International Day of Indigenous Peoples

Have a look back to our story about the cemetery. Our new friends Galina and Nina came over for afternoon tea today. Today is actually the International Day of Indigenous peoples. We could not find any observance today, but perhaps that could be because there was a celebration on June 12th (from here on we will refer to it as the Day of Festivals of all descriptions). So we decided to invite Galina and Nina over instead.
We spent some time talking about Evenki and Inuit cultures and looking at a bit of a video about the Inuit. We ate reindeer soup. Later, Galina's daughter Snezhana came over after work to pick the old ladies up. Snezhana has invited us to come to their dacha, which will be a great chance to get to know them all as a family. We are happy that more relationships are opening up.
The above video is a little film about Evenki culture. Some Evenki people who live in cities have been known to light fires in their apartments or on the balconies to "feed the fire." Feeding the fire is an animistic spiritual practice. You can see this happening in the film. We do not know anyone personally who does this (not that we know of anyway).