by James Raffan
Our time together was running out. Petr Klimov explained that for many years he denied his Chuvan ancestry, but now he read in Chuvan to his children. As he was one of just two thousand Chuvan people left on the planet, Petr’s act of reading seemed futile in light of the metaphoric complexities that every language carried, beyond the literal meanings of the words.
The theme of the nuances embedded within language was one that I had heard at almost every stop along the way from Grímsey to Anadyr, and I was reminded of Mandar’s explanation of the three types of language. The baffling part of all this common understanding was that it didn’t register more forcefully. And the lessons about what was at stake when languages died were not limited, by any means, to the Arctic.
Petr explained that language was part of a much bigger picture, a more complex negotiation. He continued, adding the lawmaker’s perspective to the discussion. “There are federal laws regarding the rights of Native peoples,” he said. “Unfortunately, those laws are very formal. They talk about enabling municipalities to provide support to Native people through programs at that level. There is also a federal law on the books that has to do with local self-rule. But, at the municipal level, at the regional level, there is no mechanism to enact those laws. So nothing happens. We have raised this with committees looking at problems of the North. But I have to say we’re not having much luck.
“I can say that this issue with the Native people is a difficult one,” he said sadly. “When we visited Alaska and looked at land issues, mining interests, employment, and resource provisions, we were impressed with the amount of Native participation in those matters. If we had a system that worked like that, we could solve a lot of problems. My opinion is that our laws and our system for providing services for Native peoples in the North fall well behind international standards.”
“It is almost as if you are invisible, as if you have been invisible all these years,” I blurted out.
After murmurs of affirmation around the table, I heard about a new set of school textbooks that taught Russian not as an ethnic language but as a “government language.” “They want children, regardless of background, to come to learn to be Russian…. Put another way, they say that to be Russian is to be a citizen of Russia without ethnicity,” said Petr.
“How sad is that?” I asked under my breath.
“Of course,” Larissa said, “we often struggle to be Russian, but what we strive to be is Chukchi, Eskimo, Chuvan, Even, Yukaghir—whatever we were born. We have to regain our self-respect. We have to develop our trades. We must strive to preserve and develop the cultures of our ancestors. We understand that you cannot run from civilization. We have to find a compromise between traditions and progress.”
Knowing our time was over, I turned to Petr, struck by the resilience of these people and all that they have faced through the years, through the generations. I had to ask, “Where is the hope in all of this?”
Petr looked at me with his bright blue eyes and said, “For all its faults, the government of Chukotka has turned to face us. That gives me hope. We have agreements with the government to implement social programs. It shows us that cooperation is possible, even if progress is slow. The future of our children is what matters most to us. That is our goal, still.”
The next day, at Elena’s kitchen table in her two-room flat in Anadyr, Irina Tymnevye’s composed expression didn’t change but her beautiful Mongoloid eyes welled and tears dripped down her high cheekbones and onto her hand-crocheted top. At Elena’s invitation, Irina, in her thirties, and her fiftysomething sister-in-law, Tamara, had come to show me the human side of the processes that the politicians and community leaders had sketched out. Both grew up in Chukchi reindeer-herding families on the north slope of Chukotka, in the tundra hills overlooking Chaunskaya Bay more than four hundred kilometres northwest of Anadyr. Both had been removed by Russian authorities to residential school at age seven. And although they fondly remembered summers with their families on the tundra, neither had been back or would be going back, and that memory stung like a lash on raw skin.
With a sheaf of well-thumbed snapshots, set out on a glass tabletop among bowls of sugared blueberries, chocolate biscuits, dried reindeer, and chunks of beluga mattak (frozen whale skin that Elena kept on hand for her young son, Dani, whose father was Eskimo), Tamara pointed out her father, mother, sister, and brother among a sea of reindeer swirling around the yaranga where she was born on a very cold day, March 11, 1959. “We lived in our own world. We had no idea that there were other countries out there. Or that there were people fighting wars. Our world was the reindeer. We had everything we needed.”
In the fall of 1966, however, Tamara and the other boys and girls her age and older in the brigade were picked up by a Soviet Army helicopter and flown to Snezhnaya—a place called Snow Wind—to start school.
“It was a sorrow for the parents and a sorrow for the children,” she said quietly, “but that’s the way things worked back then. It was a shock to realize that the language we had been speaking since we were born was not the language that the teachers spoke. We didn’t even know simple words like “table” or “wall.” And the teachers made fun of us for that. We had grown up without electricity, without radio. We went from lamps that burned seamammal fat to light bulbs. It was very different. There were a lot of difficulties, a lot of stresses. But the happiest times were when our parents drove the reindeer close to Snezhnaya in the spring and we were able to spend the whole summer back in the yaranga, back with the family on the land, back speaking Chukchi.”
“Do you miss the times with your family on the land?” I asked.
“Well,” she replied, “life is easier here and it is nice to have money, but what I miss is family. For a long time, we had a band—tambourine, drum, tumran [jaw harp]. We sang and danced and performed around the place, which kept us together. I miss the reindeer, but I miss making music with the family as well.”
