The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [174]
475 Norway’s Finnmark Act of 2005 transferred 96% of Finnmark County’s land ownership to a council called the Finnmark Commission, comprised of representatives from the Sámi Parliament as well as the local and central governments. Minority Rights Group International, World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples—Norway: Overview, 2007, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4954cdff23.html (accessed September 10, 2009).
476 According to Aili Keskitalo, president, Norwegian Sámi Parliament, personal interview, Tromsø, January 23, 2007.
477 J. Madslien, “Russia’s Sami Fight for Their Lives,” BBC News, December 21, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6171701.stm.
478 M. M. Balzer, “The Tension between Might and Rights: Siberians and Energy Developers in Post-Socialist Binds,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no.4 (2006): 567-588. See also A. Reid, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (New York: Walker & Company, 2002), 226 pp.
479 However, outright land ownership is a backburner issue in Russia. Most Russians, including aboriginals, view private land ownership as nonessential and even inappropriate. Aboriginal people are more concerned with winning stewardship, protections from competing uses, and the ability to pass use of the land on to their descendants. G. Fondahl and G. Poelzer, “Aboriginal Land Rights in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century,” Polar Record 39, no. 209 (2003): 111-122.
480 A very small aboriginal group called the Yukagir people successfully fought for the adoption of a special law guaranteeing them self-governance in the two townships of Nelemnoe and Andrushkino, where much of their population (1,509 people in 2002) lives. P. 97, Arctic Human Development Report (Akureyri, Iceland: Stefansson Arctic Institute, 2004), 242 pp.
481 S. N. Kharyuchi, “Option (sic) letter by the delegates of the VI Congress of indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of the Russian Federation” (open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev and Chairman Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin regarding the sale of twenty-year commercial salmon fishing leases in Kamchatka), May 12, 2009, RAIPON, http://www.raipon.org/RAIPON/News/tabid/523/mid/1560/newsid1560/3924/Option-letter-by-the-delegates-of-the-VI-Congress-of-indigenous-small-numbered-peoples-of-the-North-Siberia-and-the-Far-East-of-the-Russian-Federation/Default.aspx (accessed September 15, 2009). See also G. Fondahl, A. Sirina, “Rights and Risks: Evenki Concerns Regarding the Proposed Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline,” Sibirica 5, no. 2 (2006): 115-138.
482 On September 7, 1995, Aleksandr Pika and eight others disappeared after setting out from the town of Sireniki, Chukotka, by boat. Five days later the overturned boat and five bodies were found, with Pika’s among the unrecovered. Quote is from p. 16, Aleksander Pika, ed., Neotraditionalism in the Russian North (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, and Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 214 pp.
483 Russian Federal Law 82-F3, April 30, 1999, O garantiyakh prav korennykh malochislennykh narodov Rossiyskoy Federatsii (“On guarantees of the rights of the indigenous numerically small peoples of the Russian Federation”); Russian Federal Law 104-F3, July 20, 2000, Ob obshchikh printsipakh organizatsii obshchin korennykh malochislennykh narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka Rossiyskoy Federatsii (“On general principles for organization of obshchinas of the indigenous numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia, and the Far East of the Russian Federation”); Russian Federal Law 104-F3, July 20, 2000, O territoriyakh traditsionnogo prirodopol’-zovaniya korennykh malochislennykh narodov Severa, Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka Rossiyskoy Federatsii (“On territories of traditional nature use of the indigenous numerically small peoples of the north, Siberia, and the Far East of the Russian Federation”). Translations by G. Fondahl and G. Poelzer, “Aboriginal Land Rights in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century,