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Fighting Climate Change and Forest Fires – From a Sámi Perspective as part of the panel Sámi Perspectives on Climate Change, Green Colonialism, Forest Fires, Industrial Exploitations, and Food Sovereignty . Chair: May-Britt Öhman, Uppsala University and Luleå University of Technology.

In the summer of 1959 there was a large forest fire at Turberget, Jåhkåmåhkke. Palle Erixon from Kilkok, 14 years old at the time, was one of the fire fighters. In the summer of 2018, we interviewed him at the same site. He shared with how they fought the wildfire.

Supported by Indigenous Climate Change Studies FORMAS Dnr 2017-01923, lett av Fil.Dr May-Britt Öhman, Uppsala universitet.

Welcome to an evening dedicated to three artists who delve into themes of memory, power, and identity through the exploration of landscapes and seascapes. This event is associated with the exhibition featuring Ingrid Pollard, the 2024 Hasselblad Award winner. In her work, Pollard revisits the landscape as a cultural construct that illuminates issues of power, representation, and the narratives that often remain obscured. 

Ignacio Acosta is a visual artist and researcher working with photography and video in territories under pressure from extractive industries. His multi-layered collaborative practice and spatial installations seek to connect audiences with these complex yet critical concerns.

Acosta works in places made vulnerable through ecological exploitation, colonial intervention and intensive capitalisation. He is devoted to the understanding of sites and landscapes that, although often neglected, are of global significance. Developed mainly between his native Chile and Swedish Sápmi, his projects focus on resistance to territorial fragmentation produced by extractive industries and the so-called “green transition”.

Jorma Puranen is known for his long-term work, which re-animates the colonial history and legacy of Arctic explorations. In ”narrating the North” he often uses archival sources and different techniques of re-photography, exploring and visualizing relations of history, knowledge, landscape and culture. Through experiences of travel and borderland Puranen wishes to create a matrix of fact and fiction, a field of fantasy and geographical imagination.

Puranen´s methodology is a dialogue across time, to rethink the Arctic colonialism and landscape through a poetics of memory and the historical. In his photographs the found visual material reappears as though from a lost world, becoming manifest in a ghost form.

Lotta Törnroth (b. 1981 in Solna) works with photography, text, sculpture and aquarelle. She is educated at the University of Photography in Gothenburg and at Aalto University, the University of Art, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. Törnroth has published three monographs with the publisher Blackbook Publications, and participated in exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 2023, she spent 6 months at IASPIS in Stockholm, where she worked on two projects about the sea and grief. Her latest book Lunar Cycles will be released in September 2024.

In recent decades, the extraction of raw materials has increasingly become an ecological, economic, political and social problem with global impacts. Extensive extraction practices and the exploitation of ecological and social systems represent one of the greatest environmental burdens of our time. Their consequences are dramatic in many places, but the fight for resources continues unabated. Since the earth's resources are finite, new, sometimes surreal-looking locations are constantly being sought, such as deep sea mining and deep space mining.

Into the deep takes a critical look at the history and present of the extraction of raw materials, which is inextricably linked to environmental destruction and colonialism. The complex connections between raw material extraction in the deep sea and in space are illuminated, as are forms of resistance and activism against the exploitation of people and the environment. In reference to Friedrichshafen's industrial history, the focus is also on the raw material aluminum, the metal of flight, which, during its energy-intensive extraction from the rock bauxite, causes environmental damage as well as the toxic waste product red mud.

The book aims to be climate-neutral. This is achieved through the use of recycled paper with the Blue Angel eco-label, open thread stitching without environmentally harmful adhesive bindings and the use of mineral oil, soy and hazardous substance-free (organic) printing inks based on vegetable oil. Unavoidable CO2 emissions are offset by a certified forest protection project in the Harz Mountains as the last possible step of all environmental measures. At the same time, the book inspires environmentally conscious action: DIY instructions for building insect hotels from aluminum cans or repair hacks make the topic of recycling directly tangible.

