Sven Haakanson executive director of Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository.  www.alutiiqmuseum.com  His main research area has been the Russian Arctic and the people of the Yamal. Haakanson is a native Alutiiq from Kodiak Island, Alaska and is fluent in Russian.

The photos are of the people of the Yamal who are Nenets reindeer herders. They have been known to live in this region prehistorically and historically. There are 7,500 Nenets people living in the Yamal Peninsula today. Their total population in the four autonomous Okrugs, (Yamal-Nenetsky, Nenetsky, Taymyrsky, and Khanty-Mansiysky), is approximately 35,000. They are assumed to have lived in this region for the last one thousand years as reindeer herdsmen and have been pastorialists since the 17th or 18th century. One would presume that these people had been acculturated during the last seventy five years of Soviet rule, but, in fact, the Yamal Nenets have maintained their traditional way of life. They still travel by sled and reindeer; live in tepees or as the Russians call them "chum", or in Nenets "mya"; live off the land; and still worship their own deities. It was interesting to learn that they have maintained their life ways despite all of the changes occurring with minority peoples throughout the world today.