We, the indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East of the Russian Federation,

believe that:

The Air, the Land and Water are blessed,

Nature is the source of life,

Man is but a drop in the whirlpool of life,

The river of time is but a reflection of the past, present, and future and that how our ancestors lived in the past is how we now live and how our offspring will live in the future;

know that:

Man is a part of nature and bears responsibility for protecting the diversity of the environment;

Our home is the tundra, the taiga, the steppe and the mountains bequeathed to us by our ancestors, these are great, powerful, harsh, kind and generous manifestations but defenseless in the face of technical progress;

Use of knowledge can bring not only perfection and happiness but can cause pain and inflict injury;

Thoughtless work of human hands is capable of polluting and poisoning the air, the land, and the water, of destroying the living and of killing both large and small;

Economic growth, expanding wealth and assets for the few do not always improve life and prosperity for the majority;

Social, economic, and environmental policies of those now in power:

• do not eliminate need and injustice,
• do not protect the health of man and so the tree of life, of our kinfolk and our fellow countrymen, is rapidly withering away,
• do not renew the disrupted natural processes that forms our historical development,
• do not return the land of our ancestors, the lands of our traditional use;

Our way of life, based on time-honoured experience of communal, social organization, has been created from the original cultures and beliefs of our ancestors and is the one, true way of maintatining life and sustainable development;

No one, neither society nor civilization, will ever solve our problems and only we, and the good will of the government, are capable of accomplishing this task;

desire that:

• our unique cultures, our ancestral homelands and way of life be protected by the government;
• our legal rights be observed and that we can participate, as equal partners, in the planning strategies for the sustainable development of the North of our country;
• our experience, knowledge, interests and traditional approaches to the use of the environment be accounted for when decisions are made on how the lands of our ancestors shall be used.

Everything that we believe, everything that we know and all that we desire must serve as the basis for advancing our traditional way of life.

We speak of development and not simply of “preservation” or “government protection,” emphasizing our desire to take part ourselves in the process of sustainably developing the North, our government and the world in general, using and improving on the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors.

Only in harmony with nature will humanity find a way out of its current crisis. We, the indigenous peoples of the North, Siberia, and Far East of the Russian Federation, know this path!

Adopted at the IV Congress of Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East, Moscow, 13 April 2001