A Nordic Colonial Model?

Abstracts

Let's meet outside in silence

Vivi Vold, Ilisimatusarfik – The University of Kalaallit Nunaat  

One of the biggest challenges in science in Greenland and the Greenlandic society is the gap between the scientist like biologist, and hunters from local society. And something we often hear now is we need to acknowledge the Kalaallit culture, and what doesa that mean in a Nordic model and is there any place in this construct? Acknowledging the culture means Kalaallit worldview, strengths and competencies in an equitable and ethical manner. Academic scientific education is tightly connected to scientific research, as educators are often researchers and curriculums are based on Eurocentric research. Therefore, interactions and relations in scientific research and scientific education overlap and have similar dynamics. What does the gap actually mean, and how is Indigenous knowledge positioned in the Nordic models and structures. Something we see as uncomfortable questions in the Nordics and in Kalaallit Nunaat, what can we do to make the collaborations interculturally in an ethical, equitable and reciprocal way.

Colonialism, Multi-voice history and Exploration of Indigenous oral accounts in Western Greenland

Anna Andersen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

The 20th century represents an epoch of rapidly changing industries, living spaces, cultures, geopolitical conflicts, wars and borders, citizenships and societies. Is there a place for Indigenous communities in the history of this ‘brave new world’ created in the previous century? Can paternalistic sentiments of colonial policies, industrial land exploitation, and urbanization continue to be considered appropriate political and socioeconomic tools for advocating the development of such communities and their cultural existence?

The multiple Indigenous voices enunciate contradictions to the benefits of former colonial endeavors and call for a reconsideration of how colonial pasts are being researched, written, and told. This paper seeks to contribute to the discussion on how the colonial past is reflected in Indigenous people’s experiences, their feelings, bodies, minds, and memories, and how it transcends their everyday actions, choices, protests, or silent refusals to acknowledge the legacies of their own historical senses. Based on empirical examples from recent oral history and archival fieldwork in the Nuuk area, Greenland, the paper engages in a broader discussion about the meaningfulness of Indigenous people’s experiences in contemporary visions upon their histories.

A reflection on doing fieldwork in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat

Anna Jensine Arntzen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

The paper is a reflection on doing fieldwork and research in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat. Today, there is an expectation that researchers who come from the outside to do research are considerate of the Indigenous community Nuuk is, and that the research is relevant to and benefits those who are researched. Recently, the Inuit Circumpolar Council published a protocol for Equitable and Ethical Engagement (2022), focusing on engaging with Inuit when doing research, recognizing Indigenous knowledge, communication, data ownership, and data sharing, etc. Ethical guidelines from Ilisimatusarfik are also in the works.

However, even though the ‘formal expectations’ for doing fieldwork now exist/are being discussed, research that is being done sometimes still escapes the Greenlandic people’s notice (ICC 2022), and there are many international researchers interested in the area that have variable knowledge and sensitivities to the colonial past and present of Kalaallit Nunaat. A relevant question is who has the right to tell a story, and how a story can be told from the ‘outside’ in a way that is respectful and of benefit to the community.

Building on experiences from ethnographic fieldwork in Nuuk, being a PhD student affiliated with Ilisimatusarfik, and learning from both academic discussions at Ilisimatusarfik, and conversations among the Kalaallit public, the paper reflects on how to navigate (or how to not navigate…) doing research in an Indigenous community.

Sources:
Inuit Circumpolar Council. 2022. "Circumpolar Inuit Protocols for Equitable and Ethical Engagement"

The importance of wood. Materiality, colonialism and Sámi homemaking in transition

Astri Dankertsen, Nord University

The relationship with firewood is an important part of homemaking in a Sami everyday life. Based on data from the INDHOME-project, a project that looks into housing policies, homemaking, and Indigenous survivance, we argue that harvesting wood and making a fire continues to be an important part of Sámi homemaking. While the importance of firewood has changed due to new and improved houses and electricity, the practices associated with the procurement of firewood, and the practices of distributing firewood among family and friends, continue to be important both as a material, practical, social, and spiritual part of Sámi survivance. The practice of connecting through wood-cutting is a way of connecting to kin as well as connecting to homeland/place. Firewood, piles or pires of firewood are also material manifestations of their owners' hard work and the care for family. It is also a practice of sharing; sharing labor where relatives forage firewood together and through the distribution of firewood among elders and others who are unable to do so themselves. Firewood also has a practical function, as a practice of making fire or heat. While firewood today can be bought, we see that harvesting wood is an important cultural and social activity in itself. Having areas available for wood harvesting is therefore an important part of cultural survivance, something that is also exemplified in the Svartskog court case from Kåfjord in Norway (Bjerkli 2015), where the right to utilize land for wood harvesting was an important part of the case.

