Daria Boltokova is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. An Indigenous Sakha originally from a small community in Northeastern Russia, Dr. Boltokova completed her B.A. in St. Petersburg before receiving her Ph.D. in Linguistic and Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia. She joined Memorial University in 2022, after spending three years as a doctoral research fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and two years as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests are in language revitalization, Indigenous self-governance, and youth activism.
Her current book project, Baahynajdyy (“Mixed”), explores the contentious history of Sakha linguistic and cultural loss, revival, and change in the post-Soviet era. Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the book traces contrasting beliefs about the Sakha language across four generations of Sakha, their conflicting understandings of Sakha identity, and its impact on the Sakha decolonization movement. Boltokova’s own activism focuses on youth language revitalization, and she is currently leading a new Indigenous media project in Yakutsk to support young Sakha language learners with funding from the Smithsonian Institute. She has also worked extensively with the Dene Tha and Kaska communities in Northern Canada on issues of youth engagement, language documentation, and the adoption of new technologies such as online talking dictionaries to support ongoing Indigenous language revitalization projects.