by James Raffan
Set against the memory of the vibrancy of Aksarka, the absence of people in the outdoor museum made the installation flat. From a very helpful curator, however, I learned about the joinery on the sleds, the animist beliefs of the Nenets, and the rules and etiquette of the chum—how, for example, in a traditional family situation, an invisible line divides the space exactly in two, from the door back through the stove, with one side being the male domain and the other being the female side. “Men, for their part, should never touch the floorboards or the tent poles. These rules are what allow for efficient division of labour under what are often very cold and difficult working conditions,” the curator explained.
We moved inside to the very pleasant ambient temperature of the museum’s offices for a further chat. Katya, a beautiful young translator from the Department of Culture, motioned to a cloakroom off the foyer and said, “James, let us go in this room and take off our clothes.” I blushed.
Here, with a map to aid the discussion, the curator explained the strong twenty-first-century presence of the Nenets on the Yamal. After the arrival of the Cossacks, the Nenets continued herding, managing to survive the sometimes oppressive tax regimes that various waves of newcomers imposed. But in a territory one and a half times the size of France, and with a habit of moving, coexistence was more possible than one might think. The Bolshevik Revolution more or less came and went without fanfare at this latitude, and it wasn’t until the years of Stalin’s terror regime that laws forbidding the private holding of land or animals and, among other things, the use of the Nenets language began the cultural decay for the Nenets above the Arctic Circle. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the policy of “sedentarization,” moving women and children to houses in settlements in the name of better living conditions and improved education, broke up the family units that had followed age-old divisions of labour to make the pastoral life viable.
But even in 1961, when the Soviets collectivized the herds and created a number of state farms, or sovkhozy, the Nenets managed what others had not, by quietly insisting that women and children remain with the travelling herds rather than being forcibly resettled into settlement tenements. So when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and many of the sovkhozy faded with the government, animals reverted to the families who looked after them and private reindeer herding took hold like nowhere else on earth. Today, the curator told me, there are more than 7,500 Nenets involved in traditional herding and something like three hundred thousand reindeer moving over one of the richest natural-gas fields in the world.
A handsome Nenets teen and his younger brother padded into the museum in their store-bought jackets, jeans, and new black Nike running shoes. The lad spoke quietly to the curator, who turned to us and said, “Your ride awaits.”
Outside, a late-model Russkaya Mekhanika snowmobile sat with an old-fashioned handmade spruce stanchion sled attached, just like the ones in the ethnographic museum. The boys pulled blankets from under ropes tied to the sled, arranged a thick cushion of reindeer hides on the bed of the sled and then invited Katya and her boss, Venera, to sit on one side with their feet on the runner, and me on the other side. They then arranged what felt like thick horsehair blankets over the three of us, and we were off.
On the icy roads of town, I was worried that if my feet slipped off the runner, the rest of me would be sure to follow, leaving no option but to hand-wrestle with the snarling dogs that flew out to meet us at every turn, all spit and teeth. But in a few minutes, deceased cars, outhouses (there is no running water in most rural houses in Russia), and cobbled-together houses in the dilapidated “suburbs” of Gornoknyazevsk disappeared, and we were out on a hard-packed snow trail the boys had made on their way from their camp into town. Once on a less slippery surface they speeded up, leaving their passengers fighting to stay warm and hanging on for dear life.
The landscape was classic taiga with sparse copses of birch and spruce trees washed like thin colour across rolling snowcrusted tundra hills. Although the track we were following cut through new snow that had fallen overnight, washboard rumbles below the runners indicated that this was a well-used trail. We dropped down into a deep ravine and crossed an ice bridge over a stream and started to pick up tracks and broken snow where it looked as if many reindeer had been using their snowshoe-like feet to dig down for the rich green tundra lichens below.
