chapters

Patrick Dillon, Dawid Bunikowski

This chapter sets out the organising framework for the book based on a synthesis of cultural ecology and customary law. Cultural ecology because it is a framework through which we can understand how people engage with their surroundings, make sense of them, live and work in them, and create narratives that connect and sustain both themselves and their environments. Customary law because it deals with established patterns of behaviour within social settings that are locally endorsed, thus offering the possibility of localised protection that is culturally inclusive rather than imposed. The introductory chapter also explains the relationship between the core Arctic chapters in part one, and the broader context in part two, drawn from case studies elsewhere in the world.

Dawid Bunikowski, Francis Joy and Patrick Dillon

The concluding chapter will draw together the major arguments from all the contributions and integrate them into a new, integrative framework of legal pluralism, with the intention of it becoming a manifesto for action. Legal pluralism is a framework for reconciling customary ways of being in environments with statutory forms of governance. The Western legislator often depreciates “the soul of the land”. This brings social conflicts, misunderstandings, and personal pain. Traditionally, in indigenous cosmologies, lands are both material and spiritual entities, both nature and divinity. These places are special in every possible sense. The framework of legal pluralism and cultural ecology proposes that local spiritual practices can be respected by reconciling statutory legislation with customary law, a step towards inclusive protection of cultural heritage. Indigenous or “pagan” sacred places should be “protected” in the same way as e.g. Christian sacred places (or sacred places of other religions), and this involves rethinking the relationships between traditional practices, their linguistic and behavioural expressions, and dominant hegemonies and ideologies.

Romona Bennet

Romona’s chapter focuses on the representation of sacred landscapes in two works by Guyanese writers – Pauline Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale and Wilson Harris’s collection of poetry, Eternity to Season. Melville’s novel centres the perspectives of her main Indigenous characters, including their relationship with the circum-Roraima landscape of the wider Guiana region. Wilson Harris, a major Caribbean literary theorist, novelist and poet, also features the diverse landscapes of Guyana throughout his oeuvre. Many of his works, including some of the poems in Eternity to Season, acknowledge and celebrate the ‘living’ Guyanese interior landscape, a reference to the Indigenous ancestral presence, but also to the continuity of close relationships between Indigenous peoples and that landscape.

In both Melville’s and Harris’s works, these landscapes are sacred places, and the chapter examines what constitutes such ‘sacredness’ and how it relates to the Indigenous characters within the texts. For example, how do Indigenous culture, history and memory connect to these landscapes within the texts?  Extractivist industries such as gold and diamond mining and logging continue to change and affect Guyana’s interior landscapes and Indigenous Peoples in many ways. It is therefore important to examine how literary writers such as Melville and Harris represent these landscapes and what these literary texts might contribute to current discourses about protecting these sacred places for future generations. 

Hege Dalen

This chapter explores the reclamation of Indigenous Sámi knowledge as a response to the epistemicide inflicted by colonial governments, particularly on indigenous spiritual traditions. It focuses on the sacred places of Vaapste—a region encompassing sacred mountains, rivers, stones and other persons spanning the Norway-Sweden border—and their significance for Sámi identity and cultural continuity over 9 000 years.

Central to this exploration are the ceremonial practices in Arts represented by the Vapsten gievrie (South Sámi drum), the gåetie (the turf-hut), and storytelling from the sacred mountains Aahkansnjurhtjie and Atoeklimpoe. These practices strengthen connections between Vapsten maadtoe, the landscape, laahkoe, the family, ancestors and other human relations, and saajve, the saajve-birds, saajve-fish, saajve-animals and saajve-persons emphasizing as persons in South Sámi cosmology and worldview. The chapter is a study of holy landscapes from a pluriversal perspectiv, and the complexitiy recognizing the landscape as a common or shared landscape.

The identification of sacred landscapes by historical sources, oral traditions and visual art as a way of beeing and making yourself in the world, demonstrates Sámi cosmology and reaffirm cultural identity.

The chapter addresses the complexities but also the possibilities with Indigenous Methodology and purpose a pluriversal perspective as a way to coexist in common or shared landscapes trough generations.

Ayonghe Akonwi 

The question of how to go about sacred sites or places of spiritual importance to a people has been widely debated within the anthropological literature. As it stands, there are often no obvious or concrete answers, especially when we think about the different actors that shape the use of such places. This is similarly observed in the example of collaborative management (co-management) which Grazia Borrini, Paul Nadasdy, Fikret Berkes to name a few, have explored broadly in their work. While this question remains a challenge and certainly, an issue of interest, for many scholars in anthropology, I would like to situate this problem in my work with people of the Mount Cameroon National Park (MCNP) in Sub-Saharan West Africa.

