God’s Dancing Lessons

Flying low over the golden conifers in the magical early evening light, the delta of the Ob River sure looks like Canada’s Mackenzie. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Cat’s Cradle. It’s that delightful credo that leads me to the Arctic coast of Siberian Russia, to Salekhard, a town of 37,000 souls sitting precisely on the Arctic Circle.

It’s September 2006, and I’ve been invited to the obscure Northern Travelling Film Festival to screen and discuss two of my Arctic films and to share stories and experiences with Siberians and other Nordic film-makers, to shake hands with our northern neighbours.

Farley Mowat used to remind us that the Arctic is more than a place, it’s a state of mind — one that Canadians and Russians particularly share. In Mao’s China they used to say that women hold up “the other half of the sky.” Well, Canadians and Russians share the same lofty polar sky, wonder at the same northern lights, and touch each other spiritually along a lengthy, icebound border over the pole. We share a lot with Russians. Like Canada’s Arctic, where oil, gas, and minerals are abundant, Russia’s Arctic is also rich in oil and gas. As we touch down and taxi to the sparkling new steel and glass igloo-inspired terminal building, I see rows of Mi-8 helicopters and satellite, microwave, and Cold War-vintage “early warning” stations — the Soviet Union’s version of the dew Line.

I’m the only Canadian filmmaker invited to the film festival this year. It was started in 2000 by award-winning Russian ethnologist and filmmaker Andrei Golovnev and his dynamic sister, Marina Yuzhaninova. They wanted to bring together filmmakers, ethnographers, and anthropologists from polar nations to share ideas and to work together on projects of mutual interest. In fact, there are two film festivals happening in this small town simultaneously — a Russian-only festival of anthropological films and the “travelling festival.” In 2004, the prize for “best enlightening” film in the Russian-only event had the dramatic title Domestication of Tiny Deers. It’s going to be a bizarre few days.

I’m curious to find out if there are parallels in our Arctic experiences or lessons we can learn from each other; to explore links between Siberia’s aboriginal people and Canada’s Inuit; and to see if we could share a strategy on how to deal with exploding oil and gas development here and in Arctic Canada.

I expected Salekhard, which is a three-hour flight northeast of Moscow, to be a bustling boom town like Fort McMurray. But as filmmakers from Russia, Finland, Sweden, Ice-land, and Denmark board the buses downtown, I find a 400-year-old village that’s prosperous but by no means bursting out of control.

Over 20 percent of Russia’s proven natural gas reserves — 10.4 trillion cubic metres — have been found beneath the Yamal Peninsula, just to the north of here. And they’ve found a lot of oil, too. So, in contrast to the rest of economically and socially challenged Russia, where youth unemployment is rampant, the people of Salekhard and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region are doing very well. Five years ago the town was made up of one-and two-storey clapboard houses. Now there’s a group of tall hotels and office buildings, numerous traffic lights, even a mosque. The fancy Arctica Hotel was built by Albertans. Road and housing construction attracts Turkish labourers, leaving the highly paid oil and gas jobs for Russians.

Local politicians call Yamal the “energy heart” of the country. Many here predict that the region will be the economic saviour of post-Soviet Russia. Former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson paid a visit some years ago, and photos of her trip grace a glossy economic-development brochure. But unlike Fort McMurray, which is overrun with trucks sporting Big Oil insignia, Salekhard doesn’t feel like an occupied town. Though the multinational Schlumberger deals with oil equipment infrastructure and there are joint ventures with Shell, BP, and others to market the gas to Europe, Russia’s national energy company, oao Gazprom, owns and operates the wells and pipelines. Here, a national energy program is alive and well.

While Yamal has huge untapped pools of natural gas, its muskeg, lakes, and rivers are also home to the world’s largest reindeer herd, 600,000 strong. Many of the Nenets, the aboriginal people of Yamal, still live a nomadic life, following and harvesting reindeer. During Stalin’s reign, herders were forced to move to collectivized farms, but they have now returned to their traditional life. Khabaecha Yanungad, a Nenet elder who sports a jaunty white moustache and edits the local newspaper, tells me that the reindeer are not just animals to be harvested, they are central to his people’s perception of the world. Their word for reindeer means “giving life.” Canada’s aboriginal people haven’t lived a nomadic life for quite some time, but the Inuit and Dene share Yanungad’s deep concern that wells and pipelines may destroy their traditional beliefs.

A Russian anthropologist tells me that he encountered a group of Nenet herders crossing a distant and remote river. He asked if they needed anything. “No,” they replied, “we have everything we need.”