Twenty minutes later, nearly frozen solid on the sled, we crossed another stream and roared up onto a rise. In the distance were two chums, like the ones we’d seen in Aksarka. In association was a semicircle of sleds, piles of firewood, and all the trappings of an active and ongoing nomadic winter camp. A boisterous black border collie ducked out under the door flap, closely followed by the man of the house, Nikolai Laptender, who waved heartily and welcomed us in.
Speaking Russian, Nikolai said how pleased he was to welcome a visitor from Canada into his home. He introduced us to his wife, Oustinia, who was busy tending the tin wood stove and preparing what looked like a feast on the low table near the fire, and to the other five of his seven children. He had six boys and one girl, Yalanya (the name means “sunny person”), who at about three years old was the youngest.
“But before we go any further,” he said, looking directly at me, “I need to ask you to put your camera away. I would hate for you to publish a photograph of your visit here in a magazine that might be thrown in the garbage. It would show disrespect for the reindeer. The same goes for any other type of video or audio recording here. Please ask. You are welcome to use your notebook. The tadibya [shaman, the connector to animist traditions] insists that above all else we respect our reindeer and watch out for anything that might upset them. Without reindeer, I could not imagine living on this earth.”
Pondering the simple profundity of that, acutely aware there were sounds and images happening inside this remarkable nomadic home that I would never hear or see again, I felt a surge of panic as I stowed the camera and looked for an instant at the digital recorder in the bottom of my daypack. This day in Siberia, whether I liked it or not, would be an immersion in the oral tradition—what I saw and what I heard, what I smelled, sensed, and felt was all there would be to build a mind map and memory of the encounter. Gulp.
As my eyes adjusted to twin beams of sunlight poking into the dim recesses of the chum through two portholes of heavy clear plastic sewn into the double-reindeer-hide walls of the structure, I could only marvel that in this very modest enclosure, there lived nine people with everything they owned: their clothes, bedding, food, firewood, sewing supplies, books, dry goods, kettles, toys, cooking supplies, pots and pans, and sacred things, all neatly stowed in less than fifty square metres. Of the many lessons I learned on my way around the circumpolar world, this was one of the most enduring. How gluttonous were we acquisitive dwellers of the middle latitudes with all our stuff, how spoiled and protective were we of space, personal and otherwise, and how much we could learn about the simple art of sharing and, apparently, interpersonal harmony from a nomadic family such as the Laptenders, who, for now, were ensconced so comfortably on the Arctic Circle.
Nikolai sat on a bundle of reindeer hides in the middle of one side of the chum and invited us to do the same. Without being asked, the five children settled in on the other side of the structure and set about either just watching the guests or quietly amusing themselves. In due course I was invited to wash my hands in a basin of warm water and rinse them in an ingenious reverse-plunger gravity-fed cold water reservoir that hung on three delicate chains from a horizontal bar tied to the main poles of the chum.
The low table Oustinia had been working on was moved in front of Nikolai, and on it was served boiled reindeer with bouillon and noodles, pieces of frozen raw reindeer meat, frozen muksun—sweet, delicate whitefish—butter and cloudberry jam, homemade bread, salt, sugar, store-bought meringues, salted fish, a dish of hard candies, cookies, and an opened can of sweetened condensed milk that everyone applied as liberally to almost every co
mestible on the table as North Americas would do with ketchup, as if it were a food group unto itself.
And we talked: about Gazprom, climate change, education, and how the Nenets world works. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the family groupings—the brigades—from sovkhoz times have persisted as reindeer-working units on the same yearly round that Nenets have been tracing up and down the Yamal Peninsula as long as anyone can remember. Stipends from the government for tending this meat resource fell away substantially but were replaced, in some cases, with allowances and services from Gazprom that provided more ample compensation. Yes, they now owned their own reindeer. And yes, they still looked after some reindeer that were effectively owned by the state, but they did not have any rights to land or protections in law for their way of life.
