Availability of natural resources drives exploration and transformation of remote regions in the Arctic and beyond. Extractive infrastructure is one of the major sources of industrial development’s impact on landscapes. For Indigenous people, these landscapes are homely environments full of sentient beings, and for other local communities they provide a wide variety of subsistence and hunting resources. While infrastructure violence is the evident issue for many Indigenous communities, we call for attention to more complicated situations where extractive infrastructure is indigenized and utilized for subsistence and support of other human and more-than-human relations in local and Indigenous communities. In this presentation, I will discuss some findings based on field studies with Evenki communities in Eastern Siberia in 2013-2021.The region experienced significant transformations with construction of Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean and Power of Siberia pipelines. The notion of Indigenous infrastructure is utilized to discuss complex relations entangled around infrastructure objects’ planning, creation, use, maintenance, and transformations. 

Dr. Vera Kuklina is Research Professor at the Geography Department, the George Washington University, Washington, DC. An Indigenous Buryat scholar, Dr. Kuklina studies urbanization of the Indigenous Peoples, traditional land use, socio-ecological systems, cultural geographies of infrastructure and remoteness in the Arctic and Siberia. Dr. Kuklina currently leads several NSF projects in the Arctic, including “Frozen Commons” and "Informal Roads: The Impact of Unofficial Transportation Routes on Remote Arctic Communities." The latter project is aimed at detailed interdisciplinary analysis of the overall impact of informal roads on Arctic environment and economic, social, and cultural wellbeing of local communities. Frozen Commons studies the shared governance of ice, snow and permafrost under changing climatic and socioeconomic conditions in the Anthropocene.