Violations of the indigenous peoples’ right to education | Anti-discrimination podcast. Episode 2

— If languages and other aspects of culture, education and identity are to be revived, people must be given a reason to feel proud of them. Wherever they are — in Chukotka, Yakutia, Kamchatka, or anywhere in the Far East — they need to know that they won’t be ridiculed for speaking their language. On the contrary, they need to hear people saying: “That’s amazing you know Nenets — how cool!”

Hello, dear friends! You’re listening to the podcast of the Anti-Discrimination Centre “Memorial”. This episode is about the rights of Indigenous peoples: the right to a traditional way of life, to self-determination, to culture, and to language. I’m Gelya Pevzner, and today in the studio I’m joined by three wonderful guests:

Mark Zdor, a native of Chukotka, member of the International Committee of Indigenous Peoples of Russia, and an anti-war activist.

—Hello

Dmitry Dubrovsky, sociologist and lecturer at Charles University in Prague.

— Good evening, Dmitry.

— Hello

And Stefania Kulayeva, from the Anti-Discrimination Centre “Memorial”.

— Hello, Stefania.

— Hello

Today we’ll be talking about education, about the right of Indigenous peoples to study their languages and cultures, and of course about law enforcement — because without that, rights on paper mean little in practice. We’ll be askinghow much of this right now exists in theory alone, and how much is actually available to Indigenous communities?

I’d like to begin by asking Mark to tell us his personal story.

— Hello everyone! My name is Tletegyn — that’s my traditional Chukchi name. I was born and raised in Neshkan, a Chukchi village of sea hunters and reindeer herders. It’s on the Arctic coast in the region known as the Bering Strait, not far from Alaska.For our people, sea hunting, nomadic reindeer herding, fishing, and gathering aren’t just a means of survival — they’re core parts of our spiritual and cultural identity. My relatives and neighbors still live in the traditional way. Their relationship with nature taught me to respect our land and the traditions that have been passed down for generations.

As a child I loved Chukchi wrestling. It was only later that I realized it shapes not just the body but also one’s identity, and it opened me up to the values and worldview of my people. That’s probably why I set myself the goal of doing something meaningful for my community, and I dreamed of studying my culture. This dream took me to St. Petersburg, where I enrolled to study at a physical education college and then at the Institute of the Peoples of the North.

—  Before we talk about your time at the Institute — did you have any classes in school on local history or your native language?

— No. We had nothing: no history, no language, no literature. As far as I know, in the villages Chukchi and local history are taught in a very reduced form. In practice, almost no one speaks the language anymore, except the older generation.

— And what about in your family?

— My grandmother spoke Chukchi fluently.

— Was that common for her generation?

— Yes, but in everyday life they mostly spoke Russian. My parents speak a little Chukchi, but not well.

— And you?

— Just the literary language. I read Chukchi books, but that’s it.

—  Dmitry, let me bring you in here. Were there any school programs at all for Indigenous languages?

— The problem wasn’t only that many languages didn’t have proper programs. Even when these existed, local Russian-speakers — being part of theimperial majority — never bothered to learn them. Bilingualism must be mutual. But for minority languages, the space where the language lives is already so small. Unless that space is rich and full, it fades. And of course, the number of speakers matters. If there are only a handful, you can’t really create television programs or a vibrant media landscape in that language.

— I’d like to point out that — although Russia has now withdrawn from the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and is steadily renouncing other conventions, even the Convention Against Torture — for a long time Russia was part of that framework.

—  When I began studying Indigenous education requirements, I was amazed to learn that experts and linguists all agreed that children must start learning in their native language, at least in preschool and primary school. Only later should the state language be added as part of a bilingual model. But in the post-Soviet period, while these conventions were still in place, resources were steadily being reduced: education, media, everything. There were short windows of freedom: for instance, in the 1920s after the revolution, when Indigenous activists worked to create written forms of their languages. But in the 1930s this was brutally shut down. Again in the 1990s, after ratifying the Convention, there was a brief window. I remember meeting a Chukchi speaker who hosted a weekly radio program in her native language — it was just 15 minutes long. Imagine: a people who had dominated this land linguistically a century earlier were reduced to 15 minutes a week. Over a century, we’ve witnessed massive destruction of linguistic diversity. By the end of the 1990s, those fragile initiatives were gone.

