Mining in Biedjovággi

Mining futures in Biedjovággi have a turbulent past. According to non-fiction writer, Svein Lund (Reference Lund2015), copper ore was discovered by Aslak Persen Siri, Anders Nilsen Juuso and Aslak Nilsen Sara – three herders who contacted consul Holmboe from Tromsø to obtain support for investigating the potential for valuable minerals in the ore (Lund, Reference Lund2015). Consul Holmboe acquired rights to investigate the area, which he sold to the Norwegian State in 1955, and the Norwegian geologica survey - Norges Geologiske Undersøkelse (NGU) - continued the investigation. In 1966, the Norwegian mining company Fangel bought the rights and started mining a few years later. Fangel extracted copper, but did not have any major success. From 1973 on, the Norwegian company, Sydvaranger continued mining without success. From 1975 and 10 years onwards, the company closed the mine. In 1983, the Finnish company Outokumpu Oy took over the mine and intensified prospecting in the area, intending to find and extract gold. The company operated the copper mine until 1995 and, in the last period, it did so with the help of government subsidies due to declining profits and the need for additional investments (Lund, Reference Lund2015; Planprogram, 2011). In 2006, the International Gold Exploration (IGC) sold these rights to Arctic Gold Nordic AB, and in 2010, Arctic Gold became the major actor.

The Planprogram of 2011 presented through a public hearing triggered local engagement. After the hearing, a new draft of the Planprogram answered some of the critiques and arguments that came up during the hearing. Still, according to Lund (Reference Lund2015), this draft did not meet the requirements for impact assessment (EIA) on the Sámi language and culture, for which many had asked, and it made no changes to the size and border of the land targeted for further investigation. In a 2012 letter, the district council of Ábborášša withdrew from the agreement with Arctic Gold, stating that the district did not consider itself bound by the agreement. Additionally, the district sent a letter to Arctic Gold highlighting that they had noticed that the company, on many occasions, had referred to the existing dialogue with the district, but the district did not recognise any such dialogue and found it unacceptable that Arctic Gold publicly expressed such dialogue existed (Lund, Reference Lund2015). The municipality administration placed the reworked draft of the Planprogram before the municipal council on 16 December 2013, which made the decision to reject the Planprogram for Biedjovággi entirely.

The municipal council referred to the previous periods of mining and their negative impacts on nature and other users’ interests in the Biedjovággi area (Koivurova et al., Reference Koivurova, Masloboev, Hossain, Nygaard, Petrétei and Vinogradova2015). In addition, the ongoing controversy between reindeer herding districts and mining interests was an important argument launched in the local public debate. The Arctic Gold CEO was disappointed and stated: “We are of course both sad and surprised that the majority of the municipality council did not listen to our arguments that this would be a good project. We think it is stupid that we [were] not given the permission to start an environmental impact assessment (EIA), so facts could come on the table. As its stand now, people are voting with their hearts” (Vuolab & Gaup, 2013). In this argument, the Arctic Gold CEO made a distinction between knowledge and emotions that run through the arguments used by Arctic Gold. It was a rhetorical figure, which suggested that the opponents of the company’s proposed mining project were thinking and acting in a way that was essentially different, irrational and thereby inferior. Such rhetoric are an othering device. In the context of this mining conflict, it added to the change in local support. Within a postcolonial context, indigenous people are aware of and sensitive to othering. In this situation, the local peoples’ response was framed as based on emotions; implying that then mining companies’ arguments are not, but built on knowledge.

To begin regular operations, a number of permits are required, including the fulfilment of the requirements of the Planning and Building Act, the Nature Diversity Act and the Pollution Control Act, in addition to obtaining an operating licence under the Mineral Act. By Norwegian law, extraction rights include an “option” for companies to enter into a position that would allow them to open a mine at some point in the future. In Norway, through the Planning and Building Act, the municipal board has the autonomy to make these decisions. Neither the county’s municipality nor the states’ authority may require a municipality to designate an area for a specific purpose (Rundskriv, 2014); their task is primarily to communicate national and regional goals and guidelines through professional advice and remarks, possibly with the objection if necessary. As a professional council, they can also point out that the plans are not good enough professionally and, therefore, should be considered in more detail, or that the plans do not meet the formal requirements (e.g. regulations for maps or descriptions with impact assessments). Bjørklund (Reference Bjørklund, Benjaminsen, Gaup Eira and Sara2016) argued that, paradoxically, the court of assessment for mining in Biedjovággi did not mention that the mining operations damaged the pastures where herders kept their reindeer in the autumn. The operations reduced the spring and summer pastures because a new water plant already built in the neighbouring municipality of Kvænangen, affected the quality and size of accessible pastures.

