Mythologies of the Nenet Tribe

The Nenets (Nenets: ненэй ненэче, romanized: nenəj nenəče; Russian: ненцы, romanized: nentsy), also known as 'Samoyeds' or 'Yuraks' (deprecated terms), are a Samoyedic ethnic group native to Arctic Russia, Russian Far North. According to the latest census in 2021, there were 49,646 Nenets in the Russian Federation, most of them living in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Taymyrsky Dolgano-Nenetsky District stretching along the coastline of the Arctic Ocean near the Arctic Circle between Kola and Taymyr peninsulas. The Nenets people speak either the Tundra or Forest Nenets languages. In the Russian Federation they have a status of Indigenous small-numbered peoples. Today, the Nenets people face numerous challenges from the state and oil and gas companies that threaten the environment and their way of life. As a result, many cite a rise in locally based activism. The old Russian name 'Samoyedy' most probably came from the ancient name of the territory where the Sami and the Nenets lived together Saame edna (the land of Sami). The name 'Samoyed' went out of usage at the beginning of the 20th century. The people are known as the nentsy/nenej nenetsj', which means "real humans". In Russian Empire, the term Samoyed was often applied indiscriminately to different peoples of Northern Russia who speak related Uralic languages: Nenets, Nganasans, Enets, Selkups (speakers of Samoyedic languages). Currently, the term "Samoyedic peoples" applies to the whole group of these different peoples.

Russia’s most iconic reindeer folk, the Nenets, continue to practice their unique herding style in modern times. This practice has survived a tumultuous history, and the Nenets remain the keepers of Siberia’s Arctic despite new challenges threatening their traditions and way of life. The Nenet culture and way of life has survived the Soviet collectivisation of reindeer herding and Stalin’s efforts of ethnic cleansing, only to face new issues of a modern kind. The effects of climate change and the pursuit of natural resources continually threaten their ability to use their native land as earlier generations have done. Despite this, the Nenets are a robust people, who are determined to preserve traditional customs and practices. As the wardens of Siberia’s north (above the Arctic Circle), Nenets have inhabited the rarely visited Yamal Peninsula for centuries. In their native tongue, ‘Yamal Peninsula’ translates into land’s end. It is wild and remote, and the climate is harsh. It is also about one and a half times bigger than France. Despite consisting almost entirely of near-to-barren Arctic tundra, the frozen land harbours some of the biggest underground oil deposits on Earth. For the most intrepid traveller, it is also one of the best spots in Russia to view the northern lights. The reindeer herd is central to the Nenet traditional way of life. Unlike other reindeer-herding people, the Nenet move massive herds between winter and summer pastures, traversing thousands of kilometres a year across frozen rivers in temperatures as low as -50°C (-58°F). This integral practice illustrates the nomadic traditions of the Nenets, who travel with their herds. Reindeer are a source of food, income, shelter, transportation and clothing for the people. So revered are the reindeer that the animal is often included in marriage dowries, and the Nenets believe that the creatures give themselves to humans for nourishment and transport in exchange for protection from predators along their migratory route. As a result of this belief, there is a kind of spiritual relationship between the Nenets and their precious beasts.

Nenets, ethnolinguistic group inhabiting northwestern Russia, from the White Sea on the west to the base of the Taymyr Peninsula on the east and from the Sayan Mountains on the south to the Arctic Ocean on the north. At present the Nenets are the largest group speaking Samoyedic, a branch of the Uralic language family. Their name comes from the word nenets meaning “man.”

Descended from people formerly inhabiting southwest Siberia, the Nenets are reindeer pastoralists, fishermen, and hunters (especially of wild reindeer) of the tundra, but they also include small groups of forest dwellers. Ethnographers generally refer to them as the Forest Nenets and the Tundra Nenets. The former group is much smaller (roughly five percent of the total Nenets population) and its language, considered seriously endangered because few if any children learn it, is spoken by only about 1,500 people. The language of the Tundra Nenets, the larger of the two groups, is spoken by more than 25,000 people, but children in some regions are not learning it. The Forest Nenets live near the Pur River and on tributaries of the Middle Ob. The Tundra Nenets inhabit three principal regions: an area west of the Ural Mountains, the Ob and Yamal peninsulas, and regions on the Taymyr Peninsula and the Yenisey River. Smaller groups of peoples related to the Nenets include the Enets (Entsy, or Yenisey), the Nganasans (Tavgi), and the Selkup. In some areas Turkic languages and Russian have replaced Samoyedic dialects. Under Soviet administration, communal, collective production was introduced among the Nenets, with reindeer keeping remaining the main activity. Reindeer breeding provides the Nenets with meat, lard, and blood for food; skins for making clothes, footwear, and winter tents; leather for making lassos, harnesses, and summer footwear; tendons for making thread; and horn for making various implements. A herd of 70 to 100 reindeer furnishes everything needed by a household. Descent is traced through the paternal line; clans of people claiming common ancestry have their own territories, as well as common burial and sacrificial grounds and clan symbols and signs. Individuals marry outside their own clan. Women are in a subordinate position. There are several classes of shamans, with different abilities.

