Ket Life and
Culture
Hello
all, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show Where I Say
Things. Today: I didn’t choose the
Siberian hunter-gatherer life, the Siberian hunter-gatherer life chose me.
So
today we’re going to be talking about the traditional lifestyle and culture of
the Ket people, past and present. We’ve
already talked about the very basics of the Ket, but today we’ll go into more
detail. What was important in the traditional Ket world? What did traditional Ket people do every
day? Let’s take a journey through space
and time and take a look at the ancient Ket way of life, the last remnant of an
age-old tradition that once held sway across inner Eurasia. When we examine the Ket forest
hunter-gatherer lifestyle we are seeing in modern times a cultural succession
with roots that go back far beyond recorded history. It’s really cool stuff, so let’s get
started. We’ll be dividing our
discussion today into six parts: worldview, nomadizing, other people, animals,
food and the present situation of the Ket.
Part I: Worldview
The Ket
worldview and concept of space was influenced by two major features: the river
and the forest. The river was a place of
plenty and ease, while the forest was harsher and more austere (Vajda 2011). Geographically, the Ket positioned themselves
in relation to the river. The upriver
south was seen as an idyllic land of warmth and plenty, where dwelt a kind of
good witch or goddess named Tomam. She’s
the one who saves the Ket from starvation each spring by sending the birds on
their migration north. Supposedly she lives at the Yenisei’s headwaters. I’ve been there, stood on the very banks of
the Yenisei at its source, but I didn’t see her. Maybe next time. At any rate I could feel the spirit of Tomam as I stood on top of the cliffs looking
over the very upper Yenisei. On those
cliffs, every year, Tomam comes and shakes out her feathered cape; the down is
carried away by the wind to become the birds so necessary to Ket life (Vajda
2011).
Meanwhile,
the north was a place of evil, cold and misfortune. If we traveled far enough north, we would run
into a very mean lady named Hosedam, The Wicked Witch of the North:
Kinda like this, but
colder and no monkeys.
Hosedam’s
favorite food is human souls. If we ran
into her we’d be done for unless Alba, the great hero of Ket myth, came along
and made her vomit the souls back up.
Pretty cool.
Nomadizing
A major
part of Ket life was moving to new encampments every season. Unfortunately, a lot of people have the wrong
idea that nomadic people kind of just wander around aimlessly. Not true.
Nomadic migration patterns are very precisely calculated to things like
weather and food availability. And
they’re consistent. For instance, a Ket
families tended to use their own winter hunting trails that were remembered
without the use of markers or other aids (Vajda 2011).
Ket
family groups had a migration for each season.
In spring they emerged from the forest to camp at the riverside in
birchbark tipis. With the summer come
the mosquitoes, so the people would hang out on houseboats on the river, where
the mosquitoes couldn’t reach. When the
mosquitoes died, the Ket returned to shore; and when winter came they would go
away deep into the forest. During the
coldest weeks Mom and the kids would hole themselves up in an earthen shelter,
while Dad and older sons would be out hunting.
Such
were the patterns of the Ket year, and so did they cope and even thrive in the
harsh environment of central Siberia.
Neighbors
In
terms of interactions with other Siberian peoples, the Ket most frequently ran
into two groups, the Selkups and the Evenki.
The
first group, the Selkup, lived in the swampy lowlands to the west. Speakers of a language distantly related to
Finnish and Hungarian, they were known to the by their word for “friend”—kind
of like if, instead of saying someone was from Mexico, we just said “he’s an
amigo”. The Selkup were (and are)
reindeer herders, which is fundamentally different from the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle of the Ket. This difference,
however, seems not to have impeded the bro-level relationship (brolationship?)
between the two peoples.
The
Evenki, on the other hand, were on not-so-good terms with the Ket. The Evenki lived in the hilly east, their
ancestors’ expansion having forced the Ket downriver from their ancient
homeland. In a reference to the more
mountainous territory of the Evenki, they were known to the Ket by the
less-than-flattering name of “stone spirits”—a reference to the rugged
topography of their home. Also less
friendly were relations with the Enets, a group related to the Selkup.
A
fourth group with whom the Ket frequently interacted, at least in modern times,
were the Russians. They showed up every
year to trade and collect the tsarist fur tax.
Animals
The
traditional Ket world was of course shared with a number of animals. Dogs were the only domesticate of the
Ket. According to legend, the first dog
was the son of the sky god Es, who was sent to teach the people how to revive
their dead. Instead he told the people
to put the dead in the ground, thereby condemning humankind to mortality. For his forgetfulness he was cursed to serve
humans for all eternity, sniffing and digging around in the ground (Vajda
2011).
The
singularity of the dog as the Ket’s sole domesticate sets them apart from their
reindeer-herding neighbors, and there’s a reason that they survived while other
forest hunter-gatherers didn’t make it.
The Ket had a secret ally: mosquitoes.
Every summer, mosquitoes would be so thick on land that reindeer would
literally suffocate on the insects that they’d inhaled. The Ket, meanwhile, would be sitting
comfortably on houseboats in the middle of the river, away from the bugs and
enjoying the excellent fishing. So the
reindeer was never as central to Ket life as it was for others.
The
other main animal in Ket life was the bear.
Believed to be inhabited by human spirits, the Ket treated bears with a
reverence bordering on worship. Whenever
a bear what brought down in a hunt, the dead animal was considered a special
guest among the people and eaten at a feast in its own honor. This tradition of “bear festivals” seems to
have extremely ancient roots, as we can observe ceremonies like it across
boreal Eurasia, from Finland (as mentioned in the Kalevala) to Japan (practiced
among the Ainu people of Hokkaido).
Present Situation
The
current state of the Ket people is a tragic one. Having been subjected to forced assimilation
throughout the 20th century, little remains of their traditional way
of life that is being actively maintained and passed to the next
generation. No fluent native speakers of
Ket are younger than fifty and even though kids in school get an hour a week of
Ket class, that’s just not enough to make a difference in the survival of the
language.
The
days of birchbark tipis and bear festivals appear to be gone forever. The Ket have been entirely sedentarized, and
forced into a world drastically alien to that of their ancestors. The modern situation, therefore, is
tragically one of people forced in between worlds with a decimated culture,
punishing isolation, and few employable skills.
The results have been predictable.
Furthermore, alcoholism is a serious problem in Ket communities. Domestic violence and alcohol-related illness
appear, with the tremendous human suffering they entail.
This
vicious cycle can only be ended by the Ket themselves, which they must be
empowered to do. One step towards this
empowerment is preservation and promotion of the Ket language and traditional
culture. Before one rises up, one must
have ground to stand on. Hopefully, by
sharing with everyone that I can the awesomeness of Ket language and culture, the effect will not be wholly negative, and I can do my part as an admirer of Ket.
Sources:
1.
Ed Vajda. “Siberian Landscapes in Ket
Traditional Culture”. 2011. https://www.uaf.edu/files/anlc/2011ketlandscape.pdf
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