Annikki Herranen, Ph.D.
Where the material foundations of a lifeway melt away, what reparative possibilities emerge? Through interconnected narratives centered on the climate-altered permafrost wetlands of Sápmi, the transborder Indigenous Sámi homeland, this essay examines the striated social and ecological effects of permafrost land formations’ disappearance through planetary-scale cryosphere loss. The narratives illuminate futures made at the edges of environmental transformation and repair. Thus, they explore the discordance the climate crisis creates in land and language, and in the time scales of environmental repair. While grappling with the (ir)remediability of accelerating environmental transformation and its social-institutional underpinnings, they also foreground a striving for sustaining and remaking embodied, intergenerational practices and systems of knowledge that might support human and more-than-human adaptation to climate-altered futures.
The name Allabalsajeaggi is made up of three words in the Indigenous North Sámi language,
Alla = high
Balsa = palsa, a peat mound with a permafrost core
Jeaggi = a type of northern wetland (Fin. jänkä, Nor. myr)
Allabalsajeaggi, then, is a wetland, a mire, named after its high palsa feature. It is located near lake Mierašjávri in the town of Ohcejohka, about 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, in Sápmi about 40 kilometers south of the northernmost Finnish-Norwegian state border.
I first learned about Allabalsajeaggi from Uhca-Jovnna (Jovnna Sámmol Laiti), a renowned traditional Sámi artist and craftsman (duojár), educator, researcher, and an integral member of the local reindeer herding community in Ohcejohka.
His political art and social critique are grounded in duodji, traditional Sami art and craftsstmanship, which encompasses weaving, sewing, leathercraft, woodworking, and bone carving. As an educator, he has for decades worked to cultivate knowledge, skills, and language of duodji techniques and materials in new generations of practitioners (see Laiti [ed.] 2018). His artistic practice has long been driven by concern over humankind’s violent exploitation of nature through extraction, excess consumption, waste, and contamination. He seeks to counter this exploitation in his care in the sourcing and use of materials, particularly wood, antler, and bone, that he finds in nature. Yet, through duodji as political art, he also demands that his audience face the harms visited upon Sámi ecologies.
In his work titled “Eatnama bávččas IV (Ache of the Earth IV)” (Figure 2.), a rusted iron nail is rammed through a hand-crafted guksi cup made of birch wood and intricately carved reindeer bone ornaments. It depicts metal violently struck through wood, piercing a vessel that when intact could nourish or hydrate, the rusted nail now contaminating and leaking out anything it might carry. This work forms part of a series in which Jovnna grapples with destructive intrusion of extractive industries and infrastructures, from enormous wind farms to a planned Arctic Ocean railway corridor, into Sámi lands.
When I asked Jovnna how he thought of climate change in the context of his art, he responded by framing the global process as a “consequence” (čuovvumuš) and indeed a “subconcept” (vuolledoaba) of a drastic change in value systems he had witnessed in his community. He attributed this transformation to the rapid and coercive integration to webs of national and global institutions that had unfolded in the wake of the Second World War.
He elaborated:
It’s only a consequence, this climate change.
It’s the world of values in which there are so many people and the society lives in debt, everyone has debt, the society has debt, states have debt, and the debt has to be paid.
And when the debt has to be paid, distress comes, and when distress comes there is no time to think about any of these beautiful things like how nature is doing.
Nothing emerges but the exploitation of nature, and when you exploit it then that improves the situation economically for mankind. But the consequence of it is climate change.
Dat lea dušše čuovvumuš, dat dálkkádatnuppástus.
Dat lea dat árvomáilbmi, go olbmot leat nu ollu ja de servodat dat eallá vealggis, buohkain lea vealgi, servodagas lea vealgi, riikkain lea vealgi, de dan vealggi galgá máksit.
Ja go dan vealggi galgáge máksit de boahtá heahti, ja go lea heahti de dalle ii šat leat ástu jurddašit maidige dákkár čabba áššiid go mo luondu veadjá.