—  Mark, was your generation already in school at a time when Indigenous languages were no longer taught? By then, the level of fluency had already declined, native speakers were gone, and classes, if any, were taught by linguists rather than by speakers themselves.

— Yes. From the 1980s onward, children weren’t raised as native speakers anymore. Even my lecturer at the Institute wasn’t fluent in Chukchi, though she was Chukchi herself.

—  So she was essentially teaching it as a foreign language?

— Exactly. I only began studying Chukchi at university, but I was very disappointed: everything was in Russian. I thought we’d be learning in Chukchi, but even “Chukchi literature” was taught in Russian.

—  So the teacher spoke Russian?

— And grammar books also were made in Russian. Now I live in Germany, and it’s a different story: when you learn German, you learn fully in German.

— Dmitry, would you like to add anything?

— Yes. The Soviet model — teaching the native language first, then switching to Russian — wasn’t bad in theory. But in practice, only minorities became bilingual, while Russian stayed dominant. That’s a matter of status: if your language has no political status, why use it?

— This applied mostly to larger groups — those with their own republics. But nomadic peoples were different: their children were taken away by force. Research shows that even toddlers, when just two years old, were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, especially in Chukotka. The purpose was to cut them off from family life, language, and culture.

— Exactly. Instead of nomadic schools with nomadic teachers, the state imposed boarding schools. Children lived there for years, barely seeing their parents. They grew up not knowing the life they had lost. The nomadic way of life clashed completely with the schooling system, which never acknowledged or explained it. They were caught between two incompatible models: “this is life in the boarding school, and that’s life in the camp.”And the school curriculums were designed around European knowledge, ignoring local traditions and ways of passing them on. In fact, they destroyed those practices along with the languages.

— I looked at what training programmes are available in Canada. There is a master’s degree in management, a master’s degree for social workers, i.e. very practical programmes. Practical and taking into account the principle of free prior consent. Indigenous peoples must agree in advance to everything that is proposed to be done with them. This is what Canadians are striving for now. I am not sure that it always works, but in Siberia and the Far East, when creating higher and secondary education programmes, it seems that they did not even try to find out and obtain consent.

— Mark, during your time in higher education, apart from language, what else did you study?

— We practiced traditional crafts — making items from bone and wood, working with drawings. But I only studied at the Institute for six months.

— Why so short?

— I was expelled because of my anti-war stance.

— When was that?

— In March 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Protests began in St. Petersburg. I joined one, was arrested, fined, and then my university was informed. I was summoned, reprimanded, and forced to attend “lectures” about Ukraine.

— What did they tell you?

— That Ukraine was “a gift from Lenin,” that it was full of neo-Nazis. I refused to agree and said it was all lies. They warned me I’d have problems if I kept speaking that way.

— Were there other students who also disagreed with these lectures?

— Yes, You could see the students’ reaction when they read this to us; you could tell they were unhappy.

— And perhaps the students of the Faculty of Northern Peoples do not feel like representatives of the Russian world themselves?

— There were both indigenous people and Russians. There were also Russian students who studied the culture and language of the peoples of the North.

— And were they all punished?

— Some were simply dissatisfied, but some were punished, some were expelled.

— Mark, what degree were you studying for? What was the name of the degree you received upon graduation?

— I studied philology.

— Was it possible to graduate as a sociologist, for example, or not?

— It was possible to work as a teacher of your native language.

— Basically, as I understand it, the institute was designed so that representatives of different peoples would come, get an education, and then go back home.

— It was usually like that: they studied for four years and then went back home to their native villages.

— Dmitry, how did this look in Soviet times?

— There was a Faculty for the Peoples of the Far North. There was also an Institute of the Peoples of the Far North. It later became part of the Herzen Institute as a faculty. Then another interesting development appeared — the State Polar Academy, which was closed in 2015 after existing for 17 years. And it was clear that the practical purpose of these programs lay in the fact that they had a cluster of language courses, a cluster connected with administration, and another cluster connected with various kinds of ecology.

Moreover, the Northern Polar Academy placed strong emphasis on Arctic studies and research of the North. It eventually ended, rather oddly, with the Polar Academy being merged with the Hydrometeorological Institute.

A separate problem of such educational institutions always was, and still remains, a distinctly Russian colonial attitude of staff and teachers toward the students. On the one hand, students often found themselves in a big city, in an unfamiliar environment, in unfamiliar places. They were often not very familiar at all with big cities, with the metro, and they displayed certain difficulties, just like any other person confronted with the challenges of life in a large unfamiliar city, with unfamiliar transport and unfamiliar rules. But this difference was interpreted in cultural terms — in terms of cultural distinctions.

