Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia 0007133626, 9780007133628

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V I T

P I E R S

B S I< Y

The Reindeer People LIVING

WITH

AND IN

ANIMALS

SPIRITS SIBERIA

"Rewarding ... Vitebsky_ is sensitive to ever:r sight and sound in the Siberian wilderness." - NE w Yo R K TI ME s

WINNER OF THE lsky, Pim, date. The mndeer people : living with animals and spirils in Siberia I Piers \itebeky. p. an. Includes bibliographical refen!nces ,and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-21188-:3 ISBN-10: o.618-211-.S 1. Evenki (Asian people)-Oomestic animals. 2. Evenki (Asuln people)-Religion. 3. Evenki (Asian people)-Social life and cuatoms. 4. Reindeer herding-Russia (Federation)-Verkhoiansk Range. S. Relndeerherde�-Russia (Federation)-Verlchoia.nslc Range. 6. Sha­ uwusm-Rus.,ia (Federation)-Verkhoiansk lunge. 7. �oianslc Range (Russia)-History. 8. Verkhoianslt Range· (Russia)-Antiquities. 9. Verkhoianslc Range (Russia)-Social life aind customs. L Title. DIC759.E83V58 2005 305.89'4]� 2005045994 Printed st the United States d America MP 10 9 8 7 6 S 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

vii

MAPS, FIGURES AND ILLUSTRATIONS

xi

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

xiii

PROLOGUE

Soul-flight to the sun

3

PART I THE PARTNERSHIP OF REINDEER AND HUMANS

1 2

The prehistoric reindeer revolution Civilizing the nomads

17 40

PART II A TALE OF TWO HERDS 3

4 5

6

The massacre of Granny's 2,000 reindeer, camp7 Granny's herd restored: late summer site, 1-2 August Migrating into autumn, 3-8 August Kostya's mushroom crisis, camp 10

63 78 106 129

INTERLUDE: SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

Vladimir Nikolayevich's winter hunt

151

vi

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

PART III BEADS FOR THE NATIVES

7

Frightened children and disdainful women 8 Men ful.6lled and men in despair,, camps 9 Landscape with Gulag: brushed by White Man's Madness 10 IEp-apher Middle: Author's collection, unknown photographer Bottom: American Museum of Natural Hi,story, New York 0esup collection No. 22410) FIGURES: Page 7 Reindeer stones from northwestern Mongolia and neigh­ bouring areas (from Savinov 1994: 182-3) Page 8 Mask on sacrificed horse from Barrow 1, P'azyryk, in the form of a reindeer head (from Rudenko 1970: plate 119) Page 9 Winged deer's head with antlers ending u,1 heads of birds or griffins, from Barrow 2, Pazyryk (from lRudenko 1970: plate 142d)

xii

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

Page 10 Designs of deer and birds tattooed on mummies from burials at Pazyryk (from Polosmak :2000: 96) Page 32 Contrast between Sayan (left) and Tungus (right) methods of riding a reindeer (from Vainshtein 1980: 131) Page 71 Earmarks for the herds in Sebyan, head facing towards the viewer (from author's field notes) Page 140 Map of camp l0's autumn pasture, during mushroom crisis (from author's field notes) Page 261 A Tungus (Eveny or Evenki) shaman in the seventeenth century (from Witsen 1672: plate following page 663) Page 319 Kesha's map of the territory of cam1p 8 (from author's field notes) Page 336 Pictures for a memory game, drawn by Patrick and Catherine (from author's field notes)I Page 385 Poster from the World Reindeer Peoples' Festival, Tromse 1993 Page 403 Tiger with antlers, Pazyryk (from R1udenko 1970: figure 137b) Page 417 Chemistry of an aphrodisiac: how to tum a reindeer antler into a pill (from Yudin 1993: 57)

DRAMATIS PERSONAE Camp7 Granny, a shrewd and ironic matriarch the Old Man, her husband their four unmarried children: Ivan, the brigadier (head herder), somewhat morose with sudden flashes of dry humour Yura, his younger brother, a Hght�r presence Emmie, full of laughter, devoted to nomadic life Masha, a teacher in the village school also:

