When I grow up I want to be a professional Evenki

Lunch at Ziniada's house (including raw fish).

When I grow up I want to be a professional Evenki.

That's a bit of a tongue in cheek thing to say. We spent the day with the most lovely professional Evenki lady, named Ziniada. She and her husband live in probably one of the nicest houses in Baykit, which would still be humble by Australian standards. It is much bigger than the average village house here, which is quite small by Australian standards. It was owned by the last governor of the Evenki Autonomous Okrug, before it was merged in with the Krasnoyarsk Krai. (Another contentious topic that I am not even touching on.) Her husband is not in town because he went down to Krasnoyarsk for the congress of indigenous peoples.

Ziniada and her sister Maya come from a little village of 150 people further up the Tunguska river, called Oshorova. (Yes, we are in the general vicinity of Tunguska Event, the only meteorite to hit the earth in living memory.) They are both uber fluent speakers of Evenki and it was such a pleasure to hear them naturally speak it with each other as their language of default. They did not stop to speak in Russian, just because we were there. I loved this, and that is the kind of tenacity that is needed to save their language. It is a contrast to the fact that we do not see Yura and his mum speak that much together. (They speak a little together but seem to switch back to Russian fairly easily. I would love to know how much they speak together when there are only Evenki speakers around.)

Maya on the left and Ziniada on the right, happily chat away in Evenki when ever they speak to each other.

Ziniada works for the Evenki Cultural Preservation Society. They produce materials to record songs and stories etc. She also runs a Summer camp for kids to teach them about Evenki culture and language. It would have been wonderful to have her as our Evenki teacher, as she knows her language so well. 

Ziniada made the very telling comment that the future of their culture is in their own hands. Even if powers that be do not understand, or even make things difficult. I couldn't agree more, and when I meet people like Ziniada I want to help all the more.

We had the loveliest time with her, hearing her stories and learning more about the culture. It would have been nice to hear some folk stories or legends from her in Evenki and record them, but she did not feel like doing that. But she very happily and comfortably completed our dialect comparison word list without missing a single word, and even giving multiple options for some words.

I mentioned to her the film "Tymanchi's friend," the only completely Evenki language movie. We told her how much we loved the film. We were told that she might know where to find a copy. Her first response was, "the boy who is the central character in the movie is our natural brother." Secondly, she gifted us with a box DVD set of that movie and the other Evenki movie "The evil spirit of Zambuya." We were at a loss to express our gratitude. Especially since no word exists for thank you in Evenki (apart from the context of food, which really only means yummy /amoko/).

We realised that a visit to an Evenki house hold takes a long time. Our first visit to Katya's house in Krasnoyarsk last year was six hours. Our visit to Marina the other day was also six hours. Our visit to Ziniada and Maya today was more than six hours. Melody learnt many years ago in Novosibirsk in her early days, that if you can't visit someone for three hours, you probably shouldn't go. That was for regular Russians. It seems you double the number for Evenki people!

Many other treasure troves existed, including a map showing all the Siberian tribes back in the 1600s, which I meticulously photographed.

We were so exhausted by the time we got home this evening, not the least because PJ has still been running us ragged. He could not keep still and avoid tearing their house apart the whole time we were there, punctuated by screams and cries demanding his way. When we decided to go outside he calmed down, but there was a very large yard to explore, which meant one of us supervised him the whole time. Melody was able to share a couple of stories and encourage them both that they are loved and accepted by God, even though an orthodox priest once told Ziniada to rack off for being a pagan.

Our week has been quite full in many ways. We have a big day of story telling ahead of us. We can easily see how we can fill up our time for the rest of the week. At the same time, we could easily go home to Krasnoyarsk and flake out. So far things are looking good for the idea of desiring to make a return trip to Baykit.