Summer on the Kanin Peninsula

As promised I am giving a short report about my summer experiences with the reindeer herders on the Kanin peninsula before telling you about my visit to their camps this winter.

It was quite difficult to reach the Kanin peninsula from my starting point, the city of Naryan-Mar. Without the help of our partners, in particular the Association of Nenets People “Yasavey”, foremost Galina Platova and Aleksandr Belugin, I would not have been able to organise transport and the border zone permission. In Naryan-Mar, Galina introduced me to Natasha Latysheva, the head of the house of culture of the village of Nes, the place where most of the Kanin Nenets and Komi live nowadays. Natasha provided me with a list of elders I should meet and organised my stay in the village.

The church in the village of Nes

Why the village of Nes? It’s one of the westernmost villages where Nenets reindeer herders live nowadays and it seems that anthropological fieldwork concentrated so far mostly on the so called Boleshezemelskaia Tundra, the eastern part of the European Nenets area. The Kanin Nenets were the first who established close ties with the Russian settlers and came into contact with Christianity. They experienced a wave of Komi and Nenets immigrants from the eastern tundra in the 19^th century due to reindeer epidemics that broke out there. That’s why Yasavey suggested going to the Kanin Nenets, where Galina Platova herself comes from.

Kanin reindeer herders

The one month in the Kanin Tundra became crucial for my work to study the oral history of Nenets, because this is the place most of the stories I recorded in the village originate from. Often people asked me, especially in the capital Naryan-Mar, why it would not be sufficient to just visit the village and record the old people there. I think it wouldn’t have worked for two reasons. The first reason was trust. My interlocutors have to be sure that I am able to understand what they are telling me. Why would they tell somebody about their life in the tundra who has absolutely no clue what it means to live there? The second reason was to get to know the social context in which the stories appear and that forms the collective memory of the reindeer herders. I wanted to know more about everyday life where knowledge about the past is passed on from one generation to the next and some memories are recalled and others silenced.

Nobody in the village of Nes wondered about my wish to visit the herders. A lot of people tried to help me and gave me good advice on how to get to the reindeer herders who were at that time on the very northern part of the Kanin peninsula. I used my time in Nes waiting for transportation to the tundra to visit and record the Nenets elders. My Nenets guide Volodia Ardeev took me to his 92 year old grandmother Nadezhda Fiodorovna Ardeeva, the oldest inhabitant of the village. I spend almost a whole day listening to the amazing stories and going through the huge photo archive of this so very hospitable lady.

Nadezhda Fiodorovna Ardeeva

I managed to convince the head of the Committee for Indigenous Affairs of the Nenets region to reserve me a place on the helicopter transporting the college students to their parents in the tundra. At the airport I was able to see with my own eyes the consequence of one of the biggest problems of the Kanin peninsula nowadays, the lack of transport infrastructure. Only by chance did I manage to obtain one of the rare flight tickets from Naryan-Mar to Nes, but then in Nes there was an almost fighting crowd around the helicopter. People tried to use the rare possibility to send something to their relatives in the tundra, like letters or parcels. The lack of any organised way to go aboard and to take or send luggage produced a real chaos around the entrance. The flight personal started to threaten people that they would not take anybody or anything on board at all and I started to lose hope that I would make it. But in the end my place on the helicopter was affirmed by some official and I could enter.

When I arrived at the campsite of brigade Nr. 3 I felt quite relieved. I was invited by the family Vokuev with whose daughter Svetlana I had shared the helicopter. The campsite had the name Langudo. Immediately I became acquainted with the oldest reindeer herder of the community, Vasili Ananevich Kaniukov of the neighbouring 4^th brigade. He became one of the most interesting interlocutors among the Kanin reindeer herders. He very carefully chose the information he thought was appropriate to share with me and I could feel that he was always aware of the context and the practical use of some of the stories he told me. He cared a lot about my ability to understand things correctly and the consequences of revealing knowledge about places and the past.

Vasili Ananevich Kaniukov

Together with the Vokuevs I took part in the everyday life of the camp. We rounded up the reindeer, harnessed them for driving on the sledges, went fishing, and after several days travelled with the whole household to the next campsite. The ten-year-old boy Tima taught me how to drive the reindeer sledge over the tundra in summer. The reindeer herders suggested that I should travel from the 3rd brigade to the West to visit a couple of other brigades and arrive after one month at the campsite where the “Day of the Reindeer”, the most important feast of the reindeer herders would take place at the beginning of August. This way I had the chance to visit the brigades Nr. 3, 4, 6, and 7 and at the celebration the camp of the brigade Nr. 9.

