Diversity of stories and Nenets approaches to them

The Nenets oral history interviews include individual life stories, personal biographies, stories about relatives, friends, and neighbours, historical narratives, individual songs, stories of songs and people who made these songs, and collective narratives. There are single narratives, dialogues, group talks, discussions and comments about other people’s stories. There are different versions of the same story told by many different people. In general, all of these stories represent the Nenets past from the beginning of the 20^th century until nowadays. This work on Nenets oral history shows that stories and interviews concerning big changes on the tundra reflect a general mechanism of making official historical narratives about past events.

In the Nenets language, the word wa”al or waal (Nen. ва”ал, ваал) means historical narrative, while the word ilye”mya (Nen. иле”мя) is used for a life story and narrative (Bobrikova 1965; Kupriyanova 1965; Khomich 1984; Pushkareva 2001:23; Lar 2001:14; Golovnev 2004:11). Nenets also have stories about historical events which border between a myth, a historical narration and a life story. For example, Nenets researcher Leonid Lar describes stories about recent Soviet time repression and reindeer herder rebellion in the year 1943 as wa”al along with other Nenets historical narratives about the 19^th century (Laptander 2014). At the same time, Nenets folklorist Elena Pushkareva distinguishes wa”al (historical stories) from ilye”mya (legends, tales or real-life stories), but different from traditional Nenets fairy tales lakhanako (Nen. лаханако), epic songs syudbyabc (Nen. сюдбябц) ‘epic songs about giants’ and yarabc (Nen. ярабц) ‘epic crying songs’ (Pushkareva 2001:23). There are also Nenets historical songs khynabts (Pushkareva 2010). In general, in Nenets storytelling performance there is no strict rule for defining historical narratives and narratives about the past. However, I consider that ilye”mya tells about the nearest past in people’s life stories and individual narratives (Bobrikova 1965; Kupriyanova 1965; Khomich 1984; Pushkareva 2001; Golovnev 2004).

The word ilye”mya comes from the verb ilyes’ ‘to live’ and can be translated as ‘a life story, a true story and a real fact’. This term has several meanings, as ‘a personal story’ as well as ‘a true story which really happened in the past.’ Apart from these characteristics, other stories about people can be lakharyu ‘a rumour or gossip, which cannot be trusted’. However, when people tell their personal stories, they usually define a story to be personal or about somebody (Boyd 2015). In Figure 3.1. I give the classification of the Nenets life stories and historical narratives.

Figure 3.1. Diversity of Nenets stories ilye”mya.

Additionally by using the term ilye”mya, people define the time of the narrative.

It means that the story is about the past, and the time of the story indicates its importance for narrating (Kostikov 1936; Pushkareva 2001; Lar 2001; Lukin 2008;

Laptander 2014).

Collected Nenets texts were collected and analysed from the point of view of the local, regional, and national history of the Nenets, the Uralic-language-speaking Arctic minority nation of the Russian Federation, with the following timeline:

a) Memories about the time of the ancestors and their kinship to present-day Nenets families. Most of these stories stem from the Russian Empire until the period before collectivization in the tundra. These stories illustrate the rules of building relationships of reciprocity that Nenets maintain with people, the land and its spirits and the ways in which these stories are embedded in individual and collective memory stories.

b) The Nenets life on the tundra under collectivization, during the period of the formation of the Soviet Empire and its consolidation in remote Arctic areas.

Such stories tell how Nenets people remember the transient period of their past.

These stories tell how reindeer herders were forced to do industrial fishing in the tundra rivers, and how ex-fishermen moved to the tundra to work with reindeer or as polar foxhunters.

c) When the overall Soviet umbrella of the historical past collapsed, the Nenets had to learn new rules of living in the post-Soviet society. However, even

contemporary life in the tundra has many reflections of the Soviet past, which still influence how tundra people speak about their present difficulties.

In general, the Nenets collective memory stories are represented by canonical narratives and stories about special events in the tundra. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) describes such stories as open access stories, which every member of the society can tell to others. There are stories about significant Nenets people who did extraordinary, unusual things from the point of view of the tundra people; these are called historical narratives wa”al. There are also local family stories that are told from generation to generation. There are life stories that make up a collection of kinship stories about the life of individuals in their individual songs, which are performed by other people. There are personal stories khari ilye”mya that can change their narratives over time, but their main idea is to transmit the sense of the family past and the origin, which can be opposed in stories of their neighbours nyenetsya ilye”mya (Figure 3.2.). However, there are also collective stories that people have never told aloud, which have always been silent. Yet, these silenced stories could be told to young people as special lessons of Nenets unity, tolerance, respect and reciprocity.

Ilye”mya (life story)

personal a group, collective (canonical) many ilye”myamyi (khari ilye”mya) nyenetsya ilye”mya

мань иле”мями ненэця иле”мя

‘my story about my life’ ‘a life story of another person

or somebody’

Figure 3.2. Private and collective life stories.

The collective history is inseparable from the life stories of its members. However, collective ilye”mya can be made from many personal stories, like the Russian nesting wooden doll matryoshka. When one story can be inside of another story, and this second story can tell a story as a song. There are considerable memories, which are also call canonical memories. They are usually told as legends or historical stories, individual/group/collective memories, individual songs or stories of songs, in connection to people and their families.This phenomenon works especially well when Nenets tell collective memory stories about individuals in connection to Nenets individual songs.