Editor’s Introduction: Arctic Issues and Identities

Picture Indigenous youths swimming and sunbathing on a river beach in summer 2020 during an unprecedented heatwave at Verkhoyansk, famed for being one of the coldest inhabited towns on earth. Many local Sakha and Eveni elders in Verkhoyansk had never learned to swim, for their rivers were far too cold and ice prone, even in summer. The climate has appreciably changed in one generation, as has the length of time from spring to fall that the entire northern sea route above the Arctic Circle is open for navigation. In the Far Eastern Sakha Republic (Yakutia) and on the Yamal Peninsula of Western Siberia, home of the reindeer breeding Nenets, most people do not question climate change; they live with the consequences of melting permafrost and methane gas–producing “craters” forming at an alarming rate that is at least double that of other Siberian regions farther south.¹

In the post-Soviet period, as climate change has accelerated and outsiders’ attention to Arctic regions has expanded, access to energy and mineral resources has opened far beyond already well-established Soviet industrialization. Newcomer laborers of many nationalities have poured into certain Northern regions with increased job opportunities, while other regions have lapsed into ghost-town rust belts. These synergistic events have coincided, perhaps collided, with increased awareness among Russia’s local Indigenous groups that without protest more of their lands could slip away through legal and illegal tenders. The ripple effects of these changes have resulted in an increasing awareness among scholars, activists, and developers that the Arctic has become a “hot” issue. Human lives, livelihoods, and identities are at stake. It is one thing to include token selected Indigenous leaders at the table as development is planned, and another to genuinely listen and respond to the grievances of Indigenous communities. It is one thing to have laws on the books of diverse jurisdictions protecting Indigenous rights and another to enforce those laws with respect for hunters, fishers, and reindeer breeders’ traditional lands and nomadic routes, honoring sacred sites, and guaranteeing ecological expertise before, not after, devastating accidents occur.

As energy companies such as the state-controlled Gasprom seize more land for gas production and build more pipelines, many of Russia’s Indigenous leaders despair that their voices are not adequately heard. Few Indigenous people in Russia are completely against all development, and even fewer Indigenous community members are so isolated that they prefer to live “off the grid” of global intercommunications. Supply dependencies were established in the colonial and Soviet periods, and then suspended or rendered unstable in the 1990s. In the past twenty years, as elsewhere in President Putin’s Russia, people in small villages and camps of the Arctic crave stability and safety. Their underlying concerns lie in negotiating degrees of participation in development they hope will be gradual, consultative, and sustainable. Indigenous groups wish to have the human right to shape their own futures without completely rejecting their pasts.²

Economic strife, land grabs and political impotence are hardly new for Indigenous communities, but these issues have become increasingly critical in Russia’s Arctic. A few of many intersectional concerns are featured here, in articles written by authors who are themselves either Indigenous or sympathetic to Indigenous communities as “allies.” Themes highlighted in this issue include leadership; relations between Indigenous communities and newcomers; education and communication changes; and identity.

The lead article, by Arbakhan Magomedov describes a recent Indigenous movement in Yamal advocating Native reindeer breeders’ rights called Voice of the Tundra (Golos tundry), led by the Nenets reindeer breeder Eiko [also Yeiko] Sérotétto. He has defended his kin-group lands and private reindeer herd from energy prospectors. In the process, he has become a local hero. His fame has been spreading in Russia and beyond, among those who follow Indigenous rights in Russia. His fight and his fame could not have happened without the Internet. However, his profile is unusual, as Arbakhan points out, because he has not emerged from the recent generation of educated, urban Indigenous elite leaders. Rather, he is a practical, Internet-savvy working reindeer breeder, allied with Russia’s Communist Party opposition, yet not nostalgic for the Soviet period. He defends the Nenets’ rights to expand their herds in the tundra (herds were culled in the Soviet period), and refuses to let his people be herded into urban environments where they are more likely to lose their language, traditions, and values.