Gosha, a gentle man who grew up with the family Lidia, Gosha's devoted wife, strong and passionate Terrapin, Nikolay and the Bison, male herders various children

Camp8 Kesha, the brigadier, with long hair like a mythological hero Lyuda, his courageous wife, national reindeer-racing champion Diana, their infant daughter, with prophetic powers, perhaps a reincarnated shamaness Dima, her elder brother, but still little Dmitri Konstantinovich, Kesha's old father Ganya, Leonid, and Boris, young male herders who live dangerously

Camp 10 Kostya, the half-Sakha brigadier, capable and steady Arkady, his young deputy, still lacking confidence Kristina, Arkady's thoughtful mother and camp cook Peter, herder and winter stand-in for Kristina as cook

xiv THE REINDEER PEOPLE

Ivan the Fence-Builder, a herder from another brigade enjoying a change d occupation three generations of the Nikitin family, especidly little Sergei, keen to grow up a reindeer herder various women, children and male herders

Free spirits Tolya, the author's first native friend, a fighteJi for reform and a trickster; at first, head of the village's civil administration Vladimir Nikolayevich, a retired herder turned hunter; an extraordinarily competent person Vitya the Wolf-Hunter, musician and soo of a shamaness

The village Petr Afanasevich, the director of the State Fancn old Efimov, one of his henchmen in the State !Farm management Afonya, gentle successor to Tolya as head of tlhe village's civil a�tration Baibalchan, the old headman, killed by the Soviet regime in the 1920s Tolya's sister Anna Tolya's wife Varya, who joins him on arduowi journeys little Sergei's mother, head of the fur-5eWing workshop Sasha the Radio Man a retired woodcutter teachers, doctors, vets and accountants, mostly female, some of them fierce

Other characters include Motya the Music Woman and her relatives in camp 1 Valera, brigadier of camp 3 the author's family (wife Sally, children Patrick and Catherine) radio operators, boiler attendants, and vehicle mechanics psychics and sorcerers living and dead shamans, some with animal dloubles

Drama/ i$ Personae

xv

Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Cleopatra, Abdullah, Sancho Panza, and Prime Minister Chemomyrdin, reindeer of character reindeer doubles which die instead of their owners Manchary, an almost wordless young hunter daredevil Arctic aviators wolves bears Communist Party bosses presidents and governors Korean antler mafiosi Andrew, a US aid worker the author's students, foreign and local vodka bootleggers the Sausage King of Alaska the Energetics, employees of the state electricity corporation Bayanay, spirit master of the forest and of its animals a native pop group a British film crew a Russian exile in a tent next to a mountain of deep-frozen dogs Nenets, Evenki, and Chukchi reindeer herders, in nomadic camps thousands of miles away a leader of the Sarni reindeer herders in the Norwegian Arctic Vladimir Etylin, born a Chukchi reindeer herder, later a Member of Parliament in Moscow spirits of fires and rivers ancestors in graves a one-eyed dog who can see into the future

PROLOGUE

Soul-flight to the Sun

In the Verkhoyansk Mountains of northeast Siberia, Eveny nomads are on the move•. Teams of reindee1r pull caravans of sledges down the steep slide of a frozen m01mtain river. Bells tinkle on the lead reindeer while dogs on short leashes dive closely alongside through the snow like dolphins beside a boat. One man sits on the lead sledge of each caravan, his right foot stretched out in front of him and his le ,ft foot resting on the runner ready to fend off hidden rocks and snagging roots. Passengers or cargo sit on the sledges behind. The passage of each caravan is visible from afar by a cloud of frozen reindeer breath. This is the coldest inhabited place on earth,, with winter tem­ peratures falling to -%°F (-71 °C). The ice is .a condition of the water for eight months of the year and by January it is 6 feet thick. Throughout the winter, warm springs •continue to break through the surface of rivers, where they en1pt as frozen tur­ quoise upwellings, like igneous intrusions in1 rock, and freeze into jagged obstructions. Caravan after caravan jolts over the last ridge of river ice and skims across a great: frozen lake in an epic sweep stretching almost from shore to shore. Deep lakes provide a more level surface and the ice that forms from their still water glows black, marbled with milky w]hite veins snaking into the depths. The sudden speed and the spray of ice crystals flung into our faces behind the hypnotic flash of the reindeer's

