During our visit, we met the only two Chulym old enough to have seen a shamanic ritual with their own eyes. One of them was the 90-year-old lady named Varvara. Though frail and largely incoherent when we met her, in 1972 Varvara had told the following story to visiting Russian researchers. The telling itself was a courageous act, for expressions of religion were severely frowned upon in Soviet society, and many shamans had been brutally repressed in the 1950s and 1960s. Even before the Soviets, shamans faded from Chulym society because native Siberians and Russians were converted to Orthodox Christianity, which forbade shamanic practices. After she told it and the researchers dutifully noted it in their notebook in phonetic transcription, it lay dormant for over three decades in the archives of the local university. Varvara’s story is the last surviving eyewitness account of now-forgotten shamanic rites.
When the shaman shamanizes, there is a plate of meat and three liters of alcohol nearby.
Around her neck hang nineteen strings of beads, and a white scarf is on her head.
She holds twelve rings in her hand and beats them with a wooden spoon.
Then she takes the spoon and shamanizes with it.
If the spoon lands right side up, it augurs good.
If the spoon lands upside down, it augurs bad.5
This fragment of a firsthand account is a glimpse backward into prehistory—perhaps the only one we will ever have—of a lost religious tradition. The Chulym get along relatively well without their traditional religion, and some have converted to Orthodox Christianity, but scholars of religions and culture worldwide are impoverished. Given that so much of history is filled with the eradication of belief systems and the colonial imposition of religions, we should be sensitive to the impending loss of any more. As belief systems approach the vanishing point due to language shift, the best we can do, perhaps, is to write down or record texts or first-person accounts of what people once believed in.
Although Ös did not develop as a written language, we learned that there was at least one example of written Ös. A born outdoorsman, Vasya would spend weeks at a time out hunting. During the day, he would patiently track bears and other animals, and at night, sitting alone in his small cabin in the forest, he made an audacious decision—he would keep a hunting journal in his own native Ös language. He knew how to read and write in Russian, but Ös has at least four sounds not found in Russian. Since Vasya was not a trained linguist, he decided that he would not invent new letters for these sounds, but would use novel combinations of letters he already knew. After some time, he worked out a system and began to make regular entries in his journal. He was encouraged in his efforts by something his mother had told him as a young boy: “My mother told me that it is necessary to speak our Ös language…. Let the Russians speak Russian and let the Ös speak Ös.” This expression of linguistic pride inspired him to keep writing, and perhaps to even dare to think that Ös might be passed onto his children’s generation. But his journal was ill-fated.
One day Vasya got up his courage and showed his journal—now containing several years’ worth of entries painstakingly written—to a Russian friend. The reaction was catastrophic for him. “What are you writing there, in what language?” the friend demanded. “Why write Ös?” When Vasya heard these scornful words, he felt as if he had done something very wrong. All the shame of the schoolyard and stigma of being different came back to him. In a fit of anger, he threw his journal—the first and only book ever written in his native tongue—out into the forest to rot. “I might have wanted to show it to you,” he told us, “but it’s not here, it’s there where I threw it away.”
Despite this rocky start, Vasya agreed to demonstrate his writing system. He wrote a simple story and allowed us to film him talking about his writing system. He felt secure enough to express pride once more in his tongue. “I have always loved the Ös language and spoken it…. I will never throw away my language. I still speak it.”
In the hope that we might encourage Vasya to let his writing system gain wider use in the community, we used it to produce the storybook that the tribal council had requested. We also commissioned local children—none of whom spoke the language—to draw illustrations for it. Their efforts, and Vasya’s brilliant orthography, led to the very first published Ös book.
Though never written down, the Chulym people’s history is a rich one. They were traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers. Their livelihood, and also their name for themselves, derives from the Chulym River, which flows for over a thousand miles in a westerly direction and empties into the Ob River. At the time of their first contact with Europeans, in the mid-18th century, the Chulym people lived in birch-bark tepees, wore fur clothing, and had no domesticated animals other than dogs.