I focus on ethnographic experiences, drawing excerpts from an earlier study I published in 2022 entitled “Knowledge Integration in Co-management: A Study on the People of the Mount Cameroon National Park”. Some of my thoughts on this matter, I have briefly shared through a contribution “Preserving Sacred Sites in the Arctic: Lessons from elsewhere?” published in 2022 in the Journal Nordicum – Mediterraneum. However, I hope to advance this discussion even further with the subject of “reconciling the ‘sacred’ in state-protected forests”, using a book chapter publication. I believe there are many lessons we can gain from the MCNP case. In this example, I was opportune to work with the Bakweri people for over seven years, understanding their coping mechanisms, and capability to continue their spiritual use of forest despite the complex nature of a State-induced system for managing forest. From my work with them, I was able to reveal some of the knowledge they mask beneath their day-to-day practices allowing them to maintain certain spiritual practices without jeopardizing the preservation of biodiversity which is often of difficulty as observed in previous literature.

Within this chapter, I explore how and why modern forms of land-use such as tourism and extractive industries can co-exist with people’s spiritual practices, and its relevance to maintaining biodiversity and a culture. By differentiating between conservation specialists’ perceptions and local people’s spiritual meanings, I discuss how spiritual places are categorized, used, and managed. One revelation from this chapter, is that, in complex settings of co-managing State-protected forests, it is possible to promote multifaceted uses among diverse actors such that people’s connection to sacred sites may endure even when sacred sites incorporate other interests at hand. This observation, however, depends on what kind of norms, values, and taboos people associate with such places. I hope the chapter will be a useful contribution to the problem of going about sacred sites as well as adding to advance scholarly literature on the subject matter. 

Francis Joy

Within this new paradigm of research into sacred places, a broad focus has been placed on the use and status of locales as such connected to Sámi culture, which are linked with earlier sacrificial and offering practices. These places are called sieidi in the north Sámi language and are chiefly large boulders, small lakes and in some cases whole mountains designated as sacred landscapes. For decades, little has been known about both the activities and kinds of offerings dedicated to the particular. Now, as the Sámi in Finland and further afield revitalize languages, cultures, beliefs, traditions and practices the visibility of sacred places which are connected with certain supernatural powers has increased significantly, as has research into both past and present subsistence activities connected with sanctuaries as such. This, on the one hand has been important, but on the other hand it means many sacred places have been put into the public domain and subsequently become exotic as tourism destinations. More broadly speaking, which means that because of in what ways some of the most revered places have been appropriated into the tourism industry there are a number of problems which have arisen as a consequence. These for example are connected to acts of vandalism where some boulders have been damaged by fire and maltreatment. In addition, whilst some places bare evidence of contemporary use by the Sámi, tourists have also taken it upon themselves to place offerings on or around them causing litter which means these conservation areas often look as if they have been contaminated and filled with clutter, thus, making it difficult to know who has offered what? Sacred sieidi shrines are also illustrated on Sámi noaidi drums from the seventeenth century, thus stating obvious links between both tangible and intangible cultural heritage within Sámi culture.

The research focus and aims present evidence of different types of maltreatment of three Sámi sacred places in north-west Lapland, Finland, which are protected by law, and a discussion is likewise included regarding other kinds of threats from a proposed widescale mining project in the same area.

Alariesto Eleonora

The sacred places and areas of the Sámi people hold profound significance for Sámi cultural heritage, collective identities, and livelihoods. These sacred places function as gateways for communication with ancestors and the more-than-human beings of nature. They are also Sámi Cultural Environments, where the visible and invisible, as well as the tangible and intangible, intertwine to form a relational environment. Sacred areas uphold and sustain relationships between humans and other beings through various meahcci practices rooted in mutual respect, communication, and negotiation. However, these relational and sacred cultural environments are increasingly threatened by various forms of extractivism. Such activities violate not only the sacredness and sovereignty of Sámi communities but also their sense of safety, belonging, and home.

This article examines the case of Rásttigáisá, where the Finnish energy company St1 plans to develop a windmill park called Dávvi. The Rásttigáisá fell area is sacred and holds immense generational and symbolic significance for the Sámi people. The article explores research that analyzes the hegemonies of "clean" and "dirty" and investigates how colonial discourses have been used to justify "green" energy transitions in Sápmi.

