Norway aspires to be in the forefront of both sustainability and Indigenous Peoples’ rights. However, Saami reindeer herding faces threats from the climate and ecological crisis, as well as measures said to mitigate them. In her talk, based on her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Eva Maria Fjellheim discusses how three Southern Saami reindeer herding communities resist unfinished colonial business to defend their ancestral landscapes, practices and rights. Through methodologies that mobilize solidarity and care, she analyses controversies that take place in and around academia, bureaucracies, and courts. Her findings show that power asymmetries in knowledge and decision-making favour settler, capitalist, and (green) colonial interests. Notwithstanding, Southern Saami reindeer herders and knowledge holders continue to challenge racism, ignorance, and colonial presumptions of what Saami reindeer herding was, is and ought to be in the future. The decolonial task, in Fjellheim’s view, is to accompany them.
Eva Maria Fjellheim is a Southern Saami researcher, educator and journalist working on decolonial struggles and solidarity across Indigenous geographies. She has a Ph.d from the Centre for Saami Studies (SESAM) at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway. Fjellheim has a broad experience from working with Indigenous peoples’ issues, movements, and human rights defenders in Sápmi and Latin-America, mainly focusing on struggles against dispossession of Indigenous landscapes, epistemes, and practices by extractive- and energy industries. Her current research and political engagement concern resistance to “green colonialism”, as it is expressed through hegemonic climate change policies, discourses, and non-consensual wind energy development on Saami reindeer herding lands.
Join us for coffee, snacks, and informal socializing at 15:30, the seminar begins at 16:00. If you want to register for the in-person event, see instructions below. To join the online seminar, click here: .
The Speaker Series on Colonial Legacies in Northern Europe is convened by Dr. Katarina Sjöblom and Associate Professor Magdalena Zolkos. It is organized as a research activity of the Academy Project ‘Reframing Restitution: Postcolonial Object Movement, Transnational Memory and Social Repair’ (funded by the Research Council of Finland, 2024-2028).
