Indigenous People and Political Agenda: the Issue of Social and Ecological Change of the Nomadic Siberian, the Evenki, in Russia

摘要

Siberia is one of a few regions of the world in which hunter-gatherer communities survived until very recently. Many of their descendants have sustained their old subsistence economies, such as hunting and fishing, nomadism, or reindeer herding. This paper contains the ethnohistory of the indigenous Evenki people in Siberia and provides a critical summary of how changes of colonial political systems and management policies throughout the Evenki’s history have affected their cultural identity and changed their concept of territorial value. It is emphasized in this paper that, as seen in the case of the Evenki in Siberia, a sophisticated understanding of the environment and subsistence systems of the indigenous peoples in the world is an essential process for all policy makers whose decisions would directly affect the life system of indigenous or isolated peoples.