by James Raffan
As she went on, I could see just how wilful and persistent and systematic the Chukchi people have been, working to preserve and maintain their traditions and livelihoods in the face of devastatingly overwhelming odds against living in this place: the coldest, most inhospitable place on earth outside of Antarctica, but also a place that has suffered the ravages of human conquest through wars, disease, and sheer brutality since the Cossacks first arrived in 1742. There was beauty alive in this room; there had been since the moment we’d arrived.
Through seventy years of total oppression, during which it was forbidden by law to practise Native religions—any religion at all, for that matter—or to carry forward any language or tradition if it was not Russian; through forced relocations and the killing of shamans or any contrarian; through generations and decades of interventions by administrations who have done everything they could possibly think of to Russify these nomads, the indigenous fire still burns.
Elena and I got into the van to head across town to my hotel. Just as the giant raven mural rolled into view, it dawned on me that when I’d first laid eyes on that raven image, presiding over an undeveloped landscape, it spoke to me of an absence of people. But that night I wondered if the raven was the people, hiding in plain sight. Maybe the bear was the same.
15: FATE CONTROL
Although Chukotka actually hangs over the 180th meridian and the International Date Line and, on a good day, you might paddle a kayak east along the Arctic Circle to landfall in Alaska, because of Russian travel restrictions that were in place at the time, the only way home from Anadyr was to go west through Magadan, Moscow, Frankfurt, Washington, and Ottawa. Mercifully, the aged and comfort-challenged Russian plane on Flight 512 from Anadyr to Magadan had been replaced by a sparkling new Air Yakutia Boeing 757-200 leased from (and maintained by) Icelandair, in yet another creative collaboration between circumpolar nations. After half a world of Arctic experiences over nearly twenty-four months, there was something salutary in seeing my name in Cyrillic letters (my modest progress in learning to read simple Russian added its own measure of comfort) on a westbound boarding pass headed for home.
The day was crystal clear, even as we flew over great expanses of Siberian plains, wide winding Arctic rivers, and mountain ranges with their own little weather systems brewing at ground level. At one point, having arced north again on a great circle route, the shortest way to reach Moscow, we passed over mighty Eh-Beh and then over the scar of the mining town of Udachny on the Arctic Circle in western Yakutia. In their wisdom, the Soviets had approved a scheme to open a diamond mine there by exploding a 1.7-kilotonne nuclear bomb underground in 1974. It didn’t go well, and they stopped doing that; but they weren’t able to get close enough to cap the site at Udachny with twenty metres of concrete until 1992. Looking down from ten thousand metres, I wondered how the invisible reindeer people felt about that.
It’s not that the indigenous people of the North have been totally invisible. Hundreds, even thousands of anthropologists, ethnologists, and social scientists have documented their travails in a myriad of ways since the beginning of their contact with outsiders. But as I thought about my snapshots taken at hearths and kitchen tables nearly halfway around the Arctic Circle, it was as if those fierce and gentle souls, those loud and quiet voices from the land, never had a chance. They welcomed the invaders into their chums, their yarangas, and their worlds, and yet social Darwinism had prevailed. The Western way would win, or try to win, all in the name of progress or national pride and security. The North was a place of discovery that became a repository of resources and, in Russia, a convenient backwater where dissidents would build the roads and miners would do the state’s bidding as if the land were devoid of people or a culture of its own.
At best, when the people who lived there had entered the equation, they were a curiosity, a living museum, perhaps another source of cheap labour or proof of occupancy. In spite of the fact that peoples like the Sami, the Komi, the Nenets, the Yukaghirs, the Sakha, the Chuvans, the Evens, the Evenks, the Chukchi, and the Yupik had gotten along on their own for millennia, it was up to the conqueror to determine their fate and destiny from the moment of contact. The human traditions of these northern peoples were irrelevant. The bulldozing of these peoples, languages, and ways was of little consequence. It had happened in Africa. It had happened in Asia. It had happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Middle East. And here in the North it was happening again, right in front of our eyes in real time. And yet the central element of the Chukotkan coat of arms, the poster child of informed compassionate progress, was the polar bear.
I opened my tray table, flipped open my computer, and pulled up the Arctic Council’s latest statement on the well-being of northern peoples, the Arctic Social Indicators report, published by the Nordic Council of Ministers in Copenhagen in 2010. Following up on the first social-science-driven study commissioned by the eight-nation Arctic Council, called the Arctic Human Development Report, the Arctic Social Indicators study was an attempt to put in place a systematic process for fathoming the human dimensions of the circumpolar North. The authors began with three indicators from the United Nations Human Development Index—health and population; material well-being; and education—and added to these “fate control,” meaning the extent to which northern peoples are guiding their own destiny; “cultural integrity,” meaning the extent to which individuals belong to a viable local culture; and “contact with nature,” referring to the necessary connections between language, human enterprise, and the natural world.
