Narrating Colonial Slow Violence in Eremei Aipin’s Khanty, or the Star of the Dawn

Abstract Khanty author Eremei Aipin’s novel Khanty, or the Star of the Dawn addresses the destructive consequences of Soviet policies for northern Indigenous communities. The primary critique of the novel is targeted at the natural resource extraction in the home area of the Khanty people, showing how the destruction of the natural environment threatens the very existence of the Indigenous people. The chapter approaches natural resource extraction as a form of settler colonial slow violence that threatens both the Indigenous people and the non-human entities in the region. I argue that the motif of dying reindeer recurring in the novel is an allegory of the annihilation of the Indigenous people, as it both anticipates the fatality of the oil drilling industry to the Khanty people and underlines its character as a form of colonial violence. While the novel depicts the collective memory of the Khanty people as inscribed in the physical space, the destruction of their home environment leads to alienation from the memories and the culture of the Indigenous people, which is demonstrated in the different narrational strategies used in the novel.