Dr Viktoria Petrasheva, Vika to friends and family, was a song of a human being.
A formidable culture bearer and elegant myth teller of the Itelmen, the first people of Kamchatka, a peninsula in the Russian far east, Petrasheva devoted her life to the Indigenous peoples of the North Pacific, studying and preserving their history, culture and traditional way of life. On 28 January, at the age of 78, this world-renowned scholar died at her home in Kamchatka.
Petrasheva’s house in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was a shrine and museum to family and cultures of the Pacific North, and was often abuzz with activity around cultural revitalisation. Family friend and journalist Emma Kinas noted that it was often hard to find Vika at home, but even harder to find her at home alone. When visiting the peninsula for fieldwork, Russian and international academics – archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, linguists – would frequently stay in her spare mezzanine bed.
