Reshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: Managed Retreat as Colonial Decontextualization

This article describes social encounters produced through climate adaptation policy experimentation focused on managed retreat—a framework increasingly used by academics and planning professionals to describe various kinds of planned relocations from areas exposed to environmental hazards. Building on scholarship that examines the political ecology of resettlement and adaptation (Shearer, 2012; Maldonado, 2014; Marino 2015; Whyte et al. 2019), I draw on five years of ethnographic work conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders as their longstanding Tribal resettlement planning was transformed by government investment. I found that Louisiana’s Office of Community Development relied on Tribal-led planning to garner federal funds, used those funds to transform the resettlement, and used planning process and documentation to erase the rationales behind and aims of Indigenous-led planning—a process I liken to Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019)’s notion of decontextualization as a colonial strategy of erasure. I contend that state decontextualization of the resettlement from a struggle for cultural survival to managed retreat policy experimentation reproduced a frontier dynamic whereby colonial and capitalist coastal futures are rested upon the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their lifeways, institutions, and self-determination. Constructions of risk and community and timelines published in planning documentation were particularly important state tools used for decontextualization. Ethnographic accounts of such processes can inform future resistance to eco-colonial schemes within climate adaptation.

PSXII-8 Mitochondrial DNA diversity within domestic reindeer in Russia

Domestic reindeer in Russia are a valuable resource of vital importance to the physical and cultural survival of the Northern indigenous minority. During the last decades, the mitochondrial (mt) genetic markers have been widely used as a molecular tool to investigate genetic structure and diversity of livestock species. Here we aimed at the assessing the mtDNA diversity of the domestic reindeer inhabiting the area from the Kola Peninsula in the west to the Chukotka region in the east. A complete cytochrome b (cytb) sequences (1,140 bp) from representatives of six populations, including Nenets (NEN, n = 16), Evenk (EVK, n = 12), Even (EVN, n = 6), Chukotka (CHU, n = 6), Chukotka-Khargin (CHUKH, n = 6) and Tuva (TUVA, n = 6) were obtained. Sequences’ alignment was conducted using MUSCLE algorithm in R package msa. In total, 34 haplotypes were identified. Median-joining network, constructed in PopART 1.7, revealed three major groups of haplotypes: the first one joined the samples of all the populations, the second one included NEN, EVN and CHUKH, and the third group was presented by the one sample of CHU. AMOVA, calculated in Arlequin 3.5.2.2, showed that only 9.58% of molecular variance could be explained by the differences between populations and 90.42% - within populations. Genetic diversity parameters calculated in DnaSP 6.12.03, demonstrated that average number of nucleotide differences (K) was highest in CHUKH (28.333) and EVN (27.409) and lowest in TUVA (4.533) and EVK (5.400). Nucleotide diversity (Pi) was 0.01238±0.00559, 0.00474±0.00091, 0.02404±0.00453, 0.01281±0.00464, 0.02485±0.00744, and 0.00398±0.00110 for NEN, EVK, EVN, CHU, CHUKH and TUVA, respectively. Our study demonstrated the lack of clear genetic structure of the studied reindeer populations in relation to cytb sequence. The level of genetic diversity was associated with census size and was lowest in the smallest Tuva population. This study was supported by RSF-21-16-00071 and Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education-0445-2019-0024.

THE ROLE OF THE XAVANTE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE IN WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

There is an urgent demand to evaluate and document the environmental conditions of the territories of indigenous people. This is basic in the efforts to achieve sustainable development goals adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015. The Xavante people are hunters/gatherers and depend on natural resources for their physical, spiritual, and cultural survival. Their lands are localized in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, in a transitional area between the Cerrado vegetation and the Amazon rainforest. They have been developing environmental projects ~in order to manage their territory correctly for decades, as part of their survival strategy. In recent fieldwork, we stated that some major game species may still be abundant in the territory and we suggest that certain wildlife management measures in the past may be responsible for this. We easily registered most game species handled by the Xavantes, except for some edentates that were rarely detected. We confirm the giant anteater as the most vulnerable species to hunting effects. In this article, we point out the main threats for the territory and present new recommendations that may be fundamental for the conservation of biodiversity in the region and the survival of the Xavante people.

