Naukan ethnobotany in post-Soviet times: lost edibles and new medicinals

This study focuses on health-related plant use among speakers of the critically endangered Naukan language (Inuit-Yupik-Unangan family) in the Russian Far East. The Naukan people were forced, in 1958, under Soviet consolidation, to move from their original settlement on Cape Dezhnev, leading to significant changes in spiritual worldview, subsistence, social structure, and language proficiency in the years that followed. Here, we focus on changes that elders report in their edible, medicinal, and spiritual uses of local plant species since their childhood.

The authors worked from 2014 to 2016 in the villages of Lavrentiya, Lorino, and Uelen, in the Chukotskiy district of the Chukotka autonomous region, directly adjacent to the Bering Strait. We conducted structured interviews, using an oral history approach, along with participant observation and collection of voucher specimens from the local arctic tundra. Those with Naukan names and uses represent 42 species in 25 families.

Participants reported a decrease of 13% in the number of edible species that people currently harvest, from what they recall harvesting in their youth. On the other hand, the number of local species considered to be medicinal has actually increased by 225%. Current and past Naukan medicinal practices diverge in some notable ways from those of neighboring societies on the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait. Most of the spiritual significance of local plants species is remembered by only a few elders.

Naukan elders explained the large increase in use of medicinal plants by noting that their original concept of medicine emphasized prevention and that illnesses were often assigned a spiritual rather than physical cause. Increased integration with ethnic Russians after moving from Naukan led to the adoption not only of new plant uses, but also of an entirely different, more naturalistic way of viewing illness and treatment.