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In this chapter, we show how the provisions of international law concerning Indigenous children's right to learn their mother tongue in school have evolved over time and how the provisions of the Russian national legislation comply with international law. In the light of this framework, we present the historic trajectory of Sámi education at the Lovozero School, from the end of the 1800s to the organizational and attitudinal breaking point experienced during the school year of 2016–2017. Although the Russian legislation has come to contain the elements of the right in focus, we claim that the realization of this right has been, and still is, problematic. A further analysis indicates a recent negative change of the curricular contents, and of the interest of the Sámi learners to attend the Sámi language lessons. This change coincides with a shift from language-oriented teaching into history and culture-oriented program at the school, as well as with negative changes in the speaker demography.

The school was one of the main institutions where policies of colonization and assimilation took place. Currently, in the four countries where Sami people reside, namely Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, different policies for supporting Sami languages are carried out. Sami teaching at school is provided in these countries to different extents. In addition to physical teaching in these four countries, remote Sami language education in primary and secondary schools is provided solely in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In Norway, two universities offer different Sami language courses within teacher training programmes. In addition, the Sami University of Applied Sciences carries out North Sami teacher education, both for early childhood education as well as primary and secondary education, and it is taught in the North Sami language. In Sweden, the University of Umeå provides courses for Sami language teachers. In Finland, several universities offer Sami language courses for teachers. In Russia, the Murmansk Arctic State University offers a philological master programme called ‘Technologies of the Sami Language Teaching’. The Institute of the Peoples of the North of the Herzen University offers pedagogical education at the bachelor level. Within this education, Sami language courses are provided. This chapter demonstrates the positive policy tendencies regarding Sami people in four countries and their languages. Besides this, there are an increasing number of projects on Sami language learning and professional training across the four countries. Nevertheless, there is still work to be done to improve the existing tendencies. 

In Russia, there exist legal norms providing for the protection of indigenous small-numbered peoples’ rights. Yet, indigenous small-numbered peoples face multiple challenges when it comes to the implementation of their rights. After a brief presentation of the Russian legislation on the rights of indigenous small-numbered peoples, peculiarities of the Russian legal system and impediments to the legal provisions regulating the status of indigenous small-numbered peoples, this article addresses several issues related to the implementation of indigenous small-numbered peoples’ rights in Russia today. One of the core issues is the attribution of individual members of indigenous communities to indigenous small-numbered peoples. Such an attribution is still challenging despite the newly adopted amendments to the 30 April 1999 Federal Law N 82-FL: ‘On Guarantees of the Rights of Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples of the Russian Federation’. Another issue is application of the notion ‘foreign agent’ to individuals and non-commercial organizations. Still another issue is the State’s pressure on independent indigenous organizations. The final challenge is the possible impact of amendments to the Constitution approved by popular vote in July 2020 on the rights of indigenous small-numbered peoples.

There are 47 groups of indigenous peoples in Russia. Many languages of indigenous peoples are at the edge of extinction. From 1995 to 2010 the proportion of indigenous pupils among all indigenous peoples learning their mother tongue decreased by almost half. This article examines the legal regulation of the Russian system of school education and defines what place indigenous languages have in this system. The author comes to the conclusion that realising the right of indigenous children to learn their mother tongue in Russia is complicated by many factors of both legal and non-legal character.

This paper is about Sámi children’s right to learn their language in school in Russia (henceforth referred to as RtL). First, the core elements of this right are deduced from the international and regional instruments. These elements are legal recognition, nondiscrimination, participation, appropriate education, and high-quality education. Then, the Russian legal acts are analysed to identify to what extent these elements are present in the Russian legal acts. The paper demonstrates that the five deduced elements of the RtL are found in the relevant Russian legal acts. However, the contents of some of these elements in the Russian legal acts are different from the contents of the corresponding elements deduced from the international and regional legal instruments. The paper also identifies challenges in the Russian legal acts that hinder the realisation of the RtL.

In this article, we showcase the study in which we analyzed the lived experiences of the right to language in the Sámi context in Russia. In this study, we demonstrated how the social agents involved in Sámi education experienced the connection between the right to language and the current practices of Sámi language teaching in the school context. Furthermore, we investigated how social agents’ voiced experiences and views on the right to language were impacted by the local Sámi context in Russia.