Given the number of academics and researchers in eight countries who had contributed to this work, the report was surprisingly elegant in its design, execution, and presentation. From a host of possible indicators, the field of possible data sets was assessed and narrowed on the basis of what information was available, how hard that information was to collect if it was not currently available, how valid and reliable the information was, and whether the information was scalable from individuals to communities, regions, and beyond. Grigori Tynankergav, the member of the Chukotka Duma, had said the situation with Native people in Russia was complex; this report showed very clearly that he was an absolute master of understatement.
The only indicator that really resonated with me was “fate control.” “Nobody ever asks us what we think,” said person after person in one way or another on my travels. But Petr Klimov had said, “The government of Chukotka has turned to face us.” And in that, he found hope. With that, and with an acknowledgement by all parties that self-determination matters, everything else could fall into place.
The ASI report read as follows:
Fate control, or the lack of it, can be experienced at the personal, household, community, and regional levels. Finnmark County in Norway, Greenland, Nunavut in Canada, or Sakha Republic in Russia may experience economic and political dependence on, respectively, Oslo, Copenhagen, Ottawa, or Moscow. Smaller communities in each of these regions may experience a lack of control in relation to the regional centre, Alta, Nuuk, Iqaluit, or Yakutsk, respectively. Individuals and households in an Arctic community may experience more or less control over their fate than do their neighbors, depending on their capacities and resources. Yet it is the collective control of fate that seems of critical concern to Arctic residents. Many communities and regions of the Arctic endure a residual dependence on outsiders, who play a major role in administering political, economic, and cultural institutions even at a local level, and notably on a higher scale. Boombust economic cycles characterize large parts of the Arctic, with concomitant high unemployment and underdevelopment in many regions, and dependence on transfer payments.
The breakdown of possible indicators of fate control was interesting. Under the heading of political power and activism, what was the level of participation and influence in local politics? How strong was the political resistance? What was the proportion of local personnel in key decision-making positions? Who had control over place
names? Who owned the rights to land and sea resources? In the economic realm, what was the level of self-generated income, and was it sufficient? Who had control of the local economy? In the broader sphere of knowledge construction, who had access to what information, who controlled the schools, and who controlled knowledge and information about politics? What was the language of power, and what was the retention rate of local indigenous languages?
On my journey so far I had seen that fate control for indigenous northerners, however measured, had often been so low that the hopelessness of the situation was reflected in levels of alcoholism, suicide, unemployment, and anomie many times the national and even international averages. The question was, how do you write “fate control” into even short-term development plans for the North when the pressing question of what was in the larder was singularly motivating everybody to focus on resource extraction? History seemed to indicate that it was impossible. Until we found the answer to that question, the future of the small peoples of the North would hang, still and always, somewhere between invisibility and active disregard, destined for almost certain cultural oblivion.
And still there were glimmers of hope, like a constellation of possibility across winter darkness of the back side of the circumpolar moon, not least the funnelling of funds from the Kupol gold mine into Aleksei Vakhrushev’s film about reindeer herding in Chukotka. In this sense, my journey across Russia ended where it began.
Flashing back to the table in the RAIPON office in Moscow, I could see the humble Chukchi filmmaker explaining with smouldering passion his project to voice the old ways in the new world. Now that I had been to Chukotka, I had a much better sense of what was at stake and how he had raised the funds to make his film. I had found Aleksei’s trail in Magadan and Kupol and again in Anadyr, when people spoke of his work and told me about his grant from the Kupol Social Development Foundation.
Not long after my return to Canada, in the spring of 2012, Aleksei brought his award-winning film—The Tundra Book: A Tale of Vukvukai, the Little Rock—to the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, and I was able to see this remarkable work that had followed me, in a way, right across Siberia. It was a lyrical and arresting film that asked the viewer to take a breath and slow down. The story followed seventy-two-year-old Vukvukai—a Chukchi patriarch they called “the little rock”—through the seasons of the deer and the people with whom they intertwine. Except for occasional clues in clothing and equipment like knives and binoculars, it seemed almost impossible to believe that there were people living this self-sufficiently in the twenty-first century. Food, shelter, clothing, cordage, locomotion, transportation—all came from the reindeer.
In fact, Aleksei did not dwell on interactions with the world outside the cycles of the reindeer much at all, choosing to show Russian traders turning up with manufactured goods in tracked snow vehicles as if they were Martians from outer space. They communicated with the outside world with a wind-up two-way radio. The film was an engaging portrait of human enterprise that blurred the line, if there was one at all, between man and nature. It was as if Vukvukai and his family were one living breathing entity—right until the end of the film, when the spell was broken by the whack and whine of a government Sikorsky helicopter, coming in late summer to pick up the children in a whirl of Russian dust to take them off to residential school.
Goodbyes were said and the same fur-clad children who had played and learned so contentedly in the yaranga and on the windblown snow were drawn away from their parents in store-bought clothes and into the maw of a manmade machine. As the turbines spooled up, the steps were pulled up into the aging Mi-8 helicopter. Sad little sunny faces could be seen pressed against the convex windows.
