posted by Galina Angarova

My colleague Evan Sparling and I recently traveled to Altai to touch base with our partners in the field, meet with regional stakeholders, and participate in a conference on sacred sites organized by one of our partners – the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. As I have now fully transitioned into my new position as Program Associate for Community-Based Initiatives for Pacific Environment, the trip provided me with an opportunity to fully immerse myself into program work and issues faced by indigenous communities in Russia, especially in the current economic and political climate. This was my second trip to Altai since I started working for Pacific Environment, and I was very excited to visit the sacred land and meet with our partners once again.

Sacred mountain in Chui Oozy Nature Park, Altai Republic, Russia

For centuries sacred sites served people as places where they could come to pray, cleanse themselves, and recover from the hardships of life. For some nations, sacred places are Catholic monasteries, Orthodox cathedrals, Muslim mosques, and Buddhist temples. For indigenous cultures, and specifically shamanists, these are places or objects created by nature: mountains, healing springs, mountain passes, plants and animals.

Altai has also always been the heart of Shamanism in Siberia. During  Soviet times the communists extinguished shamanism and many of the shamans who lived during those days were either killed or sent to gulags. For many years shaman clans had to hide their identity and it was only after perestroika and democracy that shamanism experienced its revival. Nowadays it is not as rare to find a shaman in the remote villages of Altai. Luckily, the traditional knowledge was kept and passed onto new generations.

One of the trip’s most memorable moments was meeting a local shaman by the name of Slava Cheltuev in Kosh-Agach, a region bordering Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan.

Kurai Village, 60 km from the Russian-Mongolia border

Upon our arrival, Slava greeted us at his home with traditional tea with milk, salt, butter, and cracked wheat. It has been only three  years since Slava was chosen by his community to be a shaman and a keeper of traditional knowledge.  As a relatively young shaman at the age of 41, he feels responsible to learn from elders about his land, sacred places, and traditions so that he can pass this knowledge on to younger generations. As Russian is not his first language, most of his words were translated from indigenous Altayan into Russian by our partner Chagat.  (Today, there are only 70,000 speakers of Altayan in the world).

Cows in Kosh-Agach region, Altai Republic, Russia

Although some of what Slava said was revealed in a very simple language, his words carried a very deep knowledge and understanding of his roots and his role within his community. He talked about being close to the land and local sacred places, talking to spirits – guardians of their lands – and the meaning of dreams.

(more…)

Posted by Evan Sparling

My recent trip to Altai is proof that life imitates art. Just a few days before leaving the US I watched the film “Everything is Illuminated.” Even if you’ve never seen it, you know the plot: a mismatched cast of characters (an octogenarian Ukrainian anti-Semite, his hip-hop obsessed playboy grandson, a shy young American Jew, a deranged dog) embark on a road trip to an unlikely place (the Ukrainian countryside) and adventure (and illumination) ensues. In my case, the characters include an American GIS expert visiting Russia for the first time, two native-rights activists from Kamchatka, and a flamboyant military veteran turned professional driver. We have spent our days crammed into a van with all of our luggage and supplies, traveling across windswept tundra and over frozen mountain passes, spending our evenings in a three-room cabin with no running water and no heat beyond a wood stove. In between work-related discussions and meetings with local conservationists, we have had adventures ranging from a visit to an Altai shaman who interpreted our dreams to a swimming excursion in weather more fit for skiing.

(more…)

Shannon Kellman, Development and Communications Associate at Pacific Environment, sat down with Galina Angarova, the Grants Administrator for the Russia Program at Pacific Environment to talk about Galina’s recent trip to the Altai Region and Altai Republic in Russia.  They talked about the work the Galina and Pacific Environment’s partners are doing in Altai to protect Sacred Sites and biodiversity.

SK: Why are the Altai Region and Republic so important?

GA: They are very critical because of the biodiversity there.  They are critical places with beautiful animals and plants, and very important culturally. There’s a place called the Ukok plateau. It’s a place with thousands of petroglyphs, dating back thousands of years ago.  There are traces Pazyryk culture found and this is the place with the famous Ukok princess was found, completely preserved with all of her ammunition, clothes, and utensils.

