Olga Ulturgasheva

Cultures and identities

The Arctic Human Development Report is a scientific assessment commissioned by the Working Group on Sustainable Development in the Arctic Council. It describes Arctic societies and cultures, econom ...

Arctic indigenous youth resilience and vulnerability: Comparative analysis of adolescent experiences across five circumpolar communities

Arctic peoples today find themselves on the front line of rapid environmental change brought about by globalizing forces, shifting climates, and destabilizing physical conditions. The weather is not the only thing undergoing rapid change here. Social climates are intrinsically connected to physical climates, and changes within each have profound effects on the daily life, health, and well-being of circumpolar indigenous peoples. This paper describes a collaborative effort between university researchers and community members from five indigenous communities in the circumpolar north aimed at comparing the experiences of indigenous Arctic youth in order to come up with a shared model of indigenous youth resilience. The discussion introduces a sliding scale model that emerged from the comparative data analysis. It illustrates how a “sliding scale” of resilience captures the inherent dynamism of youth strategies for “doing well” and what forces represent positive and negative influences that slide towards either personal and communal resilience or vulnerability. The model of the sliding scale is designed to reflect the contingency and interdependence of resilience and vulnerability and their fluctuations between lowest and highest points based on timing, local situation, larger context, and meaning.

Attaining khinem: Challenges, coping strategies and resilience among Eveny adolescents in northeastern Siberia

This article examines challenges, coping strategies, and resilience among Eveny adolescents in northeastern Siberia. It explores situations which the study participants associate with challenge and hardship, namely their experiences of transition from life in the family reindeer herding camp to schooling at the age of 7, bullying, boredom, and violence. By situating the data within the Eveny framework of resilience (khinem), the study provides the ethnographic context for coping strategies and efforts (e.g., sharing, inter- and intragenerational support, availability of safe homes) undertaken by the community in order to mitigate the situations of risk and hardship and to facilitate adolescents’ resilience. The account emphasizes that instead of identifying adolescents as either resilient or vulnerable, it is necessary to explore culturally specific processes and practices which potentially contribute to their acquisition of resilience.

Collapsing the Distance: Indigenous Youth Engagement in a Circumpolar Study of Youth Resilience

The Circumpolar Indigenous Pathways to Adulthood (CIPA) study brought together researchers from five different universities, working in five different regions of the Arctic, to explore arctic indigenous-youth resilience utilizing collaborative and participatory approaches. This paper focuses on outcomes from the collaboration of two sites in the project and presents findings from a culminating cross-site workshop that engaged indigenous youth and community members, along with university researchers of various disciplines and backgrounds, in a cultural exchange of knowledge and practice. While our main goal for the study was to reveal processes and factors underlying indigenous-youth resilience, we learned much about the processes and factors contributing to resilience in research collaborations as well. Our findings suggest indigenous research methodologies may contribute towards the development of resilient collaborations with potential to bring about transformative outcomes for indigenous-community members engaged in research.

Climate strategies: thinking through Arctic examples

Frequent and unpredictable extreme weather events in Siberia and Alaska destroy infrastructure and threaten the livelihoods of circumpolar peoples. Local responses are inventive and flexible. However, the distinct politics of post-Soviet Siberia and Alaska play a key role in the pragmatics of strategic planning. The Arctic is a planetary climate driver, but also holds the promise of massive resources in an ice-free future, producing tensions between ‘environmental’ and ‘development’ goals. Drawing on material from Siberia and Alaska we argue: (i) that extreme events in the Arctic are becoming normal; material demands are in a state of flux making it difficult to assess future material needs. We must consider material substitutions as much as material reduction; (ii) local-level responsive strategies should be taken into account. Core/periphery thinking tends to assume that answers come from ‘the centre’; this is, in our view, limited; (iii) we suggest that ‘flexibility’ may become a core survival value that is as important for city planners and public health officials as it is for Siberian reindeer herders. In this, we see not only the simultaneous need for mitigation and adaptation policies, but also for a concerted effort in promoting such capacities in young people. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’.

Ghosts of the Gulag in the Eveny world of the dead

Abstract The article explores the legacy of the Gulag in Northeast Siberia by providing a detailed discussion of the space of the village built on the former site of the concentration camp haunted by the unhappy ghosts of former prisoners. Since, in local cosmology the latter are given the status of malevolent spirits – arinkael –, they create the context in which the memory of the Gulag is reproduced locally through the repetitive encounters of ghosts in the village buildings. The account illustrates that ghosts of the former violently killed Gulag prisoners charged with affective potential for contagion expand and modify the status of arinkael within the Eveny cosmology. This contributes to the process of “world-making”, in which the local population and Gulag ghosts are mutually expanding Eveny cosmology while simultaneously reactivating the memories about the Gulag.

From Lone Wolves to Relational Reindeer: Sustainability of Anthropological Myths and Methods in Contemporary Northern Communities.

This chapter examines how a new methodological approach, peer observation of research, was used as part of a comparative, ethnographic study of social resilience in Alaska and Siberia. The approach evolved through the collaboration of two indigenous researchers working in two different regions of the Arctic. Breaking from what has become a standard auto-ethnographic or self-reflexive enterprise in anthropology, our study aimed to document the collaborative ethnographic interaction from multiple perspectives and positions. We present two fieldwork episodes demonstrating the process and potential utility of a peer observation method for social researchers working in collaboration with indigenous communities and people in the Arctic. Peer observation of research reveals: (1) the ways in which our methods and models of collaborative research are relational and negotiated within an indigenous community and cultural context and (2) the degree to which our own indigenous kinship and association influences our ethnographic outcomes in a fieldwork setting leading to productive points of orientation and disorientation.

Review of Indigenous Youth in Brazilian Amazonia: Changing Lived Worlds by Pirjo Kristina Virtanen. 2012. Palgrave Macmillan: New York, Basingstoke.

process of ethnicity and identity formation implicit in a vast body of literature on indigenous activism in South America runs the risk of undermining the uniqueness of local political theories as well as the specific meanings and properties of the disputed political object, such as natural resources. Kohn’s rephrasing of these politics in terms congruent with Runa socio-ecological theories might help us in the much-needed effort to provincialize Euro-American political theory, upon which anthropology is too often dependent.