Roza Laptander is Nenets, born in Western Siberia near the  Polar Ural Mountains and the Ob River — on the natural border between  Europe and Asia. Her family are reindeer herders. Her father died when  she was very young and her mother moved to a small Siberian town; from  about the age of three Roza was raised by an aunt in that town, in a  Russian-speaking environment and at a distance from the Nenets language  and culture. She later moved to St. Petersburg to study at the Institute  of Northern Peoples, where she returned to her mother tongue,  eventually training as a teacher of Nenets language and literature and  completing her first PhD on Nenets grammar. Her work today sits in  linguistic anthropology — research grounded in the speech and daily life  of Nenets speakers. In the photo pictures she has two outfits: a  summer-weight wool noj pany she sewed herself with a fox-fur scarf at the collar, and a second set wearing a beaded necklace made by her aunt.

The Nenets female coatdress is called pany. Roza’s is made from felt - noj pany - a summer or indoor garment — and finished with deep red paneled ornaments along the body and hem. She made it sixteen years ago for her  own wedding when no one else was available to make it for her; the work  took nine months from start to finish. The patterns she chose are  Nenets of origin. The deeper Nenets pattern vocabulary is itself rooted  in reindeer — the curves and projections that recur across the fabric  read as reindeer antlers. At the collar she wears a fox-fur scarf, which  she identifies as a Soviet-era farmed cross between the white and the  dark color morphs of the arctic fox — not separate species but two  variants of the same animal (Vulpes lagopus), whose interbreeding produced the distinctive grey of this pelt.

The second set of photographs shows Roza wearing a beaded necklace. The necklace was a gift from her aunt, made specifically to wear at conferences; its pattern carries the same reindeer-antler motif found across Nenets' ornament, and the broader style is itself borrowed from a neighboring Uralic-speaking Khanty culture.

Winter clothing in the Nenets tundra is a different garment altogether — double-layered reindeer fur, with the skin facing both outward and inward. Men wear a full malitsa, an enclosed pullover-style coat; women wear an open female fur coat - pany trimmed with polar fox. Female hats – ne’ sawa - are double-layered, decorated with bead and reindeer fur ornaments and metal. Winter boots - piwa -  are also double, with long inner reindeer skin socks and outer boots  cut also from reindeer skin, insulated with dried tundra grass. This is  the clothing for migration days outside in temperatures as low as – 25-  50C. Roza, who has tested both, is direct about how it compares with  modern technical wear which is not able to keep you warm for extended  periods like the traditional clothing is.

Clothing is the most visible part of a much deeper dependence on reindeer that  runs through Nenets life — food, transport, shelter, ornament, identity.  Roza is clear-eyed about how fragile that dependence has become. She  points to the winter of 2013–14 in the Yamal tundra, when a severe icing  event killed roughly 60,000 reindeer; herders who lost their animals  ended up living in their traditional tents around towns and villages,  with no housing and no work because they did not have a Russian-language  education. Therefore, many  Nenets families send their children to study in the village boarding  schools so they have a better opportunity to get education and often can  provide support to the family, a deliberate diversification across a  livelihood the climate could remove overnight.

The  Nenets people are Native Indigenous people of the Arctic. They live  along the coastline of the Arctic Ocean above the Arctic Circle on a big  territory between Kola and Taymyr peninsulas. The Nenets people’s  traditional lifestyle is based on herding domestic reindeer, fishing and hunting. The link between movement, reindeer, and language is just as direct. Nenets herders migrate continuously,  sometimes with herds of ten thousand animals, between winter and summer  pastures. That constant movement, Roza argues, is precisely why Nenets  speakers across that enormous territory still understand one another,  while neighboring sedentary Khanty villages only five kilometers apart speak mutually unintelligible dialects. The clothing she sews,  the patterns she stitches, the language she works with, and the Nenets'  spoken stories, and interviews she collects, for her, are like one  continuous fabric — carrying, as she puts it, thousands of years of  experience.