We had one respondent, a librarian of the Polar Academy, who said: “Well, of course, they are underdeveloped, they are uncivilized, but we do try. Though in general, of course, it’s hard to say what will come of it. They had probably never seen books in their lives.” This is obviously untrue. But when a librarian, who had worked there for many years, greeted new students in this way, tension arose.The students themselves complained, for example, about a case when a classroom was changed without informing them. As I later learned, a respected professor, an honored teacher of the Russian Federation, when asked to write down the new classroom in the future, replied: “What, you Chukchi can read?” And this was a special educational institution for the peoples of the North. In other words, it was an openly racist remark. Moreover, as I understand it, this was also spoken about in lectures. The main focus of the lectures was the great Russian culture — that they must join it, that they must become part of it. Their standing as students and citizens would grow as they embraced and mastered the great Russian culture.At the same time, the students themselves did not use ethnic terms to define themselves and others; rather, they spoke in terms of regional fellowships. “Here are the Tuvans, here are the Buryats.” And Russians who had come from Buryatia were fully included: “We came from there, we have much in common, so we stick together. We spend time together and help each other.” An odd situation arose: people themselves rarely used ethnic categories, but these were constantly mentioned and imposed upon them. There was a firm conviction that culture is inherently tied to ethnic belonging and is essentially inherent in every person. This is a distinctly Soviet conviction. And it passed through the education system even into those members of minority groups who continued to remain part of this discourse — the discourse that ethnicity is innate, biologically determined, unchanging, and passed down from generation to generation.

Therefore, one of the very important, and I think under-researched, questions is the role that such educational institutions play — on the one hand, in constructing inequality, above all through cultural racism, and on the other hand in reinforcing the idea that ethnicity is innate, biologically determined, unchanging, and passed down from generation to generation. These universities should, in principle, be places for smoothing out inequality, places for critical discussion or deconstruction of that inequality. Instead, such institutions have become places where cultural racism is reinforced, and where minority students are drawn into the very framework of this cultural racism and scientific determinism.

— To what extent is the practice of folklorisation still widespread, as it was in the Soviet Union? Cultural events involving small ethnic groups, their folk costumes, performances, songs and dances – in other words, a departure from any kind of authentic identity?
We know well about attempts to flirt and bribe. The Institute of Northern Peoples has always been famous for this.

— Mark, you must remember the Northern Lights ensemble?

— Yes. Always dancing and singing. They even commercialised them, they toured the country — even to occupied Crimea and Mariupol.

— What Mark says has its roots in the Soviet Union. People posed as representatives of a certain nation, but in reality they didn’t care much about that nation as a whole or in particular. In return, however, they received privileges, advanced personally, and lived well. They were not really interested in how their people actually lived.

— German anthropologist Otto Ratke described what was happening in the Soviet Union — and what continues in the Russian Federation — as “culinary multiculturalism.” I would add: it is more like “festival-culinary multiculturalism.” In other words, cultural diversity is allowed to exist only in the kitchen and on the stage. The same problem applies to all minority cultures in Russia: they can appear on stage, or, figuratively speaking, in a soup tureen on the table — and that’s it. But when it comes to social problems, language problems, or deeper cultural issues? Those are simply ignored.

— But are there grassroots efforts to revive culture?

— That’s complicated.

— What does it even mean to “save culture”? We have to ask Mark what it means to save culture. I understand saving a language, but culture?

— Crafts?

— The thing is, you can’t do it artificially. Look at what happens to Russian crafts when people try to save them: they turn into semi-toys that nobody needs.

— I would also like to ask Mark about lifestyle. It seems to me that a lifestyle associated with hunting exists not just for its own sake, but because people hunt — which means they follow the deer they herd or animals that move away. Crafts are secondary to the culture of lifestyle. Lifestyle is much more important than creating crafts based on designs that were never actually used by indigenous people. What is really needed, I think, is to explain how to find your way in the snow, how to sail a boat in certain weather conditions. In other words, the very things that were destroyed by the boarding schools that Dmitry talked about.

— I wasn’t asking about anything exotic, as you understand, but about real grassroots initiatives, at least in terms of language learning. In Soviet times, for example, Jews organised Hebrew clubs, and people tried to learn their language in some way. Are there any such initiatives today?

