Sense of the Arctic: Episode 4

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Welcome to Polar Times, the podcast that brings you science and stories from literally the coolest places on the planet. Welcome to a new episode. But first, I wanted to tell you, if you didn't know, that this week is special, because this week is the APECS International Polar Week. There will be a couple of activities, the first one being the release of self-reflective poetry submitted by polar scientists and other polar interested people.

The second main item is an invitation to learn and reflect on governance of the polar regions from fisheries to international law. There will be a few highlights about green energy projects in the Samí Homeland or UN programs to protect marine diversity. So I encourage you to follow APECS on social media on, for example, Instagram and Twitter to learn more. And this last theme is actually exactly the theme of the podcast of today.

We are joining again, Nicholas and Inge, for an episode of the Sense of the Arctic miniseries that highlights power and knowledge of indigenous people. I will let them present their guests. And I will just thank you for joining us and wish you a very good listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone. Welcome to the fourth episode of Sense of the Arctic, a special series of conversations organized by the APECS Science and Diplomacy Project Group and released as part of the APECS podcast Polar Times.

My name is Inge Descheper and I'm a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. However, I'm studying remotely from South Africa. And my study area is biogeochemical modeling in the ocean and sea ice. And I'm Nicholas Parlato, a PhD student at University of Alaska Fairbanks studying marine and coastal resource management and politics.

So as we've heard from the first three episodes, the importance of community-driven research and how it is essential to the success of contemporary interdisciplinary Arctic science. We now head to the European continent to hear about some of their perspectives on community-based and community-driven research.

Our guest today is part of the Snow Change Cooperative in Finland, where their work focuses on advancing and preserving not just Finnish, but Arctic indigenous community cultures and traditions. Dr. Tero Mustonen is a Finnish researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and the president of Snow Change Cooperative. He is currently living in the village of Selkie in North Karelia, Finland, and is also a lead author on the sixth IPCC assessment released in 2021.

Dr. Mustonen, we're really happy to have you here today. And Inge is gonna start us off with our first question for you. - Great. So while I was doing your biography and I was looking up online, I noticed that it was mentioned that you're a winter seigner. Could you please briefly explain to our listeners what it means and how you were introduced to it?

- Well, Inge and Nicolas, thanks for having me on this wonderful podcast and greetings from the small boreal forest of Selkie where our community is located. This is about 62 latitude north. As to winter seining, I have two jobs essentially. One is to lead a very precious and quite unique professional fishing team or fishery. It's a freshwater lake system. And what we do on our lakes is something called seining.

And people might have heard how seining happens out in the oceans and on the coastal fisheries. But the ice based winter seining happens only during the winter when the ice allows us to go and harvest. And what we are doing is that we are on a lake, we are pulling nets under the ice through the morning. So it starts usually around 6 a.m. And we are hopefully done by 1 p.m. or something like that. And the distance that we pull is about half a kilometer or half a mile, depending on the site.

And this particular kind of fishery, the winter seining has been going on at least for 700 years. And actually the world's oldest net finding is from our region, Karelia, which is demonstrating how the old people probably 10,000 years ago were doing the same. I guess this is a sign of how we have not evolved what much over the centuries, but oh well. - Well, evolution is certainly a relative concept. And in this case, it's not losing critical food traditions and food ways from the region.

So I think evolution in this case would have been maladaptive. But this is really interesting 'cause here in Alaska, a lot of people also researchers are also engaged in kind of land-based activities, hunting and fishing and berry picking. And I'm really curious, here it definitely inflects and changes how people relate to the conduct of research and to being in the place that they're researching rather than researching somewhere that they only visit occasionally.

And so I wanted to ask you what your personal work with this practice of seining and fishing, how has it contributed to and influenced your scientific practice and engagement with local Sami people who have the traditional knowledge and have been practicing these life ways for centuries?

- Well, the starting point for the understanding of what's going on in this part of the North and the work that we do is no change and also in the fishery begins by appreciating the very special socio-historical context for Finland. And what I mean by that is that clearly the Sami people are the indigenous peoples by constitution, but they are linguistically related to Karelian and Finnish communities that are the main population of Finland, the Finnish people.

To give you an example, we would say we are Suomi people and the Sami of course call themselves Sami. Or if I say a lake in Finnish, it's Jarvi and in Sami it's Jauri. And these languages belong into a linguistic and cultural group called Finno-Eukric peoples.

And these boreal and Arctic civilizations or peoples are forming a bit like the Inuit languages and peoples vast stretch of Northern communities ranging from Western Siberia with the Hanti and the Muncie, the Nenets people going further into West, Komi, Karelians and then onto Finland and in the Northern most tip of the European North, you have the Sami people.

