Siberian Eskimos defy doomsayers' predictions
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Their hold on the land is so tenuous and so subject to disruption from the outside that anthropologists have predicted their demise for two centuries.
Until now, the Eskimos have defied the doomsayers. Nature has always provided. But now nature itself has gone awry.
Archaeological evidence is scant, but it suggests that today's Siberian Eskimos arrived in Chukotka from central Asia about 2,500 years ago. That settlement would not have been possible without the massive global warming that took place more than 10,000 years ago at the end of the last great Ice Age.
Melting ice submerged the Bering land bridge that the first Americans had walked across some 13,000 years earlier.
The waters that surround the Chukotka Peninsula today are among the richest in the world. They teem with 25 species of marine mammals; 450 species of fish, mollusks and crustaceans; vast numbers of summering seabirds; and innumerable krill and plankton that provide food for many whales.
The early Eskimos followed their prey. They lived in underground houses insulated from the cold and moved among seasonal hunting camps. They collected eggs from seabirds and salmon and plucked greens, berries and mushrooms from the tundra.
They hunted walrus, seal and whale. The flesh of marine mammals, particularly "maktak," the blubbery skin of the whale, is still preferred by many to "European" macaroni and canned fruit.
Ludmilla Ainana, a 66-year-old Eskimo, was educated by the Soviets in St. Petersburg and now lives in an apartment in Chukotka's biggest town, Providenya.
Though she can now buy chicken and noodles and exotic ingredients like soy sauce at a grocery, she still prefers the food of a childhood spent at a coastal camp in a single "yaranga," or reindeer-hide tent. "Walrus flippers with sea cabbage," she said. "It's delicious food."
When American whalers began arriving in the 1840s, they praised the natives for their ingenuity and hired the men to kill whales.
The whalers left behind a taste for imported trade goods, decimated whale stocks and a native population ravaged by measles, smallpox and flu.
At the time, anthropologists warned that the native way of life was doomed. But the Eskimos took to the whalers' improved harpoons and became even better hunters. Still, the hunger for manufactured goods marked the beginning of a long, slow shift from the old ways.
In the 1920s, the Soviets accelerated the process, introducing the Eskimo hunters and Chukchi herders to jobs, wages and a steady diet of imported food. They provided houses, schools, clinics and coal for heat.
Families like Ainana's who had lived in scattered settlements were relocated by the hundreds into villages such as Yanrakynnot. In a village that once recorded 26 inhabitants in five households, the population would swell to nearly 500, even though the land could not support so many.
"These were convenient for supply ships," Ainana said, "but the hunting was very poor."
For the Eskimo, food, livelihood and an animistic religion had always been intertwined. They not only hunted the whale but also worshiped it.
But the Soviets jailed the shamans and outlawed native whaling. Instead, big Russian whaling ships caught the beasts and towed them to shore.
The job of the natives was to slice up the carcasses and feed the meat to caged foxes being raised for their fur on the outskirts of Yanrakynnot. There were no more ceremonies, no chanting by the elders, no heroes returning from the hunt.
"People stopped hunting and they became butchers," said Igor Krupnik, a Smithsonian Institution ethnologist and expert on the native people of Chukotka. "This was a tremendous blow to their culture and their self-esteem."
The young began to embrace Soviet imports, including vodka and cigarettes. Many began marrying ethnic Russians. Their children received Russian lessons and Russian names.
That modernization came to an abrupt end along with the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost overnight, there were no supply ships. No food. No coal. No heat.
In some parts of the Russian Arctic, life expectancy dropped to about 37 years. A 1989 census found 1,400 Eskimos in Chukotka. The population is now estimated to be 700. Yanrakynnot's population in 1989 was 448; today it has 100 fewer residents.
Those who remained tried to resurrect subsistence hunting — even though no one really knew how.
Igor Macotrik, a hunter, filled two small boats with young men and bravely headed out to chase 50,000-pound whales. There were accidents and deaths. Some were the fault of storms and rough seas; others were caused by inexperience.
"Unfortunately, the old generation passed away — the ones that knew how to approach the whale, how to use the darting gun," Macotrik said. "We started from zero."
With the help of Alaskan cousins who provided boats, gear and even hunting lessons, the Russian Eskimo once again surprised the doomsayers.
"We watched with amazement as these people restored their whaling," Krupnik said. "We were wrong to say the Soviet Union had dealt them a mortal blow."