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6

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

skidding hooves make it easy to feel that we are about to take off and fly into the air. Thousands of years before the tsarist empire taxed them and the Soviet Union relocated them into State Farms, the ancestors of today's Eveny and of their cousins the Evenki had moved out from their previous homeland in northeast China and spread for thousands of miles across forests and tundras, swamps and

mountain ranges, from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, from the Pacific almost to the Urals, making them the ma;t widely spread indigenous people on any landmass. Even today, elders can tell stories of journeys that make young people, tied to their villages and dependent on aircraft, smile with disbelief. The old people achieved this mobility by training reindeer to carry them on their backs and pull them on sledges. The endless succession of short migrations• from one camp site to the next, which they have shared with me, gives no more than a glimpse of the power of reindeer transport and of the way in which this creature has opened up vast swathes of the earth's surface for human habitation. The association between reindeer and flying is very ancient much, much older than European or American ideas about Santa Claus•. Scattered across the deserts and steppes of western Mongolia and stretching into the Altai Mountains in the west and up to the border of Manchuria in the east, stand ancient 'reindeer stones' dating from the Bronze Age• some 3,000 years ago. These upright standing stones are set above graves or sur­ rounded by the remains of fires and sacrificed sheep and horses. They are carved with various animals, but most often with rein­ deer. Q'\ the earlier stones the image of the reindeer is simple, but some 500 years later it has become more ornate. On these stones, the reindeer is depicted with its neck outstretched and its legs flung out fore and aft, as if not merely galloping but leaping through the air. The antlers have grown fantastically till they reach right back to the tail, and sometimes hold the disc of

Soul-Flighttot� Sun

1

I

Reindeer stones from nort hwestern Mongolia and neighbouring areas.

the sun or a human figure with the sun as its head. The flung-out hooves seem to represent more than just a leap: it is as if the artist has caught the reindeer in the act of flyiing through the sky in an association with a deity of the sun. It seems the climate of Mongolia dried out towards the end of the first millennium BC, coming closer to today's desert con­ ditions in which reindeer can no longer live, •�xcept in one small, cool mountain region. But other evidence :suggests that even where it had disappeared, the reindeer persisted in the imagi­ nation like a mythic or archetypal creature. At Pazyryk in the nearby Altai Mountains, the burial mounds of chiefs from

8

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

around 500-400 BC contain food as well a:s fine clothing, gold ornaments, harps, combs, and mirrors, decorated with a range of animals including reindeer. By the secon,d century AD, one of the horses sacrificed in a grave wears a face-mask made of leather, felt, and fur and adorned with life�size antlers, clearly dressed up to imitate a reindeer•. It seems a reindeer was still better than a horse for riding in the afterli!fe. Some 1,500 years later, in the seventeenth century, at a battle between the Oirot Mongols and the Manchus 60 miles from Ulaan Baatar, a Mon­ golian chronicle tells us that the wife of the !Khan Daldyn Bashig Tu rode into battle on 'a reindeer with branching antlers'•. Since real reindeer had been absent from this region for 2,000 years, this probably indicates a continuation of the? custom of dressing a horse in a reindeer mask. The reindeer appears in an even more intimate association

Mask on sacrificed horse from Barrow 1, Pazyryk, in the form of a reindeer heatl.

Soul-Flight to the Sun

9

Winged deer's head with antlers ending in heads of birds or griffins, from Barrow 2, Paz:yryk.

with the Pazyryk people -in tattoos on their bodies. After death they were eviscerated, sewn up and mumn'.lified'., as if they would be needing their flesh as well as th,eir provisions for whatever afterlife or rebirth they were expecting. Even so, these bodies might not have survived had it not been for the water that flowed into the graves•, sometimes throug:h the breaches left by grave robbers. This water then froze arournd the mummified bodies. Three of the bodies found so far bear tattoos, and have been preserved so perfectly that we can see the designs dearly. Here on the shoulders are depicted the same 1reindeer as on the standing stones, with their hooves flung out and their exagger­ ated antlers. But in the tattoos the imagery of flight is made even more explicit. The branching of the reindeers' antlers sometimes looks like the feathering of birds' wings, and on some of them each tine of the antler ends in a tiny bird's head. When I first read about these tattoos as a child I did not

