Patty Gray’s early work explored the circumstances for indigenous activists in the Russia. In 1995-96, she carried out research for 14 months in the far northeast region of Chukotka as well as in Russia’s capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg to follow the development of the indigenous movement in the post-Soviet context. In Moscow she interviewed the founders of the Association of Less-Numerous Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far North (before it began to receive NGO funding and became known as RAIPON); in Chukotka, she investigated the struggles of indigenous activists who were being actively repressed by the local government (before Roman Abramovich was elected governor in the region).

Publications on this research

Gray, Patty A. 2005. The Predicament of Chukotka’s Indigenous Movement: Post-Soviet Activism in the Russian Far North. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Gray, Patty A. 2007. “Chukotka’s Indigenous intellectuals and subversion of Indigenous activism in the 1990s.” Études/Inuit/Studies 31(1-2):143-161.

Gray, Patty A. 2022. “In Memoriam. Margarita Ivanovna Belichenko (Kevyŋevyt), 1945-2021: Radio Journalist and Champion of Chukchi Language and Tradition.” Études Inuit Studies Vol. 45, No. 1-2.