Evgeniya Dudina is an independent researcher from Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, where her work focuses on the diet and food-gathering practices of the Nivkh, an Indigenous people who have historically lived in the northern region of Sakhalin Island and along the taiga of the lower Amur River. She is specifically concerned with the ways in which Nivkh communities sustain these traditional food practices against the force of cultural and economic Russification, isolation, poverty, and now, the rapidly intensifying effects of climate change – a crisis whose reality is largely silenced in Russia. Evgeniya is grateful to participate as a partner in the LICCI project – a project that runs counter to both the Indigenous marginalization and climate denial so rampant in Russia, that offers critical opportunities to ask new questions and to gather new information, and that might help to facilitate connections between Nivkh communities around their own experiences of and responses to a changing climate.
