Between indigeneity and nationality : the politics of culture and nature in Russia's diamond province ...

• Main Author: Hicks, Susan M.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2011
• Subjects: Sakha; Sakha Republic; Yakutia; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0072271; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0072271

Despite a half century of rapid, state-sponsored industrialization in the region, only with its more recent, abrupt exposure to global capitalism has Siberia become a hotly contested site of debates over both indigenous rights and natural resource extraction. The Sakha Republic (Yakutia), a Northeastern Siberian region twice the size of Alaska, is now a particularly crucial site of contestation, boasting diamond reserves that produce about 25% of the world‘s diamonds. The region is also home to a sizeable, highly educated indigenous population, the Sakha, who comprise over 45% of the Republic‘s residents. Sakha activists have been engaged in a sustained project of cultural revival that has drawn upon globally circulating representations of indigeneity to contest environmental destruction, assert political control over their lands and resources, and to challenge socio-economic marginalization. However, in post-Soviet Siberia, like elsewhere in Asia, distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous are not ...