The Chulym watershed is a low-lying, marshy ecosystem rich in plant, insect, bird, and mammal species and experiencing drastic seasonal fluctuations in temperature. Chulym culture, subsistence, and traditional knowledge center around river navigation and fishing, gathering of berries and roots, and hunting with snares and weapons. All Chulym knowledge systems are in decline. Use of medicinal plants has mostly been forgotten, as have the ecological (lunar) calendar systems, taxonomies of plants and fish, and techniques for making wooden dugout canoes, fur-covered skis, and fur clothing.
The Chulym people pose an interesting puzzle for genetics and the history of human migration. Descendants of an ancient local population, they are genetic and cultural kin to New World populations found in Alaska. At an unknown point in the past (possibly as late as the 18th century), they shifted from their ancient and unidentified language (likely belonging to Yeniseic, a now nearly extinct language family) and began speaking a Turkic language. They underwent a linguistic conversion of the same kind as their fellow Siberians, the Tofa, discussed in chapter 9. The Chulym did hold on to many ancient words, especially pertaining to rivers, fish, and traditional lifeways. Though they shifted languages, they kept many old place-names (especially river names) as well as vocabulary specific to animal, plant, navigation, and canoe-building technologies. By digging into the language of the Chulym, scientists can gain insights into ancient Siberian prehistory, as well as an understanding of human adaptation to some of the harshest living conditions known to mankind.
That work has become even more urgent today. Our work within the Enduring Voices project is to salvage, record, and analyze the fragmented knowledge that remains. In our field trips, we have collected, recorded, and translated a dozen new texts (stories, songs, and personal narratives), not only from Vasya but also from several others that we have discovered since. We met and recorded Maria Tolbanova (born 1931), previously unnoticed by us, and the oldest living fluent female speaker who is able to tell stories. In addition, we visited Anna and Aleksei Baydashev, the only remaining married couple who speak the language daily at home.
Nonetheless, the Ös-speaking population continues to decline sharply. Six speakers we interviewed in 2003 and 2005 have passed away. Only three speakers remain who are able to work with us. And only a single speaker, Maria, was able to tell an extended narrative about her life. What she chose to recall made her shake as she told it and brought tears to her eyes. It was a harrowing story of how, as a young girl, she nearly drowned. This is Maria’s story:
I fell into the water. It was just about the time of the war. My mother sent me to live with her relatives in Beregayevo because she had gone blind…. So I went to live with my relatives, elder sister and aunt. One day when I was 12 years old, I went to fetch water…. I was naïve and young. It was during the wartime.
So I was going along and there was an ice rift, and the water along it was fairly shallow, and it wasn’t far to the lake. I was going along with my pails and leather boots, but I didn’t lace up the boots. Just as I got to the water I slipped and there I fell, my two pails fell in, and I fell in.
I flailed around in the ice, and I’m going down, then I looked and I was completely sinking. My leather boots fell off, and then I
shouted out, “Mama I’m drowning.” I looked up to the surface, but the water was already beginning to go white.
Then suddenly, it was as if my Mama pulled me out and made me stop crying. I was crying a lot, all cut up and all covered with blood. I ran back to the house, “Auntie, I fell in!”
My aunt said to me “How did you fall in? You let your boots fall in, you dropped your pails in.”
I was shivering, my long hair was all iced. I shook and shivered as I warmed myself by the stove. Somehow I fell asleep.
Two days later all the ice melted and floated away downstream. Then my aunt Vera believed me.
My uncle came to fetch me back home. “Hey, let’s go home,” he said. But when I saw the ferry I was afraid. He had to blindfold me so I could get on the ferry.
The ferry sailed downstream until it stopped at our village…. My mama was waiting for me. “Daughter, daughter” she cried…. I was covered in scrapes and cuts, and I was ashamed. And when I think of it, I feel very bad.
