Itel'men Tribal Harvest Festival

Festival Location: Kovran, Russia

Festival Type(s): Indigenous Fest , Harvest Festivals , Traditional Festivals

Itel'men Tribal Harvest Festival - Kamchatka, Russia

by © L. Peat O'neil 2008

Out on the tundra, eyes level with the humps of juniper and blueberry bushes, I crouched and surveyed the horizon. The violet, burnt orange, purple, and brick red rolled in waves to the fading blue sky. Sunset on the far eastern reaches of Siberia. I breathed deeply, forcing my body to remember the fresh piercing scent of the brush "bagulnik" and cold ground waiting for the first fall freeze. This is what I must remember of Kamchatka.

I was on the outskirts of Kovran, a hamlet of about 500 souls on the western shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. Siberia had figured in my travel dreams ever since I'd read Kate Marsden's 19th century narrative "On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers."

In her search for lepers to minister to -- it was the age of Florence Nightingales --Marsden didn't get as far as Kamchatka, a peninsula about the size of California lying directly above Japan. Few travelers of any sort had been here since the Bering Expedition sent by Russia's Queen Catherine in the late 1700's.

Kamchatka's deep wilderness attracts foreign visitors who seek outdoor adventure. Japanese mountaineers came in search of new mountains to be the first to scurry up. European and American mountaineers have claimed the summits of the peninsula's many snow capped volcanoes-- Klyuchevskya, Koryakskya, Avacha, Aag and dozens more. The high-end hook and bullet sportsmen are plundering the salmon rich streams and game filled forests. It is to these well-fed, mostly American, hunters that Kamchatka's nascent tourist industry caters. Unfortunately, licensing and hunting limits are inconsistently applied; bribes and payoffs play a larger role in the management of natural resources than sound principles of ecology.

Remote Kovran is an experience in time travel. This is a village with 13th c. plumbing, hand pumped water and sporadic electricity because of diesel rationing curtailing the generator. Scruffy dogs forage in the ditches for garbage and human excrement tossed from the houses. When they bite the village children, and they often do, the kids have to go through a painful series of rabies shots at the clinic in Us't Kharoziva, twenty-five kilometers to the south. This is one place where a sign reading 'zlaya sobaka' (mean dog) is a true fact.

There are no big white Sports rigged up in Abercombie & Fitch gear in Kovran. Here, the hunters and fishers are gathering food for the family and living like their nomadic ancestors.

The week of fall harvest festivities was just getting underway in Kovran when I lurched into town in a windowless army all terrain transport truck. During the hour trip across the rutted track and along the high water line of the seashore, I'd been wedged between droopy eyed Koriak and Itel'man tribes people who'd evidently already downed several bathtubs of homemade hooch. My backpack was splashed with milk from a beat-up metal urn with a loose lid. The Truck, as it is called, served as local milk run, schoolbus, airport limo.

There are no hotels; everybody who comes for the festival stays with families in the village. You pay with vodka or coffee, tee-shirts, or cassette tapes, whatever you have. The village accountant, Tanya, had seen me on the truck as I was fondled about the face by an inebriated celebrant of the Alkhalalalaj festival. Sophie the moon-faced drunk told me over and over that I was pretty, as I politely and pointedly returned her handshakes and edged away from her drunken smooches. Alas, none of the handsome young Koriak tribesmen were so forward.

Tanya's daughter Katia had been bitten by one of the starving dogs. They had stayed 10 days in the clinic while the girl went through a cycle of rabies shots in Us't Khairyuzova and were returning home with me on the all terrain taxi truck. I asked for you to stay with us, said Tanya, because you have a good face. Maybe she just wanted a break from the monotony of life at the last stop from nowhere.

Communication was demanding. Tanya knew a few phrases in textbook English and I'd sat through a couple of Russian courses at the community college. Neither of us had learned the phrases for the kinds of topics we needed to discuss. "Where can I wash," I would ask and she'd smile and say "Banya, on Sunday." But Sunday was days away, I'd step into the closet, the only private room in the house, and splash down the essentials with a quart of water heated on the wood stove in the kitchen.

But we did manage to talk about our families and gardening. Her husband Vitaly hailed from the northern reaches of Russia and was pale blond like a Laplander from Finland. They enthusiastically retold how they met at a Soviet youth camp somewhere on the vast prairie. After a couple of summers together organizing entertainment programs for other campers, marriage was the next step. They hauled out photo albums and I stared at snapshots of their relatives in front of official looking building in various Russian cities. Tanya pointed to herself in front of Red Square, on the steps of several municipal museums, in front of war monuments.

Tanya served up a full table of cabbage soup, smoked salmon or river fish, along with locally grown potatoes and carrots. Many families in Kovran, including my hosts, have constructed greenhouses of plastic sheeting on wooden frames and grow cucumbers, carrots, greens and dill. I would point to the lettuce, herbs and carrots and explain to Tanya that I grew the same vegetables in my backyard. A couple of times, I joined local folks foraging for blueberries and mushrooms on the tundra and in the woods. And on Sunday, I got my bath in the shed heated with a wood stove that Vitaly had built behind their house. I sweated in the steam, scrubbed, sluiced down with cold water and sweated some more.

