Tatiana Degai is PhD candidate at the University of Arizona in American Indian Studies and Linguistics, and Director of the Community House of Culture, Kovran, Russia. She is a member of the Council of Itelmens in her home community, and is actively involved with culture and language development projects. She has a Master on Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Anthropology and a teaching degree in foreign languages from Kamchatka State University. Her research borders on indigenous education, sociolinguistics, ethnography, indigenous activism, and revitalization.

This article is about a remarkable community-initiated cultural mapping project undertaken in collaboration with indigenous organizations in Kamchatka (in the Russian Far East), and anthropologists from the universities of Victoria and Arizona. Working with representatives from the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (Kamchatskii Krai), the municipal government cultural institute House of Culture in Kovran, and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography, we set about a project to train community members to use freely available, easy-to-use software (Google Earth) to create a digital atlas of indigenous language place names and accounts by the community of culturally signi cant places. While representatives of several indigenous communities in Kamchatka have participated in the training, the eldwork has so far been mainly centered in Kovran, an Itelmen shing community on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula where the subsistence economy is vital for the community, and where many families are signicantly involved (Koester 2012; Murashko 1997).