Annikki Herranen, Ph.D.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Where the material foundations of a lifeway melt away, what reparative possibilities emerge? Through interconnected narratives centered on the climate-altered permafrost wetlands of S\u00e1pmi, the transborder Indigenous S\u00e1mi homeland, this essay examines the striated social and ecological effects of permafrost land formations\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The name Allabalsajeaggi is made up of three words in the Indigenous North S\u00e1mi language,<\/p>\n
Alla<\/em> = high<\/p>\n Balsa<\/em> = palsa, a peat mound with a permafrost core\u00a0<\/p>\n Jeaggi<\/em> = a type of northern wetland (Fin. j\u00e4nk\u00e4<\/em>, Nor. myr<\/em>)<\/p>\n Allabalsajeaggi, then, is a wetland, a mire, named after its high palsa feature. It is located near lake Miera\u0161j\u00e1vri in the town of Ohcejohka, about 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, in S\u00e1pmi about 40 kilometers south of the northernmost Finnish-Norwegian state border.\u00a0<\/p>\n I first learned about Allabalsajeaggi from <\/strong>Uhca-Jovnna (Jovnna S\u00e1mmol Laiti), a renowned traditional S\u00e1mi artist and craftsman (duoj\u00e1r<\/em>), educator, researcher, and an integral member of the local reindeer herding community in Ohcejohka.\u00a0<\/p>\n His political art and social critique are grounded in duodji, <\/em>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 <\/em>techniques and materials in new generations of practitioners (see Laiti [ed.] 2018).\u00a0 His artistic practice has long been driven by concern over humankind\u2019s 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<\/em> as political art, he also demands that his audience face the harms visited upon S\u00e1mi ecologies.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his work titled \u201cEatnama b\u00e1v\u010d\u010das IV (Ache of the Earth IV)\u201d (Figure 2.), a rusted iron nail is rammed through a hand-crafted guksi <\/em>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 S\u00e1mi lands.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201cconsequence\u201d (\u010duovvumu\u0161<\/em>) and indeed a \u201csubconcept\u201d (vuolledoaba) <\/em>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.<\/p>\n He elaborated:\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s only a consequence, this climate change.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Dat lea du\u0161\u0161e \u010duovvumu\u0161, dat d\u00e1lkk\u00e1datnupp\u00e1stus.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Dat lea dat \u00e1rvom\u00e1ilbmi, go olbmot leat nu ollu ja de servodat dat eall\u00e1 vealggis, buohkain lea vealgi, servodagas lea vealgi, riikkain lea vealgi, de dan vealggi galg\u00e1 m\u00e1ksit.<\/em><\/p>\n Ja go dan vealggi galg\u00e1ge m\u00e1ksit de boaht\u00e1 heahti, ja go lea heahti de dalle ii \u0161at leat \u00e1stu jurdda\u0161it maidige d\u00e1kk\u00e1r \u010dabba \u00e1\u0161\u0161iid go mo luondu veadj\u00e1.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Ii ear\u00e1 go \u0161add\u00e1 veah\u00e1 diekk\u00e1r luonddu rivven ja de go dan rivve de doppehan dat gok\u010d\u00e1 ekonomala\u010d\u010dat buorre dilli dan olmmo\u0161\u010derdii. Muhto das lea \u010duovvumu\u010d\u010dan d\u00e1lkk\u00e1datnupp\u00e1stus.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s multifocal integration into national systems for the governance of life \u2013 welfare state institutions, transportation infrastructures, livelihoods management, environmental stewardship, and the money economy \u2013 are a throughline in my interlocutors\u2019 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\u2019s act of situating climate change as a \u201csubconcept\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 lifetimes. Yet, Jovnna told me, the high palsa for which Allabalsajeaggi was named had melted long ago, <\/strong>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<\/em> and new permafrost mounds have not been detected for over two decades (Leppiniemi et al, 2025). \u00a0<\/strong>In these flattened surroundings, the cloudberries traditionally gathered in these wetlands \u2013 and traditionally found in abundance around the palsa features \u2013 failed to thrive (Aikio 2019). <\/strong>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; \u00d8stmo 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 \u2013 and about the concomitant health and social impacts (N\u00e4kk\u00e4l\u00e4j\u00e4rvi et al. 2026; Paltto 2021; Jaakkola et al. 2018).