was also widely embraced by the late Soviet Estonian audiences.

During the Perestroika period, the associations of Estonians with Siberan as well as other indigenous peoples (including Native Americans) worked equally well, enabling reframing the fight for regaining independence from the USSR as an essentially anti-colonial struggle.

This paper investigates the afterlife of this idea in the 1990s. What happens, when the idea of Estonians as an indigenous nation is re-applied by the Estonian nation-state and its Post-Socialist diplomacies? The temptation to play out the indigeneity card was even stronger, as the first president of the newly independent Estonia was Lennart Meri – a writer and film-maker whose books and documentaries had been fundamental to the popularisation of Uralic and Samoyedic roots of Estonians. In the 1980s, the promotion of indigenity had been a tremendous success story for Estonian cultural and political elites, including President Meri. In the 1990s, the adaptation of the same ideas on a global transnational scale proved more challenging. From today’s perspective, these attempts yet offer good sources for examining the complexities and variances of indigeneity and decolonization discourses in Eurasia.

Author

• Linda Kaljundi, Tallinn U (Estonia)