Indigenous People against industry: theatre performance

Many of you may have heard about the resistance of Sámi people against the Alta-Kautokeino hydroelectric dam in the 1970s-1980s. Even though the dam was built, the Sámi resistance including hunger strikes was hugely influential not only for indigenous rights movement among the Sámi, but also worldwide. In a way we can trace the impact …

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A snapshot of contemporary indigenous life – with emphasis on Sámi perspectives

A new publication on Arctic Indigenous Peoples from The Sámi Council and German Arctic Office (at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research) was just recently launched. While shortly browsing through it, I found that it is written very shortly and concisively and for a broad lay audience including decision makers. …

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The Experience of Displacement and Social Engineering in Kola Saami Oral Histories

Public defence of the doctoral dissertation by blog contributor Lukas Allemann on 15 Oct 2020 Our team member and periodic blog contributor Lukas Allemann examines in his thesis people’s experiences of Soviet-time, state-initiated displacement and (re)emplacement on the Kola Peninsula as well as the consequences of these developments. Sources show that Saami communities bore the …

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Saami rights lecture, Rovaniemi

Our colleague Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi will give a lecture this Friday at 13.15 at the University of Lapland main building, with a title that would sound in english something like "rights and obligations of the Saami community". Klemetti served as the speaker of the Finnish Saami parliament and has a PhD in anthropology. The lecture is …

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Oktoberfest Munich – is it all about human-horse relations?

Why would we write about the Oktoberfest on this blog? It turns out that there is an aspect of it that is closely related to the interest in one of our current projects - Arctic Ark - where we are interested in the genetic diversity of agricultural animals and the ways in which people make …

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“Linnaeus in Sápmi: Generating Knowledge in Transit”

The Anthropology Research Team is very happy to welcome you all at the Arctic Centre for a joint presentation by Professor Elena Isayev and Professor Staffan Müller-Wille, both from the University of Exeter, UK, on the 28th of May at 14:00 in the Thule seminar room. Look at or download a poster of the talk …

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Воспоминания коренных жителей Севера о национальных и вспомогательных школах-интернатах – Testimonies about boarding schools among indigenous people in Russia’s North

English text see below. Цель данной статьи – предоставить слово бывшим ученикам интернатов Севера России, с особенным упором на вспомогательных школах-интернатах советского периода, в народе приобретавшие печальное прозвище «дебилки». Материалы являются свидетельством событий с 1960-х по 1980-е годы. Я собирал эти материалы в проекте по устной истории в течение последних лет и решил опубликовать здесь …

Continue reading Воспоминания коренных жителей Севера о национальных и вспомогательных школах-интернатах – Testimonies about boarding schools among indigenous people in Russia’s North