BEFORE I finished fifty trips around the sun, I wanted to see the sun that never sets in Sápmi. For my fiftieth birthday, in other words, I wanted to drive north, all the way north, with the love of my life and our three dogs in the car, one thousand and seven hundred kilometers up from Oslo to the top of Finland, to revel in the midnight sun. We planned to spend three weeks in Sápmi, the land inhabited by indigenous Sámi people for thousands of years, stretching across the countries otherwise known as Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. Our base would be the Kevo Subarctic Research Institute, outside of Ohcejohka (in Northern Sámi) / Utsjoki (in Norwegian), Finland, just north of the Arctic Circle. 

1:48 a.m., 9 July 2023, Kevo Subarctic Research Station near Ohcejohka/ Utsjoki in northern Finland 

I moved to Norway eleven years ago from the U.S. to accept a job as a literature professor at the University of Oslo. I also wanted to immerse myself in the spectacular fjords and mountains I remembered from ads for cruise ships when I was a middle-class kid growing up outside of Philadelphia. I now teach literature that revels in beautiful places, including nature writing that cries out in the wilderness for more direct contact with nature. I also teach other kinds of literature that engage with histories and intersecting forms of injustice and oppression. 

We all know that we are in the midst of a climate catastrophe. But not everyone is equally to blame, and not everyone will pay for it equally. Indigenous people in Sápmi are now facing the question of whether they must sacrifice some of their land so that gigantic wind turbines can be built there to produce renewable energy. How can we balance the urgency of climate change with the need to protect Sámi culture, such as reindeer herds blocked by wind turbines from traditional grazing areas?

I wondered what it would be like if we were to drive north, all the way north, and ask Sámi people if wind parks could be developed in more remote areas that didn’t disrupt the migratory routes of their reindeer. Lots of people in Oslo insist that the climate emergency means that everyone, including Sámi people, must be willing to make drastic changes. But I was more skeptical. My anthropologist wife, Gro Ween, and I are very aware of imperialist and colonial histories of treating Sápmi as if it is uninhabited and empty, as if the land and its resources exist primarily for the benefit of the Norwegian nation as a whole.

Is there room for a windmill here? Ceavccageađgi is a sacred Sámi cultural heritage site in Várjavuonna/ Varangerfjorden near the border between Norway and Russia 

From my perspective, as an outsider, calls for increasing wind power in Sápmi can also be connected with a specific genre of environmental literature, CliFi (climate fiction). Novels and films of this kind often hope to scare us into action by imagining dystopian futures with apocalyptic climate disasters that have already occurred. We’ve had dire warnings of environmental damage since at least the 1960s, from Rachel Carson up now through Greta Thunberg. But Thunberg, perhaps surprisingly, has joined in with protests against the development of wind power in Sápmi. 

In recent years, CliFi has joined the call to suggest that everyone must be willing to sacrifice everything, right now, to save the planet. Novels as diverse as Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future suggest that protecting beautiful landscapes for their own sake is simply a luxury we cannot afford. But we might also lose sight of alternative ways of living more sustainably, including indigenous knowledge practices that can offer better models. 

One of the things I learned about Norway after moving here is the privileging of a certain kind of utilitarian logic which prioritizes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. By this logic, it might be reasoned that if there are fewer people in Sápmi, then their interests should be outweighed by what seems important for everyone else, such as climate change in this case. I am reminded of what Norwegians (borrowing from the Danes) call janteloven: a belief that no one should think they are better than anyone else, that everyone should be happy with their lot. I wonder if there is a flip side to this thinking in debates over wind power in Sápmi, though, with some seeing it as unfair if the Sámi people are presumed to be more oppressed than any other group, such as working-class “ethnic” Norwegian fishermen on the coasts of Norway, or poor farmers in rural areas, two groups generally assumed to be white. Why should the desires of a tiny minority of people be elevated, some might ask, over broader societal and even global concerns? There are, however, more complicated colonial and ethnic histories and dimensions to take into account.

Deanuvuotna/ Tanafjord in northern Norway 

When I was traveling around Sápmi, my thoughts often wandered into a different literary genre as well, nonfiction nature writing, with texts not necessarily calling for direct environmental activism. From Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to John Muir’s The Mountains of California and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, U.S. nature writing has long sought to describe the ways that awe-inspiring vistas and pastoral landscapes can lead to more meaningful and contemplative lives inspired by natural beauty. Reading about spectacular places can lead us to greater respect for nature, from the ponds and woods of New England in Thoreau’s time to the Sierra Nevada mountains of California for Muir, or the deserts and canyons of the Southwest for Abbey. 

