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Short abstract

The circumpolar Arctic is often inscribed by outsiders. This paper works from two examples to explore how inscription and writing sometimes empty meaning out of practices. The conical tent inscribed as a marker of indigenous sovereignty, or of cultural evolution, it elides the way it is an engagement to movement and place. Second, the process by which singing is transformed into song eclipses the felt meaning of the act. The paper will work with concrete examples taken from recent conversations in Sapmi and Eastern Siberia to unwrite the analysis of cultural heritage.

Long abstract

The circumpolar Arctic is often inscribed by outsiders with metaphors of remoteness, primevalness, and pristineness. These powerful metaphors often stand in silent contrast to a space which has increasingly has become a zone of competition over energy resources and creeping militarisation. This paper works from two examples to explore how inscription and writing sometimes empty meaning out of practices. First, the conical tent is a surprisingly common image of Northern landscapes from Eurasia to North America. Often when inscribed as a marker of indigenous sovereignty, or of cultural evolution, it elides the way that it is less than the sum of its structure and more the result of an engagement to movement and place. Second, the process by which singing is transformed into song through the classification of genre and type often eclipses the felt meaning of the act. The paper will work with concrete examples taken from recent conversations in Sapmi and Eastern Siberia to unwrite the analysis of cultural heritage.

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Short abstract

What does it mean to apply the category of "indigenous" to infrastructures? What do we intend to signal with this, something that pertains/belongs to a given group of people defined through an ethnic label or something that makes possible certain kinds of relations to the land? If we go with the second possibility what avenues of exploration this opens?

Long abstract

What does it mean to apply the category of "indigenous" to infrastructures? What do we intend to signal with this, something that pertains/belongs to a given group of people defined through an ethnic label or something that makes possible certain kinds of relations to the land? If we go with the second possibility what avenues of exploration this opens? In this paper, we pursue such an avenue by looking at how transportation infrastructures related to resource extraction become also an infrastructure that allows the continuation of hunting practices in new conditions

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Short abstract

This paper will explore how Nawken (Scottish Travellers), utilise spoken stories and traditional trails to create home within a contested landscape. Drawing from recent oral history research, and building on studies of Nawken craftsmanship and tangible heritage, this paper will seek to propose that Nawken not only 'live' the landscape through spoken stories; but that they resist the restriction of ancestral landscapes, by ensuring the presence of physical objects of 'Gypsy-ness' that unwrite authoritative sedentary cultural settings that limit ancestral relations.

Long abstract

This paper will explore how Nawken (Scottish Travellers), utilise spoken stories and traditional trails to create home within a contested landscape. Drawing from recent oral history research, and building on studies of Nawken craftsmanship and tangible heritage, this paper will seek to propose that Nawken not only 'live' the landscape through spoken stories; but that they resist the restriction of ancestral landscapes, by ensuring the presence of physical objects of 'Gypsy-ness' that unwrite authoritative sedentary cultural settings that limit ancestral relations.

Through the highlighting of the significance of cultural 'objects' within the Nawken community, this paper will identify how Nawken use these objects to re-generate supra-individual belonging. How objects of 'Gypsy-ness' such as Gold jewellery, Imari pattern Crown & Derby; symbolic motifs; and so-called 'Gypsy' cast-iron pans have come to act as definitions of resistance against sedentarisation, and cultural fragmentation. It will further suggest that the presence of these objects should not solely be understood as 'tradition', but as reminders of cultural belonging and methods of silent navigation of contested landscapes.

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Short abstract

Every year, in September, the Innu people of Sheshatshiu (Labrador/Nitassinan, Canada) organize a Gathering at Gull Island. The Gathering is a recreation of and an evocation of the past, but also a place to perform current cultural practices. A new mega hydroelectric project has been proposed for Gull Island. How is it going to affect the Gathering infrastructure and the cultural practices that take place there?

Long abstract

Every year, in September, the Innu people of Sheshatshiu (Labrador/Nitassinan, Canada) organize a Gathering at Gull Island. The Gathering is a week-long community event. Tents and other infrastructure are set up in advance and the gathering becomes a home away for the town of Sheshatshiu, where the Innu, formally a nomadic people, were forced to settle in the 1950s. The Gathering changes the landscape of Gull Island, with hundreds of people staying in their tents. The almost 130 km of the route separating the gathering place from Sheshatshiu are travelled back and forth and also become a place of encounter, a modern-day trail. The Gathering is a recreation of and an evocation of the past, but also a place to perform current cultural practices. It is a new way of community building supported by the local Band Council and a way to practice and learn Innu culture. A new mega hydroelectric project has been proposed for Gull Island. How is it going to affect the Gathering infrastructure and the cultural practices that take place there?

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Short abstract

This paper examines the agency of Sámi dwellings. By engaging with historical and contemporary examples, it explores how these dwellings are negotiated by colonial power structures while also embodying Sámi craftsmanship, knowledge, cosmology, and resilience, offering alternative narratives rooted in Sámi perspectives.

Long abstract

The Sámi dwellings and especially the conical tent, the lávvu, has come to be an established symbol for an entire Sámi culture. Outside of the practices that makes Sámi landscapes home, Sámi dwellings are engaged commercially, in visual arts, and in political arenas. This paper explores the agency of Sámi dwellings, both from inside and outside perspectives, with reference to both historical and contemporary examples.

