ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Viliui Sakha observations of global climate change, bring to light the cultural implications of global climate change and highlight anthropology's privileged approaches to understanding different ways of knowing to move anthropologists from impartial observers into the realm of action-oriented researchers. Viliui Sakha have adapted their southern agropastoralist subsistence to an extreme sub-Arctic environment and adapted to the throes of Russian colonization and Soviet and post-Soviet forces. Viliui Sakha emphasizing here that Inuit and other northern communities are far more successful when it comes to expressing their concerns and interests in the wider public. Since the fall of the Soviet Union there has been a gradual increase in existing political institutions, NGOs, and researchers-cum-advocates in the Russian North. Places and spaces for self-determination in Sakha and the Russian North in general are very different from those in Alaskan or Canadian Northern communities.