10

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

Designs of deer and birds tattooed on mummies from burials at Pazyryk.

imagine that the association of reindeer with flight had been carried by migrating populations to lands where reindeer still existed far to the north, still less that I would one day live among people who in their own childhood had !taken a ritual voyage to the sun on the back of a flying reindeer. I reached this northern region in the late 1980s, and learned about this rite from my first Eveny friend, Tolya, during some of our t1ravels together. Small but muscular, a former wrestling champion with an impish sense of humour, he was already feeling the call to abandon his role as an official in the Soviet administration and to reach back

Soul-Flight to the Sun

11

through the veils of boarding school and th:e Soviet Navy to rediscover the ancient traditions of his ancestors. As we rode from camp to camp, this ritual was one of Tolya's discoveries•. We crouched around darkened stoves at night, while I listened to Tolya talking intently to nomadic elders, who included his own mother, in a native language I could not yet understand I did not know that in front of me precious words were being spoken by people who might have been the last left aJive on earth capable of saying them. 1hese words revealed a continuity of ideas, carried over thousands of miles and thousands of years, with the birds on the tips of the reindeer a1r1tlers tattooed on the shoulders of the mummies in the Altai and the carvings in Mongolia of reindeer holding the sun aloft in their antlers. These elders told Tolya that reindeer were created by the sky god Hijvki, not only to provide food and transport on earth, but aJso to lift the human soul up to the sun. Fron, their childhood seventy, eighty, or more years before, they rernembered a ritual that was carried out each year on Midsumme1r's Day, symboliz­ ing the ascent of each person on the back of a winged reindeer. During the white night of the Arctic swnmer, a rope was stretched between two larch trees to represenlt a gateway to the sky. As the sun rose high above the horizon in the early dawn, this gateway was filled with the purifying smoke of the aromatic mountain rhododendron, which drifted over 1the area from two separate bonfires. F.ach person passed around the first fire anti­ clockwise, against the direction of the sun, to symbolize the death of the old year and to bum away its illnesses. They then moved around the second fire in a clockwise direction, following the sun's own motion, to symbolize the birth ,of the new year. It was at this moment, while elders prayc�d to the sun for success in hunting, an increase in reindeer, strong sons and beautiful daughters, that each person was said to be borne aloft on the back of a reindeer which carried its human passenger towards a land of happiness and plenty near the sun. There they received a blessing, salvation, and renewal. At the highest point,

12

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

the reindeer turned for a while into a crane, a bird of extreme sacredness. I still do not understand how the old Eveny acted out the experience of flying through the air, but tlney would mime their return to earth by sitting on their own reindeer as if they were arriving from a long journey, expressing tiredness, unsaddling their mount, pitching a tent and lighting a fire. This rite was followed by a hedje, a circle dance in thE! direction of the sun, and a feast of plenty. The annual soul-voyage made by the elders whom I met with Tolya was a small-scale echo of the voyages made by shamans, men and women whose souls can leave tlheir bodies while they are in a state of trance and fly to other reallms of a cosmos which is believed to have many layers. Whereas laypersons could only fly on the back of a reindeer, shamans could twn into a flying reindeer. The word shaman or haman comtes to us from the lan­ guage of the Eveny and the Evenki, two c:losely related peoples of the Tungus language family. All Arctic peoples have compar­ able figures, known by various names, a1s do other peoples in many parts of the world. The role of the shaman is closely linked to hunting as a way of life. Before the development of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, all humans depended on hunting to survive, and it is hard to imagine that any other kind of religion could have existed. Shamans develop tthe ordinary hunter's skills and intuitions by flying over the landscape to monitor the movements of migratory animals and by performing rites to stimulate the vitality of animals and humans alike. In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and of bird-flight. Their costumes sometimes include imitation reindeer antlers, occasionally tipped with wings or feathers, placed on the headdress or attached to thE! shoulders at the very point where reindeer are tattooed on the Pazyryk mummies. Like the participants in the Eveny midsummer ritual, shamans may ride to the sky on a bird or a reindeer. But their relationship with these animals goes far beyond mere riding. One shaman is

