#nenets

A Nenets woman in Russia hugs her grandson. The family is preparing to follow their herd of reindeer, seen in the background, even farther into the Siberian Arctic.

Pavel a Khudi Nenet from Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, Siberia, Russia. 2018

"The life of Nenets people in this area is based on following the reindeer as they move along ancient routes around the tundra. To survive the winter the reindeer eat a type of lichen known as reindeer moss, which may be covered in metres of snow. The Khudi Nenets brigade we visited have a herd of some 4,000 reindeer, with roughly 1,500 of them belonging to the Khudi Nenets themselves. The remaining 2,500 are owned by the ‘state farms’. If Khudi Nenets people slaughter a state-farm animal, its value is docked from their salary, but they are allowed to slaughter their own reindeer."

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Hmmm maybe I can open commissions again...