<\/p>\n Here, the thawing permafrost cores of Allabalsajeaggi serve as a visible emblem of the ecological, geological and societal transformations occurring over Uhca-Jovnna\u2019s lifetime. To follow the threads of his analysis, these transformations inscribed changes in systems of social values onto the landscape. The rapid integration of S\u00e1pmi, 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\u2019s reindeer in the fells; yet, their costs also began to structure choices increasingly with reference to economic gain.\u00a0 In Jovnna\u2019s 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 \u201cdebt\u201d (vealgi<\/em>) and \u201cdistress\u201d (heahti<\/em>), 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Luobbal S\u00e1mmol Sofe, an elder renowned for her leadership in decades-long efforts to protect and advance S\u00e1mi 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\u2019 Fisheries in the Arctic Region (Aikio 2019). There, she drew attention to the degradation of palsa wetlands in S\u00e1pmi, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Having learned of Allabalsajeaggi and its thawing and collapsed palsas \u2013 these \u201ch\u00e1vit eatnamis\u201d or \u201cwounds on the land,\u201d as some of my interlocutors call them \u2013 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. <\/strong>That care, she argued, would hinge on tending to \u00e1rbediehtu,<\/em> to a deep inherited knowledge of those lands, as a continuous, dynamic, practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gathering at Allabalsajeaggi on a rainy August morning, alongside Jovnna and his partner, the educator and artist Kirsi M\u00e1ret 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 S\u00e1mmol Aimo (Aimo Aikio), had written of the conditions, over a life course, of birget<\/em> \u2013 a ubiquitous North S\u00e1mi verb that encompasses the praxis and philosophy of coping, perseverance, and thriving under conditions of scarcity and adversity. For S\u00e1mi children\u2019s 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<\/em> drying as the balsa <\/em>with their reserves of frozen water were no more? As warmer winters no longer maintained the long stretches of deep buola\u0161<\/em> (subzero temperatures) required to ward off insects? What was known and what needed to be known about the species that made up the jeaggi<\/em>, and how they thrived or failed under climate-transformed circumstances?\u00a0<\/p>\n The conservation-driven restrictions on local subsistence livelihoods had, in her view, constrained community members\u2019 ability to mobilize the knowledge systems and technologies that had been developed in S\u00e1pmi over millenia to secure shelter and sustenance in the harsh Arctic climate. It was on such systems and technologies that the possibilities of birget<\/em> into the future and in crisis depended.\u00a0<\/p>\n In such aspirations to birget,<\/em> these meditations on Allabalsajeaggi, suggest, there could be no pretense of returning to an imagined stasis or\u00a0 a past harmony. One could not un-thaw the palsa.\u00a0<\/p>\n Bringing the at times radical transformation of ecologies over millennia to the present context, Sofe noted, \u201cOf course, nature and ecology have constantly changed. But then consider that nature can repair [itself].\u201d (S\u00e1. Die\u0111usge dat luondu ja ekologiijja gal lea nuppastuvvan oppa \u00e1igge. Muhto de dat ahte go luondu gal m\u00e1htt\u00e1 divvut.