Uilta. Modern culture and crafts, folklore groups, professional art

The Uilta community has two ethnic folklore performing groups: The Dorima National Folklore Ensemble (Dorima means “path/trail”) in the village of Val, home to the northern Uilta group (this ensemble is led by Anna S. Borisova, director of the municipal budget-funded community-center type culture establishment of the village of Val); the People’s Ethnic Ensemble Mengume Ilga (Uilta: Meŋgume Irga , meaning “silver patterns”; the ensemble is led by Olga A. Reznik) in the city of Poronaisk, home to the southern Uilta group. Both ensembles have Uilta names, and both are interethnic, which is natural and logical for the multi-ethnic community of both Val and Poronaisk.

Dorima includes both the Uilta and Ewenki and has had between 13 and 20 members at different periods of its history (their ages ranged from 7–8 to 35–45; most of them are aged 14–15). This is a folk-dance ensemble, although recently, it has been creating and staging fairy tales in the Uilta language. Using the dance language, the ensemble tells the stories of all traditional occupations of nomadic reindeer herders (such as, for instance, the life of women from dressing reindeer and fish to their needlework). The ensemble performs in Val, Nogliki, Poronaisk, Yuzno-Sakhalinsk, etc. At the same time, three times a month, the ensemble’s members eagerly learn to cut, sew, and embroider ethnic costumes at master classes taught by Lyubov Konusova and Irina Innokentieva, Uilta handcraft artists and currently Val’s elders.

Mengume Ilga was formed in 1979 (at Boarding School No. 3 in Poronaisk), it has 40 members (aged between 5 and 83), including ten elders (a Northern Uilta Elena Bibikova and a Southern Uilta Siryuko Minato) representing all indigenous small-numbered peoples of the north of Sakhalin: the Uilta, Nivkh, Ewenki, and Nanai. The ensemble performs ethnic songs, dances, plays musical instruments (such as Uilta ritual rattles called jōdopu , the mouth harp, the drum). The 21st century legends they stage span both ethnic history (feats performed by heroes in the four peoples’ legends; shamanic practices) and the Soviet era (the heroic time of the Great Patriotic War), and they also posit urgent issues of today: losing and preserving native languages, etc.

21st-century Uilta still celebrate Kurei (“fence, pale” in Uilta). This celebration was widely marked in the era of collective farms and state-owned farms as the reindeer herder celebration. Kurei appeared because of needing to count (and cull) all kinds of reindeer in a large herd, it concluded the annual cycle of grazing reindeer. Reindeer were driven inside a specially built fence ( kurei ) in late July – early August on the seacoast before taking the herds to the upper reaches of unfreezing rivers for fall and winter. The celebration also featured competitions: reindeer riding, traditional martial arts, games, and a feast of ethnic dishes. Today, the reindeer herder celebration that includes both northern and southern Uilta is held in the Nogliki municipality (where some families still engage in reindeer herding), and it attracts many visitors of all ethnicities.

In the 20th century, reindeer herding became an important topic of applied arts and it is very prominent in the modern art of Sakhalin’s indigenous peoples. The reindeer herders’ nomadic lifestyle embodied in the reindeer image is a historical memory code for generations of Sakhalin’s small-numbered peoples (the Uilta and the Ewenki). Today, this code serves as an important marker that defines social and ethnic identification. Modern Uilta art has different genres. Ethnic artists use both traditional techniques (black-and-white drawings) and entirely new ways of creating artwork (using fish skin, for instance). Pictures (as a reflection of reindeer herders’ nomadic lifestyle) created by modern artists frequently illustrate folklore publications. Thus, reindeer herding is becoming pictorial folklore. And as in the past, modern art (=pictorial folklore) reveals the folk worldview.

The craft of making fish skin artworks is developing at breakneck pace in the 21st century. Veronika V. Osipova, an Uilta, a member of the Artists’ Union of Russia, a member of the IAA / AIAP, UNESCO, has created an entire new art form; she uses the techniques of appliqué and appears to reveal (trace draw) a narrative picture in Chinese ink on fish skin thus creating masterful artworks. She uses the skins of Far Eastern fishes such as chum salmon, saffron cod, Alaska pollock, char, sole (two species), pink salmon, masu salmon, brown trout, pike, common rudd, etc. Veronika V. Osipova’s illustrations for publications of Uilta folklore and Uilta textbook enjoy great success. Her pictures are presented at various exhibition halls in Russia; she has gained  recognition at international exhibitions held in 2019 at on UN venues  in New York and Geneva.

Many women’s crafts have been transformed and are geared today to producing  souvenirs and ethnic costumes for stage performances.