A collaboration between the Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre and Autograph ABP.

The arts have long been concerned with highlighting the ongoing histories of resource extraction and its repercussions. This symposium asks: what next? By bringing together researchers, artists, designers and activists from a range of backgrounds, this event will consider local projects in intersectional, granular detail, to collectively re-evaluate the relationship between the arts, extraction and activism, both historically and in the present.

The two days are framed around three broad themes: Colonial and extractive histories, Reparative and fragile ecologies, Environmental justice and legal rights.

Confirmed speakers and participants include: Ignacio Acosta, Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Tobah Aukland-Peck, Eline Benjaminsen, Nancy Demerdash, Radha D'Souza, Francisco Gallardo, Hit Man Gurung, Sasha Huber, Elias Kimaiyo, Syowia Kyambi, Adrian Lahoud, Godofredo Pereira, Marie Petersmann, Julian Posada, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Gabriela Saenger Silva, Sakiya, Audrey Samson, Marie Smith, Jonas Staal, Gerald Torres, Wilfred Ukpong, Rahul Ranjan and others.The symposium is convened by Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre), Mark Sealy (Autograph/University of the Arts London) and Bindi Vora (Autograph).

According to David Garneau (2020), Métis artist, curator, and critic, Indigenous art is an emerging category that extends and adapts First Nations Peoples’ ways of being and knowing to the contemporary moment and well beyond the sites of Indigenous territories of origin. Within this context, Indigenous peoples from around the world are increasingly seeking to establish connections in order to produce international networks and a collective consciousness. If, as jurist and Blackfoot First Nation elder Leroy Little Bear states, in Indigenous culture everything is under flux, then the concept of time is dynamic but without movement. In this regard, Chickasaw academic Chadwick Allen (2013) argues for a “trans-Indigenous” research programme within the field of Indigenous Studies that would allow for a site of enunciation embedded in the specificities of the local Indigenous while simultaneously grappling with the complexities of the global Indigenous.

Moderated by Dr Sarah Tuck, head of the Craft and Fine Art Unit at HDK-Valand.19.04.2022

The seminar addressed issues arising from the current research project Indigenous perspectives on forest fires, drought and climate change: Sápmi.

The seminar explored how an artistic research project developed collaboratively with Sámi communities can be used to document, analyse, discuss and provide a basis for promoting indigenous knowledges to the nation-state and climate change debate.

The research is funded by FORMAS and is based at Uppsala University, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR).

On 7-8 June, GPS400 will host its second international conference at Röhsska museet in Gothenburg. The theme is the collaborative visual research that takes place within the framework of "GPS400: Centre for Collaborative Visual Research"

OCEAN / UNI is an initiative dedicated to art, activism,and science that invites fluid thinking with the Ocean as a way to move beyond the binaries of land and sea. OCEAN / UNI's curriculum provides students, researchers, and the public access to wide-ranging ideas and explorations through regular live sessions, reading groups, small-scale workshops or activations, and other online material, free and accessible to everyone on Ocean-Archive.org

Aiming to complement and enhance land-based understanding of the Earth, it covers a wide range of ecological, political, aesthetic, ethical, and scientific topics around the realities and futures of the Ocean.

In terms of climate change, Indigenous peoples are commonly portrayed either as victims of its negative impacts or completely ignored, or as today, due to renewed industrial colonization, desire for natural resources within Indigenous territories – depicted as being “in the way” for the necessary actions to mitigate climate change. Indigenous people and local expertise, knowledge traditions and transmission, as well as agency are in all cases obscured. This roundtable is based on the inter- and supradisciplinary research project Indigenous perspectives on forest fires, drought and climate change: Sábme, Uppsala University, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism/Indigenous Studies, aiming at analyzing, documenting and bringing forward Indigenous Sámi knowledge and expertise with regard to land management, wildfires and extreme weather events due to climate change through the lenses of Artistic research/visual documentation.

