Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to take seriously the fluidity that characterizes people’s engagement with landscape, water and weather in the Norwegian Arctic. On the basis of such relations, it goes on to question with the introduction of anthropogenic climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Tana Fjord is the end point of the fresh water gushing down the Tana River from all the smaller tributaries in the Sami core territories. Nutritious water pours down from the high mountain plateaus and the tundra, feeding the fish in the fjord. The salmon, that people depend on, spends its lifetime travelling between the river and the sea. Other animals follow the salmon.

But water is much more: it is a constant presence to the people who live near it, and a force that up until now has been experienced as something to be reckoned with. People here experience water as an active, constant, but also changing element. Communities near the sea have intimate experience of the predictable, rhythmical, seasonal changes, well as nature's unpredictability. Living nearby, and off what is in the sea, brings acknowledgement of how everything is interrelated. Water, what it interfaces with, and what is in it, figures as essential elements in people's lives. People who live on these waterways never assume that water or weather can be controlled, nor that there is a point in worrying about it. The same fluidity moreover, I contend, characterises local knowledges, socialities and human-fish relations.

In this paper, I follow an idea of fluidity as the co-constituting of thought and practice in the Norwegian Arctic, and I explore what happens when people are confronted with, what to others are anthropogenic changes in weather patterns, and subsequent changes in the migration patterns of significant animals.