Model for the Tundra School in Yamal: 10 a New Education System for Children from Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Nenets Families
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First published in Sustaining Indigenous Knowledge: Learning Tools and Community Initiatives for Preserving Endangered Languages and Local Cultural Heritage, edited by Erich Kasten and Tjeerd de Graaf 2013, 181–194. Fürstenberg/Havel: Kulturstiftung Sibirien. — Electronic edition MODEL FOR THE TUNDRA SCHOOL IN YAMAL: 10 A NEW EDUCATION sysTEM FOR CHILDREN FROM NOMADIC AND SEMi-noMADIC NENETS FAMILIES Roza I. Laptander Introduction This article describes the modernisation of the education system for the indigenous people of the North by providing an example from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District (YNAD). In 2010, the District’s Department of Education started an experi- mental education system for reindeer herders’ children. In this experiment, children have the possibility to get primary education in the tundra, where they live with their parents. This model for the Tundra School (kochevaia shkola) was introduced by the Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi. It is a new experiment for the District, because in other places in Yamal children still study in boarding schools. These boarding schools have a double impact on the indigenous children1. On the one hand, they provide them with education, but on the other, they have a negative impact on their native language and culture. This is not only the case in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, but also in the whole of the Russian North, Siberia and the Far East. This paper is intended as a report on my personal contribution to this work, which is rather modest. I had to prepare papers and to write about the Tundra School project with Valentina Niarui, a specialist in teaching methods from Salekhard. We had to apply to the Yamalo-Nenets Department of Education for official support for this project. An interesting aspect of this work is the fact that the Tundra School is not a completely new education concept in the tundra. There have been attempts to try it before, but they did not succeed. This time the participants are hopeful that this school will have the right to exist and that it will bring good results into the process of education for the tundra children. During our meetings we used to talk to Anna Nerkagi and other teachers of the Laborоvaia School, and we asked them how they are working at their school and what is different there from ordinary schools. As a result, we were able to compose a document about the development of this new type of school and its way of teaching children whose parents have a nomadic way of life or live in places difficult to reach in the tundra. This Tundra School is offi- cially called the ‘Model of Nomadic Education for Indigenous Children of the North in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District’, whose parents follow the nomadic or semi-nomadic way of life. In this paper, we shall consider it as an example of the Municipal system of education in the Priuralsky County (Raion) in the Municipal Educational Institution, the Primary Comprehensive School in Laborоvaia. 182 Roza I. Laptander The location of Yamal in the Russian Federation and its inhabitants The Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District (Okrug) is one of the 89 federal districts of the Russian Federation. It is located in Western Siberia. The indigenous population of Yamal consists of the Nenets, Khanty, and Selkup people. They form approximately 8.2 % of the whole district’s population, and only a small number of them speak their native languages in everyday life. The majority of the population consists of people of many other nationalities who migrated to this region from different parts of Rus- sia. Most of them moved here in the 1990s from central Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet Republics because of the development of the gas and oil industry in the district. Nowadays Yamal is one of the richest regions of the Russian Federation, with high salaries and good living conditions. This is very attractive for incoming people from central parts of the country and from former Soviet Union republics. As a matter of fact, this process is surely still changing the whole population structure of the district, which is illustrated by the following table. Ethnic 1979 Census 1989 Census 2002 Census 2010 Census group Number % Number % Number % Number % Nenets 17,404 11.0 % 20,917 4.2 % 26,435 5.2 % 29,772 5.9 % Khanty 6,466 4.1 % 7,247 1.5 % 8,760 1.7 % 9,489 1.9 % Komi 5,642 3.6 % 6,000 1.2 % 6,177 1.2 % 5,141 1.0 % Selkups 1,611 1.0 % 1,530 0.3 % 1,797 0.4 % 1,988 0.4 % Russians 93,750 59.0 % 292,808 59.2 % 298,359 58.8 % 312,019 61.7 % Ukrainians 15,721 9.9 % 85,022 17.2 % 66,080 13.0 % 48,985 9.7 % Tatars 8,556 5.4 % 26,431 5.3 % 27,734 5.5 % 28,509 5.6 % Others 9,694 6.1 % 54,889 11.1 % 71,664 14.1% 74,625 14.3 % The Nenets people form the most numerous northern nation among all indig- enous peoples of the Russian Federation. According to the 2010 census of the Russian Federation, there are 44,640 Nenets people. They live in three national districts: the Nenets Autonomous District (as part of the Arkhangel’sk Province), the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District (as part of the Tiumen’ Province) and the Taimyr Autonomous District (as part of the Krasnoiarsk Region). In the past, there existed a widespread multilingualism among the local people in Yamal, where one of the above-mentioned indigenous languages was dominant. Local people only used the Russian language for trading and for communication with Rus- sians, Komi or Tatars. This situation changed markedly after the 1930s. Moreover, intensive oil and gas development in huge areas of the Yamal penin- sula is a main reason for many nomadic people (who were living in the tundra with Model for the tundra school in Yamal 183 reindeer and still used their native language in everyday life) to move to settlements, where they have to use Russian. In many families the next generation will shift to the use of Russian, which is due to the fact that Russian is the official state language of the whole Russian Federation, and therefore it is the language of communication, educa- tion and official mass media. This situation is a common feature everywhere in Rus- sia, except that in several parts of the country the local national languages also have official status, such as in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) or the Republic of Tatarstan. Why it is important to modernise education for aborigines For the history of the tundra schools, we refer to the article by Elena Liarskaya (this volume), which describes how the northern minority nations of Russia had a nega- tive experience with boarding school education. Not all ideas were optimal under the working conditions of Tundra Nenets. However, here we should mention that in the 19th century there were some examples of migrating schools (shkoly peredvizhkie) accompanying the children of the families that followed their reindeer herds (see Toulouze 1999: 56). Other solutions were developed in the first part of the 20th cen- tury. These schools did not really follow nomads on their migration but they were situated on the routes of migrating families (Toulouze 1999: 65). The idea was that these migrating schools would bring education to children who lived in areas difficult to reach. Such schools started to work in the early 1930s, but it was found that such methods of education did not work well in the conditions of a permanent nomadic life. Unfortunately, we do not have many materials about these schools, but Elena Liarskaya wrote about them (Liarskaya 2005; this volume). Some articles mentioned that teachers used to travel with reindeer herders to the tundra and tried to teach children and their parents there. This work did not yield good results (Golovnev and Osherenko 2000). It is clear that the reindeer herders’ traditional way of life depends very much on reindeer. This means moving with the herds and looking for good pastures all the time. Nenets migrate all year round from the south to the north and back, a distance of several hundred kilometers. The children of these families travel with adults, and by living this life, they learn their inherited language and culture. They do not just watch how their parents work, but they also learn by taking an active part in their families’ lives, and helping the adults with the reindeer and the household work. We know that there was a strong political movement to bring literacy and education to all ‘wild northern tribes’ and to make them members of the Soviet Union. For this purpose, the children of the northern aborigines were taken away from the tundra to study in boarding schools with Russian as the only language of education for all school sub- jects. We know about this from the stories of people who used to study at that time (Dudeck 1998; this volume). 184 Roza I. Laptander Because of this fact, there is nowadays an important group of indigenous people who live in settlements and towns and speak predominantly Russian, whereas only a small number of them speak their native languages. All of them were taken to board- ing schools from the tundra, and from primary school age they felt that they were different from Russians because they spoke a different language and used to live in ‘uncultured’ life conditions. When we had our interviews with representatives of this group of people, some of them were from settlements, whereas others continue to live a traditional way of life in the tundra.