Twenty years younger than her sister-in-law, Irina was born in a hospital but she too had been taken to residential school. As she grew up, she gravitated toward town. Her parents still spent time on the land as part of the thirteen brigades that tended the herds roaming on lands surrounding the Tavaivaam settlement and collective farm, not too far from Anadyr. She recalled the days when there were fifty thousand reindeer roaming the tundra. She visited her parents when she could, living in the yaranga. But she also remembered the 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and those reindeer seemed to evaporate into thin air.
As she started to cry, lips quiverings, she recalled big celebrations, even as the herds were dwindling, in Anadyr. “Many people came from the tundra by dogsled and by reindeer sleds to take part in celebrations. We got together and exchanged skins and things that had been made. We dressed in our best fur clothing. Reindeer were tied up to blocks of flats, and it seemed completely normal. People didn’t even notice when that was happening.”
After pausing to collect herself, she carried on. “But there came a point when my parents had no reindeer and couldn’t participate anymore. They decided to move off the land. They decided to move to town. But rather than let their yaranga and their sleds and harnesses and all their things gradually rot away on the tundra, they decided …”
She paused again and just stopped talking, as the intensity of the memory shook through her small frame. Head lowered, she said in barely a whisper, “They took their yaranga and all their everyday things and burned them. They didn’t need that anymore.”
“That is so sad,” was all I could muster in response. “Were you there when that happened?”
“No,” she replied, looking up at me, “I was studying here in Anadyr. I did not see it with my own eyes but many people told me of this. It was sad. Yes. But they had no choice. They said they were right to do that. I think I agree. It would have been a lot more difficult to see the yuranga spoiled during the years that no one was using it.”
“How will your daughter Katya’s c
hildren remember that history?” I asked, nodding to the five-year-old who was now roaring around the kitchen floor with her toddler friend, Elena’s son Dani.
“I don’t know. When my mother was alive, she taught my elder daughter the Chukchi language. She told her stories of being on the land and taught her Chukchi ways. But now that she is gone, there is no one to teach Katya those things. I remember, but my life has been more in town since I left the yaranga to attend school.” She sobbed, choking up again. “I guess she will learn by our stories, spoken in Russian.”
“What does the future hold for the Chukchi herders?” I ventured.
This time Tamara again joined the conversation. She too had been swept up in the quiet flood of emotion that surrounded us all. “What does the future hold?” she repeated. There was a long pause and a sigh. “It is difficult to say. It is difficult to answer. I suspect that if our dead ancestors were to arise from their graves, they would be shocked, because they could not have imagined the situation when we do not know our language, when we drink, when we die out. It would be a shock to them.”
That evening, as I walked down the hill and back to the nicest hotel in town (the only one that accepted CP holders), I was glad to be out in the twilight of the midnight sun and back breathing clear Arctic air. Although the conversation with Tamara and Irina had not been totally devoid of hope, it had certainly sucked the air out of the room. On the way I passed huge murals painted on the windowless end walls of brightly striped Abramovich apartment blocks. One showed a huge raven standing on an outcropping of rock overlooking a wild tundra landscape. The other showed a larger-than-life polar bear swimming toward the corner of the building.
With Tamara’s and Irina’s faces and stories still very much front of mind, I attended my last event in Anadyr, which was an evening with the local indigenous cultural association. “Come in, come in,” the organizers said, as if the nondescript classroom in which they were meeting was a grand ballroom. In chairs around the perimeter of the room were a couple of dozen people from eight to eighty, each one proudly decked out in traditional Eskimo, Chukchi, and other national outfits. Elena and I were offered seats at the front before a coffee table festooned with samplings of “this year’s harvest,” including mattk, dried reindeer meat, berries, and caviar on freshly baked bread.
In the manner of a ringmaster or impresario, the charming convener of the gathering, a Chukchi woman called Viktoria, stepped forward in her blue calico summer parka and redoubled the warm and expansive welcome that showed in people’s faces. “Today we will show you,” she said, sweeping her arm from one side of the room to the other, lighting up smiles as she pointed, “how we preserve the traditions of Chukchi people, culture, and language. We have representatives from our public organization. The chief of the Eskimo, or Yupik, group is here, as a representative of Chukchi and other ethnic peoples who have lived here for eons. We have young singers, dancers, and musicians from the Children’s School of the Arts who will perform for you.”
Viktoria continued, “Our honoured guests are also some of our finest writers and poets in the Chukchi language. We will show you some of our arts and crafts, like an exhibit of walrus tusk carving and Eskimo ball making, and also some models of skin houses and boats that we use in the schools to teach our young people about the traditions of our ancestors. You must understand that we all come from different villages across Chukotka, but we now live and work here in Anadyr. Later, everyone will speak briefly about themselves, and we will ask you to tell us about your project.”
The room in which this remarkable cultural demonstration would be given was modest, to say the least. It was about the size of a normal elementary school classroom, with a suspended ceiling and fluorescent light fixtures. Light streamed in from a bank of windows covered with drawn white blinds to filter the energy of the Arctic evening sun. There was a desk in one corner. Smaller tables had been pushed to the walls and were covered with samples of sewing, artwork, and crafts. All the chairs had been moved to the end, by the teacher’s desk, and set up in theatre-style rows to allow something of a stage area to be set out in the middle of the room.
