Urbanization and Cultural Resilience of Indigenous Urbanites: Lessons from the Arctic

Abstract

The urbanization trend among Indigenous Peoples has been steadily increasing over the past few decades and is likely to accelerate in the future due to rapid climate and socio-political changes around the world, and in the Arctic particularly (Stephens, 2015). Given the speed and intensity with which Indigenous urbanization is taking place in the Arctic regions, a thorough examination of Indigenous urbanization in this region can make an important contribution to our understanding of the Indigenous urban experiences globally. Unveiling, understanding, and valuing Indigenous urban livelihoods is an important task in respect to research and policy making, but most crucially, in terms of individual and collective self-determination and self-identification of the Indigenous Peoples. In the Russian Arctic, for many of them (us), resettling to cities and towns, represents a striking departure from the traditional lifestyles and makes cultural and spiritual reconciliation with the urban environment extremely challenging. In this paper, using examples of Nenets Autonomous Okrug and Sakha Republic, we explore Indigenous urbanites’ (cultural) resilience practices that allow them to create new Indigenous identities that are meaningful in their (our) new urban environments.