Susanne Normann, Decolonizing the Gaze

David Přílučík talked with the researcher and psychologist Susanne Normann about cultural appropriation, the limits of inter-cultural understanding and indigenous people’s resistance against large-scale industrial projects. Under the conditions of pervasive climate change and the green transition, is there a need for sacrifice – and who decides?

Decolonial scholars often provide theoretical foundations for understanding climate change as a symptom of the interrelation between the coloniality of power, knowing and being. Could you please elaborate on these connections?

Post-colonial, decolonial, and settler colonialism studies are very different and diverse schools of thought. My research engages with the decolonial research school, which can be said to have origins in Latin America, in scholars trying to theorize the modern world and the making of the modern world through understanding the European invasion of what today most people call Latin America – or what many decolonial thinkers call Abya Yala – as defining for the development of the modern world. Because we have to talk about the concept of extractivism in order to talk about how decolonial scholars connect the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being with the climate crisis.

Through the invasion, Latin America became seen as a kind of basket of resources – gold and other minerals and natural resources – that one could exploit. A European way of being was developed which considered the Global South as a basket of resources, but also the subjects living there as avoidable subjects. And this came to develop what is sometimes called extractivist ways of being. And these extractivist ways of being influence the way we act, and the political and economical decisions we take in the ‘Global North.’ We can also discuss this term, but it provides us with a concept to talk about where we are situated right now – a large city in Norway – definitely within what can be called, both geographically and epistemologically, the Global North.

These decisions lead us to climate change, because of the extractivism and because we are developing a way of modernity and of modern society that requires this large-scale extractivism of many mineral resources and implicates the fossil fuel industry, which is of course related to climate change. This is a difficult argument to make for this short conversation, but we can say this complexity makes decolonial scholars reject quick fixes to the climate crisis, because it would leave untouched the entire array of colonial ways of being and acting that continues. Extractivism leads to the climate crisis and the crisis of nature.

I would like to ask about the origins of this type of thinking. What is the history of extractivism? What is its relationship for example to the Enlightenment and the historical perspective of the human as somehow being disconnected from its surroundings. This way of thinking regards the environment or animals as objects – is this process of objectification the reason why we can extract from them?

I think that this way of conceiving the development of extractivism – not only as an extractive activity on site but also as a way of being and defining world relations – touches upon what I think you mean: this dualistic way of thinking in western thought, whether as nature/culture or human/the rest of the world. There is definitely some connection there. But you also have to include into that analysis how people from different kinds of geographies would conceive of that. What kind of subjects and their ways of being have been defended through the development of the modern world, and which subjects were perhaps not interesting enough to defend, making their ways of life and futures neglectable?

And here the decolonial scholars believe that the indigenous populations and the Afro-descendant populations and the small farmers or fishing communities in Latin America have not been included in the human ‘we’ that has been developed in western thinking and current politics.

I also want to ask about the modern characteristics of green colonialism, which you have written about extensively.

Green colonialism is a concept that I trace to the first time that I found it written in the Nordic context – in a newspaper interview published in 2013, in which the former Saami parliament president on the Norwegian side of the border talked about climate change mitigation as a kind of green colonialism. I used this concept in my research after that, and others have done so too. It was kind of adopted into the Saami parliament and the councils and their papers, and now it is a concept used much more than when I was beginning my research.

The way she used the concept, and how I understand it, is to say that while the Saami populations have experienced colonialism for many centuries, this colonialism has been changing according to different political priorities and paradigm shifts, and now we are in a kind of ‘green’ stage of colonialism. The landscape that remains, used by Saami herders and fishermen and their ways of reproducing life, is seeing a lot of industrial developments. The hydro and wind power plants have come with great force into these landscapes, and in the discourse of the so-called ‘green transition’ these are seen as necessary and good developments. But they threaten continuity. In my research, I’ve been interested in reindeer herding, so this is what I can talk more about, but I know it also applies to fishing and gathering and life in general.

