Cultural History Museum

Drawing on current changes in nature practices in the County of Finnmark in Northern Norway we reflect upon the ways in which indigenous and non-indigenous locals, in a period of transition, engage with and relate to their environment in a place which is often described by outsiders as remote. Here, nature and nature activities remain central to peoples' identity, their belonging and heritage. Nature is regularly cited as the reason for staying when so many people move away.

In 2009 the Norwegian Directorate of Nature Management warned that the Atlantic salmon population in River Tana in arctic Norway was dramatically reduced. Active measures had to be taken to prevent future extinction. Local fishermen protested against this description of the cause of events. On fishing expeditions, expert claims were continuously discussed. Such conversations were, and are, a substantial part of everyday conversation amongst local fishermen. In this chapter, the fishermen's conversations are used as an entry into particular aspects of local knowledge, its relational nature, and the implicit epistemological politics. As their witness, during hours of fishing and conversing, I observed how the fishermen scrutinized scientific knowledge claims. They didn't just question and compare the expert's knowledge claims with what they themselves knew. Significantly, the fishermen made comparisons of how knowing was done. The ongoing conversations of the fishermen enacted a resistance more complex than what was visible at first sight. Positing fisheries science as the Other, local knowledge was enacted and assembled as fluid and heterogeneous, including numerous unequal and loosely assembled entities.

This paper compares two rivers, Tana River in Northern Norway and Columbia River on the northwest coast of the United States of America. Both rivers host indigenous populations, the Sámi and the Nez Perce, whose cultural and material existence depends upon salmon. Because these people live indigenously within highly industrial, postcolonial societies, their lives have been part of larger economic, political and legal structures for substantial periods of time. In these rivers, peoples have been, and are currently dealing with the possibility of salmon extinction. This article is concerned with how such a crisis has been interpreted and acted upon within two nation's natural-resource management regimes. We observe how the threat of extinction has initiated commotion where nature, economies, legal instruments, politics and science have come into play, in ways that reveal differences in the Norwegian and American constellations of interests and powers, manifested as differences in natural resource management regimes' hierarchies of positions. The outcome is the protection of different entities, which could be labeled cultural and biological sustainability. In the Columbia River, cultural sustainability was promoted while in the Tana, biological sustainability became prioritized. By way of our comparison we ask if the protection of one kind of sustainability has to be to the detriment of the other.

Indigenous people live in places that non-indigenous people generally consider nature. As these peoples' livelihoods often are in this nature, their lives are frequently bureaucratised in ways that most of us would never encounter. This article describes my long-term effort to find ways to explore such bureaucratic processes in practice as part of my contribution to an environmental anthropology. I describe how I methodologically and theoretically explore such processes by using two examples of my writing, the articles "Blåfjella-Skjaekerfjella nasjonalpark: Naturforvaltning som produksjon av natur/sted" and "Enacting Human and Non-Human Indigenous Salmon, Sami and Norwegian Natural Resource Management". The first text describes Sami reindeer herders fighting the establishment of a national park. The other concerns an attempt of the Directorate of Nature Management to reregulate sea salmon fishing.