The research draws on anthropologist Mary Douglas’s theory of contamination to decolonize the racist and colonial undertones embedded in notions of "clean" and "dirty." It seeks to address questions about how the Sámi community perceives the Dávvi windmill park as a violating contaminant, threatening the sacredness and meahcci practices connected to Sámi cultural environments.

As part of the University of Lapland’s Sámi Political Traditions and Thought in Co-Becoming with the Environment (SÁMIPOLITY) and Sámi Knowledge and Practices in the Era of the Green Transition (MÁHTUT) projects, this research investigates how human-centered extractivism contaminates the living, sacred, and shared cultural environments of humans and more-than-human beings. It also examines how such activities exacerbate inequalities between the Indigenous Sámi people and the majority population. This project has received a mobility grant from the SSHRC-funded WAGE project, enabling field research at Rásttigáisá in 2025.

Roza Laptander

The cult of stones and mountains among the Nenets is very well developed and has a significant role in their culture. In the Polar Urals there are several sacred mountains that are especially revered by the Nenets. In general, the veneration of stones and mountains among the Nenets can be associated with the cult of ancestors. This cult of stones and mountains is connected to worshiping the spirits of the land and its custodians, who can help humans and protect them from bad spirits. The soviet ethnographer Lyudmila Khomich wrote that it has many similarities with the same cults of mountains among the Sámi people. In one of the Nenets legends, a stone could appear from a coal of a family hearth, perhaps explaining why some of the Nenets religious objects are represented by stones.

In the Nenets culture people worshipped mountains as representatives of male and female deities which manifest as local land spirits. There are several sacred mountains in the Polar Urals. The most important mountain is Pe Mal Hada (grandmother of the edge of the mountains). There are also other sacred mountains: Minesey, Yengania Pe (in Nenets: yanganya means ‘special, unusual, uncommon’, pe ‘a stone, a mountain’). This chapter tells the story of the singing mountain Yanganya Pe, which was destroyed In the 1970s to extract deposits of marble. Later, in the 1990s, during the construction of the Ob-Bovanenkovo railway, the stones from the same Nenets sacred mountain Yanganya Pe were used for building embankments. Even several years after its destruction, Nenets elders remember the Yanganya Pe mountain as one of the important sacred places in the Yamal peninsula.

Locals people have very respectful attitudes about the Nenets sacred places, because they have a special power that helps a person maintain good luck and prosperity. Such places are comparable to a living temple, a symbol of eternal time, well-being and purity. They are always associated with the supernatural aspects of the universe, which build a harmonious relationship between man and nature. Many sacred places in Yamal are still not officially recognized by state bodies, so they are poorly protected and are in a vulnerable position. Therefore, the work to protect the shrines of indigenous peoples is very important. This will help preserve this important part of traditional culture, their memory of places, people, as well as songs and stories – oral traditions associated with them.

Florian Stammler

Yamal-Nenets reindeer nomads spend all of the year with their herds, camps and families migrating across the Arctic tundra between the ocean in the North and the forest zone. in doing so, they reiterate complex relations with the spirits of the land and of relatives. These become expressed on the landscape in sacred sites on significant places, and mobile sanctuaries in nomads's sledges in each camp pulled by spiritually significant reindeer. This contribution illustrates how people's relations to these stationary and mobile sanctuaries, and hence their relations to the spiritual world have changed in the last human generation. The analysis focuses on such significant external influences on this relation as industrial development, socio-economic change, and the change in theo-diversity (Vitebsky 2017).

Examples from fieldwork with nomads show, however, that such external factors do not only lead to erosion of spiritual knowledge: they also trigger opposite tendencies , such as the reclaiming of sacred sites threatened by industrial destruction as well as changes observed in privacy and publicness of sacred practices on the land. This calls for more fine-grained and locally better emplaced analyses of human-spirit relations that consider them as processes in flux rather than as stable settings. Such a processual understanding of the spirits better correspond to Nenets nomadism, where the entire life bases on the practice of mobility and relations to the land are enacted through movement.

Anna Stammler-Gossmann, Arctic Centre, University of Lapland

This study concerns the human experiences of living by and with the river, which appears as a visible power source. It analyses how a place's 'troubled' and beautiful properties are sensed through various forces and encounters in human and other–than–human relations. I focus on the different frameworks at play in creating undercurrents of meaning that also permeate the community's perception of and attitude towards disastrous events (such as flooding or misfortunes).