5. History of the Puiko family:
5.6. Discussion
The history of the Puiko family is connected both with the history of traditional and industrial fishing in the tundra. The collection of the Yamal Nenets’ personal stories and group narratives reveals that when the Puiko family came to the Yuribey, they were poor and had only a small number of reindeer. They lived only off fishing and hunting sea mammals. When the Soviets came to the tundra, this family was employed by the state collective reindeer farms. Some of them even got new jobs and high positions of brigadiers there. In this way, they obtained a new position within
Nenets society, as successful fishermen and later, as successful reindeer herders.
However, other Nenets reindeer herders still consider them to be newcomers from the Low Ob River. People remember that this family broke traditional hunting and fishing rules and received a severe punishment for it. They tell Puiko family story as a lesson about Nenets rules of fishing in the tundra. It is similar to how other Arctic people preserve and remember their important hunting and fishing instructions (Willerslev 2007).
The State Puikovskii fishing factory (Пуйковский рыбозавод) was the biggest Soviet fishing factory on the Lower Ob River. When the Soviet administration built a fishing village within 20 kilometres of the present-day Salemal village, they named it the Puiko village because the local fishing Nenets, the Puikos, lived there permanently. According to the official Russian documents, the Puiko village factory started to work at the end of the 19th century, but it developed intensively during Soviet times because of the regional politics of high industrial fishing on the Ob River and other large tundra rivers like the Yuribey and the Mordy-Yakha Rivers.
The Puikovskii fishing factory was relocated to a new fishing factory in Salemal at the end of the 1970s.
Figure 5.7. a, b. The Puiko fishermen7.
This village does not exist anymore because it was completely destroyed by the water of the Ob River. In the summer of 2015, only a few fundaments of old wooden houses remained. However, the Puiko family continues to live nearby, still fishing,
7 This photo is taken from the book Istoria Puikovskogo rybozavoda (The history of Puikovskii fishing enterprise) (Zaitsev 2011).
but now for the Salemal fishing factory. Even though the old village is gone, this place is still called Puiko. Nyadma Puiko, who actually lived all his life in the Puiko village, told how he was obliged to fish on the Ob. At that time, he was also a private reindeer herder with a very small number of reindeer, but to officials, he was one of the darmoeds ‘parasites’ who had to work for the benefit of the Soviet country.
He was employed by the local fishing farm, from where he had got a wooden boat and fishing nets. Nyadma went for his first fishing trip on the Ob River and set his fishing nets. As Nyadma mentioned, his fishing luck helped him to obtain the status of the most successful fishermen among the local fishing Nenets. At the same time, Nyadma never considered that his good fishing luck was good for his family, because after successfully fishing for the state farm, his father died. There is a Nenets word wenzyoi ‘something or somebody’s action, which brings bad luck, misfortune’
which people use to explain unexpected misfortune. Thus, Niadna conjectured that perhaps his successful fishing had brought bad luck to his family, considering what had happened to his grandfather while fishing in the sea. These people were lucky with fishing, but since they broke the custom, they paid for their breach with their lives. Here Nyadma had to pay back nature for his fishing success with his father’s life. Such fishing rules and other beliefs of the supernatural power of the universe are quite common in many animist societies, particulartly across the Siberian North.
Although many Nenets people are not connected to shamanic beliefs nowadays, and many do not even know anything about it, they still believe that the power of nature influences their fishing and hunting luck and their life in the tundra. This story represented nyewykhy ilye”mya ‘an old story’ which is now told as lakhanako ‘a legend’. Fishing has always been an important part of life in the tundra, both prior to and during communist times, and is still a key occupation of the tundra people.
This chapter told the story about awaking an old sleeping story, which had been silenced due to its sensitive nature and as common knowledge of this tragedy. The narrative about the Puiko family was told as a collection of stories, which did not provide us with trustworthy information as to whether their events had really taken place, because all stories were told by third parties – descendants of the Puikos and the grandchildren of their neighbours. There is only one topic of this tragedy, but every narrator has his or her individual version of it. Furthermore, the history of the Puiko family here reflects the Nenets rules of adoption and responsibility with respect to people and their ancestors. Even the Nenets names in such stories can be a part of “confidential knowledge” about the history of the place and its people.
Moreover, every one of these stories can have its own informative meaning during narration, similar to what Cruikshank (1998) wrote in her book about the social role of stories in the life of indigenous people in the Yukon. This collection of stories also states the importance of fishing in the lives of the Yamal Nenets nomadic and semi-nomadic reindeer herders, since fishing is even nowadays the main source of food for reindeerless Nenets in the tundra.
5.7. Conclusion
In this chapter, I showed a second role of silence: for remembering and forgetting.
Based on the collection of stories detailing one Nenets family history, I demonstrated here how opening a silenced story and retelling it as a canonical narrative or legend does not prove that people remember the original story. The repetitive telling of the same narrative could result in many different versions of it developing. However, the information in personal stories and collective narratives might not always match.
This means that the long silencing of a story makes it unlikely for members of a society to remember it according to its original account. This work also showed that the process of developing a canonical narrative about a special historical event is very social. People who live together in the same environment might tell different versions of the same story. For example, these stories from the Yuribey River are represented by diverse accounts of personal and collective narratives about the Puiko family tragedy. Such multivocality of people’s stories showed that people could remember the stories about the historical past in different ways, over several generations. Such diversity of individual, family and collective narratives showed how people remember and tell memories about special events in the tundra as a type of hidden knowledge. As time has passed, people’s memories about this silenced story have become more distant, which may allow them to talk about these real-life events as old legends.
This chapter also showed how creative the Nenets can be in developing their oral memories by reconstructing and retelling old stories. Transformation of memories in oral societies shows that old stories do not stay in one form. Stories are always changing because nobody can retell them in the accurate original way, especially since all eyewitnesses have died. Thus, their long suppression has given rise to new stories, which follow the needs and interests of the present society as well as those of the current political regime.