Looking to the Past to Survive the Future: The Hungarian Minority in Slovakia

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Here to Stay: The Politics of History in Eastern Europe”, guest-edited by Félix Krawatzek & George Soroka. With reference to the Hungarian minority’s overarching concern over its declining population in Slovakia, this article reveals how different elements of the past are activated, remembered, and renegotiated to ensure the minority’s cultural survival. Using elite interviews, party documents, and a detailed analysis of two local newspaper archives in Hungarian, I unpack how memory and politics interact in the post-EU accession period. First, I uncover how political and civil society actors use acts of commemoration as a conduit to circulate certain narratives of the Hungarian minority identity. Through remembering historic Hungarian leaders and events, elites affirm and construct the minority identity, thus enabling its cultural reproduction. The Habsburg and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy period is referred to most frequently with the celebration of national heroes. Events spanning the twentieth century are generally mourned as painful and detrimental for the Hungarian minority. While the acts of commemoration are “soft” measures to ensure cultural survival, Hungarian political actors also desire “hard” guarantees through institutional measures, best encapsulated by their desire for autonomy arrangements. However, the Slovak nation’s own past of claiming autonomy and their eventual secession from Czechoslovakia in 1939 conditions the cultural rules around language and the appropriate vocabulary that Hungarian elites can use. Consequently, Hungarian minority elites appropriate the past strategically in two ways. They readjust their tactics through using different vocabulary to claim autonomy and second, they pursue policy reforms across areas such as education and regional development, thus making the de facto possibility of autonomy more palatable to their Slovak counterparts.

Respect for Nature

This essay considers the meaning of the virtue of respect for nature. Moving past the view that respect for nature is a “new” idea, it discusses indigenous conceptions of respect as an active virtue, in contrast with the view that respect for nature is primarily an attitude. The links between sovereignty and ethical autonomy are presented before turning to look at respect for nature in the moral system of the Iñupiaq communities of Alaska. The author also considers a recent example of indigenous youth activism regarding climate change, which highlights the importance of respect for subsistence practices and cultural survival.

Dystopia under Communism

After the initial promising years, Jewish life in the newly founded Democratic Republic took an unforeseen turn that would largely bring its course to a halt. Police raids and persecutions took place between November 1952 and March 1953, and discriminatory and repressive policies were directed toward Jews, who were then labeled by the Ministry for State Security as capitalists and criminals. Subsequently a wave of migration set in, severely affecting the Jewish community. Musical practices hinged on the only cantor resident in the GDR, Werner Sander from Breslau. Sander’s contacts and collaborations with the communities (especially Dresden, Erfurt, Karl-Marx-Stadt, and Leipzig), not merely disseminated his life’s work, but led to their interaction and exchange, and ultimately to their cultural survival. As the communities did not have the resources to fully establish their own cultural programs, they often relied on Sander and his choruses as well as his connections to the secular music world for concerts and other events.

Werner Sander and the Formation of the Leipziger Synagogalchor

Werner Sander’s establishment of the Leipziger Synagogalchor as a concert choir with Jewish repertoire was relatively independent from any institutions. From his founding of the choir in 1962 to his death in 1972, Sander developed with the choir a repertoire of nearly eighty works of synagogue music and forty titles of Yiddish and Hasidic music, as well as Hebrew folklore. Under his baton, the choir performed three to four times a year, and from 1968 on assumed a steady role in the musical life of the GDR, both inside and outside the Jewish community. In spite of pressure, Sander preserved the secularity and independence of the ensemble by never overtly defining it or creating specific or lasting alliances, in a spatial mobility that navigated between different venues—synagogue, church, concert hall, and radio station. In this way, he ensured Jewish music’s cultural survival under unique and changing conditions, preserving this musical heritage for the Jewish community and transmitting it to the wider public.