Soul-Flight to t� Sun

13

suckled by a white reindeer during his initiatory vision as he inrubates in a bird's nest on a branch high in the tree that links earth and sky-. Another becomes a reindeer himself by wearing its hide, while hunters with miniature bows and arrows sur­ round him and mime the act of killing. The hide is then stretched across the broad, flat drum that the shaman will beat as accom­ paniment to his trance. Another shaman, seeking to consecrate his reindeer-skin drum, is guided by spirits as he combs through the forest to find the location where the reindeer was born and traces every place it has ever visited over the course of its life, right up to the point where it was killed. As he picks his way through bogs and over fallen branches, he picks up the scattered material traces of its existence - snapped twigs, dried dung - to gather together every possible part of its being, and then moulds them into a small effigy of the reindeer. When he sprinkles the effigy with a magical 'water of life', the drum comes to life. Like a reindeer itself but with enhanced power, it is now capable of bearing the shaman aloft with its throbbing beat to nine, twelve, or more levels of the heavens.

PART I

THE PARTNERSHIP OF REINDEER AND HUMlANS

1

The prehistoric reindeer revolution The reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) has been giving life to humans for hundreds of thousands of years over mucln of the northern hemisphere. In western Europe1 where the ice sheets retreated between the late upper Paleolithic and the end of the Pleistocene era some l 1 1000-18 1000 years ago, the sheer nu1mber of reindeer bones found in human camps has led prehistorians to call this period 'the Age of Reindeer'•. One main migration route ran from Paris to Brussels, and another from the !Massif Central to the coastal plains of Bordeaux. Bones and antliers from reindeer hunts have also been found across Denmark, Germany1 Poland1 and the Ukraine. In North America, reindee1r hunters' camps have likewise been found where the ice retreated from Michigan and Ontario around 11,000 years ago. In the Arctic1 the Age of Reindeer is not over. The world contains around 3 million wild and 2 million domesticated rein­ deer, and for many indigenous peoples this species remains the foundation of life today. In Canada and Alaska, Native Ameri­ can peoples hunt wild reindeer, which are the:re called caribou 1 using insights about herd behaviour shared with their ancestors thousands of years ago. The peoples of Siberia also hunt wild reindeer but have gone further, developing these insights to draw the reindeer into a form of domestication that is unlike that of any other animal•. Nobcxly knows when or how this was done. Domesticated reindeer closely resemble wild reindeer in

Distribution of wild reindeer (caribou) and domestic reindeer todav. Compiled from various sources, some of them contradictory. ·

■ Peary caribou and Arctic-island caribou

■ Svalbard reindeer

■ Grant's caritiou

■ Tundra reindeer

■ Baffl'n-ground caribou

■ Wild fon.'St reindl'l'r

■ Woodland caribou

· Cllmestk reindeer

The Prehistoric Reindeer Revolution

19

both anatomy and behaviour, and are handled by humans with an imperceptible continuity of knowledge and technique. The human relationship with reindeer in Eurasia is unique. It is prob­ ably the only animal in history that was originally domesticated for riding in order to hunt its wild cousins. In prehistoric sites the remains of wild reindeer are sometimes fmmd mixed with those of auroch, mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros. Of the large Pleistocene animals that were hunted for food, all except the elk and the musk-ox have become extinct, and only the reindeer has flourished in large numbers. The evo­ lutionary success of the reindeer is due to its exceptional adap­ tation to cold, its gregarious nature, and its enormous powers of migration. As the glaciers retreated northward they opened up spaces which were filled by green vegetation fed by the meltwater. Massed herds of reindeer moved in the wake of the glaciers, followed by the humans and wolves who competed with each other to hunt them, in a complex relationship that continues to this day. The reindeer's adaptation to cold seems almost total. It needs no den in winter. Above a layer of fine, inner fur, each hair of its thick outer coat is hollow and filled with air, providing both insulation against the cold and buoyancy for swimming across the icy water that often floods the Arctic landscape. Its legs have less fur than its torso and are maintained at a lower temperature. The insides of the nostrils are cleverly convoluted so that the animal loses less heat from breathing. In hot weather, on the contrary, its body is designed to keep it cool, and the thickest fur is shed in summer. 'The young, fleshy antlers that sprout in spring are full of blood vessels and covered with a soft layer of velvet. During the summer, the blood vessels atrophy as the antlers harden into nothing but horn, finally dropping off to be replaced by new, blood-filled antlers the following spring. Males lose their antlers after fighting each other during the autumn rut, but females keep theirs until after they give birth the following spring and

