Resurgent Ecologies of Care: An Ethnography from Deanuleahki, Sápmi

Abstract

This dissertation examines indigenous Sámi experiences of transformations in caregiving practices and relations in Sápmi, the transborder indigenous Sámi homeland, since the Second World War. It is based on 28 months (2014-2018) of immersive ethnographic research in the villages of Deatnu River Valley along the northernmost reaches of the Finnish-Norwegian state border. It interrogates, through the lens of care, my research participants’ (N:60) experiences of the postwar embedding of Nordic state institutions in the Deatnu River Valley, with particular focus on the effects of that presence upon kin-based and ecological relations of care.

I argue that at the heart of Deanuleahki’s social and ecological dislocations is the imbrication of Nordic welfare state institutions not only with coercive processes of assimilation and integration, but with the territorial and ecological consolidation of state control over indigenous land, waterways, and livelihoods. My ethnographic interlocutors frequently depict these interwoven modes of state practice as profoundly injurious for relationally and ecologically situated Sámi conceptions of care and aspirations for well-being. Yet, their narratives center on assertive commitment to ensuring the vitality of ecologically and relationally situated practices of care. By simultaneously holding in view the injury and the striving to heal, my research advances new understandings of the moral, political, and economic claims for reparation and repair.

The dissertation’s conceptual framework emanates directly from this dual emphasis. First, my concept of ecosocial injury foregrounds community members’ experiences of care’s alienation from its social and ecological contexts. It connects my analysis to the scholarship on social suffering within medical anthropology and critically expands it to foreground ecological considerations. In turn, my concept of resurgent care – denoting the intimate everyday practices by which community members strive to revivify relations of kinship and belonging and conditions of material livability within local ecologies – specifies my contribution to the anthropological scholarship on care, while grounding my inquiry in scholarly and public mobilizations for indigenous resurgence. In its attention to care as a site of infrapolitical struggle and striving, it accentuates the agency of my ethnographic interlocutors while lending visibility to their labor. The dissertation draws to a close by setting ecosocial injury and resurgent care in the context of broader societal processes of reckoning with the effects of Nordic nation-states’ presence in Sápmi, and the attendant aspirations for repair.