In their epistemological article, Grenoble and Osipov (2023, henceforth G&O) touch on some of the practical and ideological difficulties in working with Indigenous communities, in particular in relation to their work with the Even communities in northeastern Russia. They mention low speaker numbers and the associated challenge of obtaining sufficient data, the practical difficulties of reaching these communities (both physically and digitally), the existing skepticism in Indigenous communities towards western notions of measurement, and the need to acknowledge the difficult histories that Indigenous people have faced since being colonized. Based on our own work with the Indigenous Sámi populations in northern Norway and Sweden, we fully endorse their experiences and views, despite some differences pointed out below. We also wish to add another aspect, namely the attitudes, values and existing power struggles in our own scientific community, which not only make it hard to do research on small populations in the first place but, ultimately, prevent this research from getting the visibility it deserves.

At first glance, there are some obvious similarities between the Sámi and the Even communities. Both traditionally inhabited the far north, were migratory, and engaged in reindeer herding. In both cases, language shift has occurred as a result of harsh assimilation policies, leading to migration to urban centers and, in the majority of people, to language loss (Aikio-Puoskari, 2018); today, no monolingual speakers of either language group remain. However, in terms of language vitality, we are dealing with two very different settings. In the case of Even, of which only around 4,000 speakers remain, high proficiencies are found only in the older generation, or in what G&O term ‘traditional speakers’. Perhaps understandably, given the low number of remaining speakers, the focus of G&O’s article is on documenting language change as a process, rather than considering factors that would facilitate the revitalization of the Even language. In their study, participants’ production of word order, noun and case marking is scored against the backdrop of a–one could say, slightly idealized–baseline compiled from references grammars, dictio-