Recently, Eiko Sérotétto has defended Indigenous voting rights, and joined Russia’s struggling civil society in concerns about fair elections. With cameras rolling, a sample of Sérotétto’s activism can be found on his website: “We’re monitoring election fraud in our local elections … including places in the tundra where votes simply were not recorded” (Sept. 13, 2020). During the summer 2020 vote on Putin’s constitutional amendments, followers on the site observed “We have elections, but no real choice.” In part due to Sérotétto’s leadership, the Yamal region was among the few in Russia with substantial reported numbers (over 50 percent) voting against the constitutional changes. Their slogan is “Voice of the Tundra: All in Our Hands,” and their logo is a bucking reindeer. Sadly and predictably, a court case against Sérotétto was brought in 2019 by local authorities against his “unauthorized organization of demonstrations.”³

Magomedov’s article, “How the Indigenous Peoples of the Russian Arctic Defend Their Interests,” depicts nonviolent Indigenous resistance, and provides context for another less well-publicized movement in the Yamal-Nenets region protesting a looming merger between the region (okrug level) and Arkhangelsk (at the larger oblast level). Local residents in both areas oppose the “from above” Moscow-pressured move; at this writing it has been suspended, in part because of administrative difficulties associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Dramatically, in 2020, despite the virus dangers, for several weeks Indigenous-led protesters led a “singing revolution” on the streets of Naryan-Mar against the merger, modeled after the Baltic states’ late Soviet independence movement.⁴

Our next article highlights delicate issues of conflictual relations between Indigenous groups of the Ob River North (Khanty, Mansi, and Nenets) and energy industry workers. Written by Elena Erokhina, a legal scholar more optimistic about Siberian development than many, she hopes that her research on “conflictogenesis” has mitigating effects that bring relatively recent newcomers and Indigenous communities closer together. The two cases she features, however, are harrowing. The Khanty and Mansi of this region consider themselves related peoples, Ob-Ugrians. Many perceive their Yugra homeland to be invaded by energy workers, especially from the company Surgutneftegaz. I recall one shocking incident from my fieldwork in Khanty communities thirty years ago when Russian hunters attacked a Khanty elder riding home on a sled, robbing him of his precious fur boots (unti) in minus 30 degree weather, an act that could have killed him.⁵

Particularly egregious is the newcomers’ lack of respect for sacred territories, such as the lands around the exquisite lakes Numto and Imlor, officially designated as nature preserves. Armed confrontations in this area have increased, and Ob-Ugrians are particularly wary of Russian hunters who trespass with their dogs, threatening the reindeer. While some legal protections exist, several Russian Duma laws on “traditional land use territories” have been either watered down or rejected in the past several years, as Erokhina makes clear. She argues that emblematic confrontations can reveal a clash of incompatible values, not simply conflicts between angry armed men. But she thinks the institutionalization and enforcement of legal protections against extreme ecological despoliation is possible if authorities can take seriously the advice of ecology experts, both Indigenous and Russian.⁶

How is the next generation of local residents in the Arctic being educated? Whether Indigenous or long-term settlers, what kinds of employment can they expect? Are the cultural and social gaps between camps or settlements of reindeer breeders and enclaves or towns of energy workers so great that few Indigenous families expect or want their children to train to become energy-industry workers in vast compounds such as Western Siberia’s Bovanenkovo? Such key questions are explored in a comprehensive article on the recent resurgence of reindeer breeders’ mobile schools by ethnographer Aleksandra Terekhina, published 2017 in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, titled “Nomadic Schools: Limitations or Possibilities?” After reviewing the literature for other areas of Siberia and the Far East, Terekhina discusses the post-Soviet resurgence of controversial nomadic schools in the Yamal and Taimyr peninsulas, homeland of the Nenets and Dolgan peoples. Nomadic reindeer breeder families, far from some romanticized version of untamed peoples, want quality education for their children, and the chance for them to have choices about future employment. Among those choices should be the possibility to run family reindeer breeding as modern businesses in a globalizing world. Thus far, nomadic schools are only for the younger grades, and by middle school children of Arctic and sub-Arctic communities are hauled off to residential schools, some against their will. Terekhina emphasizes that well-run nomadic schools, staffed by competent teachers, need not be juxtaposed against village residential schools as if they were opposites.⁷

