Dress made by her sister, Anna Pawlak.

Vera Solovyeva is Sakha (Yakut), from a village of Oktem, Khangalas ulus in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in north-eastern Siberia, but has lived in the United States for close to thirty years, arriving  around 1997–1998. Her mother, ninety-five, still lives in the Sakha  Republic, and Vera is planning to visit her this summer.

Veras  clothes in the photographs were made by her sister, Anna Pavlova, who  is today a traditional master making Sakha clothing, something that was  not possible during the Soviet era. The silver jewelry — worn at the  front and at the back — carries two layers of meaning. In one reading,  it echoes the time when Sakha women were warriors. In another, it speaks  the language of the Sakha worldview: the recurring circles on the  headpiece and across the collar are sun symbols, central to a culture  that holds the sun in particularly high regard – as our highest Creator  Aar Ayii Tangara

Such  pieces are expensive — most are forged from silver — and ideally pass  through generations, although in practice the older work is hard to  find. In Vera’s family, jewelry and silver decorations made by her  great-grandfather, a blacksmith, were taken into a Soviet museum without  their permission once they had become very old.  Traditionally, for children, equivalent pieces were sometimes made not  from silver but from birch bark; the birch being a sacred tree and home  to the spirit of the local environment, a protector of children, family and the surrounding land (alaas).

Sakha worldview rests on three interconnected worlds. The upper world is inhabited by Aar Ayii Tangara, the highest god, and other deities; the middle world is the world of people, spirits, animals, rivers and mountains; the lower world is the home of harmful spirits. The three are joined by a great world-tree. This is why, traditionally, one does not make holes in the soil without reason — to avoid drawing bad spirits up into the middle world. Vera notes the resonance with what mining  companies do today across the Sakha Republic, and connects it, in her  own reading, to climate change.

A person, in this worldview, is also threefold. Each of us is made up of three “kut” (souls), each connected to one of the worlds and sticks together by life energy. The sky-cosmos kut (salgyn kut) carries curiosity, ideas and inspiration; the mother’s kut (iyeh kut)  carries kinship and physical likeness — eyes, hair, complexion — passed  through generations - what we would now call DNA; and the soil kut (buor kut)  connects a person to the earth, to nature, and to physical growth and  what one eats. When a person dies, the parts return: one to the cosmos,  one to the kinship line (sometimes appearing in a grandchild who looks  or behaves strikingly like an ancestor), one to the soil and to the  nature it feeds. The three should be in balance. If the soil-part grows  too heavy, a person becomes greedy or earth-bound; if the cosmic part  grows too big, a person, as Vera puts it, “flies away with their  thoughts” — Sakha even has a phrase “khallaan kihiteh”  - person of clouds/sky (not serious one, without proper connections to  earth (base), who moves to the direction where wind blows). The same  logic applies to modern life: too much time on the internet, she  suggests, pulls a child too far toward the cosmic side, and balance has to be tended.

The horse and the horsetail wand. The  horse is the sacred animal of the Sakha — as the buffalo is for Plains  nations and the reindeer for the Eveny, Evenki and other reindeer herder  nations — and it is a goddess, in the form of a white horse, who  carries the soul’s cosmic part (salgyn kut) down from the upper world to the child. In  the photographs, the white horsetail wand Vera carries is a tool of  blessing; a black horsetail is used to clean energy around a person. White wands are traditionally not used by young women, using the white horsetale is something that comes with age and status.

Roles compressed into one word. The  English word “shaman” compresses many distinct roles of people with  special power and knowledge into one, which Vera does not specifically  like. There are healers who work with plants and vegetation, bone-setters and others who work with the body, those who work as something close to  a psychologist, and those who can mediate between the three worlds in  order to heal people, and those who only give blessings and pray to the  sun. Each has its own Sakha name. Vera, through her mother’s line,  descends from strong women shamans and is permitted to give blessings, but she speaks about it with care: she does not see  it as a privilege but as a responsibility, and prefers not to push it.

Vera grew up under Soviet rule in a village where, on the surface, everyone was being raised as a single Soviet people — without the historical or cultural background of their own nation.  There were Sakha-language classes and Russian-language classes; her  parents placed her in the Russian class because, in the 1970s and 1980s,  that was the path to a career. Sakha-language classes were associated  with going to work on a farm. Traditional clothing of the kind in these  photographs was effectively banned — what counted as “civilized”  was clothing without traditional markers. And yet, beneath that  surface, a parallel life continued: small rituals at home, feeding the  spirit of the fire, summer-solstice ceremonies, a worldview that  worshipped nature. It was, in her words, very alive.

A revival is underway. Where once there were only a few tents at Yhyakh and traditional dress was rare in public life, there are now thousands  of people gathering in their traditional clothing each summer. Vera’s  sister, Anna Pavlova, is one of the masters now sewing this clothing — including the pieces Vera wears in these images. The Sakha culture, she says, is very strong.  The fragile thread is the language: under current Russian policy,  ethnic-language teaching is contracting again, and parents continue to  choose Russian for their children’s careers. But, she insists, the Sakha are still here, and they are still Sakha first.

Indigenous, but not “small-numbered” With roughly 500,000 people,  the Sakha are not classified in Russian law as “small-numbered  indigenous peoples” — a status reserved for groups under 50,000 — and  are not part of RAIPON. Vera reads this as deliberate: a population  large enough to be politically powerful is one the state does not want  to grant indigenous standing or a seat at international tables. About  2/3 parts of Sakha Republic sits well above the Arctic Circle, and yet,  internally to Russia, the Sakha are not treated as Arctic indigenous  peoples.

When  Vera first arrived in America she felt very alone — there were almost  no Russian Indigenous people around her at the time, and she found that  few people had even heard of the Sakha. It was only after she came to  America that she began to ask who she really was, and to learn her own culture in earnest — through diaspora websites, then through  museum work, then through the traditional masters she invited from the  Sakha Republic to visit AMNH, where a biggest collection of Siberian  artefacts is collected. She now feels she knows more about her own culture and history than she did when she lived inside it. Her father had a proverb, in Sakha, that he repeated to her when she  was young and proud to be speaking Russian: that her blood would, in  time, bring her back “Khaan tardiah.” There is a Sakha word for the rope of invisible threads “sitim” that expanded through time and perspectives – threads connect the three worlds, ancestors and descendants, people and people, people and nature - disturb one strand, and everything around it is disturbed. Language and ecology, she observes, fall together.

Trained as a biologist in Yakutsk, and, then, in Saint Petersburg, Vera came to the United States on a research  exchange at George Mason University and later became a research  associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where  she helped bring Sakha traditional masters from the Republic to study a  substantial Siberian collection gathered before the Russian Revolution.  She defended her PhD five years ago and recently completed a  post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center; she  is now between roles, finishing articles and a book chapter.