The roundtable investigates the holistic experience-earned and land based Sámi traditional knowledge system Árbbediehto (“inherited knowledge”), the science of surviving and thriving in the arctic region. We examine the challenges of Árbbediehto in times of climate change, colonization relation to transfer land based, language dependent traditional indigenous knowledge and how to reclaim and integrate Árbbediehto lost through colonization. We further examine the role of visual/artistic research in relation to Árbbediehto. How can we convey Árbbediehto to those who did not learn, and to the surrounding society to challenge and put an end to destructive settler colonial practices?

Big policy shift is taking place across the Global North, with governments and industries making a rapid “shift” from fossil fuels towards decarbonised economies and energy grids. This urgent and needed transition, however, is underpinned by significant socio-environmental issues. Low-carbon technologies are all highly reliant on minerals, which are set to be procured by the mining industry, a largely destructive and unjust industry.

Across the peripheries of the Global South, and increasingly of the Global North, exponential rise in mining projects is met with local and translocal opposition, communities seeking to protect their natural environments, livelihoods and culture. With the dynamics of “shock capitalism,” the governments and the industry often fast-track processes, police and criminalise activists, and, increasingly, “greenwash” projects and through ever more complex schemes engineer a “social licence to operate.” (Dunlap & Verweijen, 2021). This tendency of equating extraction with sustainability is compounded with an intensifying attempt of principally richer nation-states to (re)define mining as central to “security.” (Riofrancos, 2022)

The two of us have in our individual practices been following the developments of the mining industry in different geographies for years now, with particular focus on environmental justice struggles. We observe that it is getting more complicated and sensitive to relate with frontline communi-ties. On the one hand, they are under immense socio-psychological pressure from extractive expansions. On the other, being an urban academic/artist is a constantly complicated situatedness, since academic and cultural infra-structures and actors are sometimes involved in more or less visible opera-tions which can be likened to normalisation or validation of extractivism.

In this state of things, we believe that long-term and ethical art/documentary strategies can offer new ways of re-examining global ecology through local and Indigenous knowledge. In our shared discussion, through this experience and the lens of our ongoing AR projects, we will discuss and invite a conversation around these questions:

Within the sharpening hegemonic consensus that more mining is neces-sary (e.g. for national security), how can artists-researchers maintain a space in the society for radical critique of extractivist model?

How do we divest from contributing “fixes” or “solutions” to the mining sector, i.e. making it more “responsible,” and challenge the mainstream logic and political paradigms?

How can AR with a critical approach be used to document, analyse, discuss and provide a basis for asserting indigenous knowledges in the context of the nation-state and climate change debate dominated by state and industry actors?

The impact of wildfires in Sweden, commonly claimed to be caused by climate change, has recently become a national and international concern. The overall aim of the inter- and supradisciplinary research project presented in this article is to analyse, document and draw attention to the local and Indigenous/Sámi stewardship of land, with specific regard to fire management, drought, and other aspects of climate change. The project situated within the growing field of Indigenous Land Based Education and Knowledge (Wildcat et al., 2014). It is run by an experienced artist and researcher in collaboration with Indigenous Sámi communities and Indigenous Sámi academic scholars. The project brings together the disciplines of artistic research and visual documentation with the history of technology and science, environmental history, feminist technoscience, gender research and Indigenous methodologies as well as Sámi knowledge. Based on the methods available within these research disciplines, the project uses extensive fieldwork, archival research, and audio-visual documentation, including interviews, documents, drone images, photographs, writings, and workshops, as a source of research, communication, and dissemination. We investigate local and Sámi ecological knowledge available. Furthermore, we evaluate how artistic research and visual documentation -with a critical approach and developed collaboratively- can be used to document, analyse, discuss and provide a basis for promoting Indigenous knowledges in the nation state and climate change debate.