During the "Alkhalalalaj" harvest festival (usually the third week in Sept.) Kovran's population nearly doubles with people from the surrounding region who shuttle in by helicopter and the huge all-terrain trucks. The festival is deeply imbedded in the culture of the region's tribes, but during Soviet rule, many of the Koriak, Itel'men, Sunda and other tribes were forcibly resettled away from their traditional fishing and reindeer herding camps and rituals were abandoned. The Soviets plunked them down on the wind burned prairie where it was colder and farther from the sea. Currently, a cultural revival is underway and the indigenous people have begun to reclaim their heritage.

One of the old rituals was a rigorous two-day 70 km. hike to erect a carved wooden totem atop sacred Mount Elvel. We were seventeen pilgrims, hiking across the empty tundra of northern Kamchatka. Young villagers and their boy-scout style leaders made up most of the group, along with a couple of foreign anthropologists, myself and the strong, silent Gosha, a villager of substance because he owns horses. He had noticed my struggle to keep up with the hard hiking Siberians and offered his horse to carry my backpack.

We'd hiked most of the day when I found the spoon. I was walking behind Gosha's lumbering beige horse, my heavy backpack roped to its saddle. I happened to look down and found a tablespoon with a pretty scrolled handle embedded in the soil. The spoon bowl faced up. I pried the spoon from the weeds and dirt and stashed it in my pocket, then scrambled to catch up with the group. It would be a while before I learned the meaning of this find.

Despite their rustic and patched gear, the Russians were resilient and animated. They hiked pell-mell across the tundra, heedless of the stragglers. When some of the slower youngsters lost the path up to Mt. Elvel, we had to wait for a couple of hours for them to catch up. The leaders paid little attention to the rest of the group's progress, yet at the camp site, they hastened to build a fire, put on tea to boil and hung sweat-soaked socks to dry. Around the fire at night, eyes bright and alive, they gave impromptu Russian lessons and tried out their English. I wondered if it was this nerve and will and lightheartedness that got the Russians through the wars and putsches and winters?

Also on the hike was an artist who'd studied the tribal folklore. Sergie Longinov Itenmen had carved the totem to be placed on the top of Mount Elvel.. Winds at the top were formidable, so while we waited for the teenagers who were carrying the four-foot totem to find their way through the brush up the mountain, I started building a rock cairn to shelter myself and any future climbers who might be stranded up there. Eventually the youngsters arrived, the totem was planted and food left for the mountain spirits, called Kamuli. Salmon is the traditional offering. Then our rag-tag group of pilgrims scrambled down the mountain, broke camp and slogged back to the village through a day of cold steady rain.

During the week long celebration, there were fire dances, drumming, chanting, singing, more totem carving. The festival opened fairly slowly, an evening of singing by school children then some dancing. Consuming the bathtub vodka was the main event. Certificates of purity are displayed by the merchants who peddle vodka on wooden crates in city markets, but when your host offers a toast, it would be bad form to ask where the vodka came from. You raise your little glass and down it, like everybody else around the table.

The festival's cooking competition brought out dozens of variations on themes of salmon, potatoes, berries and gir (bear fat). On another festival day, a seal was slaughtered. I watched, although it was intensely disturbing. After the fat was removed, the inner body resembled an adult human right down to the five-digits on the flippers. The villagers hunkered around the knife wielding butchers, eager to get a share of the meat and fat, carting it away in plastic buckets.

I had encountered Gosha's horse before the hike. The beige horse, solid and alert was on the path that led to the sea and the community's former location, back before the Soviets threw their weight around. Were they worried that the nomadic Koriaks and Sunda people would signal to foreign spy submarines or fishing trawlers out at sea?

It would be naive to assume that this village is beyond the reach of MTV and other tentacles of popular American culture. When the electricity was running, the television sets would be turned on. A well traveled friend asked "But, how ARE they?" meaning how are the indigenous peoples faring. Oh, I said, they're tribal, very basic-- concerned with family relationships, storing up food, drinking, getting laid. Yeah, really different than people anywhere else in the world.

Then there were the idling humm-vee taxis. In the cement duplex adjacent to Tanya lived an assortment of people who enjoyed loud rock and roll of an undeniable vintage. As if all the tapes dropped on the floor and came back together scrambled. Anyway, one morning I heard a persistent rumble, like an idling semi at a truck stop. Outside the neighbor's fence, two humvee type all terrain tank vehicles were idling while the drivers visited inside. The trucks idled for hours, perhaps the empty gas tanks would be evidence that work was performed.

On one of my last days in Kamchatka, I read a recently reprinted edition of Stepan P. Krasheninnikov's "Explorations of Kamchatka, North Pacific Scimitar, 1735-1741" the most detailed authority of natural life on Kamchatka to date. I was stunned to read that when the indigenous Siberian tribes of Kamchatka embark on a hunting trip, they toss a large tablespoon to forecast their success. If it falls so the curve faces is up, it's a good omen; when the eating side faces down, bad hunting ensues. I hadn't tossed that spoon I found on the trek to Mt. Elvel, but it came to me eating side up, forecasting good hunting and what was already a luck-filled and successful trip.

by L. Peat O'neil