This is one part of it, and indigenous communities are burdened to sacrifice – because the story goes that all of us have to sacrifice something for the sake of climate change mitigation. This is a discourse we hear a lot, and this makes it even more difficult for indigenous communities to claim their rights. Sometimes I think it is a false dichotomy that we need to choose between local and global needs. This is also what I am trying to do in my research. I’ve seen the concept used by Saami political thinkers to say something, but because I work with communities as a psychologist, I ask what it looks like in the herders’ everyday experience, in the lives of those who are engaging with these resistance processes. I’ve been trying to look at it really from the perspective of individuals in the reindeer-herding districts. What can we say about that human experience?

Can you also say more about the connection between the Green New Deal and green colonialism? Does the Green New Deal have some aspects of green colonialism?

Yes, I think so, and that is an important discussion to have. In one of my articles, I tried to write a little bit about it, but it’s an important topic because many progressive parties and workers’ unions in the Global North have been trying to work on more just alternatives to greenwashing strategies. Trying to make a Green New Deal which would be socially just and inclusive creates a future for the working class in the Global North… However, I think that in Norway we have seen much struggle for what is called here ‘green industrialization,’ like making factories that can produce green factories or aluminum, which I have been looking at in my research, and to generate decent work for people while at the same time contributing to the green shift. But these worker unions and progressive political parties have not been, in my opinion, aware or have not worried enough about the consequences these decisions have in the communities living around these mines that are required to produce the mineral needed for this green industrialization. And this connects green colonialism to the Green New Deal, because we cannot talk about this locally, but have to look at it internationally and through a decolonial lens.

The workers’ unions and progressive parties have the power to do something, to force their employers to change the way they relate to the communities around the mines. And it’s a lost opportunity for creating a more socially just transition. This is of course not my research field, but I would like to add that many scholars in geology argue that there are not enough minerals on the planet to perform the green transition for everyone. We don’t have enough lithium, for example. So it is basically an exclusionary process, and this is also perhaps possible to relate to a kind of colonial way of being.

When imagining possible solutions for climate change, are we still considering sustainable energy as the best direction to go, or do you think that sustainable energy often reproduces structural violence?

I’m not so used to the concept of ‘sustainable energy.’ What is mostly used here is the term ‘renewable energy’ or sometimes ‘clean energy.’ In the context where I work, ‘sustainable energy’ is not really used. The Saami communities are losing what remains to them to be able to generate animal welfare and maintain their herds healthy and large enough to be able to live from them, which is their cultural right as Saami herders. These large-scale wind industrial sites are now destroying that landscape for them. The South Saami herders with whom I have been working as part of my research are very clear about the fact that they predict a near future where they will not be able to herd anymore. And this is a very large and alarming example of structural violence.

But there are many large and small examples. I think the Southern Saami example of dealing with wind energy development in their herding landscapes is a very serious one, because we are perhaps talking about the end to their entire herding activities in the close future, but there are many other examples. This is what I meant when I talked earlier about this ‘we’ we have constructed in western thinking, and the idea that we have to make sacrifices in order to create good living conditions in the context of climate crisis – well, many ways of life are excluded from that ‘we’. Many indigenous communities, but not only indigenous – many communities across many geographies are not included in this, and their ways of life are losing the landscapes necessary to continue into the future. I think this is a big question, and this is at least one possible answer to it.

I would like to come back now to this question of sacrifice, and how to avoid the rhetoric of sacrifice in political ecology. You were for example writing about Frantz Fanon and his “zones of non-being,” and Naomi Klein also has a similar concept regarding the sacrifice of places for a greater good. How can we avoid this rhetoric of sacrifice in political ecology?

