Storying with Homelands

Abstract

Pastoralists who live in the Tyva Republic approach their home landscapes as sentient and engage with them through a reciprocal relationship. The sociality of landscapes builds upon a multigenerational belonging amongst Tyva kinship groups with their homelands. In this study, I explore how community-homeland belonging allows for a more-than-human practice of engaging with the past—storying with homelands. I draw on a case study, which involves the construction of a Buddhist stupa by the Soyan kinship group at a site named Chylgy-Dash in 2019. I suggest that the community’s storying with an endangered landscape aims, first, to bridge with the past across socialist decades when the state neglected human–nonhuman relationships, and, second, to enact and to story-into-being community-homeland belonging. Keywords: Indigenous historicities, more-than-human storytelling, memory politics, post-socialism, community-homeland belonging