Gazprom built schools and provided transportation and accommodation for some young people from nomadic families to attend them, which was a good thing for the most part, said Nikolai. The company gave assurances that grazing routes would not be impeded by roads, railways, or pipelines—although in practice, as I would learn later, these commitments weren’t kept. Additionally, the corporation promised to ensure water quality throughout its exploration and extraction operations. Nikolai, reaching into an overstuffed leather folio for a glossy handout entitled “Yamal Megaproject,” said Gazprom claims to take its social responsibility seriously. He read out: “One of the underlying principles of the commercial development in Yamal is maintaining a reasonable balance between industrial development and a solicitous attitude towards the traditional lifestyle of the indigenous minorities.
“That would be us,” he said, waving his hand toward Oustinia and the children.
“We are worried about climate change, yes,” he said, putting the handout away, “but we are worried about these oil and gas developments even more. So far, we have been able to carry on with our life as we have known it, moving north in the summer and back here in the winter, but with the new railway and more development to come, no one is sure what will happen to the reindeer … and what will happen to us.”
That afternoon, dressed in a gus for each of us provided by the family, we travelled with Nikolai and the dog to find the herd and move it a bit closer to the camp. The dog rode on the back of the snowmobile until we started to encounter stragglers of the main herd, which were grazing happily in twos and threes throughout a wooded area along the banks of the river.
Nikolai stopped the machine and dispatched the dog, which circled and ran, traced a bigger circle, nipping at the hooves of the animals it would collect, and ran again, while Nikolai bellowed instructions to turn the growing group right or left or to bring them forward. His voice grew hoarse as he and the dog chased one cluster of deer after another. Working in Y patterns, the pair of them went up one fork of the Y, turned the animals around, and united them with the rest of the herd. As the three of us watched in total amazement, they marched the whole group back through a natural corridor in the trees to the place where the diversion had happened. It was only when we were all together and following along behind that I realized Nikolai was actually driving the herd along the snowy surface right-of-way of a buried gas pipeline.
By now, the man, the dog, and the reindeer were one, moving south, slowly but surely, in an undulating line. Clearly, the reindeer were used to this. The dog worked the sides and, in doing so, set the direction of travel, while Nikolai ran the snowmobile at the back of the pack, sometimes driving close enough that snow flung from the rear animal’s splayed hooves would flip up over us. When Nikolai idled the machine to let the animals move ahead a bit, without the roar of the motor, we would hear the bells on some of the lead animals, animating a scene that has persisted, some would say, in spite of insurmountable odds.
With the herd settled like a hoarfrost ring around the camp, Nikolai gave a little lassoing demonstration before we moved back inside, surprising me with an invitation to take a couple of photos. After a couple of hours of running with a dog and a motorized man setting the pace, none of the reindeer seemed much interested in doing anything other than just standing there as Nikolai whirled his woven-leather line in the air and dropped it over their antlers. In the dying light of late afternoon, his two oldest boys chopped and split firewood from a pile of logs on a sled and stacked it neatly to one side of the chum. And inside, Oustinia was cuddling Yalanya and showing her how to wrap her doll in a kerchief, as she herself had been wrapped to ward off the cold not so long ago. The table was set again with sweets and tea, and we settled in for a second round of visiting before heading back to town.
What amazed me as Nikolai spoke, and Katya and Venera translated, was how remarkable it was that the Nenets people have persevered. As he talked, Nikolai reached behind the stove and pulled out a small case. He pointed to a wire leading up beside the tin chimney and out through the hole at the top of the chum.
“Cellphone antenna,” he said. “But the battery is flat right now. We use it only when we have to. We have a solar charger that we use for the phone and for this,” he explained, pulling out a laptop computer. “We are experimenting all the time with these things,” he said, “figuring out what will work and what will not work. Living in town is not the answer. We are reindeer people.”
But then came the pièce de résistance: he spoke to Oustinia, who handed him a one-litre plastic bottle full of what looked like green dishwashing soap. “This is concentrated cleaning solution,” he told us. “Being concentrated, it is excellent because we cannot have too much weight when we are moving. It is environment-friendly, which is important to us. And the manufacturer says that it has twenty-nine different uses. It can clean people or pots and pans, hands, hair…. We have tried all twenty-nine applications and found it to be an excellent product. We have even found a thirtieth use that the manufacturer doesn’t know about yet. We have found that it works well for curing reindeer skins.”