Tima and his reindeer sledge

I was surprised to meet almost no elderly reindeer herders in the brigades and was told that nowadays they prefer to leave the tundra for the village, when they reach retirement age at 55. In some of the brigades there are only young and inexperienced herders who do the work and there is no way to learn from the experience of the older generation.

On my question why the pensioners prefer to leave the tundra I got a variety of answers. I could summarise them in the following way: deteriorating living conditions in the tundra and an insecure future for reindeer herding made the state sponsored houses in the village a desirable option and pensioners prefer to move there. These feelings are linked to the difficult economic situation of the reindeer cooperative “Kanin”. The wages are ridiculously low and the cooperative buys meat for a very low price because of the expensive transportation costs to the market. From the perspective of the reindeer herders the situation seems hopeless and they think they have no influence on the decision-making of the management of the cooperative.

New build houses for the reindeer herders in Nes

The illegal shooting of their livestock by villagers is one of the urgent problems. Even the reindeer herders refer to the slaughter of their own animals as poaching as everybody does. Despite the fact that nobody would call a thief or somebody who killed domestic animals in the village a poacher, the killing of reindeer seems to be considered by the public opinion still a minor offence.

The feeling of ignorance towards the reindeer herders culture have yet another source. Almost everybody mentioned sooner or later the sacred place for all the herders at the “Kuzmin’s Grove” and everybody complained that it became a rubbish dump. Since the winter road from the town of Mezen to the village of Nes was constructed through the forest, people leave whatever they feel like, mostly broken and useless things as “offerings” on the trees. This contradicts the idea of a place for religious sacrifices. The place that is of such a great cultural and spiritual significance to the Nenets urgently needs to be rescued and its protected status has to be restored. If the situation does not change, it will add every year to the herders feeling of being defenceless and ignored in their identity as they cross that place on their way to their winter pastures.

The difficulty of obtaining healthcare in the tundra is another reason that motivates the elder reindeer herders to move to the village. The brigades still have no satellite phones and it’s quite difficult to call a rescue helicopter in a case of emergency with the old radio. The brigades can only radio the closest settlement two fixed times per day to order a helicopter from Naryan Mar if weather permits. The “Red chum” project that provided medical help and cultural services in the summer season had not visited the tundra for several years.

Vladimir Chuprov and his nephew

These problems sound serious of course, but after a month of living with the reindeer herders in the tundra, I don’t feel as gloomy about the future as several reindeer herders do. There are still possibilities for change. There are still parents who know the native languages and were able to teach them to the younger generation, there are still elders that would be happy to work in the local kindergarten to speak in their language to the smallest kids, and there are still young people who would like to become reindeer herders. Most importantly, there are still Komi and Nenets that prefer the freedom of the nomadic lifestyle to the comfortable life in the village. The situation will probably change if the reindeer herders start to believe again in the future of reindeer herding and reindeer herding culture.

Tents of the Kanin reindeer herders

It’s too early of course to draw any conclusions of the research yet and there are more open questions than answers. It’s striking that the Kanin reindeer herders are the only ones in the waste Nenets tundra from the Kola peninsula to the Yenissei river that changed the conical tent called chum to a rectangular tent with mostly a half round roof. The success lies probably in the fact that it was not as most of the innovations in Soviet times planned and designed by specialists in the centres but an invention of the reindeer herders themselves to make setting it up easier and the construction lighter. Another important question for further investigation will be the traditionally strong social ties to the Russian settler communities near the winter pastures in the Arkhangelsk region. In former times, there existed a forest type of reindeer herding in that region as well that was practiced round the year in the south. I’m very interested in the connection between the perception of the landscape and the historic memory of reindeer herders that is linked to place names and stories about remarkable places that are often linked to the unusual and the supernatural.

Winners of the sports competition at the “Day of the Reindeer”

All my work and research completely depends on the help and support of my local partners. I owe the families a special debt of gratitude, especially the families of Latyshev and Ardeev and the Kanin reindeer herders for their hospitality. I hope that together we will be able to obtain the results of our research that will be first of all available and interesting to the local communities themselves.

Late Winter in Arkhangelsk and Pinega

After the month I spent with the reindeer herder on the Kanin peninsula in summer (I will give an overview in the next post), my plan was to visit them at their winter pastures in the Arkhangelsk region some hundreds kilometres further south of Kanin.

Lenin on the main square in Arkhangelsk

I thought I could visit the 7^th brigade of the reindeer cooperative “Obshina Kanin” and then travel up to the north to the village of Nes’ to interview some elders there. But I need a border zone permit from the border guard in Arkhangelsk to be allowed to enter the territory next to the cost and the villages there including Nes’. To get one takes weeks and weeks. I got one in summer, but it took also a long time. Hopefully I’ll get the permit in April, when I’m returning to the region.