The Yamal Peninsula: a stretch of peatland that extends from northern Siberia into the Kara Sea, far above the Arctic Circle. To the east lie the shallow waters of the Gulf of Ob; to the west, the Baydaratskaya Bay, which is ice-covered for most of the year. Yamal in the language of the Indigenous Nenets means the end of the world; it is a remote, wind-blasted place of permafrost, serpentine rivers and dwarf shrubs, and has been home to the reindeer-herding Nenets people for over a thousand years. Nenets herders have always moved seasonally with their reindeer, travelling along ancient migration routes. During the winter, when temperatures can plummet to – 50C, most Nenets graze their reindeer on moss and lichen pastures in the southern forests, or taigá. In the summer months, when the midnight sun turns night into day, they leave the larch and willow trees behind to migrate north. By the time they have crossed the frozen waters of the Ob River and reached the treeless tundra on the shores of the Kara Sea, they might have travelled up to 1,000 kms. Today, however, the Nenets’ migration routes are now affected by the infrastructure associated with resource extraction; roads are difficult for the reindeer to cross and they say pollution threatens the quality of the pastures. Preparations for what is known as the Yamal Megaproject (a long term project to exploit the peninsula’s gas, developed by the Russian corporation Gazprom) were initiated in the 1990s. In May 2012, the first of its gas supplies from the vast Bovanenkovo field will be produced. Every year, billions of cubic meters will be piped to western Europe. What happens to the land is very important to us, Nenets herder Sergei Hudi told Survival International recently. We are afraid that with all these new industries, we will not be able to migrate anymore. And if we cannot migrate anymore, our people may just disappear altogether.

Siberia is a vast expanse of land that covers the upper area of the Asian continent. The totality of its expanse includes both the eastern and central part of what is now known as the Russian Federation. The land mass that is under Russian rule holds the history and survival of the Nenet peoples. The Nenet tribe itself, that was once a central nomadic tribe established sometime before the twelfth century, has since branched into three separate tribes. The main tribe, which we focus on here, is the Tundra Nenets who travel with and herd the local reindeer. The second tribal branch is the Forest Nenets, which are also called the Khandeyar, who chose to settle in forested areas rather than the tundra and the third branch are the Kominized. The Kominized Nenets are known as such due to their intermarrying and settling with the Komi people of what is now known as the Republic of Komi. The Republic of Komi is located west of the Ural Mountains. Since the two branch tribes have come from the Tundra Nenets, each group shares some of the traditions and customs of the Nenets as a whole. The main difference between each of the three is that the original tribe’s way of life and survival began from being dependent on reindeer herds, and that remains a central aspect to their people today. The Tundra Nenets people developed their way of life around the Eurasian Tundra Reindeer. This specific reindeer breed offers many advantages to survival in the arctic like climate. The animal has hooves, which are designed to dig easily through the snow. They use these hooves when hunting down edible lichen by scent so that they can offer a food source as well as be one.

