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  • Parks and ArbitrationA leader of Russia’s Udege community describes the decades-long fight to create Bikin National Park, the first to safeguard Indigenous rights
  • Pavel Sulyandziga (bio)
    Translated by Talia Lavin

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AGÊNCIA BRASIL FOTOGRAFIAS

Bikin National Park is one of very few areas in the Russian Far East that remain untouched by those I consider the “wild barbarians of civilization.” It is home to the largest cat on the planet, the Amur tiger, and the Bikin River basin, nicknamed “the Russian Amazon.” Its forests are known as the lungs of the Northern Hemisphere, just as the Amazon’s jungles are in the Southern Hemisphere. The Bikin is also the native land of the Udege people, and about 600 of us still live there. [End Page 6] The history of Bikin National Park is inseparable from the history of my people, and over the decades the land has been a valuable lens through which to observe the workings of Russian national politics. After years of struggle, in 2015 Bikin became the first national park project in which the government took responsibility for protecting indigenous rights.

My involvement in the fight to defend the Bikin began at the end of the 1980s. At that time, an agreement was signed between the governments of the USSR and South Korea granting the Seoul-based company Hyundai a three-decade lease of my people’s territory for industrial logging. By then, only four out of eight Udege groups remained in the region. The four lost groups hadn’t been wiped out; they had simply been cut off from their taiga—their native home—and were no longer able to engage in traditional activities like hunting and fishing. Some of the tribesmen tried to find happiness in cities; many others relocated to live among their relatives in different Udege populations. These groups—the Imanka, Kuruminskaya, Namunka, and Sungariyskaya—disappeared, although the Imanka are now attempting a revival. And all this happened in less than 30 years: Loggers first began to challenge them in the 1960s.

When our territory was handed over to Hyundai, my people immediately resisted. After our struggle gained attention and began to harm the company’s image, Hyundai decided to terminate the project. Its vice president even made a “farewell” visit to our Krasny Yar forest, during which he apologized and said that Hyundai had been misled by authorities, and that he did not know the lands were Indigenous when he signed the agreement.

Between 1991 and 2008, the story of the Udege was a story of preservation against development. In those years, my people rebuffed efforts by gold miners, multinational companies, and government agencies to log, mine, and build on our land. We also dealt with other kinds of mistreatment. In 1997, a Malaysian logging company rented Udege lands near the Khor River for 50 years, agreeing to pay the aboriginal people $100,000 in the form of 10 vehicles. Even this deal was corrupt—the community received only two vehicles and the remaining eight were given to local authorities. The following year, the governor of the eastern region of Primorsky Krai tried to create a nature preserve in the upper reaches of the Bikin, ostensibly for environmental reasons. But this was just another effort to remove us from our territory. The bylaws of the preserve contained a clause stipulating that we Udege were only allowed to travel to our hunting grounds in the protected area by traditional means of transportation, which prohibited snowmobiles and cars. We sued, and a representative of the governor explained in court that we could use reindeer to move from place to place—even though reindeer had never been bred in that area and the Udege had never ridden them. We lost the suit, but when it became clear to the authorities that we would never stop protesting, they eventually lost interest in the project.

Another example: In 2008, Sergei Darkin, who had been elected governor in 2001, started taking bids on our territory. Seven companies took part in the auction, most of which were affiliated with the governor’s business empire. The Udege also participated, with...

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