Ii eará go šaddá veahá diekkár luonddu rivven ja de go dan rivve de doppehan dat gokčá ekonomalaččat buorre dilli dan olmmoščerdii. Muhto das lea čuovvumuččan dálkkádatnuppástus.
In this, he echoed the words of many others I interviewed during more than 30 months of ethnographic research between 2014 and 2026 about changes in relations and practices of care amidst structural and environmental change in Deanuleahki in the wake of the Second World War. The ongoing impacts of the region’s multifocal integration into national systems for the governance of life – welfare state institutions, transportation infrastructures, livelihoods management, environmental stewardship, and the money economy – are a throughline in my interlocutors’ narratives. Traversing scales from intimate care among kin to reckonings with ecosystem transformation, these narratives detail the destabilization and resurgence of kin and ecological relations that underpin health, well-being, and survival (Herranen-Tabibi 2025). Here, Jovnna’s act of situating climate change as a “subconcept” of these broader transformations underlines the experienced continuities in the undoing and remaking of local ecologies and value systems across the upheavals visited upon the region during periods of war, state-building, and a global climate crisis.
It was here that Allabalsajeaggi entered our conversation. This cherished cloudberry peatland, near his childhood village, was named after and known for its high permafrost mound, towering as high as 3-4 meters in my interlocutors’ lifetimes. Yet, Jovnna told me, the high palsa for which Allabalsajeaggi was named had melted long ago, leaving behind a flattened mire with cold water pooling amid small peat hummocks. This transformation reflects wider developments in the region, wherein, due to climate change, palsas have vanished en masse and new permafrost mounds have not been detected for over two decades (Leppiniemi et al, 2025). In these flattened surroundings, the cloudberries traditionally gathered in these wetlands – and traditionally found in abundance around the palsa features – failed to thrive (Aikio 2019). Cloudberry harvesting forms part of the web of subsistence livelihoods and traditional food systems that traverse the Circumpolar Arctic, undergirding the inter-generational transmission of language, knowledge, and lifeways (see Joks 2022; Retter 2021; Østmo and Law 2018). At Allabalsajeaggi, the disruption of these practices by permafrost thaw adds to growing concern about the viability of subsistence livelihoods in a rapidly warming climate – and about the concomitant health and social impacts (Näkkäläjärvi et al. 2026; Paltto 2021; Jaakkola et al. 2018).
Here, the thawing permafrost cores of Allabalsajeaggi serve as a visible emblem of the ecological, geological and societal transformations occurring over Uhca-Jovnna’s lifetime. To follow the threads of his analysis, these transformations inscribed changes in systems of social values onto the landscape. The rapid integration of Sápmi, in his telling, into national institutions and economies created the conditions for accelerating overconsumption, financial dependence, and the economic exploitation of nature. This integration may have improved the material standards of living for many in the region, as often recounted by my interlocutors with reference to the arrival of electricity, snowmobiles, and countless other imported conveniences. These conveniences facilitated an intensified practice of subsistence livelihoods, such as by cutting down the time it took to reach and round up one’s reindeer in the fells; yet, their costs also began to structure choices increasingly with reference to economic gain. In Jovnna’s narrative, this rapid integration eroded the values and systems of knowledge that underpin relations upon which life in the region depended. Encapsulated in the terms “debt” (vealgi) and “distress” (heahti), the ongoing exploitation of nature and the turning of nature into profit were driven by unsustainable overconsumption as a dominant system of social values in the postwar era.
The scale of the ensuing harm to the local ecology was represented at Allabalsajeaggi by geomorphology. It was not only that, as many of my interlocutors noted, the desire to possess and commodify drove excessive herd sizes for reindeer cooperatives, or resulted in burdens on land and waterways from tourist fishing, rifle-powered ptarmigan hunting, or commercialized cloudberry picking for export across the globe. It was also that overconsumption, as a global system of values that had radically transformed the conditions of life in Deanuleahki over the past 80 years, had driven catastrophic global warming that had irrevocably undone the frozen foundations of the lifeway. At Allabalsajeaggi, cryosphere collapse brought with it discordance in land and language: at this Arctic wetland patch named for its tall permafrost mound, the high palsa was long gone.
