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Indigenous people are watching their way of life disappear in Primorye. Raisa Andreitseva is fighting to preserve their ancient culture — and their rights.

When Raisa Andreitseva was 14, she had a dream that still haunts her. It was as if there were a field filled with flowers and strange animals, and she was flying above them. They were speaking to her.

She can no longer remember the particular animals, whether they were fantastical creatures or the tigers and boars of the taiga that surrounded her village. She does know that the dream deeply impressed her mother. Her mother was an Udegue shaman who would play tambourines and sing laments to the spirits in the houses of her neighbors when they were sick.

Her mother told the dream to Aunt Nadya, who was wise in the teachings of the Udegue, one of the indigenous peoples of Primorye. The aunt confirmed it was an omen. “Raisa could be a great shaman,” she said. The older woman offered to teach the girl native spiritualism.

Andreitseva simply laughed at the notion. She said, “Mama, I am a Young Pioneer.”

She would live to regret her decision. Andreitseva, who is now 50, became a teacher of trades – sewing and cooking. When she left teaching, she entered law school. She became a fighter for peoples whose language and culture are dying and whose legal rights are often ignored by the bureaucrats. Instead of a shaman, she is a warrior.

Andreitseva is one of some 1,360 indigenous people – Udegue, Tazy, Gold, Nanai, Orochi and others – who live in Primorye. Their numbers are declining, the krai Department for National Minorities reports, though hard figures are unavailable. Having survived Soviet relocations and paternalism, the indigenous way of life is dying because of indifference, intermarriage and alcoholism.

“There is a move now to restore our culture and traditions,” said Gennady Zakharenko, administrator of Mikhailovskoye, where Tazy and Golds were forcibly settled in the 1930s. “For 70 years it was being destroyed.”

Andreitseva has found herself at the cusp of that movement. Over the May Day weekend, I traveled to her home in Permskoye to see her work.

Andreitseva lives in a peasant house in a village so small there isn’t a bakery (she or her daughter, Inga, bake their own bread every morning). She was born in a family of eight children. Her mother had been sold by her grandfather to a Korean trader for a bag of corn. When the Bolsheviks released her, she fled to Krasny Yar and eventually married an Udegue. Andreitseva’s mother lived a greuling life, raising children, chopping wood, fishing, working the garden. Andreitseva vowed she would keep her family small. She and her husband, Vladimir Andreitsev, an ethnic Russian, have two children, both of whom consider themselves Udegue.

Andreitseva took up her struggle on behalf of her people in 1995. Zinaida Zaika, head of the regional Committee for National Minorities, said that in the past, most indigenous people had trouble getting access to funding. That’s because her predecessor, now in Moscow, provided most of the grants to his home village. “The federal money earmarked for the indigenous people came to the administration, and so far all of the money went to Krasny Yar,” Zaika said.

Andreitseva and Zaika formed Golden Valley, an association open to all indigenous peoples, in order to spread the funding more equitably.

A more difficult battle has been to secure fishing rights. When Raisa went to law school, she began researching the laws relating to her people. She learned that they were supposed to be allowed a quota of fish every year. She told this to krai officials, but, she said, they refused. When she continued to complain, for half of the catch. Because these one official blew up and unleashed a string of profanities, Andreitseva said.

Local fisheries inspectors continued to make life difficult, she said. They prevented all of Andreitseva’s indigenous fishermen from working, and seized all their catch. Finally, Andreitseva had to hire ethnic Russian fishermen, who work in exchange for fish. Because the men have connections, they are allowed to fish, although inspectors seized two-thirds of a recent catch. The rest is divided among indigenous peoples in the area.

Alexander Goltsov, senior fishery inspector of Olginsky County, denied the dispute Andreitseva relates. There have been misunderstandings, he said, but he supports Andreitseva’s fishing rights. “I have always helped her,” Goltsov said. “Some problems with fishermen have been the fault of Andreitseva’s workers, Goltsov said. They would fish without their passports or proper documents, so that inspectors mistook them for poachers. He added that he knows nothing about inspectors taking any fish.

Recently, Andreitseva and her fishermen drove out to the Avvakumovka River. Permskoye is so remote, it only gets Japanese radio stations. As we bounded down a dirt track, the music gave way to an English lesson.

“You are tall, Patrick,” said a Japanese-accented voice.

“Yes. I am!” Patrick declared.

“I am small, but strong.”

“Yes. You are!”

Andreitseva stared at the river. “Sometimes we get threatening phone calls. Some Russians actually threatened to kill me. They said they would confiscate our nets, because we complained when other people were fishing in our spot.”

