This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project is an experimental applied science project, PI David Gordon, Pacific Environment, to collaborate with high altitude and high latitude indigenous communities in Siberia, Russia to 1) facilitate their interest in mapping their ecological and cultural environments; 2) to provide scientific expertise and methodology to these groups; 3) to assist them in engaging Russian policy makers and managers in the decision making process over lands and resources on indigenous homelands; 4) to transfer knowledge and methods between Siberian indigenous peoples; and 5) to evaluate the effectiveness of Pacific Environment's program to engage Siberian indigenous groups in civil governance in Russia.
Pacific Environment (PE) is one of over 800-1,000 Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) operating in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union (New Regional Environmental Center statistics). PE's Russia Program has been in operation since the early 1990's and its focus is on "strengthening the capacity of on-the-ground community-based NGOs and local communities to protect the natural world." PE provides scientific expertise, training, operational support, and organization to primarily indigenous led organizations and communities in Siberia in order to facilitate their knowledge, participation in, and support for civil society in Russia. PE's philosophy is to strengthen Russian voices in civil society in order to protect the environment.
PE has partnered in this project with the Magadan Center for the Environment, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON), Silva Forest Foundation British Columbia, Lach Ethno-ecological Information Center Kamchatka, Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai, and others to bring the Southern Siberian communities together with the Northern Siberian communities to share their lessons, data, and methods. This project is experimental not so much in the mapping and GIS technology shared but in PE's response to an expressed need from the community; its support of not only environmental mapping but cultural mapping - the recognition that the natural world has metaphysical referents that need to be respected; the transfer of methods, techniques, and knowledge between southern and northern Siberian peoples; and the evaluation of the research and its application to the policy debates over resources. The Altai communities and later the Northern communities, approached PE and asked that they assist them with GIS, geographic, and anthropological science to help them address a growing concern and need they have over their changing relationships to their landscape because of increasing development and rapid environmental change.
This project is high risk/high return, the research team is exploring new territory with the mapping of cultural and metaphysical space, including place name data for highly endangered languages; they are facilitating the voices of indigenous peoples in civil society; and perhaps most importantly they want to reflexively self-examine their role and efficacy, as one of the 600 plus environmental NGOs in Russia jockeying for space. The project combines GIS, ethnography, anthropology, human geography, political science, traditional knowledge, and applied research to increase understanding of the cultural and ecological environments in Siberia and how this understanding can facilitate the indigenous voice in policy and management debates. It will transfer of knowledge south to north by indigenous communities, for indigenous communities, which increases the participation of underrepresented groups in science and allows for minority peoples to co-opt science to inform their needs. In addition, the research and the proposed workshop will train local people in the application of science to address the identified community need to recognize, map, and register their cultural sites with governmental authorities in order to give them a voice in the larger discussion taking place about indigenous lands and resource development. The knowledge gained through this project will be applicable to communities mapping and understanding the environmental and cultural changes they are undergoing due to climate change.