“Who makes it?” I had to ask.
“A company called Amway,” he said with no irony at all in his voice or his face. And with that, Nikolai launched into a story of how he went to a seminar in Yarsale, one of the towns they passed twice a year on the way from here to the summer grazing grounds in the north.
“It might have been sponsored by Gazprom,” he added. “I can’t remember.”
But, clearly, he had taken in everything that the good folks from Amway—short for “American Way”—had to say, as evidenced by his description of sales pyramids. He explained that if he became a distributor of the products, with his own customers, he would be able to purchase this soap and other Amway products suitable for the nomadic lifestyle for much less.
“Please,” he said, “take my card.” His business card had the logo of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, with its prominent reindeer and an oil derrick or gas flare poking out of a crown symbol and, of course, the characteristic tricoloured Amway logo as well.
A man with no fixed address had just handed me his business card.
“Yes,” he said, “our telephone number is on there and we have a postbox in Salekhard where mail can be sent. Please note that the card also has my dealer number on it. If you and your family ever need an Amway product, even back in Canada, just put my number on the order and our family will benefit.”
The Arctic trails have their secret tales.
With the kindness, patience, or perhaps curiosity of local people in Salekhard, time on the land with Viktor and Nikolai Laptender and their families led to an invitation to attend a meeting of a group called the Intelligence of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (elders representing Nenets, Khanty, Komi, and Mansi peoples of the Salekhard area). Because other meetings had run long, Katya and I were late and found a group of stone-faced people waiting in a government conference room, looking at their watches.
But after a round of apologies and some initial pleasantries, the elders took me one by one through what turned out to be a common story of steady migration of nomads to settlements, wit
h their complaint that Russian law gives the ones who remain on the land no real protection against the march of progress in the oil and gas industry. Each in turn talked about the seductive lure, especially for their young people, of TVs, computers, cellphones, and wage work to earn the cash to buy and service these attachments to the world outside. I asked whether they had been following the Arab Spring, where social media had been the vector of inclusion that was changing the politics of these places in front of the world’s eyes. “Not really,” was the answer.
But the talk of revolution struck a chord. One of the leaders agreed that it would take something like that to get the Russian government’s attention and make the process of law-making more responsive to the needs of indigenous peoples. However, Leonid Ivanovich Khudi, the Nenets representative, went into a long explanation of how that kind of fight, that kind of very public resistance to authority, was just not in his people’s nature. It was a moment that was so revealing and, in some ways, so sad. But it illustrated how these people, who were only a generation or so away from being pastoral nomads, have rolled with the world they’ve found themselves in.
The elder stopped and thought and said, “You know, the oil in Yamal is going to run out in thirty or forty years. And when it does, the reindeer-herding people will be prepared, still living on the land, still working with uncomplicated resources.”
“So you’re looking forward to when the oil runs out?” I asked, somewhat incredulous.
He broke a toothy smile and said, “Da, da, da, da, da.”
All of a sudden there was a strange and quite wonderful flush of optimism in the room. Everyone, it seemed, knew the situation for indigenous people in the face of ongoing development in Yamal was going to be a continuing struggle, but this man, Leonid Ivanovich Khudi, in his own quiet and lovely way, had broken through all that, if only for a moment.
The last stop in Salekhard and probably our most important meeting was with Sergey Nikolayevich Kharyuchi, the Nenets president of RAIPON, who had written and signed the all-important letter of support for my project. Thinking Kharyuchi would have another job to pay the bills—NGO work, worldwide, seems to be largely a labour of love with many rewards but sometimes some very modest remuneration—I had asked my hosts in Salekhard if they knew him and if we might catch up with him at some point to say hello and thank you.