Battle for Bikin: How a Far Eastern Park Was Born

ABSTRACT

The turbulent history of one of the most important natural preserves of Russia, surrounding the Bikin River, sometimes called Russia’s Amazon, is related by one of the park’s founders. This Indigenous narrator interweaves the story of his people, the Udegé, together with their relationship to the sacred Bikin taiga lands, and to issues of leadership on many levels. The case is significant because it features one of the few large Indigenous territories that have been saved from development (timber, gold, road building) by continuously scheming outsiders, and for its depiction of the importance of Indigenous solidarity combined with guarantees of flexible traditional land use (hunting, trapping, fishing). Russian ecology activists and international allies in the battle for the park played key roles, as did the presence on Bikin territories of the charismatic largest cat in the world, the Siberian tiger.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous politics
• cultural survival
• ecology activism
• Russian law
• Udegé
• Bikin River
• Ussuri taiga
• Siberian tiger
• Far East Russia
• land development threats
• Batani Foundation

Notes

a. The case of forging Indigenous signatures is not unique. A clumsy example of this was attempted in a land development scheme effecting northern Khanty in the 1990s and was exposed by local leaders and the Russian folklorist of the Khanty, Olga Balalaeva. For context, see Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 146–72.

b. The lawyer who valiantly argued that local Amur Natives had never been reindeer breeders or riders, and that they had a right to reach their traditional lands on modern snowmobiles, jeeps, or motorboats, was Julia Yakel’, whose husband was Nanai. See also M.M. Balzer “Indigeneity, Land and Activism in Siberia,” Land, Indigenous Peoples and Conflict, eds. A. Tidwell and B. Zellen (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 13.

c. Translator Stephan Lang points out that a Russian proverb is “catch a fish in muddy water,” a phrase that author Pavel Sulyandziga is playing on here to refer to corruption.

d. Founded in 2008, the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment (http://www.mnr.gov.ru/en/) has had a “fox in the chicken coop” function, since its industrial development priorities have been internally competing with environmental oversight. Especially ironic is their intermittent responsibility for interfacing with Indigenous peoples’ interests and organizations under this same bureaucracy.