Sacred Places in the Arctic and Beyond

Researcher

Ayonghe Akonwi is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Forest Science, University of Helsinki. He is currently pursuing a research project within the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science entitled ‘Future ‘Ecotopias’ of Sustainability in Nordic Forests Systems’. He uses Ernest Callenbach’s ‘ecotopia’ concept to examine different perceptions about a near-utopian future of using ecologically balanced principles in sustaining people’s relations with forests. He has also worked with indigenous people and their connection to protected forests in the past years of conducting his doctoral research and has continued to explore these issues. For instance, his ethnographic work with people of the Mount Cameroon National Park in Sub-Saharan West Africa illustrates the agency of indigenous residents and persistence in their ways of knowing the land in a National Park. More recently, he has worked closely with colleagues from Lund University, Copenhagen University, and the University of Helsinki, within the project GreenPole to assess forest policy outcomes over the last two-three decades in Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. He also engages his research with anthropological insights to evaluating Nordic Forest Policies.
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Researcher

Åsa Andersson Martti is a researcher and Master’s student in the History of Religions at the University of Gävle (HiG). She is an Indigenous Sámi and Tornedalian artist, traditional healer, and academic researcher based in Kiruna, the northernmost town in Swedish Sápmi. Due to expanding mining operations for rare earth minerals, Kiruna as a town is undergoing relocation, dismantling, and reconstruction. Åsa´s research examines the existential, spiritual, and emotional health aspects of utilitarianism and technological applications related to extractivism and colonialism, focusing on how industries, stakeholders, and politicians address the voices of people, places, and more-than-human entities.

Additionally, Åsa is the founder of the historical and animistic pilgrim trail, the Sámi Trail of Tears, inspired by her mother´s childhood memories from the village of Lainio during the state´s forced dislocation of the North Sámi people, understanding the landscape as a living archive.

Researcher

I started my academic career as a linguist, then became an educator. I spent my professional life pursuing the inclusion of minorities within mainstream education. I have rediscovered my roots in language and am beginning to understand that ‘indigenous’ is about the way we ‘language’ our world. ‘To Language’ is a verb. I cannot render my Grandmother into glue, but I can reduce a mountain to obtain a tonne of lithium. I language my Grandmother as venerable. If I language mountains, as sacred spaces then I cannot reduce them. ‘Languaging mountains’ is the same as ‘languaging’ children (people, culture, histories) who are different. Indigenous languages do strange things -one they challenge a hegemonic (western) world view; secondly they produce a (grammatical) connection with the world that may offer hope against alienating minorities and an inexorable destruction of the planet.

Researcher

Romona Bennett is Guyanese, of Lokono-Arawak heritage and she currently works in the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Guyana. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Leicester in 2022. Her PhD research focuses on representations of Indigenous women in cultural texts set in Guyana from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. While her background is in Literature, her PhD and current research are influenced by Indigenous studies, including Indigenous feminism. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, especially Caribbean and Guyanese literatures; decolonising the curriculum; Indigenous Guyanese heritage and culture, such as the safeguarding and preservation of Indigenous languages; Indigenous Guyanese history; social justice for Indigenous Peoples, especially in Guyana. She has a special interest in research that focuses on education for Indigenous Guyanese children, particularly at the secondary level. Romona also has a passion for archival work, and enjoys rummaging through old diaries, letters, photographs, museum collections and anything of interest. Romona has worked on collaborative projects with the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research (SDCELAR) at the British Museum, and her work appears in SDCELAR publications, including in Mapping a New Museum (Routledge, 2021). She has also published in the Victorian Studies journal in a forum on ‘Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom’.

Associate Professor

Dawid Bunikowski holds a PhD from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland (2009), and resides in North Karelia, eastern Finland. Dr Bunikowski is an Associate Member of the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford (www.bfriars.ox.ac.uk). He is an Associate with the Centre for Law and Religion, Cardiff University. He serves as a Professor (Law) at the State University of Applied Sciences in Wloclawek (Poland) and a Visiting Lecturer in the University of Eastern Finland School of Theology. He is also a part-time Lecturer at the University of Guyana (Department of Law) and Karelia University of Applied Sciences (Finland). He was granted the Docent title in the philosophy of law in the Arctic (by the Rector of the University of Lapland on the request of the Arctic Centre; Finland). For example, he was also a Visiting Professor at Carleton University (Department of Law and Legal Studies, Ottawa, Canada) and a Visiting Scholar at Cardiff University (School of Law and Politics, UK). He was a Postdoctoral Researcher (Law) at the University of Eastern Finland. Before he had been a Vice Dean and an Assistant Professor in Torun School of Banking as well as granted ministerial awards for an “outstanding young scholar” in his native Poland. He works on legal philosophy, ethics, law and religion, legal pluralism, Arctic indigenous rights, Nordic welfare state and migration, and other issues like law and language, etc.
His recent publications include: 1) “Philosophies of Polar Law”, ed. D. Bunikowski, A.D. Hemmings, Routledge 2021, 2) (with A. Szpak) “Saami truth and reconciliation commissions”, International Journal of Human Rights, 2022, vol. 26, issue 2; 3) “Why Religion? Towards a Critical Philosophy of Law, Peace and God”, ed. D. Bunikowski, A. Puppo, Springer 2020; 4) “Immigration and the Survival of Nordic Welfare State: Can the Welfare State Survive in the Time of the Last Refugee Crisis?”, in: “How to Deal with Refugees? Europe as a Continent of Dreams”, ed. G. Besier, K. Stoklosa, Berlin 2018.

