Chukotka’s Indigenous intellectuals and subversion of Indigenous activism in the 1990s

Abstract

This paper, based on the author’s extensive field research in Chukotka in the 1990s, examines the conditions for Indigenous activism in Chukotka during the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Indigenous movement in Chukotka faced extremely difficult conditions in the 1990s because of a concerted attack by a belligerent and chauvinistic regional administration that sought to undermine any effort on the part of Indigenous activists to mount an effective movement.Se fondant sur une recherche de terrain extensive menée par l’auteure dans la Tchoukotka des années 1990, cet article examine les conditions de l’activisme autochtone dans cette région de l’Extrême-Orient russe durant la décennie qui a suivi la dissolution de l’Union Soviétique. Le mouvement autochtone a fait face à une situation extrêmement difficile en Tchoukotka dans les années 1990 en raison d’une attaque concertée de la part d’une administration régionale chauvine et belliqueuse visant à saper tout effort émanant des activistes autochtones pour monter un mouvement efficace

Siberia

“…Land belongs to the state, and in the wider context of human rights and legal pluralism, the concept of indigenous rights has a weak conceptual and legal foundation (Novikova 2003(Novikova , 2014Rohr 2014, and many reports in English by the same publisher). Regional conditions vary: Fondahl (1998) discusses Evenki land tenure struggles around Lake Baikal; Gray (2007) shows how Chukotka swung during the 1990s from a hostile administration to an extraordinary (but temporary) period of support by the oligarch Abramovich (Thompson 2008). Occasional reports show a surprising and heartening possibility of coexistence between indigenous communities and industrial enterprises at the local level, but these oases of local goodwill (Stammler & Peskov 2008) are not carried through to the national level.…”

An historical institutionalist perspective of Russian Inuit political autonomy

“…Indigenous rights were restricted to local administration and matters of selfgovernment (Gray, 2001). Yupiget intelligentsia, who were previously social activists within the Soviet Union, naturally became social activists within the context of the Russian Federation (Gray, 2007). From the onset of the 1990s, the emergence of the Indigenous rights movement was supported at the Okrug level; however, a wave of opposition to regionalism swept across Russia within the decade (Pelaudeix, 2012).…”