Indigenous Affairs 3-4/08: IWGIA, IWGIA Moscow and Raipon

IWGIA’s collaboration with Russian indigenous peoples began following the foundation of RAIPON in 1990 at the III Congress of Numerically-Small Indigenous Peoples of Russia in Moscow. Three years previously, in 1987, an initiative on the part of Arctic scholars called “Anxious North” (Trevozhnyi Sever) had come into being. This was a small group of Moscow scholars working in the North who were troubled by the situation and problems of indigenous peoples as a result of social changes. Administrative resettlement, transitioning nomads to a settled way of life, educating children at boarding schools (and separating them from their families) and the industrial development of the North had all led to the social disorientation of indigenous peoples, a loss of culture and language, the destruction of the surrounding environment and an undermining of their traditional way of life.