Notes on methods

This paper is the outcome of cooperation between Kramvig and Avango – two researchers who have worked in different scientific fields in different Nordic countries and who have different methodological concerns. Kramvig is working in Northern and indigenous studies, inspired by indigenous studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS), engaged with Sámi landscape, memories and caring practises (Bratland, Kramvig, & Verran, Reference Brattland, Kramvig and Verran2018; Kramvig, Reference Kramvig and Miller2015). Avango is a historian-archaeologist, inspired by approaches to materiality in STS and archaeology (Hodder, Reference Hodder2012). Avango has worked extensively on research about the legacies of resource extraction. This research project depends upon document studies and the mapping of relevant public debates, in addition to the ethnography of walking, which was developed during a two-month Sámi language study in which Kramvig participated at the Sámi University College in Guovdageainnu (autumn 2017). We will highlight that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organisations but, rather, they constitute bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes and even the organisations themselves (Hull, Reference Hull2012). Asdal and Jordheim (Reference Asdal and Jordheim2018) argued that texts are both mobile and mobilising.

From this, it follows that what characterises the historical existence of texts is not their stability, but their mobility – not what they say, but what they do. Thus, to study documents means “to study movement, texts on the move, across space and time, to set off or perform small or large events of modification, innovation, and transformation: on the move, moving others” (Asdal & Jordheim, Reference Asdal and Jordheim2018, p. 74).

In addition, the authors have been inspired by the ethnography of walking, which has been highlighted as an important entrance to Sámi landscape practices and traditional ways of knowing (e.g. Gaski (Reference Gaski1997), Jernsletten (Reference Jernsletten2010) and Law and Joks (Reference Law and Joks2019)). Jernsletten (Reference Jernsletten2010) argued that both landscape and stories belong to places, in addition to being memorised and having these places described in depth. Ingold and Vergunst (Reference Ingold and Vergunst2008) hold that walking comprises a suite of bodily performances that include observing, monitoring, remembering, listening, touching, crouching and climbing. Through these performances, knowledge is forged (Ingold & Vergunst, Reference Ingold and Vergunst2008, p. 5). The movement of walking is itself, a way of knowing and learning. Walking is noticing the smell of mushrooms on moss, the sound from rivers, mountains and from the animals and the wind. Walking and learning leads to learning where the grouses nest, where the reindeer lie down to rest, and what paths will lead to the lakes and the rivers or, as in this case, towards the mine. As mentioned above, one member of this research team (Kramvig) did much walking during her Sámi language training in Guovdageainnu. To learn the Sámi concepts, nature was used as a classroom. The idea of learning the land through walking guided her attention. She walked on her own and sometimes with friends. Often, she met people and animals on the move. She tried to learn Sámi concepts on these walks, carrying her notebook along.

The “becoming” of different natures

Ontologies weave themselves into worlds (Blaser Reference Blaser and Green2013), and this is why ontologies and worlds can be used as synonyms (de la Cadena, Reference de la Cadena2015). In addition, ontologies are enacted as “stories” that are not only verbally embodied in people, but also in the landscape. Blaser (Reference Blaser and Green2013) argues that political ontologies refer to the politics involved in the practices that shape a particular world or ontology. In this world of many worlds, there are also practices, events and objects thrown together as partial connections between worlds, but also as conflicts that can turn from conflicts of interests into ontological conflict. In the following, we will take into account such events.

A range of localised and specific practices and concepts bring forth Sámi landscapes, which have gone untranslated and silenced in the discourse of mining. Therefore, we argue that what the indigenous people of Guovdageainnu are defending is not simply control over resources, but control over the complex web of relations embedded in luondu and a specific way of living with the land, of which the CEO of Arctic Gold did not pay sufficient attention and respect. The company’s lack of support for an impact assessment regarding Sámi culture and society was part of the rejection of the Planprogram. These ongoing troubles of the translation result in what many consider to be a lack of respect, which evokes colonial memories that the Sámi people struggle to undo.