Such dwellings are constantly reproduced in ways that align with colonial politics and complex power structures: In acts of cultural appropriation, in cultural representations of Sáminess, or embedded in government interventions into Sámi landscape practices.

Unwriting the lávvo as ‘an object of Sámi heritage’, how can such Sámi dwellings otherwise be engaged and described from an inside perspective? The tangible materiality of Sámi dwellings are extensions of Sámi people, they materialise craftsmanship and embodied knowledge. They are testament to lifestyles, they are archives of language and epistemology, they embody cosmology, and Sámi resilience. Sámi dwellings can reshape, challenge or indigenise, in negotiations over landscape, meaning, use and understanding.

This paper exemplifies how the meaning of Sámi dwellings extend beyond the material cultural heritage. Sámi dwellings are epistemological infrastructures, they generate relationships between peoples and land. Unwriting here, originates in both a Sámi academic and artistic standpoint, in conversation with examples from both inside and outside cultural practices.

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Short abstract

The project Sávvet - To heal cultural heritage through digitization explores how local Sámi communities can be directly involved in repatriation processes, to re-establish relations between museum objects and Sámi families. A central part of the project has been to understand and meet Sami perspectives in the museum's work.

Long abstract

The project Sávvet - To heal cultural heritage through digitization explores how local Sámi communities can be directly involved in repatriation processes, to re-establish relations between museum objects and Sámi families. The project is based on close cooperation between Silvermuseet, a local cultural history museum within the Pite Sámi area, and the local Sámi community. Together we identify objects that are sensitive from an ethical perspective and explore how digitization, through 3D technology, can give the Sámi society and families access to objects in the museum.

A central part of the project has been to understand and meet Sami perspectives in the museum's work. It has become clear that certain concepts commonly used by museums are not appropriate in relation to Sami perspectives. An example is the concepts of “object” or “item” which are based on the museums’ view of ownership of the collections. However, objects that have a strong connection to a specific Sami family have a completely different dimension in their eyes. To describe this type of object, we have chosen to use the concept “belonging” to show respect for this relationship. Our conclusion is that the terminology reflects power relations that museums need to be aware of.

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Short abstract

This paper focuses on arctic and subarctic ethnographic collections stewarded by two Estonian museums and explores the different knowledge infrastructures that these collections reference. While the belongings in these collections are part of Indigenous knowledge systems, access to them is mediated by digital infrastructures rooted in past epistemic practices that shaped them into museum objects. This paper aims to explore how understanding the hybridity of these collections can help reframe historical narratives and foster relationships that contribute to a more equitable future.

Long abstract

Drawing on Alessandro Rippa’s analytical framework of ‘environing infrastructures,’ which emphasizes the historically specific, dynamic, and co-creative relationship between humans and their environments (2024: 27), this paper examines ethnographic museum collections in relation to the knowledge infrastructures they are embedded in. Focusing on the ‘foreign ethnology’ or ‘world cultures’ collections acquired by Baltic-German explorers, administrators, and scientists in the mid-19th century from Siberia and Russian-America—now held by the Estonian History Museum and the Estonian National Museum—this paper explores the forms of engagement with the environment that these collections trace and afford.

I investigate the different epistemic systems these objects are part of and the roles they have played within these systems. I then consider how making visible the "invisible"—the embodied Indigenous knowledge embedded in these objects, as well as the Western systems that have shaped them into epistemic objects—can help rewrite historical narratives and create possibilities for more nuanced representations of different ways of relating to the world.

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Short abstract

This paper addresses the generative potential in the Lars Hætta collection, renowned for its exquisite craftsmanship and its brutal history. This spring, the collection will return home. The homecoming becomes an opportunity address the unwritten in the widely circulated stories of the collection.

Long abstract

The collection of miniatures by Lars Hætta is easily Norway’s most violent museum collection. These are models of Sami material culture by Sami prisoner, Lars Hætta or Jáhkoš-Lásse, at Akershus Fortress. Hætta was imprisoned at the age of 19 for participation in the Kautokeino rebellion (1852), narrowly escaping the capital punishment. The fate of his family was brutal. His brother was beheaded, others imprisoned, the reindeer confiscated, people left destitute. Hætta himself spent over a decade in slavery.

The exquisiteness of the miniatures is mesmerizing: Perfectly crafted objects from nomadic lives; tents, skis, sleds, objects for food production. All miniatures are functional, made to illustrate use. They can be neatly packed and transported. Meant to be teaching aids, they typically come in sets. Every part is neatly named in Sami and Norwegian. The miniatures assemble the infrastructure that makes a Sami landscape into a home.

We do not know how many objects Jáhkoš-Lásse made. This is also part of the violence, how the story of these artefacts, as much as their beauty, contributed to the spread of the miniatures, to museums across the world. The Guovdageaidnu rebellion might be of the most described historical events in Sámi history. Still, as the story has been circulated, the violence within it has gradually disappeared. In this collaborative writing project, we return to elements in the story of the rebellion that has become unwritten. We hope Jáhkoš-Lásse’s miniatures can speak for themselves enabling other stories to be rekindled as they return home.