So there's an alien research station in space. Humanity's worst attempts to destroy it amount to a bear turning over the trash can. Aliens occasionally abduct people and return them with a clean bill of health and an ankle bracelet. It takes them forever to figure out those bracelets are screwing with their data because humans who carry them are curve-wreckingly popular.

Disaster strikes somewhere, I dunno, Japan, and there's an uptick in abductions, but of people stuck in collapsed buildings, and yeah the giant octopus tree that looks straight out of Call of Cthulhu is scary but it's also using tech you can't even comprehend to find survivors and teleport them out of the rubble. You see humans with absolutely 100% deadly injuries wisked away and a good number of them even return. There is now a new consent form specifying if rescuers can take you to the aliens, because they will probably try to save you but if they can't your family will never get your body back. You decide if your life or your body is more important.

Little by little, pragmatism wins out. The aliens aren't attacking, but they ARE abducting and doing weird tests. But the survivors mostly return unharmed with a Big Mac in hand and a weird piece of tech. There have been less valid excuses to miss school. The aliens are clearly researching humanity just as much as we are researching them, and until communications are established this status quo isn't the worst.

Ofc, then one of them actually attacks. Knocks the statue of liberty clean off. The military starts to deploy fast, and even wounds the attacker a lot, but before they can shoot the second missle it bounces. And it turns on the shooter. Every military person in the attack dies, suddenly and through means you cannot comprehend. The other aliens whisk the attacking one away. Construction materials appear as if in apology, but that's it.

The attacker was a hooligan who thought destroying wildlife was fun, and ran into something they can't handle. But even if the bear is perfectly within its rights to defend its territory, the ranger will atill have to shoot it to save the stupid brat, and hope the idiot learned their lesson.

But the bear is still dead. And the forest critters who had just started getting used to the ranger are now having second thoughts.

But the abductions continue. There are no hooligans for a while. And what else can you do? This is your home, but if the invaders really want to take it, what can you do?

So you try to stay out of their way, if you are in some serious trouble and your chances are already less than 50/50, maybe you seek them out. Sometimes they help. Sometimes they don't.

And sometimes the abductees catch glimpses of something that looks like it might have been human once, but eyes and skin all wrong, speaking incomprehensibly, and rubbing its head on the alien's 'knees'.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN!

"And how does Russia treat them?"

A good place to start to actually learn a bit about at least one of Russia's many Indigenous cultures is Piers Vitebsky’s incredible book ‘Reindeer People’ [which you can read in full, for free, on the internet archive here] about the indigenous Eveny reindeer herding culture of Siberia.

What really happened when Russia began to encroach on the herders' lands?

[p.34]

Vitebsky then tells us about how the Soviets imposed their policy of collectivization on the herders - the opposite of letting them 'keep their lands and lifestyles' as the guy on twitter says:

[pp.35-6] As we see, these are the same policies of land exploitation, forcible 'civilising', and imprisoning or killing those who resisted.

The Soviets essentially abolished the nomadism and deep-rooted relationship to the land that the Eveny had nurtured for thousands of years [p43]:

But hey, at least the Soviets didn't implement the boarding schools for native kids that were infamous in North America - surely the apparently Indigenous-rights-loving nation of Russia would never have stolen indigenous kids from their parents to raise them away from their parents and cultures, right? Uh...

[p190]

On the very next page: "There were stories of native children all across the North who had escaped from their boarding schools, sometimes dying of exposure while trying to rejoin their parents. Most of these incidents happened in the spring, when the sun was up but the temperature was still far below freezing. Though the boarding schools had taught native children to read and count, it had left them unfit to survive on the land."

'But... but... the USSR championed women's rights and feminism! Surely it empowered Native women!' Here's what actually happened to Eveny women as a consequence of Sovietisation:

Traditionally, Eveny herded reindeer as families. Not only were children removed from this through boarding schools, but women, too, were forced out [p45]:

The boarding schools were only closed when "the de-nomadization of women was complete". With their mothers no longer partaking in traditional herding culture, the Soviets knew their children could now be raised at home without learning their traditional ways [p192]:

To go back to the original tweet: apparently, Indigenous peoples in Russia kept their "lands and lifestyles" for centuries. Shamanism was a huge part of these lifestyles for many Siberian cultures. What happened to the shamans?

And what about language?

Most Eveny today speak Sakha, the lingua franca of what is known as the Sakha Republic, or Yakutia, because the Sakha are the biggest Indigenous group there. Smaller languages like Yukaghir, Chukchi, Eveny and Evenki are struggling to survive.

The author writes about sitting in on a local meeting in the village of Sebyan. The complaints the villagers raise - of dwindling language use, land exploitation leading to widespread health issues - will sound familiar with the issues faced by Indigenous peoples in North America.

While the book is largely about the Eveny people, they are not the only reindeer-herding culture whose livelihoods have been near destroyed by Russian colonialism [p379-80]:

Obviously this is just one book, and just a handful of examples from it. But anyone can use it at least as a start from which to do further research.

But you might say, "these are issues that happened over the Soviet period. What about today?"

Today, Indigenous Siberians are being drafted by Russia to a much greater extent proportionate to their population than European Russians, especially those from the cities. Consequently, there are significant anti-war and even independence movements among some Indigenous groups there, like the Free Yakutia and Free Buryatia movements, which Russia has designated as terrorist organisations.

If Russia's Indigenous peoples were truly being left to live their traditional lifestyles in peace in their own lands, perhaps Putin's government would not be so quick to use them as cannon fodder for his imperialist war in Ukraine.