Young and less young residents of Indigenous communities have found the Internet, and are learning to thrive on diverse social platforms. Whether in schools or playing games at home, as I have seen in Srednaia Kolyma villages of Sakha Republic near the Arctic Circle, the adaptability of social media for communication among networks of far-flung kin and friends has become crucial for fun, survival, and everything in between. Diversity and flexibility is a theme of Dmitriy Oparin’s article comparing social media and radio use among Indigenous communities in Western Siberia (Eastern Khanty) and Eastern Siberia (Yu’pik and Chukchi of Chukotka). Oparin has done fieldwork in both of these far-flung regions. Among his salient observations is that many Siberian and Far East villages lack appropriate physically inviting public space venues. His insights and narratives about how new virtual technologies have changed communication among Indigenous individuals and groups, while also influencing Native language survival and revitalization, are fresh and at times poignant.⁸

The capstone article by Sakha scholar Daria Burnasheva directly confronts the issue of Arctic identity and its fungibility, its formation in historical contexts of shifting geopolitical boundary definitions. She focuses on the ways Arctic identity, like definitions of the Arctic itself, has expanded in post-Soviet times within her Sakha Republic (Yakutia) homeland. Moscow bureaucrats have attempted to dictate a narrow frontier-mentality version of the geopolitically defined boundaries of the Arctic, focused on its resources, extraction potential, and Northern Sea Route transport utility. However, authorities in Yakutsk, the capital of the republic, have fought back for a broader swath of territory to be defined as Arctic (thirteen vast provinces, called ulus, instead of seven). When Moscow bureaucrats were not able to deliver basic necessities to the Far North, as they had in the Soviet period, elected Sakha leaders, such as the popular first president Mikhail Efimovich Nikolaev, took up the slack and used negotiated diamond profits from the republic’s relatively more southern areas (Mirny) to subsidize broadly defined Arctic regions. He famously opened the republic to international connections, made the Sakha Republic a leader of the Northern Forum, and received moral and material support via international Arctic trade networks and cultural exchanges.

One key subtext of Burnasheva’s political anthropology, supported by her many interviews with academic and political elites, is that the republic was never secessionist or disloyal to Russians in Moscow on a Sakha (Yakut) nationalist basis, as was alleged in the 1990s. Rather, Sakha leaders found ways to gain increased degrees of power for the multiethnic region when Moscow was unable to handle the obligations of real federalism. In the process, Arctic identities grew by necessity, and, according to Burnasheva, transcended other competing identities such as Indigenous or Turkic. Writing about multiple and situational identities depends on context, timing and eye-of-the-beholder analysis. Intriguingly, I disagree with the author on the significance of pan-Turkic identity in the republic today, and differentially assess pre-Christian spirituality revival among the Sakha. This in part may reflect her sensitivity to the importance of Arctic identities for smaller-numbered non-Sakha Indigenous groups of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, the Eveny, Evenki and Yukagir. Lessons from our diverse approaches include: how one frames one’s topic of study influences one’s conclusions, and theory and methodology are inextricable.⁹

Returning from the taiga in 1991, a Nenets leader and founder of the group Yamal Descendants [Yamal Potomkam], bemoaned to me the piles of trash she had just seen. “Russian energy workers have taken the land from us,” she said, “but in treating it this way they surely do not think of it as their home.”¹⁰ Trashing the Arctic in Indigenous homelands has intensified in the past thirty years, culminating in the most recent 2020 ecological disaster at Norilsk (Krasnoyarsk Krai, Taimyr). It was caused by the melting permafrost collapse of storage buildings owned by the company Norilsk Nickel. While the full extent of damage is unknown, reports of local rivers running red were leaked to the world by brave local Russian ecology activists. An estimated 21,000 tons of diesel oil may have been spilled. The accident, which could have been averted by wise ecology expertise, has galvanized Indigenous groups and environmentalists worldwide.¹¹

Crucial in our interconnected world is learning to prevent ecological disasters by recognizing climate change, as well as to respect what is left of the precious Arctic lands that Indigenous and long-term settler residents consider their homes. At stake is their dignity, and their future generations.

