TO THE EAST OF DREAMS ***SOLD***

Nastassja Martin

(La Découverte, 250 pages, 2022)

***Shortlisted for the 2022 prix Medicis des essais***

In Kamchatka, in the Russian far east, during the fall of the USSR, a family clan belonging to the Evens indigenous people leaves behind the ruined kolkhoz where they were settled during the Soviet era. They choose to return to the forest in hopes of reconnecting with an independent way of life based on hunting, fishing, and trapping. But the path is an arduous one in an environment radically altered by a devastating extractive industry and a global climate crisis that greatly affect their region.

After working in Alaska with the Gwich’in people, the anthropologist Nastassja Martin decides to cross the Bering Strait to compare the different national politics of integration of indigenous peoples in Russia and the United States. In Esso, now turned into in a scenic touristic town, Martin first hears of Daria and her extended family, and she embarks on a strenuous journey to find them—an uncertain one as well as they may have no interest in meeting her. But she is keen to understand how an indigenous collective could seize on the crumbling of the Soviet regime’s political and economic structures to regain their autonomy. How were they able to learn to dream again and renew the daily dialogue between humans and animals without the help of their shamans, who were eliminated by the colonial process? To secure their basic needs, Daria and her family find themselves paradoxically having to source furs and caviar for the flourishing luxury industries of modernity.

In her vibrant, emotional, and powerfully descriptive style, Nastassja Martin brings together colonial history and indigenous cosmologies to explore how autochthonous peoples of the north have responded to assimilation policies as well as the disruption of their ecosystems.

Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich’in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Along with In the Eye of the Wild, (New York Review Book 2021), for which she received the François Sommer, Mac Orlan, Joseph Kessel, and Livre du Réel awards, she has written Les âmes sauvages: Face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska, winner of the Prix Louis Castex of the French Academy.