Other texts in the American tradition have resisted the dominance of white men wandering in the wilderness, engaging crucial questions about how to immerse oneself in nature in everyday environments as well, from Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. These texts interweave a commitment to nature with communal engagement, including indigenous and alternative models for better ways of living with the land. Nature writing can also teach us the value of trying to read a place better, with deeper respect for communities of people and other species living together, even if we might be just visiting.

During our three weeks in Sápmi, we were fortunate to be invited to stay with friends sometimes, but we also brought along our tent and camped out in some of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. My wife Gro is engaged in the global movement to repatriate museum objects—such as those taken from Sápmi—back to their sources of origin. Indigenous objects were often acquired through dubious means, to say the least, within broader histories of imperialist and colonial collecting practices. 

She was also eager to speak with Sámi friends about an ongoing crisis in salmon fishing on the Deatnu/ Tana River, which begins in Finland, runs north past Ohcejohka/ Utsjoki and up into Norway, before running all the way up to its mouth at Deanuvuotna/ Tana fjord and emptying finally into the Barents Sea (Barentsáhpi/ Barentshavet). The Deatnu/ Tana River has been one of the biggest and most important salmon rivers in the North, attracting British and other European fishermen since the nineteenth century. More important, though, it’s a crucial site for Sámi fishing and cultural traditions. 

The river is now threatened by a proliferation of Pacific salmon from Russia swimming in and crowding out the Atlantic salmon that Sámi people have depended upon for centuries. Current state management practices in both Norway and Finland have a history of ignoring local knowledge, opting instead for regulations and prohibitions that make it difficult for Sámi fishermen to survive. While trying to find out more about the current crisis, we also drove through long stretches of Sápmi in other directions, from the Kevo Research Station up to places such as Vuorea/ Vardø, the easternmost point of Norway, a tip of land hanging over the Barents Sea (Barentsáhpi/ Barentshavet), longitudinally on top of Russia. Hámmanbirgi/ Hamningberg is where the road ends in that part of the world.

The Barents Sea (Barentsáhpi/ Barentshavet), beyond the end of the road at Hámmanbirgi/ Hamningberg, Norway 

When I was working on my MA in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, I was inspired by faculty members who championed the practice of ecocritics hiking out beyond where the road ends, often walking in the footsteps of nature writers they admired. These were some of the founding figures in the field of ecocriticism in the U.S., who also introduced me to global thinkers such as Vandana Shiva in India and Arne Næss in Norway. Wandering around Hámmanbirgi/ Hamningberg, I was reminded of the passion of fellow graduate students back in Reno who thought that reading environmental literature should lead to direct action, such as protests and writing letters to Congress in favor of more wilderness protection, as well as throwing wrenches (sometimes literally) into the machinery of logging, mining, and other extractive industries. 

I was interested in longer-term effects, too, and broader connections between environmental literature and other social justice issues, including histories of environmental racism, imperialism, sexism, and conquest. I continue to think that literature does not necessarily need to lead immediately or directly to letter-writing or sabotage as proof of one’s commitments. Immersing oneself in dynamic texts and spectacular landscapes can have other kinds of effects, too, including awe and wonder, respect and humility.

Lágesvuotna/ Laksefjorden in northern Norway 

The sunlight and the wind feel different to me in Sápmi. The roads are narrow, the distances vast, but huge stretches of land come to feel like bioregional neighborhoods. The idea of community is expanded to a scale of hundreds of kilometers, ranging up and over from one fjord to the next. We drove countless kilometers over the course of several weeks, staring out the window in wonder at oceans of blue sky over enormous blocks of green fluttering through the leaves of stunted birch trees, lit up by low slanting light over the horizon: from Ohcejohka/ Utsjoki up to Deanušaldi/ Tana Bru and over to Deanodat/ Vestertana; across to Kárášjohka/ Karasjok; up through Kalak and on to Skeavvonjárga/ Skjånes; turning back and meandering along from Idjavuotna/ Ifjord to Deanodat/ Vestertana once again, camping or staying over at various places along the way. 

I tried to imagine meeting up at turn-offs marked by signs made for the winter on those roads, showing where to form columns of cars and vehicles to drive together and steer clear through blizzards and whiteouts. I was told that you need to follow the car in front of you so close that you could almost touch their bumper. There would be the stress and anxiety of not losing sight of that car ahead, but the solidarity of knowing you were not alone. Community can become condensed, then, into a column crawling through the winter landscape. Other times of year the dispersion of people can stretch across hundreds of kilometers. I can imagine what it might be like for the roads to feel so familiar, though, so local, whether inching along in winter or flying through once the snow has pulled back. 