Sámi scholar Harald Gaski (Reference Gaski1997) states:

How can these “holistic views of interdependence”, which Gaski considers fundamental, be heard? There is no easy translation of the concept “nature” from Sámi to Norwegian or English. One of these Sámi concepts of nature, luondu, can be translated as the embodied nature of the person, as well as the land through which the person moves. Another of these concepts is meahcci, which points to the land a person knows as home, the tracks and trails of past and present practices, the stories that belong to specific places and the gifts of nature offered by the land, rivers and lakes. Meahcci is in addition the landscape where people find whatever they need in order to participate in the subsistence economy, and this is still important in many communities (Kramvig, Reference Kramvig and Miller2015; Riseth et al., Reference Riseth, Solbakken and Kitti2010; Schanche, Reference Schanche and Andersen2002). The Sami landscape concept of meahcci is used according to unwritten rules agreed upon by local communities for persons and the siida – traditional areas the Sámi use for different subsistence practices such as fishing, berry picking, hunting. (Østmo & Law, Reference Østmo and Law2018). Meahcci relates to movement and land, connected with what the land may offer. Meahcci also connects the land and its people. Embedded in meahcci are complex networks of user rights associated with particular places and resources (Ween & Lien, Reference Ween and Lien2012). Meahcci, as Riseth et al. (Reference Riseth, Solbakken and Kitti2010) argued, is the opposite of luondo, which is abstract nature that exists independent of whether one uses it or not (Riseth et al., Reference Riseth, Solbakken and Kitti2010). Still, many of the people use the concept of luondo to mean the landscape that they consider their own – a claim of ownership different from the juridical Norwegian regulation of land.

Traditional Sámi herders also see reindeer as actors inside the siida system (Sara, Reference Sara2013). A siida is often translated as the social unit organising several families involved in herding within a district. Sara (Reference Sara2013) argued that the animals and the land are both considered part of this unit. Each animal is a free creature that chooses its own movement and course of life (Sara, Reference Sara2013, p. 173). Oskal (Reference Oskal1995) claims that, regarding reindeer, people are always in danger of insulting the animal or its origin by thinking of it solely as a means to satisfy human intentions and not as having its own dignity.

Nature is enacted through practices and language, but also through documents. The ontological division between humans and nature continues to constitute the modern world (Latour, Reference Latour1993) and sets limits for how the Sámi lands are, or can be, narrated and imagined in public controversies regarding resource extraction. Sámi academics have already long argued that nature in Sámi lands differs from the natural-scientific way of knowing and narrating nature (Buljo, Reference Buljo2002; Jernsletten, Reference Jernsletten2010; Jernsletten, Reference Jernsletten2012; Kramvig, Reference Kramvig and Miller2015; Law & Joks, Reference Law and Joks2019; Oskal, Reference Oskal1995; Schanche, Reference Schanche and Andersen2002). Still, up to now, this has not stretched the public imagination enough for the Sámi landscape, as meahcci or luondu, can participate in politics and in political arguments. Comparable to indigenous participation in politics in Peru (de la Cadena, Reference de la Cadena2015), the public presence of earth beings – the others with whom the indigenous people live, in politics is ontologically unconstitutional in states ordered by biopolitical practices that conceive of human life as discontinuous from (what those same practices call) nature (de la Cadena, Reference de la Cadena2015, p. 89).

Law and Joks (Reference Law and Joks2019) argued that a spatial logic of the practices of herders and their task-scape enacting realities that are contingent and uncertain. However, there are more lively and powerful entities in luondu that must be treated with caution and, indeed, with deference. Life unfolds, and survival depends on showing respect to others with which humanity lives.

Nature, as approached in political negotiations and the documents upon which politics are based, is defined by its modern usefulness of natural resources. For instance, the methods for mapping the landscape, according to the Planprogram, are explained as follows:

This wording specifically defines land only through the mapping of minerals and resources. Furthermore, the lines are drawn on the above landscape map work to claim an area of the land for the purposes of further prospects. This organisation of value, extracted from the landscape, becomes the constitution of the land. The visual scientific imagery of minerals are framed as values published and circulated by various institutions such as the NGU and Ramboll in the Planprogram Report. The counter-mapping conducted in different Sámi mining initiatives (Lassila, Reference Lassila2018) in addition, highlights this imagery. Benjaminsen et al. (Reference Benjaminsen, Reinert, Sjaastad and Sara2015) addressed this narrative and the associated policy, which often leads to a misreading of the Arctic pastoral landscape (e.g. neglecting alternative scientific evidence, interpretations in line with non-equilibrium ecology and the indigenous knowledge of reindeer herders). Thus, such alternative perspectives generally remain invisible to government institutions that regulate the practice of reindeer management.

