From disappearing languages to selfie-taking tourists at sacred sites, preserving native cultural heritage has become a race against the clock, indigenous groups said.
The suicide of an indigenous rights activist protesting against Russia’s language policies has highlighted the cultural threats native communities face across the globe as they fight for their land and survival, campaigners and researchers warned.
According to local authorities, a man died last week after setting himself on fire outside the regional parliament in Izhevsk, the capital of the so-called Udmurt Republic in western Russia.
Indigenous groups said the man, whom local media identified as 79-year-old Albert Razin, carried out the act in protest over a recent law that they said favours the study of Russian over native tongues.
Images shared on social media showed Razin holding signs reading “If my language dies tomorrow, then I’m ready to die today” and “Do I have a Fatherland?” as he stood outside the parliament building.
More than 40 per cent of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken around the world are at risk of disappearing, and most of them are indigenous tongues, according to the United Nations.
Sophie Grig, a senior researcher with the British-based indigenous rights group Survival International, said when a language is lost, the entire community that spoke it also risks disappearing.
“(Language) holds the key to the wealth of knowledge a people has about their past, their land, their livelihoods and ways of understanding the world,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“When it is lost, the tribe’s future is imperilled.” Indigenous knowledge and land rights could be crucial in global efforts to curb global warming, according to a special report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The extinction of a community’s native languages can also lead to the loss of its claims over the land it occupies, indigenous rights experts say. And indigenous communities already have a tenuous hold on the land they live and work on.
Up to 2.5 billion people depend on indigenous and community lands, which make up more than half of all land globally, but they legally own just 10 per cent.
Along with fighting for their languages and land, indigenous groups also regularly find themselves defending their culture, language and knowledge against what they see as cultural appropriation by businesses. Last week, Air New Zealand angered indigenous Maori when it sought to trademark a logo with the phrase “kia ora”, which means “good health” and is commonly used to say “hello”.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
Umberto Bacchi
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