An Interview With Julia Phillips, Part 3

". . . it is an extraordinary betrayal of a national promise to care for, that the state will care for the people and its land. And the state has cared for them in the past, that the state has said 'Yes, we are here, you can depend on us. Put aside your traditional ways of gathering food or of looking out for each other. Because we are here now, and we are here to, you know, supplant your economy with our economy now, so you can depend on it and we'll be there.' And then for that state to disappear, is deadly. It's really deadly."

In Part 3, National Book Award Finalist and Fulbright fellow Julia Phillips, author of the debut novel Disappearing Earth, discusses behavioral expectations for women across the circumpolar North, including some surprising differences and similarities across cultures. Discussion includes the “second shift” women endure across cultural and national identities, and examination of the common threads of colonialism which have impacted Indigenous cultures in both Russia and the United States. Phillips reflects upon the struggle of Indigenous Kamchatkans to retain language and traditional way of life. She reminds us that the infrastructure buildup during the years of the U.S.S.R. provided enormous economic security to rural Kamchatkan communities, which collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union. She talks about the privations remembered in rural Kamchatka after Soviet support evaporated, complicating current sentiments about the future of the Russian State. In closing this episode, Phillips’ recollections of stories told by Indigenous Kamchatkans of the post-Soviet era, serve as a cautionary tale to Alaskans of the dangers rural communities here face in our current era of declining oil revenues.