Russia has marked its inaugural Day of Indigenous Minority Peoples on 30 April, a new annual holiday introduced last year by President Vladimir Putin as a domestic alternative to the United Nations International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, which is observed on 9 August.
The holiday has sharpened attention on Russia’s narrow legal definition of indigeneity. Russian law recognises only 47 ethnic groups while denying the same legal status to dozens of other peoples whose territories were absorbed during Russian colonisation.