Political ecology has many tools to think differently about how we can confront climate crisis. But first I would say that zones of non-being seem to be a geographical concept in the sense of sacrifice zones. But as I understand it, those zones of non-being are the skin, the person. Although I do think it is interesting to look at this anti-colonial analysis of Fanon. But the sacrifice zone is a more geographical concept, denoting those areas outside the fences of large industrial projects which cause pollution and cancer. And there is one decolonial scholar, Christos Zografos, who came with the concept of ‘green sacrifice zones,’ basically adding the ‘green’ into the sacrifice zone. And it means that some sites are maybe destined to produce renewable energy now, and that the lifeforms inside them are not that relevant. They will thus have to be sacrificed for the greater good you mentioned.

I think we see clear examples of this in the Norwegian discourse regarding reindeer herding. Maybe not about reindeer herding as such, but confronted with wind energy development we often read that there are so few herds, that it is not profitable, it is un-economic. They are saying quite clearly that we all must sacrifice something for climate change mitigation and they are referring to these herders at the Fosen peninsula, where they have a supreme court decree saying that the project is illegal. And the herders say, “We have sacrificed so much for so many years,” and this is just one more in a large array development within their territory.

I don’t think I can answer how to avoid sacrifice in political ecology, but I think political ecology has tools to question this and raise discussion about what is happening to the lifeforms in these green sacrifice zones, and about who can define what should be sacrificed. I think it is an interesting concept to think about and discuss, these consequences of hegemonic climate change mitigation.

How to reframe this false dualism of the global and local perspective? I think there is a lot to unpack in this dynamic – what is global and what is local and how should we address them together? What kind of politics and decision-making can we use for such complex issues as climate change?

I think we need systemic change. If I go back to the decolonial theory I mentioned in the beginning, we cannot solve this through quick fixes. We are now sitting in one of the capitals in the north of Europe, the North of the North, and this way of life is totally unsustainable. This is a large task and we will not solve anything through destining some zones of the world to produce renewable energy while we continue to produce the same products, to extract the same resources, in different parts of the world.

I think an anti-capitalist critique is totally necessary, but maybe I disagree with workers’ unions and progressive parties on this: they say that it is only an anti-capitalist critique. I think it is also a decolonial critique that is necessary because we, as subjects, are perhaps thrown into circuits and ways of life that don’t always provide us with a good alternative. We are living a very accelerated life where we have to work, we have to consume certain things to be able to live, but it is unsustainable to think that everyone in the world can live like this, so we have to give up on some privileges that we have in this part of the world, right? So it is an anti-capitalist critique, it’s a feminist critique, a decolonial critique, as there are many oppressive systems that we have to change in order for the planet and community relations to recover and create a more sustainable future for everyone.

To look more at the specifics of your research, how does Norway participate in green colonialism? You’ve already spoken about it generally, but what are the concrete cases of your research?

If we look at green colonialism in the Norwegian state and its borders, we can look at the relations between the Saami community and the Norwegian state and the majority population. The first large, well-known conflict was the Alta construction in the 1970s and 1980s. There was a huge resistance process where the Saami population and environmentalists were trying to stop the construction of a vast hydropower plant in Finnmark, Norway. And they weren’t able to stop it, but it was an important and defining historical moment for the historical memory of the relations between the Norwegian state and the Saami population, one which also connected the struggle of the Saami communities for their land to the larger context of indigenous struggles for their family lands.

And now we have the wind energy development. It is not only in indigenous communities, of course, as we have a lot of Norwegian small communities eagerly protesting to stop these projects from their lands, while others accept them. Every context is different, but right now it is perhaps the most debated example of green colonial and industrial development in Saami areas. But you also have the mineral extraction happening on the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian sides of the border – copper mines, and copper is a metal which should be used in renewable energy infrastructures.