What are the ongoing effects of Nordic colonialism on Indigenous language learning today within our nation states?

Nina Hermansen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

All over the world, and in the Nordic countries, colonialism has had huge consequences for us as indigenous peoples and our languages. A well-known consequence is an enormous decrease in the number of native speakers, and there is tremendous work being done in the field of Indigenous language revitalization and the development of Indigenous language education (Hinton, Huss & Roche 2018).

To discuss the ongoing effects of Nordic colonialism on our Indigenous languages today, I will use an example from my own research in Alta, on the Norwegian side of Sápmi (Hermansen & Olsen 2020). The regional Centre is on the periphery of the core area for Sami language. Bordering two of the municipalities where North Sámi is the dominant language, Alta is still a town where the Norwegian language dominates public spheres of life. Young Norwegian-speaking Sámi in Alta are experiencing revitalization of Sami language and how their lack of language skills affects their ethnic identity.

Between power and powerlessness - the de / colonized mind

Julie Edel Hardenberg, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts & University of Copenhagen and Bergen Academy of Art and Design

In the PhD project "Between power and powerlessness- the de / colonized mind " I will examine the colonial memories and experiences that exist among the population in Greenland. With previous artistic studies of the Danish colonial history's political influence in Greenland, I will in my project turn the focus on what I call the de / colonized mind, exposed to crucial political and cultural influence from Denmark. The project's hypothesis is that when you are born and raised in a society that is built with colonial structures and thought patterns, it is not always that you as a citizen are aware of your own contribution to reproducing the colonial system. Therefore, the project aims to examine the more invisible aspects of the colonial structures and shed light on the impact it has on the citizens / society: How do descendants of colonialism carry the colonial heritage with them? What are the processes you take on when you want to fit in or stand out?

Temporal Displacement: Colonial architecture and its contestation

Tone Huse, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

The paper focuses on Danish-led urban planning and development in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat in the 1950s–1970s. The paper discusses how urbanisation became a technology of colonialist policies, but also how colonial architectures were resisted by Kalaallit women. These movements and counter-movements, the paper shows, speak to how time and temporality are scripted by colonial architectures. And, in turn, how temporalities are resisted and counteracted. As an analytical tool for understanding these processes the paper suggests the concept of ‘temporal displacement’. The concept speaks to forms of displacement that privilege distinct temporalities, thereby excluding others, and that in the context of urbanisation are solidified by the durability of built infrastructures. The paper will focus on three aspects to the temporal displacements of urban forms introduced by the Danish state: the eviction of the present to the past; materialising so-called ‘new time’; and temporal exclusions and their contestation. The paper considers ways in which housing seminars organised by Arnat Peqatigiit Kattuffiat (the Greenlandic Confederation of Women’s Associations) in 1967 and 1970 enacted a counter-temporality, connecting this to food practices, urban aesthetics, and claims for increased influence over future urban development and planning. Through this, the paper works to identify and problematise how tools and technologies of urban development characteristic of the post-World War II Nordic welfare state were put to use in a continued assertion of Danish dominance in Kalaallit Nunaat, also after the formal conclusion of its colonisation.

Silenced archive – in a land of dormant reciprocity

Britt Kramvig, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

In the paper, I will explore if it is possible to imagine an epistemic decolonial archive practice? The questions come from my engagement with the odd archive of Knut Lunde, his patient records, letters from people in need, and other documents that for 80 years have been safeguarded by Lunde’s family. The archive can be seen as a gift, not only from a Sámi medical expert, naturopath, and healer but also from the indigenous land of dormant reciprocity, that, when these documents were written were pushed to live at the brink of existence by colonial oppression, exploitation, and legal violation of traditional medical practices and Sámi lifeforms and philosophy. Coloniality is among other things the silencing of indigenous landscapes and “forgetting” what was once there, through privileging some assembles over others. In this presentation, I will reflect upon how such an archive can be read – and what is not in the archive? Can the archive be read, following Stengers, through the lens of a cosmopolitical struggle, a struggle over what is rational, reasonable, normal, and everyday common sense on how to relate to healing and to the land.

