Urom

Rock art produced by the Wod͡ʒagat people, a critically endangered Urom tribe

Urom are a heterogeneous category of non-Coscivian peoples native to Great Kirav, distinguished from the other non-Coscivian minorities of the island continent (termed “National Minorities”) by their tribal mode of social organisation, historical umpéa status under Imperial law, lack of integration into mainstream Kiravian society, and special developmental concerns. Collectively, they represent 2.1% of the Kiravian population, around 15 million people.

Urom peoples, having many cultural characteristics in common with indigenous peoples on other continents and beset with similar socio-economic and political challenges, are often included in Occidental discourse on indigenous issues. In the Coscivian world, however, Uromkor is understood as a function of socio-cultural otherness rather than autochthony and colonial displacement, and Urom peoples are generally not regarded as being any more “indigenous” to Great Kirav than the National Minorities or Coscivian peoples, though claims to the contrary have been advanced by Urom activists.

Urom are not a single people, and ideas of a collective Urom panethnic identity have yet to extend beyond the context of political agitation. There is great diversity among the various Urom tribes in terms of ancestry, appearance, language, religion, and lifestyle.

Concept

The concept of Urom derives from the self-understanding of Coscivian civilisation and its origins. According to tradition, primitive agricultural Kirav was a violent and brutish environment characterised by near-constant endemic warfare between small tribal units, and widespread murderous practices such as infanticide and uxoricide within tribes due to both ritual demand and resource scarcity. Lifespans were extremely short, with the prelude to the Great Law Chant reminding Coscivians that "mere beards - not white but rich with ūmar were the mark of the elder; fortunate and few were those who survived to full manhood, for the earth was bathed in the young blood of hairless youth." It was only with the rise of the Emperors, through their imposition of the Four Laws and patronage of the Four Rites, that communities were able to know peace and order. During this nascent stage of Coscivian civilisation, known as the "Lawful Commonwealth", the "Empire" was a tribal confederacy rather than a proper state, without an administration or defined territory. The Four Laws and Four Rites spread by voluntary diffusion more so than conquest, and from this emerged a binary identity of Lawful tribes who accepted the Emperor's authority versus Lawless tribes who did not.

The discovery of ærose metallurgy and other technologies that enabled the consolidation of stable political control over wider areas and facilitated the evolution of the Empire into a territorial entity complicated this binary, as the Emperor's authority was no longer limited to those communities that had accepted the Law and Rites voluntarily, and now extended to communities brought under his rule by conquest, bound by the Law but (initially) not admitted to the Rites. This engendered a trifurcate distinction between Subjects of the Emperor (ritually initiated), Subjects of the Land (lawful but uninitiated), and barbarians (lawless). Over time, many Subjects of the Land, either on a corporate or individual basis, undertook the Rites and adopted the emerging Coscivian identity. At several junctures, such as the Great Invitation of Emperor Kompūserv and Emperor Ṉspektadek's Naturalisation of the Land, these initiations occurred en masse and may have been less-than-voluntary. At any rate, the arc of Imperial Coscivian history was long, but it bent toward the convergence of Subjects of the Land with the Emperor's Subjects, and also toward territorial expansion and the closure of the frontiers, such that by [Milestone], few redoubts of ungoverned barbarians persisted, and most remaining Subjects of the Land were tribal peoples living on marginal lands, especially inaccessible mountains, dense forests, and malarial swamps.

To Be Continued.

Cultures

Heterodox Customs

The traditional narrative ascribes the ancestral Urom's refusal to assimilate into Coscivian society to their desire to retain customs that did not conform to the Four Laws or other defining norms of Coscivian culture. Commonly cited examples of such customs include marital norms, with many Urom peoples having practised (at least historically) forms of polygamy, or (especially in the case of hunter-gatherer groups) eschewing the marriage bond in favour of serial partnerships. Many Urom of the Southwest and the Western Highlands continue to (extralegally) observe customs obligating a married man to marry his brother's widow as an additional wife.

To be continued with weirder stuff.

Some Urom tribes have no cultural memory of customs at odds with fundamental Coscivian norms. Many other tribes who once had such customs later abandoned them without assimilating into Coscivian society. In High Modernity, both Federalist and Kirosocialist governments asserted stricter control of the Urom reductions and suppressed practices such as polygamy.