Cut to a close-up on the face of Vukvukai, the old herder, who normally had all the answers but was clearly at a loss. In subtitles, he said: “Why does the helicopter take them away? The boys and the girls. It’s like it takes them to prison. And this is the end. They get used to living there. And they won’t work in tundra. They don’t want to. They will live over there. They’ll become drunks. Or they’ll end up in the grave.Just imagine—ten months of residential school and only two months in the tundra. It’s like prison. Why are they doing this to our kids? The world has turned upside down. And then they’ll leave their mother, leave their father. You see, in this tent, in that tent, their kids didn’t come back. Why do they have this law? It is a stupid law.”
Lest the film media not hear the call to action at the end of his 112-minute documentary, Aleksei took every opportunity, in far better English than he ever let on having when we spoke in Moscow through an interpreter, to hammer his point home again and again. When he won the prestigious NIKA award for best documentary from the Russian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 2011, he reiterated his message on stage: “I am holding this award, the five-hundredth NIKA,” he said, “and I see it not only as recognition of the merits of our film, but also as recognition of the rightness of the film’s protagonist. I wish his point of view to be heard in some higher quarters. I wish that a more flexible law of the universal secondary education is adopted, so the residential schools can be closed and these reindeer-herders, Chukchi and other indigenous people that still retain their identity, stay alive. Let them live!”
In coverage of Aleksei’s big win, I saw an indigenous man with a voice, speaking proudly about what concerned him. I saw a man controlling his own fate, or at least trying to with every bone in his body. But the significance of something else wasn’t lost on me: in the credits, though buried among other acknowledgements and thank yous, was recognition of the Kupol foundation in helping to bring that voice, that creative energy, that compelling story to market.
Contemplating the second half of my journey, I sat at the kitchen table on a fine autumn day staring off into space. In front of me was the polar projection of the northern hemisphere, with little Post-it flags on all the stops I’d already made. Underneath the map was a sheaf of trail-worn journals that was growing by the minute. With 210 degrees of longitude behind me, I had about 150 yet to go, through Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, before I would cross over the Denmark Strait and back to Iceland.
Gail, having long since rolled with my yawning absences, was out for the day. My keys still fit the locks. The dog hadn’t barked at me when I arrived home from the airport. And our two daughters, although they had more or less flown the coop since graduating from university, were present in the room, as was Gail, in a collage of family photos in frames hung on the kitchen wall. Suddenly I was awash in guilt. What had Gail and I ever done to deserve this privilege? And why was there not more generosity of spirit among the many who inhabit the middle latitudes, when we had so much?
Here we were, consuming with abandon, fretting about climate change, apparently oblivious to the fact that the attitudes and appetites driving global warming were no different from those that had powered policies of conquest and assimilation in the North. We talked of sovereignty and the resource potential of the North while northerners watched their land base and the sustenance it provided shrink with each passing season. They watched their babies die from disease and overcrowding. They worried about clean water and food security. They buried their elders, who took with them the last words of languages derived from a relationship with the land, knowing in their guts that it was possible to die of a broken heart. And they looked to the future, as they buried their teens, too many of whom have died at their own hands, suspended in a cultural muddle between cellphones and spears. And still, with unquenchable beauty and courage, they welcomed us.
16: NINETY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SOURDOUGH
The Arctic Circle comes ashore on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. The nearest town, Shishmaref, is an Inupiaq community of about six hundred souls that had been in the news almost enough to make it a household name in the early years of the twenty-first century. Because of the way that changing sea conditions—rising water levels, less sea ice, shorter winter season, fiercer storms—h
ad been eroding the land on which this little village was located, Al Gore, among others, had taken to calling the residents of Shishmaref the “first victims of climate change,” as they watched buildings on the edge of their community fall into the roiling waters of the Chukchi Sea.
As I planned the next leg of my journey, a web search revealed the site of the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition, founded in 2001. Its newsletter of August 2005, the latest on the site, mentioned that media coverage over the previous year had brought to town representatives from Time, National Geographic, Alaska Public Radio, HBO, and a host of other outlets including the National Radio of Switzerland, ZDF German Television, the Swedish newpaper Svenska Dagbladet, and a French production company called Miroir Film.
A link led me to an elaborate website for a film called The Last Days of Shishmaref: An Inupiaq Community Swallowed by the Sea. A team including a Dutch large-format photographer, Dana Lixenberg, a web documentary maker, Jan Louter, and a filmmaker, Melle van Essen, were drawn by the worldwide attention surrounding the beleaguered community. They had found their way to Shishmaref in 2007 and captured an uncomfortably intimate portrait of faces, voices, and living conditions. Their work had been released the following year through multiple platforms—film, book, web—to great acclaim from almost every artistic and environmental organization.
The web documentary included Lixenberg’s superb photographs, clips from van Essen’s film coverage, and stories in the voices of the people of Shishmaref, interwoven with a theatrical-trailer-style narration and an orchestral score including Inupiaq drums. It had a kind of elegiac quality. That tone, combined with the definitive past tense “swallowed” in the film’s title—it didn’t say the community was “being swallowed” or was “soon to be swallowed”—did nothing to convey that there was a process under way here. No, Shishmaref appeared to be a community that had been swallowed by the sea: past tense, done deal.