So there are a lot of different projects, but we also have to talk about the Norwegian state outside of its borders. There are lots of investments in everything from agro-industrial developments to mining, to hydropower, to infrastructural developments in other countries through the Norwegian Oil Fund, Statkraft (the Norwegian energy company), Norfund (a smaller investment company), or Norsk Hydro – the aluminum company I’ve been researching which invests and extracts minerals and other things in the Global South. And some of these extractivist activities were not brown or green before, but they are now going through a process some would call greenwashing, where they are trying to reposition as providing solutions for a future confronted with climate change. And one of the major things they are doing is basing their activities on renewable energy, so they are bringing about the need to construct wind energy or hydropower developments in many territories around the globe.

These are often production sites where we see structural violence as you mentioned before, but also direct violence, as in many of these places human rights are not respected at all and it’s very difficult for the local population to protest and claim their rights, because they are scared for their lives. As in Brazil, which is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a land defender or environmentalist. And Norway has many investments in Brazil. It’s not that Norsk Hydro is necessarily contributing to direct violence, but the presence of direct violence against environmentalists makes them accept more Norwegian investments. And the people are in a dangerous context, so they are not free to raise their voice.

I would like to talk about these communities later, but right now could you say a bit more about this connection between Norway and Brazil, and their relation in terms of mineral extraction? This was also part of your research, so could you say how they are connected?

I’ve been researching the aluminum production in Norway, as it is connected to wind energy developments. As I said before, many mineral extraction sites and the industrial sites which convert minerals into other materials, in this case bauxite into alumina and this into aluminum, are going through processes of ‘going green,’ which requires renewable energy. In Norway, two of the projects of wind energy development in southern Saami lands that I’ve been looking at are directly connected to the aluminum sector, because Alcoa and Norsk Hydro are buying the energy produced, and they need this to be able to fulfill their requirements and green certificates, and to then be able to sell their final end products as green – green aluminum.

Both companies extract bauxite in Brazil, and not only in Brazil but in other places as well. My research however brought me to eastern Brazil, to the Amazonian state of Pará, which is one of the places on Earth where we can find large quantities of bauxite – the very red, heavy mud which is the basis for producing aluminum. In Brazil, the bauxite venture started in the late 1970s when there was still a military dictatorship in power. And Norsk Hydro and Alcoa were among the first companies to establish there. They established in the region called Trombetas in the Amazon, and this mine still exists – Mineração Rio do Norte is its name. It is a joint venture still, where Alcoa and Norsk Hydro are two among several companies, who are also established elsewhere with their own independent mines.

They extract the bauxite, they bring it by large ships around the coast of Brazil where it is converted into alumina, and this is then shipped elsewhere. And one of the places where it is shipped to is Norway. This is a very concrete example of how global value chains connect the realities of different communities together, and while we in Norway are discussing the local, environmental and social footprints of renewable energy, we are not talking at all about how it is connected to the reality of the communities.

In Brazil, there are huge human rights violations. We can definitely talk about this concept of sacrifice zones and green sacrifice zones we were discussing earlier, because these alumina production sites exist in the cities of Barcarena and São Luís, and these areas are heavily polluted. You don’t only find alumina production there but many industries, and the local populations claim to have huge health consequences as a result. One of the demands they had when I was there, was for an investigation of their bodies’ heavy metal concentration, and also why they were seeing so many cancer cases… And it is of course impossible for the community to prove causality – as in “ this company is doing this to us.” They need scientific knowledge to be able to document what is actually the problem and to try to find solutions to them. And they found no interest to follow it up. They were abandoned. It’s a very concrete example of the zones of non-being, and in Norway this is actually not spoken about very much.

What are the strategies of resistance that the Saami and Amazon communities use? What are their registers of resistance?

This was not part of my research, but of course I have been observing and following up. When we think resistance from the outside, we only see the big blocking of the streets and that’s all we’re able to see. But I think resistance happens in everyday practices. Sometimes it is very subtle and slow, and sometimes we come to tipping points or moments in history when big protest actions break out, as we saw just a block from here in Oslo, a couple of weeks ago, when hundreds of young Saami activists and environmentalists blocked many state departments. They started with the oil and Energy Departments, but all of a sudden they had seven Ministries of the Norwegian state blocked. They said “You take our country piece by piece, well now we close the state, Ministry by Ministry.” This is a point in time which will be recorded in Norwegian history, but of course the Saami herders may use different kinds of resistance strategies which can be more subtle. But talking about subtle resistance strategies is not a good idea, because sometimes the resistance movements need their secrets. It is not up to us to claim that to the world.