Researcher

Born and in Aarbortsne, Hattfjelldal, in the South Sámi part of Saepmie, Hege Dalen returned to her ancestral home 30 years ago to take over her grandparents’ farm after a career as a marketing manager and years living as a “western Nomad”. Since 2018, she has worked as an independent researcher and author in art history, focusing on amplifying the impact of Indigenous knowledge in society, particularly through the intersection of science, art, and spirituality—fields she recognizes as fertile grounds for innovation and knowledge creation.

In 2024, she completed a Master’s Thesis in Art History at the Arctic University of Tromsø (UiT) titled “Spirituality in Saepmie: Recovering Indigenous Belonging and Identity.” Her research examines the creative processes of multimedia artists Sissel M. Bergh (Saepmie) and Bodil Mette Louise Amalie Fontain (Kalaallit Nunaat), drawing on Indigenous methodologies.  Personally, Dalen’s journey to reclaim her lost Sámi identity has profoundly influenced her work, combining deep research with a personal connection to Sámi culture and spirituality.

Emertius Professor, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Exeter, formerly Professor in the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Eastern Finland.

My first degree is in biology, and my early research was in human impacts on ecological systems. This involved studying changing patterns of land-use, and was the subject of my PhD in environmental history. My involvement in teaching drew my attention to social and educational systems. This has led to work on how people experience the world and how they come to understand it. The common theme through this research is how people engage with the resources, affordances and constraints of the environments in which they live, work and learn. I call these patterns of engagement ‘cultural ecologies’, and an account of the research will be published by Routledge in 2025 in Cultural Ecologies of the Land. A restless dynamic of people and place.

As well as jointly editing Sacred Places in the Arctic and Beyond, with Francis Joy and Dawid Bunikowski, I am contributing a chapter on the Uffington White Horse in the UK. This is a huge piece of land art, built about three and a half thousand years ago into a hillside. Current archaeological thinking is that the figure is a sun-horse image, tracking the passage of the sun through the sky, reflecting what would now be termed an ‘animistic’ worldview. What is remarkable about the place is its survival. The shape of the horse must be renewed every decade otherwise it will overgrow with vegetation. This renewal has happened over about 100 generations, during which the original sacred context has transitioned into cultural heritage.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrick_Dillon

Researcher

Francis Joy is a visiting post-doctoral researcher from the United Kingdom, currently working as a member of the Arctic Anthropology Research Team at the University of Lapland Arctic Centre. The focus for research has been an extensive study of Sámi religion, history, culture and traditions in different settings which includes beliefs, practices and cultural heritage. Furthermore, within the research field a study of sacred sites, prehistoric rock paintings in Finland and what appear as links between cosmological landscapes on sacred Sámi drums from the seventeenth century has been another topic of enquiry and subsequent investigation. Data and materials from these fields of enquiry have been presented in Siberia, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Francis has also published three books of poetry and is currently engaged in a two-year funded research project in a study titled: Gifts from the Sentient Forest: Communication and Collaboration between Trees and People in Northen Finland.

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Law Professor

Dr. René Kuppe is a retired law professor from the University of Vienna/Austria, whose academic work is concentrated on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, with a focus on Indigenous legal philosophies; Indigenous legal systems; protection of traditional Indigenous beliefs and religions; and sustainable development and Indigenous Peoples.

He has been involved in international law practice and legal policy work related to Indigenous Peoples’ rights, including work on the development of Indigenous autonomy arrangements and jurisdiction systems in Latin America, demarcation of Indigenous territories in Venezuela, and promoting the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ property systems in the Arctic. In January 2022 he became a Baoard Member of the international human rights organization IWGIA.

Researcher

Roza Laptander is a sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist. Her research interests are based on documentation of the Nenets language and spoken history of the Western Siberian nomadic Nenets. In her works she explains why the elders’ memories about the past are important for the young generation of the Nenets people and describes different roles of silence and silencing in the Nenets culture, offering a new approach to understanding how small indigenous societies keep memories and stories about their past and present life in the Arctic. Additionally, she describes how tundra people talk about contemporary changes in the Yamal tundra, impacts of recent changes in climate and weather on the Nenets’ traditional way of life in the tundra and their work with reindeer. Laptander holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Lapland.

Melissa K. Nelson Ph.D. is an Indigenous ecologist and award-winning scholar-activist and media-maker. She is a professor of Indigenous Sustainability at Arizona State University (ASU) and Professor Emerita of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the founding executive director of The Cultural Conservancy (TCC), a Native-led organization she directed from 1993 to 2021, and currently serves as their board chair. Her work is dedicated to indigenous rights, protecting biocultural heritage and Indigenous food systems, elevating Indigenous knowledges and land stewardship, and renewing community health and cultural arts through higher education, activism, and philanthropy. She is the co-founder and leader of the  Global Future Laboratory’s Indigenous Knowledges Focal Area at ASU and Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation grant focused on Racial Equity in STEM.

Dr. Nelson’s research examines the epistemological roots of the global polycrisis and Indigenous strategies for regeneration, including land rematriation and other forms of Indigenous-led conservation. Her edited publications include Original Instructions – Indigenous Teachings for A Sustainable Future (2008), Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (2018), and What Kind of Ancestor do you want to be? (University of Chicago Press (2021).  Melissa writes for public and academic audiences and hosts and produces the Native Seed Pod podcast. She is the Bundle Holder and President of the Native American Academy and serves on the boards of the California Academy of Science, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, and Sogorea Te Land Trust.  Her work has been featured at UNESCO, the National Museum of the American Indian, and by PBS, BBC, and others.   Melissa is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Norwegian and is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.