Urfolksaktivist og forfatter Kseniia Bolshakova presenterer “Indigenous Resilience through Arctic Literature”
Presentasjonen er basert på Bolshakovas roman skrevet på dolgan-språket om hvordan klimaendring påvirker hennes urfolksgruppe. Bolshakova vokste opp på tundra i Sibir, men ble tvunget til å forlate Russland fordi hun uttrykte seg imot krigen i Ukraina.
Bio
Kseniia Bolshakova is an Indigenous decolonial writer and a member of the Dolgan Tribal community Yjdyŋa. She was born and raised in the tundra and the village of Popigai in the Russian Arctic. As one of the youngest keepers of the Dolgan language—spoken by only 1000 people—she is deeply committed to preserving her native tongue and traditional knowledge, as well as advocating for Indigenous rights and social justice. Her debut novel, Buluus da irer / All The Frost Melts, was first published in a bilingual Dolgan-Russian edition and presented at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York in 2024.
Book annotation
All The Frost Melts explores the fate of Arctic Indigenous nomads through the personal story of a child raised in a traditional reindeer herding family in the tundra. The novel is about the forever that is becoming finite: permafrost, tundra, reindeer herding, and native language. Both the child and adult voices of the author reflect in the novel on the far-reaching effects of ongoing colonization and assimilation.
The novel encapsulates all the aspects of the life of Arctic Indigenous Peoples: mortal dangers and miraculous rescues in tundra, faith in spirits and communal solidarity, raising of a sacred reindeer and slaughter of a reindeer bull, ice fishing and goose hunting, lassoing games and snowmobile races, household and spiritual taboos, ecological challenges and social hardships.