But I think we can say, in the Saami situation, that lawsuits have been one of them. When I finished my doctoral thesis, the Fosen case was still going through the legal system, and they didn’t win in the first nor the second instance. But then they actually won the case in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court accepted their knowledges and understood that two of the wind parts of the large Fosen project were actually detrimental to reindeer herding in the Fosen peninsula. So that was a historical sentence. But as these large protests from a couple of weeks ago show, wind turbines are still there and the oil and energy department has not taken much action to undo the human rights violation at Fosen.

Maybe in the Norwegian context this proves that the lawsuits are an important strategy for the indigenous communities, but it’s perhaps not enough to have their human rights respected. Things seem to be moving along a bit more now, but it was still necessary for these young Saami activists to block seven ministries for many days.

And in Brazil you have many protest actions at all times, like blocking off streets. There was one historical moment in 2009 at Juruti Velho when the Amazon river was blocked off by small boats and fishing communities. The river is the means of transportation, because they don’t have streets there, so instead of a roadblock there were huge river blocks trying to stop the entry of Alcoa. But they weren’t successful and Alcoa is there today. But this was a very meaningful historical moment.

You also have a large process in the state of Pará where communities gather and try to construct protocols of how they should be consulted. Because both Brazil and Norway have signed the ILO Convention 169 and are bound to respect indigenous communities and their right to informed and meaningful consultation before industrial activities come to their lands. In Brazil, the communities tried to construct the protocols of how to be consulted before the actual consultation happens, so that they could make the consultations meaningful for them. This also had the effect of spreading awareness and mobilizing the communities.

What is the public view in Norway about these questions? To what degree do people who are not part of the Saami community support them?

There is definitely a need to create more awareness in Norwegian society, and this is symptomatic for the colonial context in this Nordic region – that the majority society actually knows very little about Saami communities. We are in Oslo, the capital of Norway, and it is a very common phrase that “most of the Saami population live here in Oslo,” which has the implicit meaning that they are now a part of this other way of being and that perhaps only a few people need these rights; I’m not actually sure what it’s supposed to mean, but you often hear this opinion and it is problematic. And you can also hear this sacrifice discourse – “There are so few, and we need wind energy to survive.” So I think there is this a lack of sensitivity and ignorance about Saami ways of being and their knowledges. It is because of the colonial history, and we need that to change. I think the protest action a few weeks ago changed things and things are happening. As I’ve said, green colonialism is a concept which is becoming better understood.

Is that a question of education? If there is no institution to teach people this…

Definitely. This is a big part of the decolonial process, that we need more education. But I also think we need more different political purposes, because sometimes referring merely to education is a bit naive, as it is about more than that. It’s about different ontologies and about different world constructs clashing. There are larger needs to decolonize and to create a space where different worlds can co-exist. But I agree that education is definitely a part of it. And this is also a demand that Saami politicians have had for a long time.

I also think that progress is now being made in the schools. When I was studying as a kid, I think that one year we had a paragraph in one history book which said something about the Alta struggle, and that was it. And they now celebrate the Saami National Day on February 6 in the kindergartens. It however shouldn’t be just that, it should be a much more intense dialog.

How do these conflicts affect the self-determination and cultural practice of the Saami people? You wrote about how they identify themselves and how they changed through these conflicts.

