Rapid Climate Change (RCC) has serious consequences for indigenous peoples in the north not only for their life ways and resource utilization but also with respect to ethnic mobilization and conflict. The "dynamics of Circumpolar Land Use and Ethnicity" (CLUE) project is a combination of research and education in partnership with northern indigenous peoples of Russia that will investigate the relationship between resources and ethnicity of indigenous circumpolar societies confronting RCC, as well as their agency on the global stage to secure land and resource rights. Because Fennoscandia and Alaska have in some respects developed the discourse of indigenous rights more fully than Russia, the bulk of the fieldwork will be done in Russia with materials from Fennoscandia and Alaska serving as comparisons.
Starting with the premise that when nation states define which indigenous groups can access land resources and the usage such access entails, a circular dynamic is formed whereby categories of people (and even historically well-defined groups) aspire to be "recognized" according to these state legal criteria. The CLUE project will explore the ways in which climate change adds additional pressure to this state defined system of land access and use. One example of such pressure is that as RCC increases the growing season and the agricultural line pushes northward it intersects with indigenous reindeer pastures, affecting local peoples' herds, which are already under stress from winter temperature fluctuations. These intersections, catalyzed by RCC, create new disputes not only about land use but also about the definition of "indigenous" itself.
In addition to an investigation of how RCC and the discourse of RCC affects indigenous resources and resource use, CLUE researchers will investigate the concept of "indigenous people," their rights according to international covenants, and the different meanings of the concept in different national settings. Finally, the CLUE project team hopes to explore other arenas of ethnic discourse such as environmentalism, often with global roots and funding, and resource extraction in the north as well.
CLUE has been sponsored as a full proposal by the IPY Joint Committee and is endorsed by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON). Through its educational outreach component, CLUE will train local indigenous students and incorporate them into project as full research assistants. Finally, this research hopes to give a "voice" to indigenous concerns and serve to facilitate communications between different levels of local, state, and global decision making.