The Nenets are an ethnic group of 35,000 nomadic reindeer herders who live in northern Russia and speak a language related to Finnish. They are also known as the Nentsy, Yurak or Yurak-Samoyeds. Nenets that follow their traditional customs dress in reindeer skins, eat raw fish, drink reindeer blood, practice ritual sacrifice, and sleep outside in tepee-like tents (“chums”) made from reindeer skin and handcrafted poles even in the winter when temperatures drop to -60 degrees F. The word Nenet is derived from a Nenet noun for “human being.” [Source: Fen Montaigne, National Geographic, March 1998] Russians have traditionally referred to the Nenets as Samoyeds which some historians believe means "self-eater" (perhaps given to the Nenets because their consumption of raw reindeer meat was confused with cannibalism). The term Samoyed is also used to describe a group that speaks similar languages and have traditionally lived in the northern areas of Siberia and the Far East of Russia. The Nenets are the largest of these groups. Other Samoyed groups include the Selkups and Ngananssan and groups like the Mator and Kamas that are now extinct. Different groups are also defined by where they live: the tundra, the taiga or the mountains. The Tundra Nenets live in an area that extends from the Kanin Peninsula in the White Sea in the west to the Taimyr Peninsula in the east, a distance of about 2,000 kilometers. The southern boundaries of their range is defined by the tree line. The Forest Nenets live in a taiga region in an area around the middle Ob River. The languages of the Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets is different enough to almost qualify as separate languages. About 10,000 Nenets practice their traditional nomadic ways. Thousands of others live in barrel-shaped homes set above their permafrost in settlements working primarily as fishermen. "These are indeed people who live in a totally different dimension," Russian archeologist Andrei Golovnev told National Geographic. "They do not want to be the same as everyone else. They just want to be who they are. The Nenets believe they're the best reindeer herders in the world. Such absolute certainty on their superiority, the belief they are special people, allows them to survive." Since the break up of the Soviet Union the Evenks and the Nenets have suffered catastrophic declines in life expectancy and high rates of sickness and death that have prompted speculation that some of those groups may become extinct.

The Nenets will often be seen picnicking outside with tea and biscuits before they undergo a subzero migration. When talking amongst themselves Nenets speak a language that is not related to Russian, but is of the same family as Estonian or Finnish. There are two main divisions in the language between Forest Nenets and Tundra Nenets with the Tundra Nenets further divided into 11 sub-dialects that are all mutually intelligible. From the late Stalin period on, all children were put into Soviet boarding schools, where Russian was the primary language and for this reason almost every Nenets person under the age of 50 will speak fluent Russian. The enforced attendance of boarding school came as something of a shock in those early days and families resisted the policy. Today, boarding schools have become part of the usual Nenets life cycle and parents are supportive of the opportunities that education provides, such as the ability to make a choice between living in the tundra or remaining in a town. Although the tundra-Nenets dialect is the main language of the tundra, without fluent Russian, proper contact with the markets would be impossible. The Nenets herder economy is driven by the reindeer meat that they sell. The salary they get from herding state-farm reindeer is minimal when compared to the income they get from selling private reindeer, and from sawing off their antlers to be exported to China as a male potency drug. Aside from its market value, reindeer meat is a source of food, shelter, clothing, transport, spiritual fulfilment and means of socialising. For example, it is still common that a bride price in the form of reindeer is paid, and a dowry is brought into the young family when a tundra couple marries. The reindeer is also revered as a symbol. It’s believed the people and the deer entered a kind of social contract, where reindeer offered themselves to humans for their subsistence and transport, and humans agree to accompany them on their seasonal migrations and protect them from predators. Such is the importance of reindeer to the whole district (and not just to the Nenets) that the reindeer symbol made it to the centre of the YNAO coat of arms. The size of Nenets’ herds varies, depending not only on the owner but also on the seasons. In summer, for example, herds need to be larger to act as a natural defence against mosquitoes. The herds on the Yamal Peninsula will range from 50 in small private herds to 7,000 in the largest 8th Brigade of the Yar-Sale state farm. The migration pattern (see map above) depends on seasons and on sustainability of lichen pastures on which the reindeer feed. The large herds will have their winter pastures in the forest-tundra just to the south of the Arctic Circle, and in spring the brigades begin their migration northwards as fast as possible until the thaw comes. They spend a short summer in the northern tundra close to the Kara Sea and then return southwards to the forest tundra in November. The entire migration covers around 1100 kilometres and includes a 48 km crossing of the frozen waters of the Ob River. For these journeys the reindeer are used to pull sledges that carry the people and their camp. These enormous single-file reindeer trains can stretch out to 8 km in length, as far as the eye can see. A daily migration covers distances between 8-20 km during snow-covered time, and 3-11 km in summer, when the reindeer pull their sledges over the grass. On their winter migration to the south they stop at the administrative centre of Yar-Sale for the annual slaughter, which is where the salaries are paid to the herders and where they are able to make most of their money.

