September 7, 2001

Russian intern observes GN

RAIPON representative examines indigenous people play in Nunavut government

MIRIAM HILL
Nunatsiaq News

IQALUIT — Daria Kudriashova settles into her seat, cappuccino steaming in front of her.

She's never been to this Iqaluit café. Five days before this interview, she'd never been to Canada.

Kudriashova, 24, is Selkup, a small indigenous group from Western Siberia. For the past two years, she's worked as an intern for the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North in Moscow. She's visiting Nunavut for five weeks.

To get here, she flew eight hours from Frankfurt to Toronto, before flying to Ottawa for one day.

"At first I was so afraid, I couldn't look out the window (of the airplane)," she says, giggling. She finally was able to fall asleep and see the country she had always had trouble imagining. Then she came to Iqaluit.

"It's like Russia," she says of her first impression of Nunavut's capital. "It's not like Canada. When I came here I was quite surprised. I couldn't believe this was Canada. The people don't speak Russian, but the buildings, the land, it's not like Canada."

With her snazzy handbag and vinyl jacket, she could be mistaken for a resident of any big city in Southern Canada. But she comes from a community smaller than Iqaluit.

Kudriashova's home town in western Siberia has fewer than 500 people. She began school in a community called Ivankino and finished in a town roughly the size of Iqaluit, about 60 kilometres away.

After graduating from university in Tomsk, a city of nearly a million people in central Siberia, she moved 4,000 kilometres to Moscow to work for RAIPON. Moscow, she says, is more like Europe than her home town.

"I couldn't believe this was Canada. The people don't speak Russian, but the buildings, the land, it's not like Canada."
- Daria Kudriashova, RAIPON intern

According to the 1989 census, in the old Soviet Union there were 3,612 Selkup. The Selkup economy was based on hunting and fishing, but modern Selkup now hunt and fish only for personal consumption.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many Selkup trade communities were established to regenerate their traditional economy. Each got land with rights to natural resources.

But only one of these enterprises survived. Others could not compete and dissolved or went bankrupt.

Kudriashova says she's here to observe the Nunavut government.

"I'm trying to understand how it works and how indigenous peoples are involved in this work and how I can use it after my internship program in Russia," she says, smiling as she picks the English words that do not come easily to her. "I would also like to look more at indigenous life here."

This is the second intern RAIPON has sent to Nunavut so that its younger, English-speaking staff can gain experience in a government where indigenous people play a major role.

Kudriashova has a master's degree in education and is working on a PhD in anthropology. She learned to speak English in Tomsk. Her first language after Russian is German.

"My native language is Selkup, but unfortunately I can't speak it. I can understand it, but only on the level of 'how are you.'"

Kudriashova says it's hard to compare Canada and Russia, but during her time here she'll try. There are many differences between Russia and Northern Canada, she says.

"For me it was very interesting to look at life here and to just understand the changes." Life here for indigenous people is obviously better, economically, she says.

"But the way of life — fishing, hunting — is the same."