Luobbal Sámmol Sofe, an elder renowned for her leadership in decades-long efforts to protect and advance Sámi and global Indigenous rights, had often been called upon to speak of climate-induced changes in local ecologies to audiences near and far including, in 2019, at a UN Food and Agricultural Organization Expert Seminar on Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples’ Fisheries in the Arctic Region (Aikio 2019). There, she drew attention to the degradation of palsa wetlands in Sápmi, arguing that thawing of palsas and the creation of thermokarst ponds disrupted cloudberry growth and harvest and threatened a part of the web of subsistence livelihoods upon which well-being depends.
Having learned of Allabalsajeaggi and its thawing and collapsed palsas – these “hávit eatnamis” or “wounds on the land,” as some of my interlocutors call them – I turned to Sofe for her thoughts on their significance. She posed to me a counter-question: Did I really think anything could be done to change what had already happened? After all, permafrost thaw itself could not be reversed by local measures. And yet, the altered lands would continue to need care to ensure human and more-than-human flourishing. That care, she argued, would hinge on tending to árbediehtu, to a deep inherited knowledge of those lands, as a continuous, dynamic, practice.
Gathering at Allabalsajeaggi on a rainy August morning, alongside Jovnna and his partner, the educator and artist Kirsi Máret Paltto, Sofe drew our attention to the need observe, experience, and understand the elements, flora, and fauna, and how they behaved. Her elder brother, the scholar Luobbal Sámmol Aimo (Aimo Aikio), had written of the conditions, over a life course, of birget – a ubiquitous North Sámi verb that encompasses the praxis and philosophy of coping, perseverance, and thriving under conditions of scarcity and adversity. For Sámi children’s growth into resilient adults, he had emphasized learning foundational knowledge and skills across generations through time spent together on land and waterways, and applying this learning through independent exploration (Aikio 2010). In an altered ecology, Sofe argued, such learning and practice was all the more important. What, she asked, happened to the cloudberries when the wetlands appeared to burn in the summers, the jeaggi drying as the balsa with their reserves of frozen water were no more? As warmer winters no longer maintained the long stretches of deep buolaš (subzero temperatures) required to ward off insects? What was known and what needed to be known about the species that made up the jeaggi, and how they thrived or failed under climate-transformed circumstances?
The conservation-driven restrictions on local subsistence livelihoods had, in her view, constrained community members’ ability to mobilize the knowledge systems and technologies that had been developed in Sápmi over millenia to secure shelter and sustenance in the harsh Arctic climate. It was on such systems and technologies that the possibilities of birget into the future and in crisis depended.
In such aspirations to birget, these meditations on Allabalsajeaggi, suggest, there could be no pretense of returning to an imagined stasis or a past harmony. One could not un-thaw the palsa.
Bringing the at times radical transformation of ecologies over millennia to the present context, Sofe noted, “Of course, nature and ecology have constantly changed. But then consider that nature can repair [itself].” (Sá. Dieđusge dat luondu ja ekologiijja gal lea nuppastuvvan oppa áigge. Muhto de dat ahte go luondu gal máhttá divvut.) When I asked Sofe how she thought of the possibilities of human action in support of ecosystem “repair” (divvut) on climate-altered Arctic wetlands, she drew attention to the need to not only sustain and reclaim these knowledge systems but also to harness others. For example, locally stationed plant biologists had several decades ago experimented with cultivating and hybridizing cloudberries in order to render them more plentiful and resilient (see e.g. Mäkinen and Oikarinen 1974). How might such bodies of knowledge – developed over decades by natural scientists who had made Sámi lands and waterways their laboratories, yet had seldom made their process or findings accessible to local communities – now be drawn upon in the search for healthful and livable futures?1 What knowledges, including ones not yet institutionalized, might be required for ecosocial future-making in the wake of cryosphere collapse?
Footnotes
Works Cited
Aikio, Aimo. 2010. Olmmošhan gal birge: Áššit mat ovddidit birgema. ČálliidLagadus.