After staying in Arkhangelsk for almost a week waiting the permit I went to the big village (an former small town) of Pinega to visit at least the reindeer herders staying outside the border zone.

The German communist Otto Handwerg (Отто Гандшерг, on the lower right) emmigrated to the USSR and was executed during the party cleansing in 1937. His family was banished to Pinega subsequently. Display in the Pinega museum.

I visited the nice local museum here in Pinega and was surprised to learn how diverse influences shaped the local history. A lot of newcomers came against their will to Pinega: banished left wing revolutionaries, poets, intellectuals searching for unspoiled Russian folk life, American soldiers during the the civil war, banned Ukrainian peasants accused of being too wealthy and than the long row of “enemies of the people”: the opposition within the Russian left, the party members that were decimated, the suspicious nations like the Germans, even the families of executed German communists – became either settlers in special villages or inmates in the Gulag camps on the river Kuloi.

Houses of the rich merchant family Volodin in Pinega

From the abolishment of the Gulag under Khrushchev on the town seem to have shrunk in importance and only a few remaining trader’s houses witness the pre-Soviet wealth.

Communicating with the camera

After the long interviews that in some cases went over hours and hours I usually tell my interlocutors, that I want to take a picture of them, that I need a portrait for my work. The first reaction is in most of the cases shyness.

Marfa Prokopievna Laptander

Some take refuge to the excuse that they are not well dressed or coiffured or just don’t like to be photographed. The reaction is very similar to that before the interview. The first reaction then is usually also refusal: „I don’t know anything interesting.“ „My life has nothing to do with history.“ But I don’t need much insistence and the elders start to tell their stories and sometimes cannot find an end.

Paraskovia Savvateevna Ledkova

Sometimes I have the impression that the initial refusal is more a kind of cultural convention to avoid the impression of self-praise. The appropriate form of giving information about oneself is the personal song for the Nenets, and people tell me that a person usually sings that song about oneself only if she or he is drunk. Afterwards these songs has to be performed by others.

Aleksandr Nikiforovich Taleev

The dialogue about ones personal life and experiences is therefore relatively new among the Nenets.

And I am just a beginner in learning the appropriate way of communicating in the Nenets society. Of course my former experiences with the Khanty and Forest Nenets reindeer herders, and probably my family background helps me to develop intuitively the art of dialogue that consists of swinging between close contact and letting loose. Contact is established with questions, eye contact and giving feedback with voice and head movements. At time it is appropriate to avoid eye contact, looking together out of the window and letting thoughts develop their own way. People can dive deep into their memories that way.

Look out of the kitchen window in Khongurei

But one has also to let room for silence, for the thoughts to get formulated. And one has to allow for changing the topic, for silencing certain themes, avoiding certain answers, and veiling the wounds that live left on the soul.

Elizaveta Filippovna Khatanseiskaia

Of course it seems sometimes as if one gets lost in nostalgia or in kitschy ethnographic self-presentations. It helps nothing than as to be patient and wait until the interlocutor opens up again and share more individual and personal experiences.

The same sensitivity mixed with persistence is needed to make the portrait after the interview. I don’t like the flash and I don’t like the artificial light so I prefer to make a close picture with eye contact just on the kitchen table where the interview usually happens.

Stalina Yakovlevna Taleeva

Strangely as a rule either the first or the last picture in the series of photographs I make comes out to be the best portrait. There are people that are relaxed at the beginning and start to tense up after some time. The other kind of people give up their ready made photo-face only some time after, when they get tired to keep it all the time. I would not say that they take of the mask. I don’t believe, that their is anything else than the different social faces that are enacted all the time. But I try to create a more dialogical, a more open and telling portrait of these old people.

Ekaterina Nikitichna Bobrikova

Their faces seem to tell already through their physical appearance about the history of communication and interaction that is life. All the mimics, the movements, the enacted roles and told stories left traces in their muscles and on their skin. If the portrait succeeded it expresses openness and closeness at the same time. The face is a mask to hide behind and to speak through.

Stalina, Oktyabrina, Vertоlina

Openness to innovations is an important character-trait of the Nenets reindeer herders and sometimes the mixture of modernity and traditionalism goes against all expectations.

The first of the elders of Khongurei I got the chance to interview was Stalina Yakovlevna Taleeva.