In this presentation, part of a research project at Uppsala University with the ambition to promote Sámi knowledges and values, I discuss how I as a Lule Sámi teacher work with the transfer of traditional knowledge to Sámi school children. Sámi tradition is climate and environmental friendly and shows deep respect for animals, water and nature. 

There are five Sámi schools on the Swedish side of Sábme. In Jåhkåmåhkke where I work, there are 62 pupils from preschool to year six. 

What differs from Sámi school from a Swedish is that the Sámi language is present throughout the day, in class, at breaks, at lunch and at the after-school centre.  Sámi culture is supposed to permeate the entire education, with the Sámi eight seasons as its foundation. Today only few children can learn the traditional knowledge earlier transferred buolvas buolvvaj – from generation to generation – as most families are in need to wage income and thus adapting to the Swedish industrialised society. Furthermore, the families are no longer living with the older generations. The Sámi society has changed as we spend so much time in the Swedish society, where these knowledges and traditions are not valued.  I work with árbbe diehto, traditional knowledge, teaching the pupils a closer relation to the Sámi language present in all Sámi activities, such as hair removal from hides and the whole process to sassne, the tanned hide to be crafted to duodje, handicrafted work, and guole – the handling of fish from capture to cooking. 

Statens hantering av forskningsresultat i rättsprocessen med Girjas sameby utgör ett hot mot Sverige som rättsstat och kunskapsnation. Åratal av svensk och internationell forskning underkänns och man använder ett språkbruk som skulle kunna vara hämtat från rasbiologins tid. Nu måste staten ta sitt ansvar och börja agera som en demokratisk rättsstat, skriver 59 forskare.

When the climate apocalypse comes I’ll make it: 16 year old Hampus Andersson’s survival month living off the lands and waters in the forests of Norrbotten, Sweden. There is a lot of talk of crisis and apocalypse, due to war, to climate change. Young people worried about their future go on school strike and manifest, around the world. But, when the climate or any other crisis happens, how are these young (and adult) protesters prepared to fend for themselves? How long can you survive without electricity and water in the tap, with access to food in the supermarket? Thinking about all of this, 16 year old Hampus Andersson decided to try to live off the lands and waters for a full month, on his own. If there is such a crisis, would he make it on his own? From mid July to mid August 2019, the experiment went on. He made sure to learn from more experienced and older reindeer herders and others with experience from the forests. Hampus is not completely unaware on how to get access to food in the forest. His father is a Sámi reindeer herder, and his mother’s family are an agriculture family. But until this day he had never done such an experiment. How would he find food, water, shelter? What would be the hardest? Some things that he had never even thought about turned out to be harder than expected. During the stay Hampus documented his everyday life with photos and short films, and posted on his Facebook page and Instagram. This is a film made from those photos and videos, along with an interview by film maker Petri Storlöpare, Slowfilm AB. Hampus speaks of his experiences, thoughts and ideas on how to continue this experiment. Will he try the same in the Arctic winter, with temperatures down to minus 40 Celsius? The film project is supported by Dálkke: Indigenous Climate Change Studies, led by Dr. May-Britt Öhman, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, CEMFOR, Uppsala University.

Sammanfattning. 

Det har gått drygt hundra år sedan Unna Sájvva, en samisk offerplats i norra Lapplandskändades och plundrades. Offergåvorna grävdes upp och fördes till Stockholm. Det skedde i en tid då svensk samepolitik präglades av rasbiologi och rasism.

Samerna är ett urfolk och har, med utgångspunkt i FN-deklarationen för urfolk, rätt att fåtillgång till sina ceremoniella föremål. Nu driver Kerstin Andersson tillsammans med andra samer frågan om ett återbördande av offergåvorna till det samiska folket och ett museum i norra Sápmi. De har ett starkt stöd i av flera stora organisationer i det samiska samhället.