Notes

1. Recent background data on climate change in Russia includes Ben Aris, “Russia’s permafrost is melting,” https://intellinews.com/russia-s-permafrost-is-melting-190398/?source=russia, September 2, 2020, with charts and maps. Compare Chelsea Harvey, “A New Arctic Is Emerging,” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-arctic-is-emerging-thanks-to-climate-change/2020. For excellent perspective on the intersection of Indigenous and climate change concerns, see Gleb Raygorodetsky, The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change (New York: Pegasus, 2017).

2. No outsider should speak for any Indigenous person or community. A leading Indigenous lawyer in Russia is Julia Yakel’. See her “Obshchaia kharakteristika deistvuiushchego zakonodatelstva,” in Sever i Severiane: Sovremennoe polozhenie Korennykh malochislennykh Narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka, eds. N. I. Novikova and D. Funk, 8–21 (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 2012), and her “Bez viny vinovatye. Traditsii i zakon—dve grani zhizni korennykh malochislennykh narodov,” http://raipon.info/info/news/3018/, February 2, 2018. For grievances, see the Indigenous-led Cultural Survival, https://www.culturalsurvival.org. See also Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Indigeneity, Land and Activism in Siberia,” Land, Indigenous Peoples & Conflict, ed. A. Tidwell, 9–27 (New York: Routledge, 2017); and Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People. Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Literature on development in Russia’s Arctic and on its economic, social, and security ramifications is extensive. Compare Stephen Blank, ed., Russia in the Arctic (Carlisle: Strategic Studies Institute, 2011); and Marlene Laruelle, ed., New Mobilities and Social Changes in Russia’s Arctic Regions (New York: Routledge, 2017). See Piers Vitebsky, “The Arctic as a Homeland,” http://www.thearctic.is/articles/overviews/homeland/enska/index.htm, Stefansson Arctic Institute, 2000; and the work of Sergei Sukhanin, for example https://jamestown.org/program/russia-steps-up-efforts-to-dominate-arctic-region/2020. Compare the forthcoming Thane Gustafson, Klimat: The Future of Russia in the Era of Climate Change. 2021.

3. The article by Arbakhan Magomedov was solicited after I read an earlier, shorter version in a Kennan Institute (Woodrow Wilson Center) report. On Voice of the Tundra election monitoring, see https://vk.com/golos_tundry, September 2020. On the case against Serotetto, see http://www.yamalpro.ru/2019/04/15/yamalskomu-aktivistu-eyko-serotetto-shyut-delo-o-provedenii-nesanktsionirovannogo-sobraniya-v-tundre/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=b422.

4. On the Naryan-Mar singing protest “against the possible unification with Arkhangelsk Oblast,” see nazaccent.ru/content/33594-zhiteli-neneckogo-okruga-s-pomoshyu-peniya.html; and Paul Goble, “Another Singing Revolution Breaks Out—This Time in the Nenets Autonomous District,” https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/07/another-singing-revolution-breaks-out.html, July 14, 2020.

5. For background on the Khanty, see Andrew Wiget and Olga Balalaeva, Khanty: People of the Taiga (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2011); Andrei Golovnev, Govoriashchie Kul’tury: traditsii Samodiitsev i Ugrov (Ekaterinburg: Akademiia Nauk, 1995); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); N.I. Novikova and D. Funk, eds., Sever i Severiane: Sovremennoe polozhenie Korennykh malochisklennykh Narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 2012), especially the chapter by Elena Pivneva.

6. On legal protections for Russia’s Indigenous peoples, see V.A. Kryazhkov and R.S. Garipov, “ILO 169 convention as a vector for the aboriginal legislation development in Russia,” The International Journal of Human Rights, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2020.1804371 2020; and A. N. Sleptsov, “Pravovye osnovy etnologicheskoi ekspertizy,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 2018, no. 6, pp. 92–96. On Indigenous and gas worker relations, see the excellent monograph of legal anthropologist Natalia Novikova, Okhotniki i Neftianiki (Moscow: Nauka, 2014). Relevant concepts of the late Nenets-Khanty leader Yuri Vella (Vaella-Aisaveda), valorized in Arbakhan Magomedev’s article, are discussed in Natalia I. Novikova, “Model’ mnogokul’turnosti Yuri Vella,” Vestnik Ugrovedeniia, vol. 2, no. 8, pp. 376–86.