“Hi, Patrick! Nice to meet you.”

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. Nice to meet you, too.”

Andreitseva said, “They cut our nets if we leave them overnight. We have to stay with them, and get them out of the water when we leave.”

Andreitseva often makes the rounds of villages where indigenous people live, holding meetings for Golden Valley or dropping off fish for needy families. During a visit to Mikhailovskoye, we dropped in on Zinaida Sy, a Tazy known among locals as “Zhirinovsky II” because of her loud mouth and salty language. Sy speaks in a strange Russian, stripped of declensions, with an accent that sounds Chinese, but she seldom uses her native tongue, even with fellow Tazys, because children who overhear laugh at her.

Sy remembers when, in the 1930s, the Soviets forcibly moved indigenous people from throughout Primorye to what had been a largely Korean village. About 128 indigenous people — 56 percent of Primorye’s Gold and Tazy population — now live in the village.

“There was a big flood,” Sy recalled, “and they told us we had to load our carts and brought us here. There were homes here left by the Koreans – old style homes with roofs made of straw. Everybody gave their horses and cows to the collective farm.”

Zakharenko, the village administrator, agreed to meet us at the school he had once attended as a boarding student. Officials removed him from his home for six days a week and boarded him at the village school, 300 meters from his house. Ethnic Russian children were allowed to live with their parents, but not indigenous people. In such an environment, children lost their native languages.

“At first, whenever I woke up here in the night, I tried to run away,” said Zakharenko. “But there were nurses and tutors who did their jobs well, and they would catch us. I pretended to be sick so they would send me home.”

From 1963-65, some teachers discussed the possibility of teaching indigenous languages in the school, said Principal Anna Plynskaya, whose husband is a Tazy. Only three or four indigenous parents actually wanted their children to study the subject.

“They said, ‘Why do they need to study another language when they already study Russian and English. … Nobody will speak it in a few years,’” Plynskaya said.

Nowadays, Zakharenko said there has been a reversal of many indigenous peoples’ move into modern society: Hard times are forcing them to return to the old ways, fishing and hunting. And some adults, realizing they have lost something with the evaporation of their culture, have turned back to their parents seeking to learn from them. They are sometimes surprised by what they find. Said Zakharenko: “I am 40 years old, and only two weeks ago did I find out that my mother has a Gold name: Thundercloud.”

Elsewhere in Mikhailovskoye, Andreitseva found a “spirit house” in the woods behind the home of two Tazy brothers, Viktor and Yury Utaisyn. Viktor Utaisyn said they still pray there when someone is sick, but he is uncertain about the old rituals. And when asked how he felt that his people’s culture and language was dying out, he had little to say.

“It’s a big pity,” Viktor Utaisyn said. There was an awkward silence.

“Why is it a pity?” I said.

He and his brother, who is 25, looked at each other. They shrugged. It was May Day. They were both a little bit drunk.

Andreitseva exploded at the young men. “Why are you so indifferent to your own people?” she said.

Viktor Utaisyn protested they had elected Zakharenko as city administrator. “He should take care of this problem,” he said

“You can’t rely on your bosses to do this for you,” Andreitseva said. “I’ve come a few times to your meetings, and I’ve never seen you there.”

We headed on to Gornovodnoye village, where we meet Vera Chivalu, 67, a Tazy widow brightly dressed in a red sweater and a beret. She seldom speaks her language any more, only when her sister visits from Vladivostok. The strongest force to preserve the cultures, she said, used to be arranged marriages, which kept the Tazy language alive. Chivalu’s parents found her a Tazy husband when she was 20 – a 34-year-old veteran whom the girl did not love.

At first she thought, “I’ll live with him for a while, and then I will escape.” But she got used to her husband. “And I had children,” she adds, “and there was no way to escape.”

Andreitseva still has plans to help her people develop. She is hoping to get businesses interested in recreating a model village for indigenous people, which tourists could visit and stay in.

Sometimes the task seems overwhelming. When Raisa gets depressed, she takes a cup from her kitchen and prepares a small offering.

She gathers some rice, a little vodka, a match, and a cigarette, then heads out beyond the family potato garden. She breaks up the cigarettes, mixes the tobacco and rice, douses everything in vodka, and ignites it. The flames change substance into smoke, into spirit. Thus she offers a little drink and some tobacco to the spirits of her parents.

“I ask my mom and my dad to help me carry on,” she says. “Then, gradually, I come out of my dark mood.”