Alaska asylum seekers are Indigenous Siberians from Russia who want to be recognized as people of Indigenous status. They want to be allowed to live in Norway. And they want to claim land there from what they call the ‘Komodopet’ group, which they say has been stealing it.
They are in the Arctic.
If you want to read a piece by someone who really knows what’s going on here and wants them to know what’s going on here, it is here for you. If you want to read the piece, it is here. And here is a link to some of the other pieces written about this issue, and some of the commentary, and then here is a link to another piece by James Brown, who is actually Canadian.
Here is how it began:
A few weeks ago, Norwegian police received a call from a woman named Dagny, who asked them if the Norwegian authorities could help her.
“She’s in Norway because she wants to find a home,” says Officer Johansen, as he explains the situation to me from the police station. “She didn’t want to stay in Svalbard, but that’s impossible for her to find a place.”
Dagny is from the village of Nome, in Siberia, which is a remote region that no one even knows how to reach.
Nome is populated by a dozen Russian families, who moved there from the North Siberian village of Ust-Ushiy of an indigenous group known as Ostyak, which means a mixture of indigenous people from Canada, Siberia, Japan, China, and Vietnam.
The village’s only shop sells food and clothing to Nome residents, and the village has no school or medical centers, so Dagny would have to bring her children here to the village of Ust-Ushiy. There is one school, which costs 6.5 thousand Kroner (about $800) a month.
But the kids’ school needs to be repaired and there are many children left in Ust-Ushiy who are not