Languages

Urom tribal languages mainly belong to the 'Palæo-Kiravian' (Elutic, Gascanic, Intheric, Rulo-Swadeshi) or Itaho-Atrassic families, and not to the Cosco-Adratic family, which is associated with the spread of Coscivian civilisation. The reverse, however, is not true, as many ethnic groups accepted as Coscivian speak Palæo-Kiravian or Itaho-Atrassic languages. In the rare cases where a urom tribe speaks a distinct Cosco-Adratic language, they are known to have shifted to that language in historical times from a non-Cosco-Adratic language, which is evident as a substratum. Some urom languages, such as Varekthari and Oklʌsterbé, are isolates.

Contemporary Issues

Demographic stability

Although the total Urom population has increased according to every census since the end of Kirosocialism, buoyed by growth among larger and more developed groups such as the Qódava, Xufur, and Wawa, most Urom peoples - particularly those with smaller populations to begin with - have suffered a decline in absolute numbers during the same period. The Oklʌsterbé, presently reduced to nine individuals with the youngest females in their late fifties, face complete extinction with the passing of the current generation. Other small tribes with collapsing age pyramids must reckon with looming cultural extinction as their populations will soon be too small to maintain community life and traditional continuity, even if their genetic lineage survives.

The familiar compounding factors of poverty, poor health outcomes, and the pressures of assimilation and exogamy, as well as the disruption of traditional lifestyles and economies, are believed to contribute to this decline. However, there is also the phenomenon of "Late-Modern Urom Sterility" observed across an array of Urom peoples from different regions, characterised by precipitous declines in fertility beginning during Mid-Kirosocialism that are not evident among similarly-situated Coscivian or National Minority communities. The cause(s) of Late-Modern Urom Sterility are presumed to be environmental or socio-economic in nature, but the exact etiology remains an open question.

Educational attainment

Urom collectively lag behind the other demographic supercategories of Coscivians, Celts, Kiravite Minorities, and National Minorities in educational attainment statistics. They are the only supercategory for whom absolute (rather than functional) illiteracy remains a problem: In 1990, 70% of urom men and 40% of women enumerated by the Federal Census were reported to be literate in any language. By 2010 these figures had improved to 85% and 60%. Present urom literacy rates are now believed to be much higher, in large part due to the departure of older generations from the sample, though estimates still converge on 5-12% illiteracy among both genders. As with other statistics of the urom population as a whole, these data are skewed upward by the numerical dominance of larger, better-developed tribes such as the Xufur and Qódava, and are unrepresentative of smaller and more isolated tribes.

Dropout rates among urom students are higher than among Coscivians or Minorities at every level. Among the small-numbered tribes and the urban Dispossessed Tribes, most students do not complete secondary schooling, and as such few are eligible for entrance into higher education.

A contributing factor to low educational attainment among urom tribes is that urom reserves are not subject to provincial compulsory education laws, and in several Western Highlands states and territories even urom living off-reserve are exempt from such laws since Reunification. Some tribal governments have their own schooling laws, which may or may not be rigorously enforced, while others do not. Urom cultures are often ambivalent toward modern formal education, understanding that it can lead to both social and economic empowerment on one hand and assimilation and disintegration on the other, even if delivered by urom instructors in a tribe's own language.

List of Urom peoples

Current

• Biznad͡ʒ - Native to Korlēdan and Argévia.
• Hazléta - Gascanic tribe inhabiting the Hadselet Valley in Sixua Province
• Oklʌsterbé - Native to Lataskia; moribund with all 9 remaining Oklʌsterbé past reproductive age.
• Pungōvak - Native to Inokarya and Qihuxia, related to the Coscivian Kayakem.
• Qódava - Largest Urom tribe, with around four million members.
• Rifpito - Relatives of the Qódava.
• Vaguan - Native to the North Kiravian plain south of the Lake Belt; known for their small earth lodge dwellings
• Varekthari - Native to Metrea.
• Wamdue - Native to Sixua, once ruled a confederation of chiefdoms and proto-states at parity with neighbouring Coscivian polities.
• Wawa - Native to Váuadra.
• Wisaya - Native to Sixua and known for their exotic marital norms.
• Wod͡ʒagat - Native to Kensonia, known for their distinctive and haunting geoglyphs.

Historical

Surfantur - Inhabited coastal swamps in Fariva, extinct since the 17th century AD.