When I launched this column last month, I promised to keep my readers up-to-date on the current discourse — or simply the hottest gossip — in the republics. In this edition, I am fulfilling that promise. This week, all eyes, ears and whispers in Russia’s Indigenous and decolonial activist circles are focused on the 17th session of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) that started in Geneva on Monday. While Indigenous and ethnic minority activists from Russia are under no illusion that today’s UN is a largely dysfunctional institution in desperate need of reform, …