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May 4, 2016 · The Nenets are an indigenous nomadic people of Arctic Russia. They live off reindeer herding and fishing. Sergey Anisimov/Anadolu Agency. Wed 4 May 2016 04.30 EDT 16.25 EST. A reindeer flock at a ...
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Aug 21, 2019 · For thousands of years the Nenets people have migrated with their reindeer herds across the Yamal Peninsula in the Russian Arctic. In October 2016, Alegra Ally travelled to north-west Siberia to ...
- Overview
- A Nenets Winter
The Nenets, reindeer herders in Russia’s Arctic, face modern obstacles in their long journey: climate change and a giant natural gas field.
This story appears in the October 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
Clad in a camouflage jacket, the mosquito netting unzipped from his hood, Yuri Khudi squats by the fire inside his large chum. Outside, seven more of the teepee-like tents cluster in a semicircle. Swells of Siberian tundra roll north toward the Arctic Ocean; a reindeer herd grazes on a distant crest. It’s mid-July, and the group of Nenets herders that Yuri leads are about halfway through an annual trek that takes them 400 miles north on the Yamal Peninsula to the Arctic coast—in normal years, that is.
“It’s been three years since we have made it all the way to our summer pastures by the Kara Sea,” Yuri says as his wife, Katya, pours him a steaming mug of tea. “Our reindeer were too weak for the long journey.” In the winter of 2013-14, an unusual warm spell brought rain to southern Yamal; the deep freeze that followed encased most of the winter pastures in thick ice. The reindeer, used to digging through snow to find lichen, their main winter food, couldn’t dig through the ice. In this herd and others, tens of thousands starved. Now, in the summer of 2016, the survivors are still recovering.
The canvas entrance of the chum flaps open, and a reindeer, antlers down, bursts inside. It pauses in front of the fire, shakes vigorously, and flops down to chew its cud meditatively.
“This young cow lost her mom, so we raised her ourselves inside the chum,” explains Yuri, taking a cautious sip of tea. “She doesn’t like mosquitoes. Hopefully next year she’ll have a calf of her own. We’re down to about 3,000 reindeer now, half of our usual herd.”
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Eighty-year-old Nina Khudi steps outside the family chum. Covered with reindeer skins in the winter, the teepee-like tent protects the family from blowing snow and biting cold.
Eighty-year-old Nina Khudi steps outside the family chum. Covered with reindeer skins in the winter, the teepee-like tent protects the family from blowing snow and biting cold.
Perched on the left side of the sleigh, his legs firmly planted on a runner, Nyadma Khudi raps the backs of his reindeer with a tyur—a long pole of polished wood ending in an antler knob. Grunting softly, he urges the four bulls forward through shrub willows and clouds of mosquitoes. Nyadma is Yuri’s elder brother and a former brigade chief. As a sign of respect, his caravan of several sleighs is in the lead as Brigade 4 presses on toward Bovanenkovo.
After about an hour, Nyadma suddenly stops. “We’ll break here for a bit, to let everybody catch up,” he says, as he fishes a ringing cell phone out of his capacious, bell-shaped reindeer-skin coat. Other sleighs pull up behind us. The harmony of clicking reindeer hooves soon gives way to the cacophony of dial tones and human chatter as the Nenets enjoy one of the few perks of having a mega-development in their backyard: We’re now within range of Bovanenkovo’s cell phone tower.
The Nenets people of the Siberian arctic are the guardians of a style of reindeer herding that is the last of its kind. Through a yearly migration of over a thousand kilometres, these people move ...
Nenets Herding Laika are small to medium-sized dogs with a thick double coats that are either solid or bicolored, coming in grey, tan, red, black or white. [4] [1] They come in two coat lengths, a long-haired coat called “erre” and a short-haired coat called “yando,” and they should retain a well developed coat through the summer.
