If you place your finger on the top of a globe, it is a miniscule move to draw a line down from the North Pole to northwestern Siberia, where land greets the water. The borders have shifted since the end of the U.S.S.R. in 1989, but if you start on the western frontier and trace the shoreline to the right, your finger needs to move only a few centimetres east to reach the Kara Sea. Here a peninsula, named Yamal, sticks out like a thumb into the icy water. Yamal, explains Nenets artist Evgeniy Salinder, literally means “edge of land.” This place is aptly named.

The peninsula is home, and has been home for thousands of years, to the Nenets people. Their population of around 40,000 is predominantly nomadic, herding the largest population of reindeer in the world across the tundra. They choreograph their seasonal movements with the freeze and thaw of a landscape rich in lichen for hungry animals. This region also contains one of the world’s largest deposits of natural gas. Like in the Arctic region in Canada, climate change has led to melting of the permafrost and to erratic weather conditions that negatively impact the Nenets way of life. Herds go hungry when rains come early or the ice doesn’t freeze in time for travelling to other seasonal camps. There is also the familiar story of resource extraction clashing with Indigenous ways of existing. Pipelines moving natural gas across the tundra may block the reindeer migration routes.

Read full article on National Gallery of Canada Magazine.

IMAGE: Leah Snyder