Speaker Bio:

Gro Ween is an anthropologist who examines the intersections of heritage, repatriation, and natural resource management within indigenous communities. Her research spans work with Aboriginal people in Australia, Southern and Northern Sami in Norway, and Yupik communities in Alaska. Ween is particularly interested in how heritage practices and repatriation efforts are tied to broader issues of land rights and resource conflicts. Her approach emphasizes the everyday enactment of these processes, from cultural activities to negotiations with authorities and scientists. Ween’s work delves into the complex relationships between indigenous knowledge systems and external environmental management, exploring how repatriation and heritage are continuously shaped by both local practices and global interventions. Through her research, she aims to understand how indigenous communities assert their rights and identities amidst the ongoing pressures of natural resource exploitation and management, highlighting the importance of cultural heritage in these struggles.

Abstract:

Deatnu River is the largest Atlantic salmon river in the Northern Hemisphere. Sami fisheries in the river have been colonized over many centuries. Deatnu gold, the salmon, attracted kings and their tax collectors to the valley in the early 1700s. In the late 1900s, legislative efforts designed to reshape Sami human-fish relations were put in place, transforming Sami fisheries from collective events to become individual activities associated with private ownership of land, making space for Norwegian settlers. Today in Norway, indigenous knowledge of salmon has been a political and legislative issue for almost 40 years. This paper considers the Norwegian Ministry of Environment’s efforts to somewhat decolonize, by creating a co-management body for the Deatnu salmon, a process that has been ongoing since 2008. What happens when Sami salmon knowledge becomes enrolled into environmental management regimes? In what way can such a process be called collaborative? Based on my long-term presence in Deatnu, my collaborations with fishery associations, fishermen, Sami academics and activists, I compare the foundational approaches to Sami knowledge at the core of what is presented as co-management by the Ministry of Environment, to existing Sami approaches to salmon knowledge. I trace events where state biologists seek to pin down Sami knowledge and question what Sami knowledge become in such instances, in comparison to what Sami knowledge of salmon can be outside of these relations.

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Location: QC 2013

Date and Time: Monday, Sept. 23 at 05:30 PM - 06:30 PM (NDT)

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