Emotional mining negotiation

Before the municipality council made its final decision, Arctic Gold’s CEO participated in a public debate regarding the plan for mining in Biedjovággi, which appeared in the local newspaper, Ságat, in Finnmark. On 5 June 2012, Grete Bergstrøm and Solveig Joks wrote a chronicle referring to a public meeting in Guovdageaidnus where reindeer herders did not get to speak about how mining would influence the future of their land and animals in a discussion centred on the deposit density of refuse and environmental effects. They reflected upon how easily mining companies set the agenda and how easily “we that are directly affected [were] guided to ignore those of our fellow citizens that through generation[s] have learned to use renewable resources through knowledge on how to live in and of marginalized and exposed areas” (Bergstrøm and Joks Reference Bergstrøm and Joks2012). The CEO of Arctic Gold responded in a comment entitled “Irrelevant debate”, stating that the arguments Bergstrøm and Joks brought forward were disrespectful, pretentious claims, which had no value for the discussion about future business development in the region. He ended by arguing that: “It is important to hold on to a standard of objectivity and fact-based arguments in questions regarding environmental impact assessment. This debate is way too important to be [prompting] dialog in such unworthy ways” (Claesson, 2012).

In a public speech to shareholders, filmed by the national broadcast company NRK Sápmi, Claesson stated the following:

Many considered this statement to be a provocation in line with prejudices concerning Sámi society that are no longer accepted. Speaking with NRK, the Vice President of the Sámi Parliament, Laila Susanne Vars, describe Claesson’s behaviour by saying that it was “unpleasant when local politicians in Kautokeino are described as ‘not normal’ compared to the average. It’s not flattering when he calls them hobby politicians with low skills and this is directly provocative” (Somby, Idivuoma, Manndal & Sápmi, Reference Somby, Idivuoma, Manndal and Sápmi2013).

Documents such as the Planprogram for Biedjovággi (Rambøll, 2011/2012) became texts that did more than establish control. They redefined what the issue was about. The past and present of Biedjovággi differ in documents written by environmental organisations, such as Friends of the Earth Norway’s local team leader Svein Lund (Reference Lund2015), and those by consultancy companies, such as Ramboll (2011/2012) that was hired to draft the Planprogram for Biedjovággi upon which the political decision was built. There are also multiple local stories of the dramatic changes the mine of Biedjovággi had from the start such as on nature and reindeer herding. However, the long-term pollution affecting mining communities became part of the national debate.

The situation surrounding the consequences mining has on nature is normalised as something people must accept, similar to accepting the increasing access to technological devices (where these are used) or accepting the development of modern society. As Asdal (Reference Asdal2015) reports, the staging of an issue modifies the very issue at stake. Reports, as well as impact assessments, also participate in making an industrial future and, through that, integrating people into a modern Norwegian society. Such documents (Asdal, Reference Asdal2015) can be read as part of a political project that implies that living in a modern industrial society, a society undergoing rapid development, means that one must also accept pollution or smoke damage, or vice versa (Asdal Reference Asdal2015). In the end, the locally felt lack of respect and the ongoing lack of attending to and learning from the Sámi community became an integral argument for the municipality board.

The politics of emotions

Thrift (Reference Thift2008) claimed that the “affects” refer to “the complex, self-referential states of being”, whereas emotions are cultural interpretations of the affects that culturally construct “everyday understanding[s] of affects that have a distinctive vocabulary and serve as a means of relation to other[s]” (Thrift, Reference Thift2008, p. 221). Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004) argued that emotions play a crucial role in the “surfacing” of individual and collective bodies through the way in which emotions circulate between bodies and signs. She suggests that emotions do not come from within and belong to individuals, but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and the world. In affective economies, she argues that emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004). Her economic model of emotion suggests that, while emotions do not reside in a subject, they still work to bind subjects together. From this, it follows that the movement of affect is crucial to drawing a line between “in here” and “out there”. The accumulation of affective values helps shape the surface of bodies and worlds. Navaro-Yashin (Reference Navaro-Yashin2012) challenges the ways that affect has generally been theorised through metaphors that invoke abstraction, imagination of immateriality and conceptualisations of invisibility. Instead, she proposes that affect is explored beyond the realms of subjectivity and can be studied as the senses of governance (Navaro-Yashin, Reference Navaro-Yashin2012). The legitimacy of an administration is rooted in mimicking the bureaucratic state processes of “legal” states; she argues that those who mute the herders in the ongoing mining debate cut the land into something unrecognisable for the herders through environmental assessment plans. Merriman and Jones (Reference Merriman and Jones2017) outlined how theories of affect can enable scholars to focus their attention on the distinctive forces and feelings that circulate between and take hold of bodies, which are in process and possess differential capacities to affect, or become affected.