20

THE REINDEER PEOPLE

use them aggressively to defend the feeding hollows that they scrape through the snow for themselves and their calves with their powerful front hooves. Reindeer have the most flexible joints of any hoofed animal - they can scratch their ear with their back hoof and can run across rough scree where a human can barely crawl. The large surface area olf their broad, forked hooves prevents them from sinking in boig or snow. A riddle among the Eveny asks: 'There is a bearded old man who lives between two cliffs. He never moves from the spot yet he runs very fast. Who is he?' The answer is the tu:ft of fur between the digits of a reindeer's hoof which helps it to grip the surface as it runs and skids over ice. With the retreat of the glaciers the speci,es moved north, and most of the world's reindeer are now fownd within the Arctic and sub-Arctic, across the northern forest (which in Russia is called taiga) and through the treeless tundra to the coast. Wild reindeer have even reached the islands of S1valbard, at 80° north, crossing hundreds of miles of frozen ocean. Beyond this, there is nowhere further to go. DNA testing of the Svalbard reindeer cannot confirm whether they came from North America via northeast Greenland or from Russia via Frantz Josef Land, but the earliest droppings so far analysed,. are 5,000 years old. In recent centuries, the impact of climate change in Europe has been accelerated by the spread of agritculture and cities. In his account of Germany written in 52 BC, Julius Caesar• wrote that the forests there contained many kinds of animal that the Romans had not seen elsewhere, including 'an ox shaped like a deer' whose horn 'sticks up higher and straighter than those of the animals we know, and branches out widely at the top like a human hand or a tree'. As late as the nineteenth century, the limit of wild reindeer in the European part of Russia ran far south of their range today, passing just east of St Petersburg on the shore of Lake Ladoga and just northeast of Moscow at Zagorsk, continuing to Ufa in Bashkortostan•. In Asia, the north was not glaciated like Europe and is not so urbanized today,

The Prehistoric Reir.1deer Reoolution

21

and so the retreat has not been so great. Wild or domesticated reindeer still extend from north to south in an ;almost unbroken belt from the Arctic Ocean islands, past Lake 1Baikal, into Tuva and just over the border into the northwestern mountains of Mongolia. However, the numbers in the sou1them forests are very small and most reindeer are in the far north. Russia today contains between 1.25 and 1.5 rnillion wild rein­ deer, and of these the herd on the Taimyr Peninsula on the Arctic Ocean numbers between 800,000 and 1 million animals, double the size of the 450,000-strong Westen, Arctic Caribou Herd which migrates between the North Slope and the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. Reindeer populations a11e subject to dra­ matic cycles of boom and bust. When the snow cover thaws in a warm winter and refreezes into an impenetrable crust of ice, thousands may die of starvation. The Taimyr population has grown to its present size from 110,000 when the first aerial survey was made in 1959, though it is widely E!xpected to crash either from overgrazing or from an epidemic of anthrax, in Rus­ sian called 'Siberian Ulcer', whose spores lie hidden in the soil. The native peoples of North America never domesticated the caribou. Apart from a few Siberian reindeer introduced into Alaska in the 1890s, all domestic reindeer are i1n the Old World. Some half a million of these are in Scandinavian Lapland•, where over the last fifty years the Sami people have t:ransformed their traditional reindeer techniques into a technica.lly sophisticated modem ranching system. Distances in Scandina1via are relatively small, and infrastructure highly developed. In Russia, the situa­ tion is quite different. The grazing range of Russia's domestic reindeer, said to be 1.3 million square miles, ai:nounts to nearly a fifth of the country's land area, with almost: no roads at all. Their number has recently halved from a peak of 2.4 million in 1970 to 1.2 million in 2002•. The earlier figure was the fruit of an unsustainable Soviet system of overprodlllction, while the current decrease is the result of the crisis in the Russian economy since 1990.

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