What I began to feel more deeply was the sense that migratory patterns of both animals and people can work together to illustrate a broader understanding of the concept of home. In his poem, “My Home is in my Heart,” Sámi writer and artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää/ Áillohaš tells us, “My home is in my heart/ it migrates with me”:

How can I explain

that I cannot live in just one place

and still live

when I live

among all these tundras

You are standing in my bed

my privy is behind the bushes

the sun is my lamp

the lake my wash bowl

[F1]

Deanuvuotna/ Tanafjord from north of Skeavvonjárga/ Skjånes 

I could imagine reindeer wandering across entire high plateaus in the summer, down toward one fjord before back up and over to the next, sometimes in small groups, other times just a pair here or there. I wondered how they could all be found and gathered together at the right time. I pictured instead far-flung and desperate cattle roundups in the canyons of New Mexico, as Abbey writes about them in Desert Solitaire. In Sápmi, I was told, just wait for them where you know they will go in the autumn. Go to where their wandering migrations will take them, knowing the pattern, aiming for the place where you know you can all meet up again. It makes little sense to focus on one reindeer or one place in isolation from everything else. Each is in deep reciprocal relation with the whole, within this larger sense of home, even if it’s hard to see that at first.

Reindeer on the road 

What has disrupted these relations is the history of imperialist and colonial interventions, stolen and appropriated indigenous land, inadequate acknowledgment of alternative ways of understanding and living with the land. In a poem titled “For Us,” Sámi poet and activist Timimie Gassko Märak reveals not only histories of conquest and appropriation in Sápmi, but also the twisted logic of saying it is for their own good: 

 What we want

To be acknowledged as a people treated as an

            equal

What they do

They cut our hair and our forests

They say they are doing it for us

Always ignoring the chorus crying out facts

            and feeling

[F2]

Märak connects the dots between reindeer and wind power: 

They are killing us killing our reindeer

They are killing us killing our languages

They are killing us making wind millions 

Literary texts from other parts of the world highlight these kinds of histories, too. I was reminded of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, set in the Sundarbans region of India and Bangladesh, where tigers have been valued more than indigenous people for the sake of ecotourism. And Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest, with magically real allusions to the history of U.S. imperialism in South and Central America, and mineral resources extracted for capitalist profits in the Global North. And Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, which follows the lives and lands of Native Americans decimated by the not-so-slow violence of contagious diseases and economic extortion. 

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the difference between settler colonial and indigenous ways of thinking about the land in the U.S.: “In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground.”

[F3]

Sámi people have their own histories of land appropriated by private interests and national governments, as well as boarding schools and forced integration analogous to what happened in the U.S. It is now, supposedly, the time for Truth and Reconciliation in Norway, a process which took five years, resulting in a report finally published and delivered to the Norwegian Parliament on June 1, 2023. While the report acknowledges the violent history of the forced “Norwegianization” of Sámi people, “reconciliation” at this point seems difficult, to say the least. The Sámi Parliament is supposed to be consulted about plans affecting Sápmi, such as the development of wind power, the dumping of waste into northern fjords, and the “electrification” of industries such as natural gas plants. But the recommendations of the Sámi Parliament are not binding. They can be simply ignored by the Norwegian government, along with the companies they authorize to develop and dump and extract as they please in Sápmi.

From Kárášjohka/ Karasjok to Guovdageaidnu/ Kautokeino, from Leavdnja/ Lakselv to Deatnu/ Tana, the Sámi people are deeply intertwined with their land. My visit helped me to see some of these relations more clearly. The landscape is obviously not empty, even if everything is on a much larger scale. It depends in part upon your focal distance. After reading Valkeapää, it seems to me now that erecting wind turbines in Sápmi is like having the government install giant fans in your living room, without your permission. Or building a giant fence right through the main hall of your community center. You might be able to walk around it, but your home and community will have been split in two. 

In the area of Fovsen/ Fosen in Mid Norway, an enormous wind park now cuts reindeer off from traditional lands, providing habitat instead for gigantic wind turbines. In 2021 the Norwegian Supreme Court ruled that the Fosen wind turbines were in violation of Sámi human rights because they disrupt the migration of Sámi reindeer that are intimately interwoven with Sámi cultural traditions. After the ruling, Sámi people began counting the number of days when nothing happened. The Norwegian government announced no plan afterward to take down the wind turbines. There was no acknowledgment that they were obligated to do so. Sámi people gathered for protests five hundred days later, seven hundred days later, and then a full two years after the decision, but nothing still had been done to dismantle the illegal turbines. 