The public debates and the events that followed Arctic Gold’s plan to reopen the mine in Biedjovaggi brought the enactment of two ontologies with different landscape practices into one contact zone. For the reindeer herders, this is by no means a new situation. They recognise the need to “come along” with not only the land and those figures who inhabit and care for it, but also with multiple others who have interests or projects, such as mining, taking place.

What these stories reveal are the limits of recognition. As de la Cadena (Reference de la Cadena2015) pointed out, recognition is an offer of inclusion that can transpire only in terms of state cognition. It can work as long as it does not violate the terms of the modern agreement regarding one single nature and differentiated humans. Others, or what de la Cadena frames as “earth-beings”, cannot become public actors. They are a non-problem in de la Cadena’s terms and hence do not exist as a matter of national political concern. National and international institutions are increasingly recognising “indigenous rights” and this makes it possible for indigenous peoples to defend the existing relations that constitute their worlds against the claims from companies and programmes. However, as Blaser (Reference Blaser and Green2013) argued, these rights have limitations insofar as the world being defended has to be reduced to a culture, and as such, should be forced to fit into the modern world.

Emotions and the infrastructure of mining

The existing and planned expansion of the mine, as well as the attached plan and assessment documents, newspaper articles, documentaries and the local and national academic books produced during the lifetime of the Biedjovágge mine, enact national mobility infrastructures. These are also highly embodied experiences through journeys along very different but particular routes in the landscape. They serve, as Merriman & Jones (Reference Merriman and Jones2017) argued, as important materials, and media, through which human and non-human inhabit, traverse and constitute national space. The infrastructural investments in Biedjovággi resonate with national emotions of being a nation that takes on the responsibility of securing minerals for the European Union (EU) as argued by national politicians. In 2010, the NGU received extraordinary support directly from the 2011 state budget of NOK 100 million. The mandate was to conduct geophysical mapping of the bedrock in Northern Norway to offer a commentary on when mining could begin in the area. Airborne electromagnetic, magnetic and radiometric measurements served as tools to map underground deposits. NGU argued for the need to raise awareness of the importance of metals and minerals in future industrial transitions. Boyd representing NGU stated in an interview: “There’s a moral side to this….if we in Western Europe say no to mining, mining companies go to countries that don’t care as much about what conditions people are working under” (Stephansen, Reference Stephansen2010). This argument concerning the need to take on national responsibility for the “green shift” has since been embedded in political discourse to the extent that the president of the Sámi Parliament named it “green colonialism” (Vermes, 2019). Mining infrastructure participates in producing a new nationalism inflicted by the story of Norway as a responsible nation. Mining is an enactment of the responsible governing bodies of the Norwegian state. Merriman and Jones (Reference Merriman and Jones2017) argued that everyday encounters with such infrastructure may (or may not) be characterised by attuning to the material topographies, distinctive landscapes and networked topologies of association, meaning, feeling and remembering, which surround them. For many in the Sámi communities, this infrastructure recalls connections to the colonial past, with Sámi communities excluded from participating in formulating the greening of the future. This, in addition to Claesson’s description of the people of the community, brought colonial tensions into the present political negotiation on what the future holds for mining in the area.

We suggest that, what started as events of negotiations turned into an ontological conflict, involved in trying to shape particular worlds, while these different worlds strive to sustain their own existence. The parties here do not agree upon what is at stake. The Sámi worlding are not seen or recognised in official models and documents made to support informed decisions regarding mining on indigenous land. Sámi practices, such as reindeer herding, berry picking, bladder sedge cutting and sik, char or salmon fishing, are all embedded in and help reproduce a web of respectful and reciprocal relations between lively actors (Østmo & Lae, Reference Østmo and Law2018). These actors – the lakes, the weather or the moon – are powerful, and they act in ways that can neither be entirely predicted nor controlled. They also come in a range of forms, both human and non-human and distinctions between them are of no fundamental significance. What is important, rather, is the cautious process of maintaining respectful relations. Only in this way can people survive in a world filled with such powerful actors. Blessings, offerings and thanksgivings are all about maintaining those relations (Østmo & Law, Reference Østmo and Law2018). These practices, however, do not figure in the politics of mining. In Arctic Gold’s rhetoric, the community has articulated itself as being of different citizens who are not capable of relating to the regulations at hand. This rhetoric, however, did not work in Arctic Gold’s favour. On the contrary, these arguments mimicked a colonial past that many, not least the younger generation, did not accept.