Aikio, Maria Sofia. 2019. Statement to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization’s Expert Seminar on Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples’ Fisheries in the Arctic Region, 23-24 September 2019, Rome, Italy.
Bahnke, M., Korthuis, V., Philemonoff, A., and Johnson, M. 2020. Letter to “Navigating the New Arctic Program, National Science Foundation.” At URL: https://kawerak.org/download/navigating-the-new-arctic-program-comment-letter/
Herranen-Tabibi, Annikki. 2025. “And That Main Artery’s Name is Life”: Ecosocial Injury and Resurgent Care in Deanuleahki, Sápmi.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 39(2).
Herrmann, T.M., Brunner Alfani, F., Chahine, A., Doering, N., Dudeck, S., Elster, J., Fjellheim, E., Henriksen, J.E., Hermansen, N., Holmberg, A., Kramvig, B., Keskitalo, A.M.N., Omma, E.M., Saxinger, G., Scheepstra, A., van der Schot, J. 2023. “Comprehensive Policy-Brief to the EU Commission: Roadmap to Decolonial Arctic Research.” University of Oulu, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, The Indigenous Voices (IVO) research group – Álgoálbmogii jienat, Arctic University of Norway UiT, Saami Council.
Inuit Circumpolar Council. 2021. Ethical and Equitable Engagement Synthesis Report: A collection of Inuit rules, guidelines, protocols, and values for the engagement of Inuit Communities and Indigenous Knowledge from Across Inuit Nunaat. At URL: https://hh30e7.p3cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/ICC-EEE-Synthesis-report-WEB.pdf
Jaakkola, Jouni, Suvi Juntunen, and Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi. 2018. “The Holistic Effects of Climate Change on the Culture, Well-Being, and Health of the Saami, the Only Indigenous People in the European Union.” Current Environmental Health Reports 5, 401–417.
Joks, Solveig. 2022. “Frustrated caretakers: Sámi egg gatherers and cloudberry pickers.” In Valkonen, Sanna, Sigga-Marja Magga, Saara Alakorva, and Áile Aikio (eds). The Sámi World. Routledge.
Laiti, Jouni Samuel. 2017. Garraduodji. Sámi Education Institute.
Leppiniemi, Oona, Olli Karjalainen, Juha Aalto, Eevi Yletyinen, Miska Luoto, Jan Hjort. 2025.
“The morpho-ecological state of palsa mires in sub-arctic Fennoscandia: insights from high-resolution spatial modelling.” CATENA. Volume 257.
Mäkinen, Yrjö and Hannu Oikarinen. 1974. ”Cultivation of cloudberry in Fennoscandia.” Reports of the Kevo Subarctic Research Station 11: 90-102.
Näkkäläjärvi, Klemetti, Hilppa Gregow, Sami-Juhani Ahonen, Joona Hautala, Jouni J.K. Jaakkola, Suvi Juntunen, Terhi K. Laurila. 2026. “Current and Projected Impacts of Climate Change on Saami Culture.” Available at: https://saamelainenilmastoneuvosto.fi/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Ramadat3_Current_and_Projected_Impacts_of_Climate_Change_on_Saami_Culture.pdf
Paltto, Anni-Saara. 2021. “Dálkkádatrievdan čuohcá ain eanet luonddujohttiide ja ealáhusaide Sámis – dat oidno maid sosiála- ja dearvvašvuođasuorggi beadle.” Yle Sápmi, November 3, 2021. Available at: https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/sapmi/dalkkadatrievdan_cuohca_ain_eanet_luonddujohttiide_ja_ealahusaide_samis__dat_oidno_maid_sosiala-_ja_dearvvasvuoasuorggi_bealde/12172585
Retter, Gunn-Britt. 2021. “Indigenous cultures must not be forced to bear the brunt of global climate adaptation.” Available at: https://www.arctictoday.com/indigenous-cultures-must-not-be-forced-to-bear-the-brunt-of-global-climate-adaptation/
