Sápmi and Its Cultural History: Bound to the Land—Connection to the Land and the Loss of It in Sámi Communities

The seminar consists of three lectures. Gudrun Norstedt presents A Border Matter: Citizenship and Grazing Rights in the Northernmost Fennoscandia, 1850–1950. Åsa Össbo presents Protecting Reindeer Herders’ Land? The Contradictory Consequences of Establishing the Cultivation Boundary in Norrbotten County, 1867–1890. Finally, Kristina Sehlin MacNeil discusses Contested Lands, Changing Worlds: Sámi and Indigenous Relationships to the Land in an Era of Geopolitical Change.

Gudrun Norstedt is a researcher at Várdduo whose research focuses on how the Sámi have historically used and managed natural resources. She is particularly interested in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Sámi still constituted the majority population across much of the so-called Lappmark and were also in the majority among lay judges in the district courts. Her current research focuses primarily on bygdesamer, Sámi who were permanently settled outside the Lappmark and the reindeer grazing mountains. In recent years, she has also participated in the interdisciplinary research project Integrating Traditional and Local Knowledge to Understand a Century of Ecosystem Change in the Arctic, in which she has worked with ecologists and sociologists to examine how mountain environments have been affected by both climate change and grazing. An important aspect of this analysis is the major changes in land use resulting from nation-state policies, particularly with regard to cross-border reindeer herding.

Åsa Össbo is a researcher at Várdduo and works on a range of research projects focusing on energy production and land-use conflicts in Sámi areas. From 2025 to 2030, she is a member of the research programme KOSA – Conflict or Cooperation? Learning from History, Tensions and Conflicts Surrounding Land Use in Sweden’s Arctic Region, a collaborative initiative involving researchers at Luleå University of Technology, Ájtte – Swedish Mountain and Sámi Museum in Jokkmokk, Umeå University, and Lund University. She received her PhD in history in 2014 with a thesis on Swedish hydropower expansion in the reindeer-herding area and has since, among other things, taught Sámi studies. Her research encompasses historical and contemporary Indigenous land use, conflicts surrounding and consequences of natural resource extraction and the energy transition in Indigenous territories and northern rural regions, as well as Indigenous labour history, particularly in the Arctic.

Kristina Sehlin MacNeil is Associate Professor of Sámi Studies and, since 1 March 2026, Senior Lecturer at Várdduo. Her research examines conflicts and power relations affecting Indigenous peoples, with a particular focus on cultural, structural, extractive, and lateral violence in relation to Indigenous and local communities. She has developed and applied the concept of extractive violence to analyse how different forms of resource extraction affect Indigenous communities. She continues to develop conflict research in collaboration with Indigenous communities by examining lateral violence and its connections to external pressures on communities in Indigenous contexts. She leads and participates in several research projects, including an ongoing project on lateral violence that forms a central part of her work. She is also a researcher in the project Reassembling Democracy in Sweden: Trans-Disciplinary Research on Minority Narratives, Civic Imagination, and Participatory Futures in Sweden and Beyond, funded by the Swedish Research Council and carried out in collaboration with researchers at Linköping University. She is also a co-investigator in the Canadian knowledge network MinErAl (Knowledge Network on Mining Encounters and Indigenous Sustainable Livelihoods).

Várdduo – Centre for Sámi Research is a research unit at Umeå University dedicated to strengthening and advancing research on Sámi and other Indigenous issues. Várdduo works across disciplines, national borders, and international contexts, serving as a meeting place for researchers and doctoral students from a wide range of fields. Current research focuses primarily on history, land rights and land-use conflicts, natural resource extraction, education, and health. Várdduo coordinates and initiates research, supports research networks, and contributes to scholarly exchange through activities such as seminars. It is a unique center of expertise for Sámi research in Sweden, with research communication and collaboration at the core of its work. Várdduo’s activities are shaped to a large extent by collaboration with Indigenous communities, and a key principle is that research findings should benefit those communities.

For more information about the seminar series Sápmi and Its Cultural History, click HERE