TUR IMANNA
TUR IMANNA translates from even language as LAND OF SNOW. It’s a subjective map of Kamchatka peninsula by native-born half-even half-koryak man, who has been living there for 60 years hunting, fishing, dog racing, herding deers and crafting.
This work examines the meaning of long-term winter for aborigine’s way of life, shows how remote villages are still full of traditional craftsmen and that there are people who consciously choose to live their life in a land of snow despite the unaccessibility of civilisation goods.
I’ve traveled all over Kamchatka. I’ve been dogsledding in the north, even to Chukotka. Through all the northern villages: Ossora, Tymlat, Tilichiki, Slautnoe, etc. we went together with Beringia (traditional dog sled races), I made sleds for the participants and helped as a volunteer. Beringia is once and for all: the north, the vastness, the dogs, the excitement. I’d been going with Beringiya for 8 years every march. People are happy here in winter. They have skates, skate all winter, stock up on yuccola — dried red fish and eat it in the winter, send it to their children in Moscow and St.Petersburg. With Berengia we were welcomed as a holiday in every village, fed with pies. People there are protected by winter, preserving their kindness and openness.
Northern settlements are sparsely populated — after the export of reindeer from Kamchatka was canceled (under Gorbachev) it became expensive to keep a herd, people drank alcohol and committed suicide because they did not know how to live without reindeer. Where 10000 people used to live, now 400 live. And reindeer herders in Kamchatka now can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Reindeer are a way of life. They will not eat twice in one place — they are clean animals, they like cleanliness. They need new pastures, so you have to go nomadic with them. And the Koryaks, who are sedentary, without reindeer, having a farm, we call them kislyaki among themselves, because they eat sour meat, which is not pastured in the Kamchatka mountains.
My parents were reindeer herders, always nomadic. That’s why they put me in boarding school, so that I could study, but I still helped them during vacations. That’s why I speak Russian so well, although our family spoke only Koryak and Even — reindeer herders are unsociable people. They walk with their reindeer through the vastness of their land and feel free. And they don’t need a city.
I lived in Anavgai for a long time, taught bone carving, got married there, I have two sons, one also carves and helps me make tambourines. After my wife’s death I went to Esso — I gave my children to my sister to bring up and looked after them, here I take care of my mother now. In summer I work in Milkovo, and all the rest of the time I live in Esso, I go on a snowmobile in winter to prepare stone birch for tambourines, I like winter fishing.
Here winter is long, not like on the mainland.
Kamchatka is one big heart, snowy and hot like a volcano in winter.