Yuri Vella

Yuri Vella (1948 - Sept. 2013), full name Yurii Kilevich Aivaseda, known by his pseudonym Yuri Vella, was a writer, poet, environmentalist and social activist of the Forest Nenets people from Western Siberia.

Biography
Yuri Vella was born in the Varyogan village in Siberia in 1948. In the 1990s, he moved with his family from the Varyogan village to the tundra of the Agan River to revive the traditional Nenets way of life and become a reindeer herder.

He was a writer and poet writing in the Forest Nenets language, the Khanty language and in Russian. He was a social activist - in 1990, he organised a protest on behalf of the Nenets people in the Varegansk area, Yamal, against the gas and oil industry expanding into the Yamal. The energy industry was destroying the environment, killing the reindeer, and displacing and persecuting the indigenous people. The protest was recorded by Russian TV.

In 1996, he created a small Taiga school to teach the traditional reindeer herding skills to Nenets children. The school was closed in 2009, when the attending children grew older and left for other education.

In 2008, a documentary film about Vella, called Yuri Vella's world - the DER documentary, was created by Liivo Niglas.