The violation of human rights had been ongoing since the construction of the turbines first began in 2016. The United Nations commission on racial discrimination recommended the construction to be stopped in 2018. Agreements were finally reached in March of 2024 between the wind power company and Sámi groups north and south of Fosen, who were offered financial compensation and alternative grazing lands for Sámi reindeer. But the wind turbines remain in place, nonetheless. And now there are plans for more to be built in the area. There is no viable way for the Sámi people and their reindeer to simply ignore these blades cutting through their traditions, their culture, their way of life.

Greta Thunberg speaks at Fovsen/ Fosen protests in Oslo, October 2023

What I came to realize during my brief time in Sápmi is that there are no places remote enough for wind parks to be somehow inconsequential. Roads must be built—often much wider and more disruptive than initially proposed—in order to make those supposedly remote places more accessible. Relations between humans and other species are inevitably impacted in countless ways, even if the scales of time and space are difficult to comprehend. Reindeer sometimes migrate through different areas each year, in rotation, in order to ensure that various habitats are not over-depleted. Deep fjords are never deep enough to absorb toxic dumping or parasitic fish farming, even though the impacts and consequences might not be visible in the short term.

I came to find the misguided logic of sacrifice particularly disturbing as we finished our visit to Sápmi. I cannot speak for anyone but myself. I cannot say whether some people in Sápmi should be in favor of particular wind parks, mines, or dumping sites. But I hope that some of “us” might try to understand better why some of “them” find it so offensive to suggest that now is the time for Sámi people to make more sacrifices of their land in Sápmi. We cannot sacrifice their culture and traditions for the good of everyone else. The need to develop renewable energy cannot be more important than protecting their sustainable ways of living with the land. This does not mean that we can’t put up more wind parks near Oslo or other privileged parts of the world. If you start thinking that people already live there, that you would need to appropriate land and disrupt current practices, including perhaps wandering in the wilderness, you might begin to see more clearly what’s being asked in Sápmi.

Kalak in northern Norway 

The end of the road doesn’t mean anything if you’re not in a car. In the end, I wanted to take a sail, throw it up into the wind, and steer an imaginary floating frigate into those wind parks, tilting at those windmills, knocking the wind out of neo-imperialist rhetoric and its damaging consequences. I came to realize, though, that what all of us really need to do is to listen better. As Sámi scholar Liisa-Rávná Finbog puts it, “If we listen to the whispers of the wind, they speak, sharing both stories and feelings across and throughout borders of time and space. Whether we hear those stories and connect with those feelings, however, depends on our ability to take a breath—inhale, exhale—be still and listen.”

[F4]

Better answers can be found in Sápmi, but only if Sámi people are consulted first, not last, and their recommendations are mandated, not ignored. It’s time to listen to the local knowledge of Sámi people, including writers such as Valkeapää:

All of this is my home

these fjords rivers lakes

the cold the sunlight the storms

The night and day of the fjelds

happiness and sorrow

sisters and brothers

All of this is my home

and I carry it in my heart

The blades of wind turbines might seem benign, necessary, even redemptive, for those focused first and foremost on the global climate crisis. But the cuts those blades make are deep and cannot be read clearly outside the frame of longer histories and contexts, including the literary genres and politics that bring us here. Our collective climate futures require not only greater attention to all of those stories, but also more careful and close reading of the wind in Sápmi.

Looking out over our tent into the Barents Sea (Barentsáhpi/ Barentshavet) near Hámmanbirgi/ Hamningberg 

All photo credits to Michael Lundblad. 

 
FOOTNOTES:

 [F1]. From Trekways of the Wind (1994), an English translation of Valkeapää’s book Ruoktu Vaimmus (1985), by Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordström and Harald Gaski. Permission to reprint has been granted by the publisher, DAT.
 [F2]. “For Us” (2021) is reprinted in Čatnosat. The Sámi Pavilion, Indigenous Art, Knowledge and Sovereignty, eds. Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Katya García-Antón, and Beaska Niillas (Office for Contemporary Art Norway OCA, 2022), 23-24. Permission to reprint the poem has been granted by the poet, Timimie Gassko Märak.

[F3]. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013), 17.

[F4]. Liisa-Rávná Finbog, “Seeing the Unseen,” in Čatnosat. The Sámi Pavilion, Indigenous Art, Knowledge and Sovereignty, eds. Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Katya García-Antón, and Beaska Niillas (Office for Contemporary Art Norway OCA, 2022), 26-37.