Is a politics of radical difference possible?

Magnussen and Dahle (Reference Magnussen, Dale, Dale, Bay Larsen and Skorstad2018) argued that most municipal council members did not consider the potential benefits that a mine could generate, meaning that a mine could have greater effects for the community that would outweigh the potential consequences that mining activities could have on the landscape. Individual actors’ political decisions and public sentiments on the matter were also informed by a broader, culturally embedded rationale reflecting a deep concern about connections to place, space(s) and practices vital to Sámi identity. This article has expanded this argument and added that there is more at stake than the connection to place and space of Sámi identity. Following the assertions of Lassila (Reference Lassila2018), who addressed the Ohcejohka case, the scientific and visual practice of mapping minerals and landscapes becomes a reality maker that reduces the landscape as it is used, walked, harvested and told by locals. This, in the end, fuelled an ontological conflict where nature, on the one hand, and respect, on the other, were at stake.

Blaser (Reference Blaser and Green2013) stated that environmental conflicts are the bread and butter of political ecology when referring to conflicts regarding access to and control over natural resources. In some cases, these conflicts go beyond the issues of access and control and involve the very definitions of the “things” that are at stake. These “things” at stake have been the focus of this article. The authors of this article argue that the Sámi concept of nature brings into being other beings, as well as a different landscape, that are shared with these others. In this case, it was Arctic Gold’s articulation of nature that brought scepticism into the municipal council decision (Helander-Renvall, Reference Helander-Renvall2009). In addition, this research argues that what the indigenous people of Guovdageainnu were defending was not simply access to and control over resources, in addition they were defending complex webs of relations embedded in the landscape, where multiple humans and animals participate and live in the same world.

Marianne Gullestad (Reference Gullestad2001) argued throughout her academic career that the Norwegian ethos depends upon the metaphor of equality, still equality assembling sameness. She highlights that the concept of quality is made through emphasising similarities in ways that do not recognise that difference do exist, or can be articulated in the public. Equality has been the stepping stone for the Labour Party (AP), the workers union (LO) and the Norwegian welfare state. This, however, makes it difficult to argue, or get acceptance for, radical difference, as argued in this paper, between two notions of landscape. Radical difference is not, as de la Cadena states (Reference de la Cadena2015), something indigenous people have. It is a relational condition emerging when (or if) all (or some) of the parties involved in the enactment of a reality are equivocal about what is being enacted (de la Cadena, Reference de la Cadena2015, p. 275). In the Andes as in Sápmi, a mountain can be an earth being – too often mistakenly translated to “cultural beliefs”, superstition or shamanistic figures. De la Cadena (Reference de la Cadena2015) argued that people must respect that these things are living beings with and on the land. However, as in the Andes, encountering politics and most (but not all) official Norwegian publics, these others are unthinkable and made invisible in public discourses, political documents or in assessment analyses. They are a non-problem, politically speaking, and are invisible to the official documents produced in this case, as well as in a range of other ongoing ontological conflicts in Sámi.

Therefore, a decolonising practice must begin by cultivating awareness about whether people or objects are the same or different. Verran (Reference Verran and Green2013) writes, “Learning to recognise and value such difference, learning to refuse the steps which require a colonising reduction to a shared category and acceptance that we may not be metaphysically committed to a common world, is what is involved in cultivating a postcolonial impulse” (Verran Reference Verran and Green2013, p. 144).

For the Sámi people, binary distinctions between nature and culture make little sense to the degree that mainstream debates related to this division are evident of tends to categorise Sámi views, like those represented above, as romantic and traditional. In the present author’s view, this is a non-recognition of the ontological contest at stake because it does not recognise that both parties enact (and assume) different worlds. Until EIA manages to relate to this other world, it will continue to misrepresent the land in which the herders and animals live.

One important current process is the increased recognition of indigenous rights by national and international bodies, creating “conditions for indigenous people to defend the existing relations that constitute their worlds against the claims of property laid upon them by other parties” (Blaser, Reference Blaser2009, p. 891). Yet, these rights are conceived from within the modern ontology as rights to their cultures and/or “beliefs”. Thus, as the authors hinted with the example of legal ownership of land, these rights have limitations insofar as the world being defended must be reduced to a specific interest. That is, it is being forced to fit modern understandings, opposing culture to nature.