Offergåvorna från Unna Sájvva är en väl dokumenterad samling med runt 600 föremål och 156 kilo ben och horn, som finns i Historiska museets magasin i Stockholm. Boken utkom första gången 2021 och fick följande recension av BTJ: ”Det har blivit en vacker, lågmäld och sparsmakad bok med ett fantastiskt bildmaterial. De korta informativa texterna fungerar lika bra för både museianställda, arkeologer och andra ämnesexperter som för den allmänt intresserade läsaren. Helhetsbetyg: 5”.

Den nya upplagan är uppdaterad med två nya kapitel – ett om mynten som hittades påplatsen och ett om saivasjöar.

Välkommen att läsa mer om Unna Sájvva – den lilla heliga sjön – och offergåvorna.

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Nytrycket av publikationen har möjliggjorts genom stöd via forskningsprojektet " 'Sijddaj máhttsat' betyder 'kommer hem' på lulesamiska", Vetenskapsrådet Dnr 2021-03080, under ledning av docent May-Britt Öhman, som del av utveckling av samiskledda studier utförda av, med och för samiska civilsamhället. 

Sejtar tillhör ingen gammal samisk sedvänja, som hör hemma i historieböckerna. Sejtar är ett högst levande kulturarv bland många samer idag. Det framkommer i intervjuboken, som skogssamerna Kerstin Andersson och Hannah Edenbrink Andersson har skrivit.

Sejtar är heliga föremål, vanligtvis stenar eller klippor med en ovanlig form, men det finns även sejtar av trä. I boken beskriver de vad sejtar betyder för människor idag, om sorg och ilska över att många sejtar är bortförda från sina platser och tankar kring återbördande av sejtar.

Sejtens riktiga hem är i det samiska kulturlandskapet, i naturen, i Sápmi. Det är de intervjuade överens om. Men när det gäller återbördande av sejtar som finns i södra Sverige idag uppstår ett dilemma. Vart ska de placeras – på museer eller i naturen? Och vad ska man göra med alla sejtar utan känd hemvist?

Kerstin Andersson och Hannah Edenbrink Andersson är skogssamer och kommer från en by intill den heliga sjön och samiska offerplatsen Unna Sájvva i Gällivare kommun.

"Vi är inga akademiska forskare. Vi är två samer med stort intresse för frågor kring återbördande av samernas ceremoniella föremål. Vi har fått stöd av docent May-Britt Öhman i diskussioner om urval, dokumentation och etiska frågeställningar. Det är vi oerhört tacksamma för. Hon har även, via sitt forskningsprojekt ”Sijddaj máhttsat betyder ’kommer hem’ på lulesamiska” finansierat tryckningen av den här boken."

Kerstin Andersson, Sámi and Board Member of Amnesty Sápmi and Hannah Edenbrink Andersson, Sámi, involved in repatriation of ceremonial offerings

This presentation discusses removed sacred objects, sieidis, from the Swedish part of Sápmi and the issues that arise when the Sámi demand repatriation of these cult objects. A sieidi is usually a stone with an unusual shape. They are – or were – in nature placed in sacred places by lakes and rivers, or in the mountains. Research is underway to find out the true origins of the stolen siedis.

Transfers of objects between museums in Sweden are compatible with the Museum Act, but transfer of objects to indigenous people is not regulated.

In recent years, awareness of the removed sieidis has increased among the Sámi in Sweden. There are ongoing discussions about restitution to the Sámi people in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Discussions are ongoing within the Sámi society about ownership and placement but there are some difficult issues to deal with.

To understand what opinions that exist within Sami communities we will do in-depth interviews with 10-15 Sámi respondents from December 2023 to March 2024 and present a report in June about the Sámi’s view on this issue. Questions asked will be amongst other: What does a siedie mean to you? Should the siedies be placed in museums or be re-placed in nature? Who can claim ownership, and who has the right to decide?

The study forms part of “Sijddaj máhttsat” – “Coming Home” in Lule Sámi – led by Dr May-Britt Öhman, Uppsala University. Contributions, mainly guidance on ethical aspects, has been made by Dr Öhman.