— I haven’t heard of any.

— ​​Any clubs, perhaps? I’ve heard about grassroots initiatives to create an online application for learning one’s native language. Some of my friends from different nations have mentioned that they are considering developing such a tool so that those who know the language can help those who do not.

I have a question for Mark. It is clear that we are not expecting any improvements in education or in any other area in the Far North or in other regions inhabited by indigenous peoples. But, on the other hand, technology may help — including for those people who were forced to leave their native regions, and perhaps even to emigrate — to develop online education as an alternative to this state system, which does not take local specifics into account. I know that you are studying to become an anthropologist and a specialist in your indigenous culture. What can you say about the possibility of transferring the knowledge you are currently acquiring and bringing it back in the form of online education?

— This is something our partners at the Siberian Culture Foundation are working with onwith German anthropologist Erich Kasten. Our Chukchi team is collaborating with him, describing cultural topics in Chukchi, later translated into Russian, German and English.

— And this becomes accessible to the people of Chukotka, who can learn something from these materials. What do you think?

— Now, it will probably be difficult because the Russian government blocks foreign websites. Dr Erich Kasten is a German anthropologist. He studies the culture, traditions and language of the peoples of Kamchatka and Chukotka.

— Does he have an online museum or portal?

— A website about Siberian culture. Our Chukotka team is working with him. That gives us some hope.

— Then tell me, what prospects do you see in this situation?

— I believe my parents’ generation, born in the 1960s, will be the last fluent speakers. The next generation likely won’t speak it at all. In the future, no one will be able to speak the Chukchi language. That is, it will become entirely a digital and literary language, unless it becomes compulsory to study it in schools as a core subject rather than an optional one.

— So the solution is to make it a full-fledged subject in school?

— Yes.

— I don’t think that’s enough. The thing is, it’s not very motivating to learn something you don’t really understand why you need, just because someone thinks the language should be revived. From a cynical anthropological point of view, national culture, as we know, can exist in different languages. That is, culture and language are, of course, connected, but generally speaking, not necessarily. Folk culture can easily transition to other languages. The Aleuts, for example, whose language has disappeared, are doing just fine culturally. They have legends and culture, but no language. Only a dozen or so words remain, both in the American part of the Aleutian Islands and in the Russian part. This is a drama, but not a tragedy.

The tragedy will come at the following moment. If students, children, are forced to learn a language that they do not really understand. Why? Who will they speak it with? Their teacher? This is a very important point: at this moment, there must be some other motivation, not a school one. The language must have some kind of status. It must have a use. This is precisely why it is so difficult to revive languages. If the number of places where the language is needed increases, then there will be a concrete motivation to learn it. But if there are only 10 such places, you cannot force several hundred people to learn this language in order to theoretically claim a few jobs in the whole of Anadyr. Therefore, if the language does not return to everyday communication, if it does not have a use that would motivate people to learn it, then simply learning it at school will not help. Because this language must be revived first and foremost as a spoken language, not even a written one, but at school they teach the written form.

— I want to speak from my anti-discrimination perspective, from my view of the situation as a problem of discrimination. In many ways, it is a question of prestige and, conversely, the lack there of. We know that in Ireland, where very few people actually speak Gaelic, especially in everyday situations, it is simply prestigious to know and understand this language, at least to some extent. Of course, they mainly think and learn about world culture and communicate with other people, and even with each other, in English, in the Irish dialect of English. But not knowing at least something in Gaelic is not prestigious. School provides at least some knowledge. People try to learn some songs, remember some sayings. I think this is because the problem of discrimination against the Irish Celtic population has been overcome. People have regained pride in their roots and allowed it to become mainstream.People need to be given the opportunity to be proud of this, so that whether they are in Chukotka, Yakutia, Kamchatka, or anywhere else in the Far East, they know that they will not be insulted for it. On the contrary, they will be told, ‘It’s great that you know Nenets. How cool!’ What you mentioned about the Jewish language was also, in general, a fight against discrimination. People fought to regain their dignity, for the right to be themselves and not be ashamed of it. I think that’s the way forward.

— And on that hopeful note we have to end the second episode of our podcast series dedicated to the indigenous peoples of Russia and their rights.

In our next episode, we’ll talk about the right to preserve culture. For now, we must say goodbye. Thank you so much to our guests, and to everyone who listened. This was the Anti-Discrimination Centre “Memorial” podcast. Until next time!