Stalina Yakovlevna Taleeva

The reindeer herders tried the best to survive the hard times of collectivisation in the 1930s, when a lot of reindeer were confiscated by the state and herders had no choice but voluntary or involuntary to join the collective farms. Nevertheless they adopted the new political order actively and even took over the fashion for neologisms of the early Soviet Union. It was a la mode to name children after the Great Leader Josif Stalin or the October Revolution. So a lot of girls named Stalina or Oktyabrina appeared in this time. On girl was even named Vertolina still in the 60s after the helicopter (russ. vertolyot) she was born in on the fly to the hospital, Stalina told me. I didn’t get the impression that Stalina’s father was especially enthusiastic about the Soviet order but obviously he had his reason to link up with the Great Leader this way. Nobody remembers the traditional Nenets treatment of names here, which differs a lot from the Russian one with name, father’s name and surname. Everybody uses now the name-father’s name form of addressing like the Russians. To speak out the father’s name in the presence of a person was highly tabooed in former times but nobody even remembers that (my colleague Lena Liarskaya described that rules: Елена Лярская: “Современное состояние системы личных имен у ямальских ненцев” Антропология. Фольклористика. Лингвистика. Сб. статей. СПб., 2002. Вып. 2. )

Stalina is one of the lucky elders who’s ten children are all still all alive and her daughter Nadezhda, my host here in the village, displays proudly her award with the medal “Mother-Heroine” in gold.

Nadezhda Taleeva shows the “Mother-Heroine” award of her mother Stalina.

Stalina tells me also how children were baptised in the Nenets way by some elders in a small ritual during Soviet times. The small chapel on the lake Urdjuk deep in the tundra, build by Komi people, was venerated by the local Nenets also until now. Valuable things where offered or even exchanged there like on pagan sacred places in the old times. Official and informal ideologies were interwoven in the everyday practices in a complicated way (see the great article of Laur Vallikivi about the present day conversion of Nenets).

But the ultimate symbol of Soviet Modernity in the North is probably not hammer and sickle but something linked to food culture. Soviet settlers in the North introduced the green house and cucumbers grow now everywhere in the north. Stalina is growing them first behind their kitchen window and later in the greenhouse in her small garden.

A little cucumber in the window of Stalina’s kitchen.

The long polar day lets grow the vegetables in the short summer very quickly. But she has to carry sand and humus to her garden to plant there some potatoes, the other important vegetable in the North, because the village Khongurei is build on a hill of loam which made it hard to move through the village after a summer rain.

Stalina’s house in the village of Khongurei with the greenhouse in front of it.

She is also a great master in sewing traditional clothing of reindeer fur. Unfortunately the reindeer herders are not wearing any more the fur clothing made by their mothers and wives. The explanation is not the loss of prestige of old fashioned things but a little bit more complicated. The change from the conical tent with an open fire hole on top to a closed light cabin made of tarpaulin made it quite difficult to dry the cloth made of reindeer skin inside after work. The fur clothing deteriorates very quickly and has to be treated carefully. The women explained to me that after the removal of the families with women and children from the tundra to the village (I decribed this process in the arcticanthropology blog) there was nobody to take care of the treatment and repair of the fur cloth any more.

Nadezhda shows a children’s malica made of reindeer fur by her mother.

Nowadays the herders use bought clothes even if they have not the same protecting quality as reindeer clothing. Stalina sold me a pair of beautiful Nenets pimy (long sock-like shoes hand-made of reindeer’s legs’ fur and sewn with sinews) her reindeer herding sons are not wearing any more.

Collecting oral history in the village

First I took Julia Taleeva to help me to get acquainted with some of the elders in the village of Khongurei. First we went to Julia’s aunt, Aleksandra Germogenovna Taleeva, the oldest woman here, born in 1927.

Aleksandra Germogenovna Taleeva

I usually start after introducing myself and the ORHELIA project to ask about the family, about parents, grandparents and children. In the case of Aleksandra it figured out to be a very tragic story. Aleksandra Germogenovna’s father died in prison after being denounced as an enemy of soviet power in the 1930s. The reindeer where confiscated and her mother had to work as a herder during the time of the WWII, when most of the reindeer herders went to the front. The time after the war was not easy either. Aleksandras husband went to prison for some years for loosing some reindeer in the herd of the Kolkhoz. They had seven children, but now only two of them are still alive.

Julia Alekseevna Taleeva with the photo collection of her aunt Aleksandra. On the top of the picture a portrait of her father.

When we went through old photographs, I come across a picture of Aleksei Taleev, Aleksandras brother, the father of Julia with another Nenents in the army hospital. It comes out the he served the army together with a good friend I know from my last visit in the village of Nelmin Nos Mikhail Trofimovich Ardeev.

