During summer 2024, I had the privilege of working with two St. Olaf undergraduate students on a Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) project focused on the Sámi-led protests against the Alta-Kautokeino dam.
After gaining a solid understanding of the major actors and events of the protests, we examined poems and songs from the archive of the People’s Campaign against the development of the Alta/Kautokeino-watershed (Folkeasksjonen mot utbygging av Alta/Kautokeino-vassdraget), housed at the Alta museum. (Staff at the museum graciously provided us with digital access to scanned versions of relevant materials.) We examined these poems and songs to try to understand what understandings of and beliefs about the river they conveyed.
Parker has an exceptional talent for languages and their language skills proved invaluable for studying texts from the People’s Campaign archive. We also used the newspaper archives of the National Library of Norway–Parker was great at identifying search terms and methods to find what we were looking for in this impressively comprehensive archive. Katie is an Environmental Studies major, so her background in environmental science was extremely helpful for gaining an understanding of the impacts protesters believed the dam would have on the river and surrounding land, as well as the impacts that have actually materialized.
These texts we analyzed are almost exclusively in Norwegian, and they are meant for a broad audience that certainly included members of the indigenous Sámi community, but also community members with varied opinions and identities. Since the Alta protests are often credited with creating the political momentum necessary for the clarification and expansion of Sámi rights, we wanted to observe the extent to which Sámi issues and perspectives were emphasized in these poems and songs. Our research findings will hopefully be published soon, in a scholarly anthology focused on Indigenous environmental justice.
One of Katie’s friends got a photo of us in action at SASS
We presented at two different conferences in spring 2025–the first was an online workshop convened in association with the Ecocritical Network of Scandinavia, the second was the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, which conveniently met in Minneapolis this year.