Our goals
- To reconnect with ourselves and our culture, country, land (nature) and people. And because of it we will work on archives. Save open archives of repressed people in the USSR, open archives that weren’t open yet.
- Regional decentralization. Independence of Karelia Republic from russian federation and decentralization inside of Republic. It's about transfer of political, administrative, and decision-making powers from a central authority to regional or local levels of governance.
- Cultural decolonization, meaning process of challenging and undoing the cultural dominance, impositions, and influences of colonial powers on indigenous people. It will involve reclaiming indigenous knowledge, traditions, languages, and cultural practices that were suppressed, marginalized, or disrupted during the colonial era. We need to restore self-determination and pride in cultural heritage.
How do we want to achieve them?
Reconnection:
Create a resource which will safely contain all information without control of russian law enforcement, make sure it’ll work even if some of us will not be able to continue. Use open archives to save and structure information in it. Collect non-digital and unwritten information from people who wish to share. We need to co-work with Karelian diasporas and be able to use all the archives, including russia’s (USSR) and Finland's.
Cultural decolonization:
"Хочеш знищити народ, лишити його без суті, — убий насамперед його мову."
"If you want to destroy a nation, deprive it of its essence — kill its language first."
We believe that all indigenous people in the Republic of Karelia should be able to use their languages as means of communication with the government and businesses. As an example, the Karelian language must become one of the official languages in the Republic of Karelia. This means that people speaking Karelian should be able to use it for communication with public services.
Popularization of the Karelian language, most importantly for children. It must be accessible for everyone, our language isn’t a museum exhibit. Popularizing an indigenous language in the Karelia Republic requires concerted efforts from various stakeholders, including individuals, communities, educational institutions, governments, and cultural organizations.
We plan to governmentally support projects about languages and cultures of native people of Karelia. It could be self-governing organizations formed by people who desire to renovate their culture and work on it, participate in decision-making processes, choose representatives and manage a budget.
Vepsian National Volost’ (Vepsän rahvahaline volost’). It showed results in the restoration of the culture of Vepsian people even under russian law control. This example of local decentralization already shows us it’s possible.
We will officially (governmentally) support Russian/Finnish language and culture projects only with decolonization context within.