We sat silent as Maria concluded her tale. The near-death experience had been so traumatic for her that it still brought a quaver to her voice more than 60 years later. Her own daughter, watching with us, had not heard this story before. Besides the privilege of hearing this heartfelt and deeply authentic life history, we were thrilled to have heard so much Ös spoken, and so passionately. The number of people who could tell such stories can be counted on one hand, and those who could understand, perhaps on two hands. Ös is dying of embarrassment and shame, hidden away, neglected, silenced.
“It would be very difficult to bring the language back now,” opines Vasya. “But perhaps not impossible.”
He has taken small steps, assisting me and other linguists in recording his stories, helping us locate speakers, and speaking the language to his wife and daughter. Coaxing an intentionally hidden language out of its hiding place is an arduous process. Ös was so effectively concealed that the few remaining speakers themselves, we found, were not aware of other speakers, who might have been living in the same village. Families were often unaware that their elders still spoke it, or they dismissed it as the rantings of the senile. It has lain deep in the recesses of memory, undisturbed for decades. And when it did come out, it stirred great emotion. The floodgates of memory opened, and stories from childhood and reminiscences of a lifetime spilled out.
With the permission of the Chulym tribal council and the support of elderly speakers, we decided to begin a bold social experiment with Ös. We created new social networks that we hoped would act as a powerful force in resurrecting this dormant language. Casting aside the idea that anthropologists should not actively intervene or affect the culture they are studying, we formed a partnership with the elders to help unlock their memories.
The Chulym council itself (with only one member out of seven admitting knowledge of Ös) affirmed that the language was at a critical stage. There were probably only two dozen speakers, if that, and it had fallen nearly completely silent because the elders who knew it still felt their old childhood shame and lacked opportunities to speak it. Even the presence of a single Russian speaker was enough to suppress their desire to speak it. And since Russian speakers dominated these Siberian villages, the pressures silencing Ös were always in force. This was the last best opportunity, the council believed, for scientists to document the language and to gain recognition for the community by bringing some of the most powerful stories to a wider audience.
We took extreme measures—driving from one village to the next, crossing rivers by ferry and reaching some locations by wooden canoe—to collect the elders. We brought them together for the sole purpose of having a conversation in their native tongue. Many of the elders we brought along had not visited the other villages, or even met the other speakers. They were unaware of the other elders who shared their fate of being silenced.
A commonplace that we take for granted—a conversation—was an utter novelty to these elders. We set up closed meetings in the villages and even posted bouncers at the doors of the houses to shoo away anybody who was a Russian speaker, whose very presence would have been enough to force the conversation to switch to Russian. The elders showed their joy at the opportunity by launching into long, laughter-filled dialogues in Ös.
The elders included Ivan, a diminutive elderly man about five feet tall, with a toothy smile and a hand-rolled stub of a cigarette between his lips. His face was deeply lined from a lifetime of hunting and fishing in the cold climate. And Anna, who looked older than her 65 years, a pensioner with a bright flowered headscarf and a boisterous laugh accompanied by waving hand gestures. They reminisced freely, regaling each other with tales of bear and moose hunting. They were so engrossed, they seemed to forget our presence, though they had granted us permission to film the session. We kept the cameras rolling, eager to catch every word.
Then the talk turned to cultural themes, as Vasya brought up the ancient lunar calendar system:
VASYA: How did we used to name our months? There was Fox month…. Ivan, you should know month names in our language!
ANNA: Ah yes, months!
IVAN: Well, there was Fox month, Chipmunk month, Green month, Riverbank month….
ANNA: Green month, that’s May, I said that! May is Green month!
VASYA: What else?
ANNA: I knew some of the months…my father he knew them all. Oh, I’ve forgotten already. We’ve forgotten a lot…of course.
Anna waved her hand across her eyes, a gesture of forgetting. Of 13 lunar months, the elders could name only four. So much had faded from memory! They found it hard even to name plants that grew in the yard—bilberry, whortleberry, dandelion, nettle—but did not hesitate in naming animals such as mink, wolf, and moose.