Whither Nordic Colonialism

Prashanti Mayfield, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Scholars of Nordic colonialism consistently claim that it is an ‘under-theorised’ and ‘under-studied’ area of academic research. However, this claim solely considers theorising and research through a euro-american academic lens, disregarding the knowledge and actions of Indigenous peoples and communities in the regions where Nordic colonialism has been enacted and continues through to the present. In places that have been subject to forms of Nordic colonial rule and influence - such as Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi - practices of resistance, refusal, and reclaimation speak back to and shine light on the extent of the structural and affective dimensions of Nordic colonialism from Indigenous perspectives, which are frequently sidelined in academic discourse. These movements and pushbacks are valuable and generative forms of anti-colonial and decolonial knowledge creation and theorising in action, and yet continue to be silenced, overlooked, or extracted within euro-american systems of knowledge production. This paper pushes back on the claim that Nordic colonialism is “under-studied”, and instead argues that Indigenous analyses are habitually ignored within a mainstream Nordic university/societal/cultural context that does not recognise this work as knowledge creation, thus does not validate it as theory. I suggest that the deficit present in this space is not a lack of theorising and researching, but rather that euro-american academic frameworks are limited in their capacities to recognise or engage with other ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

Encountering Indigeneity in the Arctic: "I Learnt to be Indigenous in the Arctic"

Liudmila Nikanorova

Nordic research institutions have been instrumental in the emergence and formation of Indigenous research in the Arctic. In this paper, I critically assess the impact of the two Nordic institutions: the University of the Arctic (UArctic) in Finland and UiT-The Arctic University of Norway (the UiT) in Norway. The UArctic is the largest network of educational and research institution in the Arctic that aims to develop knowledge to address local and global challenges of relevance to Arctic peoples and societies. The UiT, despite being one of many universities in the Arctic, is one of the most significant institutions in enabling and disseminating Indigenous research through their MA program in Indigenous Studies, quota scholarship that was made available for Indigenous students, and hosting one of the major conferences in the region – Arctic Frontiers. Looking at these two institutions, I raise the following questions: Which institutions and networks enable Indigenous awareness in the Arctic? What opportunities and limits Indigenous researchers face when entering academic institutions in the Arctic? Whose definition of Indigeneity dominates in the field? Whose knowledge-production is included and excluded in the Arctic research? Who speaks on behalf of the globalised Indigenous? Speaking from the localised Sakha perspective, I share how the epistemic location of the frameworks of Indigeneity in the traditions of Western scholarship and international law make them less accessible and recognizable to those of us, located outside of these epistemes.

We are the archive

Vivi Noahsen, Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu

The colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat is commonly told and legitimized to be ‘in the best of intention’ or ‘beneficial’ for the people of Kalaallit Nunaat. Today, the people of Kalaallit Nunaat, like many former colonies experience ‘gaps’ in their own history.  
Several examples of disputed ownership of archives by Denmark shows that colonial structures and legacies are present and practiced within archives that relates to the history of Kalaallit Nunaat.  
Nunatta Allagaateqarfia has a significant role on preserving historical sources and making them available for the public domain.  
Kalaallit Nunaat has been a Danish colony since 1721, formally decolonized in 1953 and has been an autonomous territory within the Danish Realm since 1979. Kalaallit Nunaat has its own government and legislative authority, and yet colonial structures are maintained, met, and faced by the population of Kalaallit Nunaat. 
Main agenda for the contribution: 
With the current understandings of colonialism, the wish for participating in the Nordic Colonialism Model panel is to address these challenges that are faced, the imprints of colonial consequences that effects individuals and communities of the native people of Kalaallit Nunaat and how this speaks to ongoing colonization and decolonization of archives.  
How can decolonizing a national archive that adheres to and strengthens Indigenous knowledges and practices in archives including that of non-written sources and materials obtain greater significance for history and knowledge-building about the past.  

