Saina

Indigenous singer from the Sakha Republic in Arctic Siberia, born Ekaterina Savvinova in 1971 in Kyusyur, a village on the lower Lena, and named an Honored Artist of the Republic. She carries the song of the peoples of the Russian Arctic: Sakha, Evenk, Even, Dolgan, Chukchi and Yukaghir, sung in their own languages and held to their own timbre and intonation rather than smoothed into concert style. Her repertoire runs from festival songs to shamanic ritual to the songs of Siberia's nomadic peoples, and she accompanies herself on the khomus, the jaw harp, and the drum. She sings in some thirty languages, many of them endangered. She carried Arctic indigenous culture to the World Games of Indigenous Peoples in Brazil in 2015, and won Most Arctic Song at Pan-ArcticVision in 2025.