Artificial Borders

The indigenous peoples of the Arctic already faced marginalization before the war. As Anders Oskal, secretary general of the Association of World Reindeer Herders, said recently: “Those who are hit first and hardest by sanctions are the ones who are last in line to begin with.”

In 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that a wind farm constructed in Sámi territory was a violation of indigenous rights, yet the wind farm, and its disruption to reindeer migration, remains. In the Russian Arctic, the reindeer-herding Nenets people have found migratory routes similarly disturbed by oil and gas infrastructure. Kiruna municipality, in the Swedish heart of Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, is home to the largest underground iron ore mine in the world, alongside plentiful deposits of rare-earth elements necessary for the energy transition, which are being eyed covetously by the Swedish state.

Eirik Larsen is the head of the human rights unit of the Sámi Council, a nongovernmental organization that works across Sámi territory in Russia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. He says that projects like these

have been developed without our consent, and they have a severe impact on our culture and our way of life. We don’t oppose climate solutions. We are actually asking for climate solutions, and we are asking to contribute to finding solutions concerning our lands . . . in a way that harms the natural and traditional areas, and true sustainable areas, as little as possible.

However, with the potential for cross-border solidarity reduced as the Arctic Council’s network of cooperation has weakened, Sámi concerns are more likely to become a domestic matter, to be brushed aside by their governments.

The Arctic Council is an intergovernmental forum for states to cooperate on Arctic issues. It has long been unique among major international organizations in that it reserves places for indigenous groups, six of which, representing around 10 percent of the Arctic’s total population, hold the status of permanent participants in the council. While they cannot vote on resolutions, they have secured a greater voice in this international forum than in the domestic affairs of the states in which they reside.

Since 2022, however, the council’s functions have been paused, and indigenous groups have watched borders close once more, separating families and splitting traditional hunting grounds in a manner not seen since the Cold War. The ways of life of the Arctic’s indigenous peoples have suffered from their encounters with modern interstate borders, especially when one of the states goes to war.

In Northern Europe, several Sámi people formerly living in Russia have been forced to claim asylum in neighboring countries in order to avoid conscription. Eirik Larsen argues that the need to claim asylum at all is unjust:

Our main position is that if you are a Sámi, you should be able to consider the whole Sámi territory as a home despite crossing borders. We are used to cross[ing] the border all the time and to maneuver[ing] around it.

Complicating matters, he explains, is the fact that internal Sámi borders bisect the borders of the state system. While the Norwegian-Swedish border runs from south to north, “we have our internal borders, with our languages, culture, and reindeer-herding livelihoods crossing the borders, and they go from east to west.”

As in so many other places around the world, state borders here fail to take into account the lives of people who live on and around them. Even if free movement is possible at the time of their creation, they set those same residents up for future struggles if and when this permissive environment changes.

Colonization of Land and Knowledge

The closure of borders and the risk of being forced to fight are not the only consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for the Arctic’s indigenous people. Several initiatives agreed in the two years before the war have not been built upon, including vital work to address the suicide crisis among indigenous populations.

Years of abuse by settlers in the Arctic, for example in Catholic residential schools in Canada, combined with alienation from traditional ways of life that are centered on a strong relationship to the land, have resulted in higher suicide rates in indigenous regions than elsewhere in the Arctic states. As a statement from the Inuit Circumpolar Council, a body representing the Inuit of Arctic North America, Siberia, and Greenland, put it in 2020, “suicide was a pandemic in the Arctic before COVID-19 came along.”

Chief Gary Harrison of the Chickaloon Native Village in Alaska spoke about the worrying suicide rates among his people, particularly younger men, at the recent Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway:

A lot of it is due to colonization, and the fact that this trauma is in their DNA. . . . We’ve got a patriarchal society that has basically taken over our land and resources. They have changed all of our customs, all of our traditions, and now they want us to go their way.

Since the Arctic Council’s “pause,” efforts to combat these issues have been forced to rely on mental health support systems at the national level, without any meaningful international agreement to address harm to indigenous livelihoods and the deep scars left by colonial intrusion.

Below the state level, cooperation still continues. Arctic Council working groups, featuring both indigenous and Russian state representation, are back up and running. The leaders of the Gwich’in Council, representing a people group who live throughout northern Canada and Alaska, have engaged with other indigenous groups in wildfire reduction, in the absence of state leadership.

Wildfires are an increasing risk in the Arctic tundra. While indigenous strategies of fire management through controlled burns have long been effective in managing the land, they are more likely to be prohibited than embraced by state-level authorities. The Arctic Council did not fully address a consistent absence of indigenous knowledge in management strategies even when it was functioning as normal.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council recently suggested that this moment could be used for a reset, and to “replace tokenism with full and effective participation and meaningful engagement of Indigenous Peoples throughout the Arctic Council.” Although Canada has taken steps to work with indigenous peoples in recent years, for example through a protected area for Nunatsiavut developed in tandem with the local Inuit, it does not necessarily prioritize their views in every case, especially when tensions are high.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the Innu people of Labrador in Canada’s northwest protested consistently against NATO fighter jet training exercises over their territory, located south of the Arctic Circle but near the retreating environmental border where trees are replaced by tundra. Until this practice finally stopped in 2005, the region was treated as a place to fly the deafening jets far away from European ears.

In 2022, the German air force requested the resumption of low-level flight training. The Innu “formally and unanimously” rejected this proposal, and it has not been put into practice, but the Canadian Department of National Defence would still like to start the flights again.

Elsewhere, Greenland’s Inuit have long lobbied against Arctic militarization, joining the broader Inuit community in referring to the region as a “zone of peace.” In contrast, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, described the Arctic in 2019 as an “arena for power and for competition,” a theme Donald Trump has returned to with his imperial designs on Greenland.

Combat Zone

Mary Simon, then president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now Inuit Circumpolar Council) and current governor general of Canada, reflected on this topic in 1989. Her words could easily have been referring to today’s geopolitical vista:

We do not wish our traditional territories to be treated as a strategic military and combat zone between eastern and Western alliances. . . . Any excessive military buildup in the North . . . only serves to divide the Arctic, perpetuate East-West tensions and the arms race, and put our people on opposing sides.

In the last few years, this scenario has come to pass. In view of the historic disdain with which states around the world have treated the historical owners of the land upon which they are built, it does not seem likely that their perspectives will be listened to now.

Even if state-level cooperation through the Arctic Council has been diminished, governments must engage with indigenous peoples in good faith. They must also recognize that these communities contain diverse opinions, just like any other group of people. Some groups have supported oil drilling on their lands: Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat collaborated with the Alaska governor’s office to ensure projects went ahead despite opposition from other indigenous organizations.

While the Arctic Council is unlikely to reestablish its precise prewar form, Norwegian stewardship of the organization since 2023 has successfully held it together, allowing a forum for indigenous representation to endure. At the national level, however, states essentially continue to listen to indigenous interests only when they do not conflict with governmental priorities. Now would be as good a moment as any to change that.