Norway has signed the ILO Convention 169 and also the UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in 2007, and this has been adopted into the Norwegian constitution and the legal framework. So in Norway, the legal framework is OK, and this also makes it explicit in Norwegian legal documents that reindeer herding is central to the survival of the Saami people’s cultural rights. And it is often said that in the Southern Saami areas, where the Saami people live in very fragmented ways among the Norwegians, the reindeer herding is a very important institution, not only for the herding itself but also for cultural reproduction and community construction.

So when these cases are in the legal system, it is not being debated is whether herding is central to the continuity of the Saami ways of life. This is not debated because it is established as a fact. The debate is rather whether the wind energy development will be the tipping point stopping that cultural practice or not. That is where the disagreement is.

Can you talk about the psychological level of this issue and what determines it?

I think people are experiencing a lot of sorrow and fear about not being able to give to the future generations what they have been given from their ancestors. I can only go off what people say to me, as I am talking about the life of someone else, but I find there is a huge sorrow about perhaps not being able to continue with herding into the future. People feel a great responsibility for the survival of their community. This has large costs for people. They say that they feel as if they can never rest and are always guarded. And the herders say that they are herders, so they should be in the mountains taking care of their herd, but they have a large quantity of emails coming in every day – from municipalities, from counties, the states – because it is not only about wind power, it is about roads as well, smaller projects, and they have to respond. If they don’t respond, then it will just happen, so they have to be available at all times. This creates insomnia, stressed people shouldering large burdens. There are just a few full-time herders remaining in the Southern Saami communities because the construction of modern society has been so much of a burden for so many years that there is not enough space for all the people who used to herd in the past.

We live at a time when there is a lot of attention being paid to psychological health, but the psychological health of these people is not talked about so much. As a person working in psychology, I think that talking about psychological health balances on the fine line between individualizing the stress and looking at the structures and politics producing it. We don’t have to pathologize the people we work with, because their reactions are reactions to the very serious situation they are facing. We talk about climate anxiety and climate sorrow and eco sorrow, but we perhaps don’t talk about the political aspects and the structures which produce it, and their relation to colonial practice in relation to the Saami people.

You are also bringing your psychological background from your western education. How do you translate their emotions and the ways they feel? How do you orient yourself in that?The idea that there exist emotions we don’t have is really interesting. There’s the universalist view that humans are all the same, that we all have the same emotions, and it was really interesting to think about emotions as cultural.

It’s a very relevant question. In decolonial psychology there’s this intent to try to think about how psychological signs or practices can collaborate with decolonial projects, but at the same time we must look at the problems with psychology itself. I’ve been working with the Guarani and Kaiwá people in Brazil, and they say “psychology is not for us, we talk about spirituality here.” And can you ask psychologists to be aligned with that, do they have something to contribute? Or perhaps it is rather about the people being able to contribute to your own thinking, and tell you about the loop that you use in relating to the world. And I think it is a very relevant question which is not resolved at all. It is an ongoing process, and I’m not sure where it will lead us.

I think that’s one thing that not only psychologists can do – to change the gaze and look at the effects of oppressive systems in people, try to see what is happening and what it produces in the people’s communities, families, minds. But not to stop there, but to see how these consequences are reflections of what is wrong with the system. Because we cannot not talk about it either. We have to address it and try to generate tools as communities confronting oppressive situations, try to live better and recover something. And sometimes the people coming from the psychological sciences like myself can perhaps play a role in that, but sometimes perhaps not.

Actually one colleague of mine – Danilo Silva Guimarães – has been working with the Guarani Mbyá and he also writes about this lack of words in the majority language of Brazil, which is Brazilian Portuguese, to talk about certain emotions. At the same time, I think we are always part of different cultural communities. We are never part of only one, but are in constant migration, changing as persons, moving and navigating. Different communities may mean geographically or epistemologically different. I don’t really know if the right path is to try to understand. Like in Brazil, studying the Guarani is no longer considered anthropology, but rather Guaranology, because there are different intellectual branches disputing the proper understanding of the Guarani – and it just makes me sick, because I think it’s a totally colonial approach.

