Contribution short abstract:

The work focuses on how Teleut people living in Kemerovo region, experience and narrate the transformations of extractivist practices within their lands. I explore how different, and often contradicting, discources on extractivism emerge within groups that experienced Soviet and PostSoviet contexts.

Contribution long abstract:

Industrial and agricultural developments have significantly reshaped landscapes, territories, social and cultural lives of human and nonhuman beings, while also fueling conflicts and debates on both local and global scales. Although discussions of environmentalism and climate change date back to earlier centuries, which were also manifested within the Russian Empire, these discourses became more urgent in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, opinions of indigenous communities and those nonindigenous groups who were directly affected by transformation and expropriation of the lands were not always adequately represented within the dominant environmental discourses and decision-making processes as around the globe so in the areas within the Soviet Union. While indigenous communities and сommunities vulnerable to mining becoming key participants in ongoing resistance, by also becoming the actors in reshaping the discourse around environmental problems and injustice, it is also important to look at how lives and interactions of different beings are involved in extractivism and reshaped within this mineral age and mining transformations. I concentrate on the Teleut Turkic indigenous group living in the villages near open coal pit mines in the contemporary Kemerovo region in southwestern Siberia and explore how Teleut people reflect on the shifts in coal mining from the Soviet period to the post-Soviet era. Although mining areas are often represented as assemblages of destructive forces, I try to look at how local people build own narratives around their landscape, coal, coal dumps and ongoing mining and what forms of interactions are emerging within the carbon landscapes.