By Carol Hiltner | President, Altai Mir University
Siberian spring has arrived and Altai project leader Svetlana Katynova is already hard at work in Tyungur Village. Your donations have already provided seed funding for a land cooperative for the indigenous Altai people in Tyungur, but the people of nearby Katanda Village are asking for help, too.
In the rest of Russia, the lands owned by indigenous peoples were surveyed and registered with government funds---but not in Altai. Even when these subsistence herders/farmers band together in cooperatives, the costs are several thousand dollars per family. And if they do not register their land, they will certainly lose it as the land rush continues in the Altai Republic, which is experiencing a large influx of ethnic Russian residents.
Svetlana pays her own costs in addition to providing volunteer labor, but the villagers we help are the widows and disabled, who have no possibility to pay for registration of their land.
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