Nordic exceptionalism and the decolonisation of higher education

Magda Pischetola, University of Copenhagen

Worldwide, the Nordic countries are known for gender equality policies, best-performing welfare models (Siim and Skjeie, 2008), and their image of progressive global agents (Stoltz et al., 2021). Research on Nordic colonialism has increasingly exposed how this regional branding is grounded in a discourse of exceptionalism (Loftsdóttir and Jensen, 2016) that entails condemning other colonial powers without condemning one’s own (Jensen, 2020).  
Some authors have conceptualised a “colonial complicity” (Vuorela, 2009) and explored tensions between benevolent public discourses and policies of exclusionary nationalism (de los Reyes and Mulinari, 2020; Padovan-Özdemir and Øland, 2022). Others have underlined the connection between Nordic exceptionalism and the unquestioned normativity of whiteness (Hübinette and Lundström, 2015) or cultural homogeneity (Keskinen, 2019). 
In this paper, we argue that Nordic exceptionalism is related to practices of reproduction and dissemination of colonial power in higher education. Building on decolonial perspectives, we problematise Eurocentric knowledge production and examine the inclusion of “ethno-knowledges” (Mbembe, 2018) in the curriculum as a compensatory act. Decolonising is thus reduced to a matter of origins and identity and normalised through superficial equality-diversity-inclusion policies (Morley and Leyton, 2023). By analysing the expansion of this trend in the Nordic universities, we ask: what counts as knowledge and why? How is benevolent exceptionalism influencing the process of decolonising the university? We defend that unsettling the coloniality of higher education involves a deeper reflection on epistemic diversity (Santos, 2010), which triggers challenges of a political, cultural, institutional (Eriksen and Stein, 2022), and pedagogical nature (Menon et al., 2021).)  

Technologies and material arrangements of urban planning in Nuuk, 1960s-1980s

Martin Svingen Refseth, University of Oslo

This paper explores the technologies and material arrangements of urban planning and development in Nuuk, the capital of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), from the 1960s-80s. In this period, Danish-led processes of industrialisation and urbanisation of Kalaallit Nunaat were ongoing, aiming to develop a modern welfare state. In 1979, Kalaallit demands for increased political autonomy and independence from Denmark led to the implementation of Home Rule. This brought back political and administrative control over multiple areas of government to Kalaallit Nunaat, including urban planning. 
Previous studies focused on the history of urban planning in Kalaallit Nunaat have predominantly addressed the period leading up to Home Rule and the technical and architectural aspects of urban development. Little has been written about how the political and technological-administrative practices that have shaped the city’s development can be understood in relation to questions of colonialism and processes of decolonialisation. This paper addresses this by asking: how did the shift to Home Rule change the ways urban planning and development was conducted in Nuuk, and to what extent? 
Through analysing documents related to the urban planning of Nuuk, and the organisation of urban planning in Kalaallit Nunaat more broadly, this paper addresses the concept of Nordic colonialism by examining the tools, technologies and knowledges that structured and enabled the development of the city during the 1960s-80s. Secondly, this paper considers how these have shifted and have been contested following the changing political and economic relationship between Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark.  

Artistic practices of survivance in Sápmi and Kalaallit Nunaat

Hanne Hammer Stien, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Since the end of the 1980ies Indigenous artists in Sápmi and Kalaallit Nunaat have turned to Nordic colonial archives as well as other colonial archives to critically examine their contents. Through the creation of what could be called counter archives these artists tell stories of racism, marginalization, and violence, but also pride, cultural vividity, and survival. Nils-Aslak Valkeapää`s (1943–2001) book project Beaivi, áhčážan (1988) is one early example of this. Pia Arke`s (1958–2007) book project Scorebysundshistorier (2003), that came about fifteen years later, is another one. Photography has a prominent place in both Valkeapää`s and Arke`s project. This undermines the intertwined relationship between colonialism, archival practices, and photography, internationally as well as in the Nordic states. In my presentation I will consider several archival art projects by Indigenous artists from Sápmi and Kalaallit Nunaat, including Scorebysundshistorier and Beaivi, áhčážan. I read these artists work as (different) practices of survivance. Along with art critic and historian Hal Foster`s description of archival art practices in “An Archival Impulse” (2004), I identify a move among the Indigenous artists to turn “excavation sites” into “construction sites”.  

Organizers

Tone Huse, UiT The Arctic University of Norway/University of Oslo; Britt Kramvig, UiT The Arctic University of Norway; Astri Dankertsen, NORD University; and Prashanti Mayfield, UiT The Arctic University of Norway