Politics of decoupling: breaks between Indigenous and imported senses of the Nordic North

Abstract

This article examines the problems met while implementing wilderness and landscape approaches to research in multilingual, Indigenous places where local lexicons only partially correspond to these external conceptualizations. The case study focuses on Sámi communities in the European North and the question of how research projects, even when they aim to respect Indigenous values, can in practice become another means by which the established relations of domination are confirmed and perpetuated. The article concludes that disengaging from this type of double logic, or decoupling, demands a broad willingness from researchers to learn from the diverse and often dissimilar rationales and nomenclatures of communities in the margins. For scholarly research in particular, this task requires becoming sensitive to epistemological discontinuities while maintaining constant self-assessment of both the use and effects of standardized Western academic discourse in our research projects.