Eremey Aipin Got Acquainted with the ‘Priuralsky Argish’ Project

Eremey Aipin Got Acquainted with the ‘Priuralsky Argish’ Project

Eremey Aipin is a famous Russian and Khanty writer, chairman of the Assembly of representatives of the indigenous peoples of the North of Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra. He paid a visit to the Priuralsky District  of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

In the course of the trip, the writer visited an elementary school in Gornoknyazevsk, a rural House of Culture in Kharsaim, and a boarding school in Aksarka.

The writer found out the peculiarities of teaching native languages in rural schools in Gornoknyazevsk and Kharsaim. The program of the concert at the House of Culture in Kharsaim included folklore works performed by native speakers of the languages of the peoples of the North.

The boarding school of Aksarka hosted a meeting with the students and the teaching staff. Yeremey Aipin attended an extracurricular lesson devoted to the culture of the peoples of the North and learned about the organization of the native language educational process.

Today, more than 100 students learn their native languages at school. In the spring of the 2022/2023 academic year, about 15 ninth-grade students are going to take final exams in their native languages.

The initiators of the ‘Priuralsky argish’ (argish is a convoy consisting of several reindeer teams following one after another) volunteer ethnographic project together with the folklore groups of the Priuralsky district presented the project to the writer. The participants of the meeting watched a theatrical performance of the fairy tale ‘Mouse’ (‘Lonkar’) in the Khanty language with the children acting.

The ‘Priuralsky argish’ volunteer ethnographic project has been implemented since December 2021. Today, it involves more than 20 adults and 45 children aged 7 to 18. The participants of the project learn the languages of the peoples of the North of Yamal with the help of theatrical performances, music, meetings with interesting people, competitions and school conferences on local history and native languages.

One of the lines of the ‘Priuralsky argish’ volunteer ethnographic project is a search and creation of fictional stories with non-existent characters. According to teachers, fictional stories contribute both to the development of children’s imagination and to the students’ vocabulary expansion.

During the project, twenty five ethnographic apocrypha have already been collected. They are compiled into an electronic collection. The growth of the collection goes on.

The project participants presented apocrypha to Yeremey Aipin and invited the writer to join the project. Yeremey Aipin donated his own works in Russian, Khanty and English to students and teachers and stressed the importance of learning and preserving native languages in families and everyday life.

The visit was celebrated within the framework of the 2022-2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages.