A Rape of the Earth: Sámi Feminists Against Mines

Lecturer
Dr. Ina Knobblock (born in Jiellevárre, 1981) is a Sámi and Tornedalian feminist scholar. Her dissertation Writing-Weaving Sámi Feminisms: Stories and Conversations (2022) explores, illuminates, and analyses Sámi feminist knowledges. She is a lecturer in gender studies at Gaskeuniversiteete/Mid Sweden University. 

Title
A Rape of the Earth: Sámi Feminists Against Mines

Abstract
This paper is a Sámi feminist analysis of large-scale resource extraction in Sábme, the transnational Sámi territory spanning northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Murmansk peninsula. Specifically, it centres on the mining of Indigenous land within the borders of the Swedish nation-state to explore the knowledge evolving from Sámi feminists engaged in the anti-mining struggle. Here, I argue that Indigenous epistemes – i.e., the foregrounding of relationality and interdependency between land, humans, nonhuman beings, and the natural environment – are foundational to the research participants’ struggles against mining in Sábme. From within a Sámi knowledge system, mining entails fracturing the relational web of connection. Consequently, mining represents a multi-generational threat against the survival of Sámi body lands and life-worlds. 

Information
The seminar will be held in English. 

Please send an email to concurrences@lnu.se if you want to participate via Zoom. 

Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies