Gail Fondahl

• University of Northern British Columbia

This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050) (available at: www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special issues/ shaping arctic).

This Special Issue “Shaping Tomorrow’s Arctic” explores the past, present and future of Arctic sustainability [...]

In the struggle of Russia's Indigenous northerners for greater control over their ancestral lands, the spatiolegal formations known as Territories of Traditional Nature Use (TTPs, using the Russian acronym) have become their most effective tool. TTPs have assumed diverse characteristics across Russian regions in response to the evolution of federal...

Вестник СВФУ. Серия «НАУКИ О ЗЕМЛЕ № 1 (21) 2021

Indigenous northerners’ rights in the Russian Federation are legally protected at a range of levels (federal, regional, municipal), and by a diversity of types of legal acts (laws, decrees, orders, provisions). Within the complex structure of Russian federalism, the country’s regional governments elaborate upon federal laws in diverse ways and at d...

Numerous Russian laws recognize rights of, and provide for benefits to, Indigenous peoples living within the Russian Federation. Yet in the past two decades, Indigenous persons have faced challenges in accessing these rights, having no way to prove that they are members of an Indigenous people. For almost two decades, Indigenous leaders have petiti...

The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the characteristics of the resettlement of the local Evenki group of the Olekma River Basin, which influenced the modern land use and economic and cultural relations of Evenki living now in the Olekminsky District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the Kalarsky and Tungiro-Olekminsky Districts...

The relevance of the study is due to the need to study the characteristics of the resettlement of the local Evenki group of the Olekma River Basin, which influenced the modern land use and economic and cultural relations of Evenki living now in the Olekminsky District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), the Kalarsky and Tungiro-Olekminsky Districts...

State-region relations involve negotiations over the power to (re)-constitute local spaces. While in federal states, power-sharing ostensibly gives regions a role over many space-making decisions, power asymmetries affect this role. Where centralization trends may erode regional agency, law can provide an important tool by which regions can assert...

In this paper I explore how the Evenki of southeast Siberia resist place-annihilation caused by both the direct actions of resource development and the indirect effects of formal education that cause a decline of indigenous place-based knowledge. I argue that they do so by the production and presentation of landscape elements that assert and educat...

The Arctic is one of the world’s regions most affected by cultural, socio-economic, environmental, and climatic changes. Over the last two decades, scholars, policymakers, extractive industries, governments, intergovernmental forums, and non-governmental organizations have turned their attention to the Arctic, its peoples, resources, and to the cha...

‘Sustainability’ is a major concern in the North, given the rapid environmental and social (including political, economic and cultural) changes the region is undergoing. Yet the definition of what sustainability is, and how it might be achieved, are still much debated. Where one is located, both geographically and socially, influences how one perce...

This edited volume examines the multiple dimensions of sustainability in the Circumpolar North, a territory facing unprecedented environmental and social challenges at the start of the 21st century. The chapters explore the cultural, economic, political and environmental aspects of sustainability, as well as examples of successful research collabor...

Reclaiming the Forest: The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya. Edited by Åshild Kolås and Yuanyuan Xie . New York: Berghahn, 2015. xiv, 198 pp. ISBN: 9781782386308 (cloth; also available as e-book). - Gail Fondahl

The Arctic is among the world’s regions most affected by ongoing and increasing cultural, socio-economic, environmental and climatic changes. Over the last two decades, scholars, policymakers, extractive industries, local, regional and national governments, intergovernmental forums, and non-governmental organizations have turned their attention to...

Key Messages Overlapping Aboriginal claims to territory often result from variously constituted indigenous political identities and the diverse spatialities they enact. Settling treaties in contested areas can privilege Aboriginal groups that settle treaties first, to the detriment of groups with overlapping claims. Ordinary courts have struggled t...

This chapter provides a brief introduction to the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic by focusing on three issues of crucial importance to these peoples: Self-governance, rights to land and resources, and traditional knowledge. We first note the diversity of Indigenous groups populating the Arctic, and discuss ‘who is Indigenous’, in terms of recognit...

Throughout the 1800s and the 1900s, woodland caribou disappeared from much of the central and southern portions of British Columbia, Canada. Conversely, moose populations expanded during the 1900s and rapidly colonized forested areas formerly occupied by caribou. Although the general trend in range recession and expansion is documented, the process...

This paper reflects on the methodological challenges of co-managed research as experienced from a non-Indigenous perspective. In 2003, Tl'azt'en Nation and the authors initiated a toponymy study that involved finding a curricular use for Dakelh place names. In this article, we chronicle our experiences with negotiating and managing this study with...

Apart from conventional understandings of its utilitarian function as spatial labels (often eponymous in character), toponymy is seldom appreciated as palimpsest or for the layers of meaning it assumes, conveyed in place-name etymologies and local knowledge associated with the named places. Over the years, a growing body of literature has emerged o...

Community-based participatory research, or what we term ‘co-managed research,’ has become increasingly common over the past decade. Its growth among indigenous communities is especially notable, as First Nations and other indigenous communities increasingly demand a role as partners in research, rejecting the position of research subjects. This pap...

In Russia, as in Canada, Native peoples are attempting to gain greater control over their homelands. In the last decade, legislation at both the federal and sub-federal (provincial, republican, etc.) level has sanctioned the transfer of land to Native ‘possession’, though not ownership, for the pursuit of traditional activities. This paper surveys...

Societies produce the space in which they operate through social practices that visualize, administer, and use lands and resources. Because Native peoples have held relatively little political power, their ability to influence the production of space has received little attention. Yet the superimposition of Euro-Canadian social practices onto Nativ...

Indigenous peoples' rights to a healthy environment and to be able to participate in decisions affecting their environment are increasingly recognized in Russian law. In this article we explore the case of the Evenki living at the north end of Lake Baikal, who are faced with the construction of an oil pipeline through their home-land. The Evenki pe...

The John Prince Research Forest (JPRF) was established as a co-managed forest between Tl'azt'en Nation and the University of Northern British Columbia, as an opportunity for these partners to blend their respective ways of under- standing and managing forests to contribute to ecological and social sustainability. Using four criteria of successful c...

Summary As tools for improving the sustainability of forest management, criteria and indicator (C&I) frameworks have grown in popularity over the last decade. Such frameworks have been largely derived from top-down approaches to determining critical measures of forest management success. While useful, they fail to capture many C&I of critical impor...

State-imposed borders inform socio-spatial identities, often encouraging divergent identities for those living of different sides of the border. However, these identities may be discursively appropriated by the groups affected by the borders, in order to manage their relations with the state. We describe how one group of aboriginal people in the Ru...

During the last decade, aboriginal peoples in Russia have sought to improve their legal rights, including their rights to their homelands and the resources of these lands. The Russian government initially responded to an aboriginal lobby by including discrete articles addressing aboriginal rights in a number of its laws, including those on forests,...

Endangered peoples of the Arctic: struggles to survive and thrive. FreemanMilton M.R. (Editor). 2000. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, xx + 278 p, illustrated, hard cover. ISBN 0-313-30649-4. £33.50. - Volume 38 Issue 204 - Gail Fondahl

An exploratory paper by an interdisciplinary team comprising two geographers and a political scientist investigates the role that aboriginal land claims legislation may play in efforts of Russia's ethnically based republics to increase their sovereignty vis-à-vis the Center. A specific focus is on the establishment of nomadic clan obshchinas in the...

Illustrations 1. Greenland and Vinland: North Atlantic exploration five hundred years before the Cabot voyages 2. Social and economic conditions in Norse Greenland before 1350 3. Church and trade in Norse Greenland 4. Ivar Bardarson's Greenland 5. The western settlement comes to an end 6. Rumors of trouble in the Eastern settlement 7. England and t...

A boundary dispute between two rayons in East Siberia's Buryat Republic is described and analyzed as an example of how changing cultural identities among Russia's peoples are reflected in efforts to renegotiate power relationships in favor of enhanced local autonomy and/or indigenous rights. Baunt Rayon has based its claim to a contested area on th...

The chair of a roundtable session entitled “The Russian North in Transition,” the papers of which constitute this special issue of Post-Soviet Geography, outlines general theoretical and methodological issues that must be addressed in the study of change in this region of Russia. Particular attention is focused on problems of defining the Russian N...

Territorial reorganization of indigenous society in Russia's North during the Soviet period included the disruption of indigenous land tenure mechanisms, sedentarization, and forced relocation. These historical processes now serve as a backdrop for current efforts toward land reform, one alleged goal of which is to increase the potential for indige...

Reindeer milk is used by native peoples throughout the Soviet North. This article describes how different groups use, or have in the past used, the milk in raw and processed form. After summarizing the properties of reindeer milk, it outlines a neglected chapter in the history of domesticated animals: the attempt in the 1930s to set up a commercial...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 351-382). Photocopy. s

This study extends previous research into the transportation implications of a crisis relocation by (1) investigating the effects of a nuclear attack on the reconfigured transportation system and the relocated population, (2) identifying and evaluating alternative means of providing transportation system support to the relocated survivors of such a...

Books reviewed: Walter Isard, History of Regional Science and the Regional Science Association International: The Beginnings and Early History Robert E. Lang, Edgeless Cities: Exploring the Elusive Metropolis Lori G. Kletzer, Imports, Exports, and Jobs: What Does Trade Mean for Employment and Job Loss? Wei-Bin Zhang, Theory of Interregional Dynamic...