The walls were papered with black-and-white images of elders and traditional activities on the land: reindeer herding, reindeer riding, berry picking, walrus hunting, yaranga life. The room was clean and tidy and clearly loved by these people, but what animated it was the energy of a group ready to put on their best face for a visitor. In months of travel eastward along the Arctic Circle from Iceland I had never been physically so close to home—after all, North America was only 90 kilometres away—and yet I had never felt so utterly distant either, having traversed eight time zones and 6,400 kilometres from Moscow—fifteen time zones and 14,000 kilometres from Toronto—to get here. But somehow, when I stepped over the threshold of this cross-cultural meeting place, any geographic, cultural, or language barrier had vanished.
Inside this remarkable bubble, a trio of girls in matching foxtrimmed summer parkas danced through a series of stylized domestic chores, while another small group of ladies sang of life on the land to the beat of a drum skinned with walrus stomach. That was followed by eleven-year-old Michael (Misha) Golbtsev, in a white cotton tunic trimmed with blue, expressively enacting a hunting story in a beguiling dance with a wooden spear as a partner.
If the girls’ practised movements were elegant in a danceclass kind of way, Misha’s movements, down to the tips of his fingers in beaded gloves and the tips of his toes in soft reindeer-hide moccasins, were positively balletic, as he searched, stalked, and speared his prey before dragging it home to camp with a leather rope slung over his shoulder. “In small settlements along the coast,” Elena whispered, “these activities are still going on, but for the most part, these dances are how they are living in the minds and hearts of children in town.”
An older Chukchi teen then stepped forward and talked of his journey to learn to play the vargan, or jaw harp. He had travelled to take master classes with players in the settlements and had learned a number of songs and techniques that, like the dances, connected him to his roots. With a combination of breathing and playing that emulated a screaming reindeer—a sound that every herder had to recognize instantly, no matter how faint, because in the safety and well-being of the reindeer was the safety and well-being of the people—he captivated the house. I thought of Mandar at his kitchen table and the woman in the Khanty winter house in Kyshik, turning their bodies into instruments by breathing through a piece of vibrating reindeer shin bone like the wind over snowswept tundra.
Next up was a filmmaker, who spoke of his efforts to capture and record the stories and faces and language of the elders. Master craftspeople then showed their work and talked about the process of keeping the traditions alive—I watched as a dog team on winter tundra emerged from the practised chisel scratches of beautiful, expressive aged hands on polished ivory. I was surprised to see these scrimshaw patterns enriched with stains from ordinary coloured pencils rubbed into the ivory with spittle from the old woman’s tongue and oil from her fingers.
Another woman juggled two ornate Eskimo balls made of sealskin in her hands as she talked about how these “circles within circles allow us to capture and keep the image of the sun. After the long polar night, the sun rises and greets every person in the settlement. To children it is just a ball or a toy, but the ball’s symbolic value is never lost. To pass on a ball is to give a gift of the sun.”
There was an old lady who talked about how writing was used to capture some essence of local ethnography. “I have been playing with words since I was very young, but I only started writing poetry in 2001, for my children.” She read a poem in Chukchi about her young son coming home dirty and how important that was because it showed that he was out learning from the land. “Most of my poems are about the tundra because the tundra charms me,” she said. “I never grumbled when my son came home dirty because this was part of our tradition.” This made people in the room laugh. Clearl
y, she was a much loved voice in the Chukchi literary community. She finished by saying she would like to read one of her favourites.
The room was instantly silent, except for Irina, my translator, who breathed English words in echo to those being spoken in Chukchi:
Look intently into the tender tundra
How it is quiet and calm
Inviting snow lies all around the quiet
The blizzard is sleeping
Don’t wake it up
This brought clapping and laughter from throughout the room.
At this point, it was Viktoria’s turn. She picked up some of the models—of a sled, snowshoes, a kayak, an umiak, and a yaranga—and began to tell her story. She had been an elementary school teacher on the coast in a little town called Uelen. Uelen, on the northwest corner of a lagoon protected by a sandspit on the point of Chukotka closest to Alaska, had always been a meeting place. At the time of my visit, it had a population of about eight hundred, she thought, but in the Soviet period this settlement had received people from communities like Nunak, Imaklik, Uyagak, and Mamrokhpak, which were officially closed. The residents were moved first to a settlement called Naukan and then to Uelen. There were local children in her school, but there were also many children who had been displaced from other communities and who, like Irina and Tamara, were removed from their families at seven years of age and whisked off to residential school by law. The same practice was continuing under the Russian Federation.
Holding up one of the models, she said, “These are to show our children the lives of our ancestors. This sled, these boats are made without a single nail. They are tied together with strips of leather, sometimes from seal or walrus, sometimes from reindeer. For the boats, the covering was always the hide of the female walrus because it is much smoother than the hide of the male walrus.”