SK: What were the highlights of your trip?

GA: The highlights were the meetings with our main partners in the field, the Fund 21 Century Altai, the Foundation for Sustainable Development Altai and the School of Sustainable Energy Tengrit.  The highlights were meeting with those people, and my trip to Ukok.  Also, my trip to the Chemal region, where the Katun damn was going to be built.  It’s a place where people come for tours and conferences on alternative energy.

SK: How have recent events (the dam explosion) affected work in the Altai region?

GA: That’s a difficult question.  The supply of electricity comes from that region which means that this will generate an electricity shortage.  With the energy situation, it aggravates the whole issue.  The energy sources, particularly for the Altai region, are very scarce, and some percent comes from the exploded damn.  Other sources are coal plants and the gas pipeline from Gorno-Altaisk, and they are building a gas fire plant, which would significantly impact the electricity supply.  In terms of how it affects the environment, there’s a pipeline in the Altai Region that goes through the Altai Republic.  With the explosion, people can come back to construct to plans to make a dam in the Republic of Altai, which is really bad news.

SK: In your assessment, what have the Altai people done well in protecting their environment?

GA: Well, in terms of recent successes, we’ve been doing this project together on sacred sites registration and land registration into communal use registration.  We are also working to promote this law on broader level for sacred sites preservation and that will give another level of protection.

SK: What were your goals in meeting with our partners there?

GA: Just to getting to know, learning what happening on the ground, participating in the conference, and updating our partners on our grant from the National Science Foundation and working with them on reporting.  I went there as a grants manager and someone who is working on the reporting of Altai.

SK: What else do they need to be doing to accomplish their goals?  What’s the next step?

GA: I think we’re already working on the next direction.  Just doing what we’re doing.  The next step is our conference at the end of this year.  It will bring together 50 people from the Altai Region and Republic.  It will be to talk about sacred sites preservation, to replicate this experience in other regions, particularly Kamchatka and the Russian Arctic.  We will be working on methodology for sacred sites preservation. A book will be released sometime later this year which details the process.

By Galina Angarova

On Monday July 20, the Governor of the Altai Republic, Alexander Berdnikov, approved the development plan of the Chemal region in the Altai Republic. This seemingly unimportant event is of considerable significance for the environmental health and safety of Chemal. The exclusion of the Katun Dam project from the Chemal development plan is going to save 770 hectares of vital land.  This land contains critical habitats for rare and endangered plant and animal species, local fisheries, as well as hundreds of residential areas along Katun River that provide employment to local communities.

On March 18^th, Berdnikov made an official statement that the region needed alternatives to the proposed Katun Dam to combat the lack of energy generating capacity in the Altai Republic .  The Altai gasification project was completed in 2008, bringing a major pipeline from Barnaul to Gorno-Altaisk and now project developers are working on designs for a 96 megawatt gas-fired power plant in Maima. Berdnikov said that a plant in Maima could be a potential alternative to the dam. “It is a possibility that the hydro-electric dam construction does not make economic sense. We do not have a goal to build the dam at all costs; our main goal is to resolve the problem of the energy deficiency in the region. If it turns out that the power plant in Maima and a cascade of small hydro dams on Chuya River are sufficient to supply energy needs in the republic, it is most likely that we [will] reject the plans for the dam construction in Chemal region,” noted Berdnikov.

The idea to build a hydro electric station on the Katun River first emerged in the 1980s, but the project declined thanks to strong local opposition. In the late 1990s the project was again under consideration, but the plans did not bloom until early 2005 when the local administration, backed by Moscow-based financial interests, tried to re-launch the project. Like 20 years ago, the dam construction plans met a great deal of opposition – a coalition of local and international environmental activists initiated a large campaign against the dam by sending petitions to the local and federal governments and providing information to prospective investors about the project’s environmental and economic risks. Although the news about the adoption of the new Chemal development plan and Berdnikov’s recent statements were a great relief for a lot of people, there is always a chance that these plans make way their way back on the decision-makers’ table.