Shifting the topic to hunting, Vasya entertained the elders with a favorite story:
I got up in the morning before the sun rose, took my gun, and set off to the lake. My boat was at the lake. I sat in my boat and set off. Then I look: a moose is coming out of the water! I landed the boat on the bank, took my gun, aimed well, and made it go boom! The moose fell over. I smoked one pipe of tobacco, then I took out my knife, skinned the moose, put its meat in my boat, and returned home. My wife and children were waiting for me at home.
Afterward, the elders were moved to laughter and tears simultaneously while watching the video playback on my laptop computer. For the first time ever, they saw themselves on video and heard their own powerful, funny, archaic voices. While there is not much that scientists can do to save a language, on that day, sitting with the elders watching the playback, Greg and I felt empowered. Our presence had awakened a slumbering culture, had created a brand-new discourse, and had, however temporarily, breathed life into a dying vernacular. “You’ve made us immortal,” one of the elders observed. Now people far removed in space and time from these villages can hear the voices and listen to the stories.
Anna and Aleksei Baydashev, the last remaining husband and wife pair who speak Chulym at home.
After returning from the village on what we knew would probably be our last visit to the Chulym, we were somewhat downcast. We thought about the dramatic life stories that Maria Tolbanova had told us. She had probably been waiting decades to retell that story to an audience that could appreciate it in its original tongue. We were awed and humbled to have been a part of that audience. We knew that the story would likely never be told again, and so we had a special responsibility to care for the recording, archive it, translate it, and make it known to the world, as Maria had instructed us. As we pored over our notes and replayed bits of the sound recording to be sure we’d gotten it right, I had a sense of finality. I was convinced no more stories like this one would ever be told in this language.
But one more surprise awaited us. Back at the archives in Tomsk, the city where we had originally begun our expedition, we decided to examine once again a collection of dusty notebooks from 1971. Buried among the pages, we had uncovered all kinds of curiosities—a lis
t of words for types of flowers and fish, instructions on how to bake bread on hot coals and how to fish with a net from a wooden dugout canoe. We had faithfully made copies of these texts. But we had overlooked one. To our amazement, on page 573 of the notebooks, we stumbled upon a truly epic story. As we flipped through the book, we realized that the story and its translation went on for a full 56 pages! Nothing of this magnitude in Ös had ever been published or even reported to exist. Not one of all the speakers we had talked to could tell a story of more than a few dozen lines. This was a truly astonishing find, and all the more so because it had lain hidden in the Tomsk University archives for nearly 40 years.
The story itself, “Three Brothers,” is a bizarre mash-up of dozens of different folktale motifs. It has echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and numerous other folktale traditions. It may be as old as or even older than any of these, representing an unbroken tradition of tale-telling from an ancient time. Handed down over centuries and passed through countless minds, it has been smoothed like a polished pebble by the process of hearing, memorizing, and retelling.
Because it had never been written down until 1971, it shows all the important qualities of oral tradition. Only what can easily remain in memory has been retained, and certain aspects have been dramatized, repeated, or embellished to make it easier to memorize. Some of the many memory hooks evident here are the repetitions, the heavy use of numbers (three, seven), archetypal animals (swan, deer, pike), and the scenes of violence (vampiric devils that stab with needles and drink blood). Like any good tale, it includes deception, doubt, betrayal, and revenge. No doubt this tale contains the threads of many ancient stories that have been woven together into a single cord. It is the culmination and the end of an ancient tradition. No person alive can retell this story in the original tongue from memory, and only a few still living would comprehend it as told. It is ancient, and yet completely new to the world, a nearly forgotten monument to human creativity that expresses our most primal fears and some of our fondest longings. These can be seen here in portions of the translated story of the “Three Brothers.”6
The Last Speakers Page 13