<\/em>)\u00a0 When I asked Sofe how she thought of the possibilities of human action in support of ecosystem \u201crepair\u201d (divvut<\/em>) on climate-altered Arctic wetlands, she drew attention to the need to not only sustain and reclaim these<\/em> 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. M\u00e4kinen and Oikarinen 1974). How might such bodies of knowledge \u2013 developed over decades by natural scientists who had made S\u00e1mi lands and waterways their laboratories, yet had seldom made their process or findings accessible to local communities \u2013 now be drawn upon in the search for healthful and livable futures?1<\/a><\/sup> What knowledges, including ones not yet institutionalized, might be required for ecosocial future-making in the wake of cryosphere collapse?\u00a0<\/p>\n Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n Aikio, Aimo. 2010. Olmmo\u0161han gal birge: \u00c1\u0161\u0161it mat ovddidit birgema. <\/em>\u010c\u00e1lliidLagadus.<\/p>\n Aikio, Maria Sofia. 2019. Statement to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization\u2019s Expert Seminar on Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Fisheries in the Arctic Region, 23-24 September 2019, Rome, Italy.<\/p>\n Bahnke, M., Korthuis, V., Philemonoff, A., and Johnson, M. 2020. Letter to \u201cNavigating the New Arctic Program, National Science Foundation.\u201d At URL: https:\/\/kawerak.org\/download\/navigating-the-new-arctic-program-comment-letter\/ <\/a>;<\/p>\n Herranen-Tabibi, Annikki. 2025. \u201cAnd That Main Artery\u2019s Name is Life\u201d: Ecosocial Injury and Resurgent Care in Deanuleahki, S\u00e1pmi.\u201d Medical Anthropology Quarterly <\/em>39(2).<\/p>\n 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. \u201cComprehensive Policy-Brief to the EU Commission: Roadmap to Decolonial Arctic Research.\u201d University of Oulu, Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ, The Indigenous Voices (IVO) research group \u2013 \u00c1lgo\u00e1lbmogii jienat, Arctic University of Norway UiT, Saami Council.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a><\/p>\n Jaakkola, Jouni, Suvi Juntunen, and Klemetti N\u00e4kk\u00e4l\u00e4j\u00e4rvi. 2018. \u201cThe Holistic Effects of Climate Change on the Culture, Well-Being, and Health of the Saami, the Only Indigenous People in the European Union.\u201d\u00a0Current Environmental Health Reports<\/em>\u00a05<\/strong>, 401\u2013417.\u00a0<\/p>\n Joks, Solveig. 2022. \u201cFrustrated caretakers: S\u00e1mi egg gatherers and cloudberry pickers.\u201d\u00a0 In Valkonen, Sanna, Sigga-Marja Magga, Saara Alakorva, and \u00c1ile Aikio (eds). The S\u00e1mi World.<\/em> Routledge.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Laiti, Jouni Samuel. 2017. Garraduodji. <\/em>S\u00e1mi Education Institute.<\/p>\n Leppiniemi, Oona, Olli Karjalainen, Juha Aalto, Eevi Yletyinen, Miska Luoto, Jan Hjort. 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cThe morpho-ecological state of palsa mires in sub-arctic Fennoscandia: insights from high-resolution spatial modelling.\u201d CATENA. Volume 257.<\/p>\n M\u00e4kinen, Yrj\u00f6 and Hannu Oikarinen. 1974. \u201dCultivation of cloudberry in Fennoscandia.\u201d Reports of the Kevo Subarctic Research Station 11: 90-102.<\/p>\n N\u00e4kk\u00e4l\u00e4j\u00e4rvi, Klemetti, Hilppa Gregow, Sami-Juhani Ahonen, Joona Hautala, Jouni J.K. Jaakkola, Suvi Juntunen, Terhi K. Laurila. 2026. \u201cCurrent and Projected Impacts of Climate Change on Saami Culture.\u201d Available at: https:\/\/saamelainenilmastoneuvosto.fi\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Ramadat3_Current_and_Projected_Impacts_of_Climate_Change_on_Saami_Culture.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n Paltto, Anni-Saara. 2021. \u201cD\u00e1lkk\u00e1datrievdan \u010duohc\u00e1 ain eanet luonddujohttiide ja eal\u00e1husaide S\u00e1mis \u2013 dat oidno maid sosi\u00e1la- ja dearvva\u0161vuo\u0111asuorggi beadle.\u201d Yle S\u00e1pmi, 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 <\/a>;<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aesengagement.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/image-1.jpeg?w=768\")
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