Siberia Pictures Nenets Oxana Kharuchi  

 The Reindeer Store

 Home  

Nani torova! That's 'hello' in Nenets.

My name is Oxana Kharuchi, and I am living in Iqaluit for two months. In Moscow I work for the Russian Association of the Indigenous Peoples of the North (www.raipon.org), and here I am working as an intern with the Nunavut Government's Department of Executive and Intergovernmental Affairs.

I am Nenets. The Nenets are an indigenous people whose homeland is the Yamal Peninsula in western Siberia. My home town is Salekhard.

Some Nenets live in towns and villages, but many still live 'on the land' in their traditional nomadic way. For example, my grandmother and some other members of my family live a nomadic life far from the nearest settlements. I made this simple webpage in order for people here to see pictures of Nenets life today. They were taken by my parents,  and friends of my parents.

Click on picture to see full size!

Chum This is a Nenets summer camp. The tent is called a 'chum' (choom). A group of tents is called 'stoibizhe'.	Stoibizhe These are photos of a typical summer day in a 'stoibizhe'...
Summer Day	Men, Summer Day
Nenets Boy Note the reindeer ears on the boy's bonnet!	Nenets Girl Traditional Dress
Chum in Winter A 'chum' is very warm in winter thanks to wood-burning stoves. This picture shows a family warming bread -- a bread very much like your 'bannock'.	We often go looking for nice clean snow with which to make good tea.
And we need to collect firewood.

Page 2                                Home

There are several good webpages which provide information about the Nenets, including htp://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/Yamal, http://borealis.lib.uconn.edu/ArcticCircle/HistoryCulture/Russia www.suri.ee/eup and www.suri.ee/r/nenets. An excellent recent book on the Nenets in English is Andrei Golovnev and Gail Osherenko's 'Siberian Survival: The Nenets and Their Story'.

I would like to thank Nunanet for hosting this webpage, Bill Sackett for scanning the pictures for me, and everyone who has helped make my trip to Iqaluit possible!