The self-designation is Nenets (n’enyts, pl. n’enytsja), meaning ‘man’; the native term for the language is n’enytsia vada. The name hasaba, ‘man’, is less common andhas restricted usage. Etymologically, Nenets derives from the same origin as Nganasan and Enets. The primal meaning of the root nenay is ‘true, real, genuine’, and this is often used in conjunction with the self-designation n’enay nenyts — ‘Nenets, .e. a genuine man’ (cf. eney enet — ‘Enets’ and ngano nganasan — ‘Nganasan’). The term originally used by the Northern Nenets was applied to the whole people in the1920s. The older and more widespread name for the Nenets is Yurak-Samoyeds, or simply Yuraks. This comes from a Zyryan Komi word yaran denoting the Samoyeds, which in its turn is probably derived from the Yamal Peninsula tundra family name Yar. Through the Russian language the term Yurak-Samoyeds has been established in other languages and it is in common use up to the present day outside the Soviet Union. The common term Samoyed probably derives from the Selkup language where samatu ~ somatu denoted the Enets. This probably has its origins with the Enets Madu-tribe, who were called samatu or somaut by their neighbours. Monk Nestor of Kiev in his chronicle A Tale of the Times Past refers to the Samoyeds as neighbours and allies of the Ugrians. In 1787 the tribe name Hasaba was used by the missionary J. S. Vater in his fable Vada Hasovo (The Language of the Nenets). The Nenets live in the polar regions of northeastern Europe and northwestern Siberia from the Kanin Peninsula on the White Sea to the Yenisey delta, occupying the central place among the Samoyed territories. They also inhabit the Arctic Ocean islands and the Kola Peninsula. Administratively, their habitat is divided between the Nenets Autonomous District of the Arkhangelsk Region and the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District of the Tyumen Region. Combined, this covers a vast territory of about 1 million square kilometres. A part of the Nenets also inhabits the Taymyr, or Dolgan-Nenets Autonomous District belonging to the District of Krasnoyarsk. The native land of the Nenets is the tundra and forest tundra, a country of permafrost, numerous rivers and vast marshy areas. Along the banks of the River Ob the Nenets settlements reach the dense forest area of the Siberian taiga.

The Nenets people (ненец ‘nenets’, ненцы ‘nentsy’ (pl.) in Russian) have inhabited the northwestern Russian tundra for approximately 2,000 years. Their traditional nomadic lifestyle is based on reindeer herding, and their shamanistic beliefs emphasize respect for the land and natural resources. Oppression has reduced their numbers and threatened the loss of their culture. Those who have been assimilated into urban life face complete loss of tradition and language. Those who continue their nomadic lifestyle are dependent on freedom to travel with their reindeer, but need support to preserve their language and traditions since recent generations have been educated within Russian-speaking environments. Nenets is the singular noun for the Nentsy people, (ненец ‘nenets’, ненцы ‘nentsy’ (pl.) in Russian), one group of the various peoples that inhabit the Russian tundra. This Samoyedic group includes the Enets, Selkup, and Nganasan people. The Nentsy were referred to as "Yurak Samoyed," the term Samoyed coming from indiscriminate Russian usage throughout the centuries, deriving from the literal morphs of samo and yed, which translates to "self-eater." Since the twentieth century, "Nenets," their self-determined name which translates as "man," became the politically correct term. Due to the similarities in languages, historians believe that the Nentsy split apart from the Finno-Ugric speaking groups around 3000 B.C.E. and migrated east where they mixed with Turkic- and Altaic-speaking peoples around 200 B.C.E. They settled between the Kanin and Taymyr peninsulas, around the Ob and Yenisey rivers, with some settling into small communities and taking up farming, while others continued hunting and reindeer herding, traveling great distances over the Kanin peninsula. Those who remained in Europe came under Russian control around 1200 C.E., while those who lived further east intermixed with the Ugains, the Novgo, and Tartars until they too came under Russian control in the sixteenth century. Since the seventeenth-century unification, Russian rulers have had difficulty maintaining control over all the Sameyodic peoples, the Nentsy in particular. Resenting their oppressors, the Nentsy attacked government officials and outposts, having the advantage of superior knowledge of the terrain coupled with the incorporation of firearms initially supplied by the Russians.