Northern Asia was inhabited by Indigenous peoples for centuries before Russia began its colonial expansion into the region in the sixteenth century. Despite the long history of colonization, the most dramatic and violent changes in Indigenous people’s lives occurred during the Soviet era. This chapter outlines the main trajectory of North Asian colonization by Imperial Russia and, subsequently, the Soviet Union, with particular emphasis on the settler colonial processes of the latter. It then provides a brief overview of the development of Indigenous literatures during the early Soviet decades, both as part of the multiethnic Soviet literary scene and in relation to the colonial context of the Soviet Union. Drawing on Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity, I understand Indigenous literatures as hybrid cultural forms that embody the cultural in-betweenness of their authors and Indigenous people in the Soviet Union more broadly. In addition to the concept of hybridity, the chapter briefly introduces the concepts of becoming and trans-corporeality, which inform my analysis of Indigenous literary works and their depictions of human-animal relations throughout this book.