Nenets: Surviving on the Siberian Tundra
Photographs by Maria Stenzel
Text by Fen Montaigne
What is remarkable about these people is not that they are some ancient tribe just discovered in the wilds of the Russian Arctic but that they have survived the modern era—and communism—virtually intact. No other native group in the Arctic has hung on to its traditions as steadfastly.
Today about 10,000 of the 35,000 Nenets still move with the seasons, tending their reindeer. They travel on sleds pulled by their deer and live in tents made of larch poles and reindeer skins. Reindeer are everything to the Nenet: food, clothing, shelter, transportation, even their sense of identity. "The first thing a newborn baby touches outside the womb is the deerskin in which it is wrapped by the midwife. A dead man is also wrapped in deer skins."
Centuries old migratory traditions and clan allegiances were stronger than the philosophies of Marx and Lenin. Now the Nenets face the challenges of privately owned reindeer stocks, growing herds feeding off of limited vegetation, and gas and oil exploration in the tundra and the incursion of modern life it will bring.
NGM 1998/03