My next question is about grief. How do the Guarani grieve? Do they have any ceremonial grieving practice? What are their cultural tools of grieving?

I can’t really talk about that. You would have to ask someone else.

What and how can we learn from indigenous cultures, and how to avoid cultural appropriation? You were already talking about the meeting points between cultures and the need to avoid the issues of global/local, so what can we learn from indigenous cultures?

I haven’t used the concept of cultural appropriation in that context, so I think it’s interesting to think about it like that – as a problem of dialogues which are not performed on equal terms. Because we talk a lot about cultural appropriation in terms of objects and arts and craft, but perhaps we can extend it to knowledges, where you don’t even translate them, but just transport them into another context, using only their parts. Then it would be cultural appropriation, and I haven’t thought about that before, and I think that’s interesting.

But in terms of cultural dialogue, when I was working with the Guarani and Kaiwá people, I was never able to understand their cosmovision totally. I could only ever understand fragments, and I was able to renew my thinking through the encounter with those fragments. Danilo Silva Guimarães again says that one person can sit here and a person from another culture could sit on the other side, and they could look at a plant and be talking about it with the same words, as they know each other’s language, but actually they would be talking about different things. Is there a solution to that? Perhaps the solution is to live with that, and to understand that tension can be a way of creating something new. To go and migrate as communities and as people and with our values and knowledges.

I think perhaps making the differences and the possible power asymmetries in the situation explicit can be tools for making these conversations meaningful. I think dialogue is the way to go and that we have to create more bridges between communities. Important knowledge in human history has always arisen along with other cultures and other communities. The problem occurs when the power imbalances make for cultural appropriation. There is never only one conclusion, you always have resistance, cracks. I think that more dialogue is necessary, but the terms of these dialogues must be identified from someone else than western subjects, who usually come with power and with a higher position within the system of power imbalances.

I am certain that knowledges of indigenous peoples are crucial for combating climate change. That’s not just my opinion, but the UN panels on climate and biodiversity are very explicit in saying that indigenous and local knowledges are not only locally but universally relevant, and that the majority of nation states are not even close to approaching that discussion. It has been repeated in many documents, but in Norway I haven’t seen any examples of the government really trying to start processes which would show how the deep knowledge of Saami herders about snow, the winter and weather changes, and other things I may not even be aware of, can be interesting to note.

I am really interested in the question of the rights of nature, like when a river is granted its own rights. It mostly comes from non-western cultures, and from areas where they have an experience of colonial history. Usually, a community brings up the fact that there are certain areas which need to be protected and given rights, and they bring up these rights of nature. But now it is also coming to Europe and the US, so for me there is this interesting question of the translation of an epistemology and an ontology into a different context. We can translate the law, but we cannot translate the connection to the environment or the river.

Certainly. In the processes that I’ve been looking at, I think it is a very difficult and stressful thing for the Saami herders to talk about these issues because of the misunderstandings that are produced. I don’t know how you define your take on misunderstanding, but I think when you talk about the connection to the land in a spiritual way, the Norwegian mind does not consider it honest but rather banal and naive. My feeling in the lawsuits is that this is a very intimate and taboo thing which they keep close, because opening up and being ridiculed is very painful. You have these hints of the connection to the land, but it is not pronounced in the same way that an indigenous people in Mexico might say that “the river is my brother,” or “my sister.” Here, it is dangerous to say so, because some Norwegian societies are even less understanding than the majority society in Mexico. You become exposed and can be laughed at, so the colonial wounds become very present, and you really will not say it if you are at risk. So it is left untouched in the lawsuits, and the lawsuits rather discuss things like slaughter weight of the reindeer herd and other technical issues, and never question the substance of the Saami’s connectivity to the land and why it’s important. It’s just hinted at, and this is a huge problem. Even to say such things in front of the judge would be impossible. That is the education part that you were referring to. Not only the kids, but the institutions have to also know a little bit.