7. Sadly, although it has been translated, Terekhina’s article is not appearing in this issue, due to unforeseen delays in securing necessary permission for publication, which our publisher Taylor & Francis is working to resolve. This, along with the coronavirus, explains the delay in publishing the issue. I hope that the article will appear on our website when the permissions are cleared for its publication. The Russian version is A.N. Terekhina, “Kochevye shkoly: Ogranicheniia ili vozmozhnosti?” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2017, no. 2, pp. 137–53. The implications of this article are far-ranging, given how scandalous the history of residential schools has been throughout the circumpolar North, including Canada, where a multiyear Truth and Reconciliation Commission finally resulted in apologies to First Nations communities in 2015. On Russia’s residential schools, sometimes inappropriately called boarding schools, see especially Alexia Bloch, Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous Siberians in a post-Soviet State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Olga Ulturgashaeva, Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (New York: Berghahn, 2012).

8. This article was solicited after discovering that another relevant article by Dmitriy Oparin was already in English: “Locals and Immigrants on the Yamal Peninsula. Social Boundaries and Variations in Migratory Experience,” Asian Ethnicity, 2018, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 251–69, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14631369.2017.1386543. The United Nations announced that Indigenous language survival would be the focus of its annual Indigenous People’s Forum for 2020, but the forum was postponed due to the coronavirus. Concerns about Indigenous language survival in Russia’s Arctic have intensified; see https://spbu.ru/news-events/calendar/novye-puti-sohraneniya-yazykov-korennyh-narodov-arktiki-obsudyat-na-kulturnom (2019). For background, see Nikolai Vakhtin, “Iazyki Narodov Severo-Vostoka Sibiri. Sovremennaia situatsiia,” Narody Severo-vostoka Sibiri, eds. E.P. Batianova and V.A. Turaev, 19–32 (Moscow: Nauka, 2009); Olga Ulturgashaeva, Narrating the Future in Siberia: Childhood, Adolescence and Autobiography among the Eveny (New York: Berghahn, 2012); Lenore A. Grenoble, “Language Revitalization,” The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, eds. R. Bayley, C. Cameron, and C. Lucas, 792–811 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Akulina Mestnikova, “Civilian Initiatives of Indigenous Peoples in the Sphere of Language Policy,” Sibirica 2018, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 83–91.

9. Daria Burnasheva and I agree on prioritizing Indigenous perspectives and methodologies. For a range of postcolonial thinking on this, see especially the path-breaking Indigenous scholar–led book by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Burnasheva’s depiction of changing identity processes in the post-Soviet years is adapted from her University of Warsaw 2019 dissertation. It is appropriate to disclose that I was the “outside reader” at her outstanding thesis defense, on the recommendation of her Sakha mentor, Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts sociologist Uliana Vinokurova. I encouraged her to write the article published here, not knowing it would vary from a major theme of my forthcoming book Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), where I stress the salience of Turkic identities for many of my Sakha interlocutors, as well as the importance of Indigenous and Arctic identities. For background on the Sakha, see especially Vera Solovyeva, “Ecology Activism in the Sakha Republic: Russia’s ‘Large Numbered’ Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” in Walking and Learning with Indigenous Peoples, eds. Pamela Cala and Elsa Stamapatalou, 119–39 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Tatiana Argounova-Low, The Politics of Nationalism in the Republic of Sakha (Northeastern Siberia) 1900–2000 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon, 2012).

10. A similar comment was made by Ronalda S. Olzhina, Khanty-Mansiisk ethnographic museum director, after she saw the boom-town Beloiar, and the trash-strewn gas-pipeline road from Beloiar to Kazym: “I have a deadening pang of hurt when I see the road and what people have done near it. How much does one have to hate the land to do that to it?” quoted in Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp.146–47.

11. An Internet campaign to stop Elon Musk from buying Norilsk Nickel products (on which his company Tesla depends), has been launched by Indigenous activists. Compare https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/08/07/russian-indigenous-groups-call-on-elon-musk-to-boycott-company-behind-arctic-disasters-a71081; and https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/indigenous-activists-demand-tesla-stop-buying-nickel-nornickel-russia.