Threatened by major oil and mining development programmes, the reindeer-herding Evenki community are struggling to re-establish their land rights in Siberia's pristine wilderness.

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The reindeer-herding Evenki are struggling to re-establish their land rights following the collapse of their traditional ways, subsequent dependence on state subsidies as a result of the enforced centralisation of communities during the Soviet era, and then a hurried transition to a market economy. The area is now threatened by major oil development programmes. A 2001 Federal law provides for the recognition of territories of 'traditonal nature use' but the law has yet to be implemented and is being resisted by the mining and oil industries.

During 2003, Forest People Programme sent a geomatics expert to work with the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, and the Evenki organisation ARUN ('Rebirth' in the Evenki language) to train them in how to carry out a Territorial Mapping project of Indigenous Peoples' Lands in the Evenki Autonomous Okrug (EAO) in Krasnoyarski Krai in Central Siberia. The following year the maps created by the Evenki people were successfully used in a court case to oblige a petroleum company to reroute a proposed oil pipeline around a trapping area critical to local livelihoods.