This book investigates the survival strategies of Sakha girls and women in the face of postcolonial neglect, historical invisibility, and embodied trauma in the Russian North.
Drawing on oral epic traditions such as Olonkho, personal and ethnographic testimonies, and analysis of Russian literature, Natalya Khokholova uncovers how Indigenous knowledge systems preserve life amid violence, abandonment, and medical erasure. Centering figures such as feral children, spectral girls, and forgotten mothers, the book explores the philosophical and cosmological concept of turuk-a Sakha sense of bodily intuition and ancestral guidance-as a method of both survival and resistance. Khokholova brings together literary analysis, autoethnography, and decolonial feminist theory to illuminate how “the invisibility monster” of modernity continues to threaten Indigenous life. By blending storytelling, theory, and critique, Sakha Sacred Knowledge and the Scars of Modernity offers an urgent intervention into global conversations about trauma, resilience, and the politics of recognition.