Mikhail Trofimovich Ardeev and Aleksei Germogenovich Taleev during their army service.

Julia discovers some other photos of her father, one of them with three reindeer herders posing while smoking cigarettes. This picture was probably taken, before the Nenets where settled in Khongurei and still migrated in the tundra around the small settlement of Ledkovo.

Three Nenets reindeer herders. On the right Alexei Germogenovich Taleev.

Aleksandra is switching from Russian to Nenets language quite often and I let Julia ask her questions in her mother tongue, feeling that it is quite difficult for her to remember the old times and tell about her life to a complete stranger. I hope I will translate the Nenets parts later with the help of my collegue Roza Laptander who is also part of the ORHELIA team.

As a symbol of her past as a wife of a nomadic reindeer herder, the Nenet’s woman’s bag is hanging in her sleeping room. In former times this bag accompanied every woman during her whole life and was put with her into the grave.

Aleksandra’s old bag

Khongurei – and the Kolkhoz of the “Red Reindeer”

So much happened in the last two weeks, that I don’t know where to start. So I will post in the next days fresh impressions from my first weeks of fieldwork in a small village on the banks of the Pechora River.

Now it’s time of the midnight sun and I had the luck to watch a miracle of nature, when at midnight a double rainbow appeared in the south, opposite to the sun which was just on the horizon in the north.

Midnight-rainbow over the village of Khongurei and the River Pechora

View to the North at midnight

From Naryan-Mar I travelled down the River Pechora to the little village of Khongurei to visit the Nenets journalist Julia Taleeva at her mothers place.

Julia Taleeva the journalist from the regional newspaper Nyaryana Vynder (The Red North) who grew up in the village

She promised to make me acquainted here with old people who still remember the old times, when they migrated with their herds in the tundra around the outpost Ledkova, which was established by Soviet authorities at the beginning of the 1930s when the the Kolkhoz of the red reindeer “Nyaryana Ty” was founded. The small settlement was abandoned already in the 1960s.

Julia helped to interview Aleksandra Germogenvna Taleeva, the 85 years old sister of her father. Her grandfather and father of Alexandra died in prison and all his reindeer were confiscated by the state after he critisised the Soviet politics in the 1930s.

At the end of the 1950s Khongurei on the banks of the Pechora was chosen as the place where all reindeer herding families should settle down and reindeer herding had to become a shift work business for the men only.

Farewell picture on the banks of the River Pechora in front of the village Khongurei

Nenets reindeer herders were supposed to work like fishermen on the sea, and meet their families only in their free shift. At the long run the effect was devastating because the younger generation lost almost the skills of reindeer herding and the ability and motivation to live in the tundra. Most of the herders now are single man. Cattle and horse breeding and the fox farm are closed down, because the long winter and low fur prices make these businesses unprofitable.

My “home” in Khongurei.

I am living here with Nadezhda Kaneva, the sister of Julia, in the small four room wooden house that was build in the sixties, when her mother had to settle in the village.

Nadezhda Kaneva, my host in Khongurei.

Nadezhda is working at the post office, and helped me to register with the migration authorities. It took us several hours to fill out all the forms available at the post office, but we managed to send them by registered mail to the authorities.

I took my working place at Nadezhdas kitchen and she cared lovely all the days about my well-being.

My working place on Nadezhda’s kitchen table, where I spend the evenings. At least I could check my e-mails here with a slow connection over mobile phone network.

 

Early summer in Naryan Mar

As usual I have to skip my plans. The border zone permission is not yet ready, plane tickets booked out. A lot of paperwork for the local registration to do. But the weather is changing and the sun comes out. It’s shining around the clock already. My local partners here from the Nenets Association “Yasavey” do everything they can to help me.

Self Portrait in Naryan Mar

Probably I’ll not make it to the Kanin Peninsula (border zone) and the reindeer herders there, but with some luck I’ll travel to the easternmost Bolshezemelskaia Tundra and the cost of the Barents Sea in July.

For the next days I’ll visit people and institutions here in Naryan Mar and walk through the city.

One of the few old houses left in the city centre

Now it’s almost summer. Still two and a half month ago, when I left the region, it was all covered in snow and deep winter. Instead of snow, the wind is playing with the sand now. Everything else still in its place and people believe I didn’t leave at all.

Flowers left from the Victory day at 9th of May at the monument for the WWII Reindeer herder veterans

I still need some wellingtons and then I’ll travel by boat to the village of Khongurei south of Naryan Mar on the River Pechora.

The bank of the River Pechora at the harbour of Naryan Mar