Routledge Handbook of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic

Timo Koivurova, Else Grete Broderstad, Dorothée Cambou, Dalee Dorough, Florian Stammler, Timo Koivurova, Else Grete Broderstad, Dorothée Cambou, Dalee Dorough, Florian Stammler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000284058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Naturwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

This handbook brings together the expertise of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to offer a comprehensive overview of issues surrounding the well-being, self-determination and sustainability of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic.

Offering multidisciplinary insights from leading figures, this handbook highlights Indigenous challenges, approaches and solutions to pressing issues in Arctic regions, such as a warming climate and the loss of biodiversity. It furthers our understanding of the Arctic experience by analyzing how people not only survive but thrive in the planet's harshest climate through their innovation, ingenuity and agency to tackle rapidly changing environments and evolving political, social, economic and cultural conditions. The book is structured into three distinct parts that cover key topics in recent and future research with Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic. The first part examines the diversity of Indigenous peoples and their cultural expressions in the different Arctic states. It also focuses on the well-being of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic regions. The second part relates to the identities and livelihoods that Indigenous peoples in Arctic regions derive from the resources in their environments. This interconnection between resources and people's identities underscores their entitlements to use their lands and resources. The third and final part provides insights into the political involvement of Indigenous peoples from local all the way to the international level and their right to self-determination and some of the recent related topics in this field.

This book offers a novel contribution to Arctic studies, empowering Indigenous research for the future and rebuilding the image of Indigenous peoples as proactive participants, signaling their pivotal role in the co-production of knowledge. It will appeal to scholars and students of law, political sciences, geography, anthropology, Arctic studies and environmental studies, as well as policy-makers and professionals.

Section 1

Arctic Indigenous diversity and the foundations of cultural, social and spiritual well-being

Florian Stammler

This first section hosts papers of very different kinds and orientations under the heading of diversity. Celebrating diversity is part of the mission of this book, as too long Indigenous peoples have been looked down upon by colonisers as people without history and diversity. Correspondingly, as Ongtooguk argues in his epilogue to this volume, very coarse and superficial descriptions of Arctic Indigenous peoples have become very influential in shaping their image in the western-dominated public discourses. This section cannot claim to introduce the reader to the diversity of all Arctic cultures. Rather, the chapters present in-depth insights from particular examples that illustrate how diversely different Arctic Indigenous cultures express their relations to the natural and social surroundings. One important goal of research is to generate new insights that can be used to further human well-being on this planet. This is not only true of Indigenous research but should be a guiding goal of any research. Among Indigenous peoples everywhere, not only in the Arctic, well-being is mostly the result of the interplay between the emergence and influence of the dominant societies in states that Indigenous peoples do not control and of their desire to manifest their own livelihoods within the existing narrowly defined frameworks of such states.

This starts with the very definition of who is considered Indigenous and how states do or do not record or reflect Indigenous status in their own statistics – the focus of Chapter 1. Officially, this is decided by governments which are not themselves Indigenous and statistical offices that record numbers according to the respective state’s ideologies. Thus, Indigenous registry is part of a state’s effort to socially engineer their population to its liking and favour. As Heleniak and Napper show, a statistically separate Indigenous status can be perceived as respect for the particularity of Indigenous peoples as well as racial discrimination. The authors show how differently the Arctic states approach this issue: in Alaska, something called race is the determining factor for Indigenous status, which sounds strange in a post-fascist European context that has largely banned ‘race’ as category from anywhere. In his chapter in the next section on Alaska marine mammal harvesting, Langdon further problematises this categorisation. In Canada, ethnicity is the determining identifier for Indigenous status, with the three categories of Inuit, Metis and First Nations. In Fennoscandia, neither race nor ethnicity is recorded by statistics, as both are considered to bear too much historically problematic meaning. However, beyond statistic entries Indigenous self-identification has a higher importance there. Self-identification is also a crucial component in Russia’s statistical category of natsional’nost, which is close to ethnic group and recorded in census data. However, since 7 May 2020 in Russia, the largest and ethnically most diverse Arctic country, a new registry for Indigenous peoples is in force,¹ with the goal of clearly classifying Indigenous individuals as basis for the allocation of privileges and subsidies by the state.

Another form of states socially engineering Indigenous populations is by relocating them to specific territories, as has been done in most Arctic countries in the past. As a result, few Indigenous peoples remain fully nomadic in their lifestyle in the 21st century. The chapter by Allemann provides an example of the Russian Saami and the traumatic experience of displacement (his preferred term over relocation), resulting in socially engineered villages where nobody waited for them.

