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The Evenks are one of most populous indigenous peoples of Siberia (with 30,247 individuals, according to a 1989 census), inhabiting an area stretching from west of the Yenisey River to the Okhotsk seaboard and Sakhalin Island, and from the edge of the tundra south to China and Mongolia. Reindeer herders and hunters, they traditionally practiced a system of land tenure based on territorial "obshchinas," communes of small sub-clan groups of one to several families who exercised usufruct rights to particular lands. The obshchina territory was usually defined within watersheds in which the group hunted and pastured its reindeer. Clan leaders redistributed lands to individuals as needed. The Evenks would hunt and herd on others' lands only with permission from the obshchina head or the clan leader. When the question of self-determination as an indigenous people is applied to the Evenks, one issue today is whether the obshchina can be revived as an indigenous institution.
Recent claims by indigenous Siberians presented to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples have emphasized the difficult circumstances in which they find themselves today. Since the late 1980s, the Evenks and other First Nations Siberians have demanded reforms to reverse the ongoing process of alienation from their lands and therefore to improve control over their own destiny. This article discusses the implementation of potential land reforms among the Evenks of Northern Transbaykalia, disclosing serious contradictions imbedded in several distinct concepts of land tenure (including the obshchina), and highlighting some of the problems the Evenks face in preserving their rights to land that they have inhabited since time immemorial.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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