Indigenous land claims and multiple landscapes: postcolonial openings in Finnmark, Norway

Abstract

This chapter explores an ongoing process of establishing local and indigenous user rights in Finnmark, Northern Norway. Our concern is the extent to which this ongoing process allows for what we tentatively refer to as ‘otherness within’, i.e. the nation ́s acknowledgement of multiple natures; and/or of indigenous and local nature practices that are radically different from hegemonic and legal notions of property. In our analysis, we explicitly engage Australian legal processes as a comparative figure. Our aim is not to provide an exhaustive account of Australian native title processes but rather to use this as a lens for examining the Norwegian indigenous legal process. The comparison is triggered by the following observation: While legal practices framing landscapes and indigenous rights are hardly straightforward anywhere, the Australian native title framework appears, at certain moments at least, to encompass the possibility of multiple natures; as it has incorporated attempts to engage an indigenous other with radically divergent practices of nature and time (see for example Verran 1998, see also Stengers 2005). Our concern then, is to what extent postcolonial openings provided by an acknowledgement of multiplicity, are incorporated in the ongoing Sami rights process in Norway. This chapter is part of "Nature, Temporality and Environmental Management: Scandinavian and Australian perspectives on peoples and landscapes". © 2017 Routledge