As a result of such social engineering and state interference with Indigenous peoples, livelihoods, cultural expressions, languages and religion transformed radically in the 20th century throughout the Arctic. Indigenous peoples are now brought up by their parents in these dramatically changed settings as part of the educational and political systems of their respective states and at the same time their own traditions. The result of these processes is demonstrated in diverse ways by the other chapters of this section: Olsen addresses ways in which Saami education in Norway can transform more towards implementing Indigenous approaches and principles. However, the author also acknowledges that not always are the Saami and Norwegian “distinct and separate in all manners and matters”. Instead, the chapter emphasises the need for fine-grained approaches, instead of “one size fits it all” generalisations even within the Saami. The author underscores the relevance of Indigenous approaches for education in general, drawing on broader theories from around the planet, which provide useful guidance for pedagogy inspired by Indigenous peoples’ values without falling into the trap of simplistic Indigenous/dominant society dichotomies.

The impossibility of the task of separating Indigenous and country-wide tendencies in education is also evident in the Ivanova et al. chapter on political leadership. The authors indicate that classical categorisations such as those by Weber (1922), Adorno (1973) and Hermann (2010) apply just as well to Indigenous as to any other political leadership. On the example of Russia’s most Indigenous northern region, they analysed what the most desired traits of character are for a political leader among young people in an urban and rural setting. They show how Indigenous political culture follows largely the country-wide mainstream, because the political system is just as engineered by the state as education and economy are. Even where politicians are Indigenous by origin, they are neither selected nor act according to Indigenous traditional institutions of leadership.

Under such conditions, education in Indigenous languages is a particularly pressing issue for many groups, since languages (Harrison 2007), alongside species and other diversities, die so rapidly on this planet (Tilman et al. 2017). Varlamov et al. provide the example of the Evenki and how Indigenous language education benefits from new-generation computer technology and internet-based resources. Lavrillier argues that there is a need to carefully balance the needs of scientific language documentation as a field of science with needs of Indigenous practitioners themselves, who develop e-learning tools in their languages with more applied goals.

The chapter by Peers et al. tells the history of popular music among the East Siberian Sakha people, much of which is still expressed in their own language. They show how the intimate relations between people and their environment are not only obvious in the Indigenous livelihood but also are at the core of popular music. Even today, when a large portion of the Sakha changed from a semi-nomadic agro-pastoralist livelihood to a village-based and later urban lifestyle, the connection to the land continues to inspire popular music even in urban disco and rock environments.

Along similar lines but differently topically oriented, Vitebsky and Alekseyev’s chapter about Indigenous Arctic religions or spirituality identifies relation to the environment as the core foundation common to all Indigenous belief systems. In the first overview of its kind, Vitebsky and Alekseyev give an impressively dense yet broad survey of such religions, with illustrative examples of how Indigenous Arctic inhabitants shape their intimate relations to their surroundings (animals, stones, water, landscape), often with the help of shamans as spiritual experts, As different and far from each other as the Inuit, Saami and Siberian Indigenous peoples’ religions are, none of them has written texts and codes like bigger “world religions”. Rather, they are united by the idea of “entities that fill the environment with force and agency” as foundation for their sophisticated theologies. In recent centuries, Indigenous religions have all been impacted by more dominant colonial ideologies, whether in the form of Christianity or Marxism, but Vitebsky and Alekseyev go on to show that the principles of the earlier religions remain powerful in spite of all past attempts at domination and are being transformed today in new ethnic, urban and ecological movements. Like most other contributors in this section, Vitebsky and Alekseyev illustrate how Indigenous research should go beyond being “fascinated by archaic survivals”, as it is common for research to search for the ‘last remaining shaman’, the ‘last remaining speaker’, the ‘last remaining chief’ among Indigenous peoples.

No one denies the global reduction of diversity of which these ‘last remaining’ orientations are a result: species of plants, animals, languages, livelihoods and religions, as well as entire cultural and ethnic groups, are dying out. This is the result of the global tendency of economic and social engineering that states implement in their territories, including throughout the Arctic. However, the chapters in this section confirm that Indigenous peoples are far from being passive victims and just ‘losers’ in the devastation of diversity. Research should therefore avoid what could be called the ‘traditional trap’, meaning the all-too-easy tendency of museifying Indigenous peoples in all aspects of their culture, even if this sometimes seems to ‘work’ as a strategy by activists for protection of Indigenous rights. Instead, the authors argue that future Indigenous research in the diverse fields introduced by this section should focus more on new developments, such as on present-day religious energy through urban rituals, pamphlets and social media (Vitebsky and Alekseyev); expressing Indigenous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Section 1 Arctic Indigenous diversity and the foundations of cultural, social and spiritual well-being
• Section 2 The fundamental importance of land, territories and resources
• Section 3 Indigenous peoples and self-determination in the Arctic
• Index