And the way cultural history happened here is that all of these peoples are, maybe you can say that these peoples have adapted to the boreal landscapes, the lakes, the rivers, and of course the forest herself. And that's where we come from in the sense that it's not only the Sami that practice very traditional ways of harvesting or even reindeer herding. And this is a marked difference between Sweden and Norway.

In relationship to Finland, where Finns are also reindeer herders in the North boreal forests, in addition to the Sami. This is not to say that travel don't exist, it does. The relations have been very horrible at times and the state of Finland has certainly had a bad legacy of ill treatment towards the Sami and the colonial context.

But it's important to understand that there is also this boreal set of communities, especially in the Eastern part of the country, which have maintained things like the winter seining, which are Finnish speaking and Finnish communities. And to give you a very short overview of why I would be doing this, which is to finally answer your question.

I was privileged enough to grow up in a family ever since from birth in 1970s that was constantly conducting cultural harvesting fisheries, longlining, gill netting and all sorts of fish traps and other forms of fishery. So I grew up into the world of Lake fishery. We even had a small scale commercial sales because we were financially very poor in 1970s and 80s. And then the minute I could, I started to apprentice under some master fishers in late 1990s, early 2000s.

So I had kind of a other university where I grew up on the ice harvesting and slowly emerging into the master class, which is the winter seining, of course, the communal age old practice. And by living on the lake, on the ice, or then in the summertime, of course, harvesting on the open water season, all that I do stems from this coexistence with the lake and our fish.

And very early on, already in mid-1990s, coming after the military, we could start to observe how the winters are fundamentally changing in the boreal. And also the temperatures are very high. We have a very shortening of the free sub-season. And also the melt events in the spring started to happen much earlier than, for example, in my childhood.

And that became kind of a stimulus to understand also through science what's going on and link the cultural knowledge that I have from our life in the bush or in the lakes to what's going on in the world of science. Thank you so much. That was incredible context and really important to recognize just the full cultural expanse of the northern Scandinavia, as well as that linguistic group and those cultural groups extend far across Siberia.

And I'm curious about, as far as the wind fishing goes, do you still fish the same lake that your family fished when you were growing up? In my family, I have heritage, I guess you could say, from both western part of Finland and then from here in Karelia, where I have been living now for over 20 years. And my father is from here in the east, very close to Russian border.

Our region is also world famous because this is the place where our national epic Kalevala was recorded in the oral poetry that went on to influence Longfellow and J.R.R. Tolkien for his "Eleven Languages" and ultimately what's the book known as "A Lot of the Rings." So in fact, our villages here in Karelia have contributed to a world's largest oral history, Korpus. And there's a lot of traditional practice here.

And yes, I am harvesting on the same lake where I grew up when I was a child in 1970s, both in Karelia. And my mother is still maintaining a fish base in the western Finnish area. And I do, whenever I can, I go gill netting there. And through snow change, we also revitalized seining as a communal activity after 70 years of a break in western Finland.

So there is a lot of what I sometimes call collapsing time in the sense that both the Finns and the Sami and the Greenlanders and the other northern communities that exist in these parts of the world, all of us went through a massive and very fast modernization of society from 1960s into 1990s. And when I was growing up in 1970s, I was partly raised by my uncle, Heike, who was, when he was still young, he was subsisting or hunting moose, for example, for food security.

He feasted for living in remote boreal village of Ilomansi. And it's only in one generation that, of course, caused tremendous amount of trauma, alcoholism, loss of purpose, loss of self-esteem, and many other factors, especially to our men. Somehow the women perhaps coped better.

But it's important to realize that the modernization process was associated with large ecological devastation of the land and also these traditional communities, if you want to call it that, lost their capacity to do things both in Lapland and here in Karelia during this period of 1960s to '80s, '90s. And of course, that is what's known as a cascading trauma, that in one generation it was told that traditional knowledge and practices don't mean anything anymore.

Everybody has to go to Helsinki or Stockholm for out-migration from the villages and so on and so on. So what we are really looking at here in my own village, Selkje, and all the other villages in the region is that we used to have this gigantic practice and coexistence with the boreal forest, where the oral poetry meant a lot of things. And then just in a time span of one or two generations, now we are living in this post-industrial logging landscape.

I guess just to finish off, in a sense, I think a lot of the same happened to the Sami. So despite the fact that they have and they, of course, deserve and are the indigenous peoples by the Constitution, they faced exactly the same kind of modernity, impact, and suffer from the same troubles.

And that's why a lot of the work that we're doing is no change, whether it's our research unit or our rewinding and ecological restoration work or revitalization of these fisheries, for example, is really to navigate this new century where all of these things happened to the previous generation, as well as the ecosystems, and now I sometimes call it the great rebuilding. So we are rebuilding, rising from the ashes of the past, and it's very exciting.

It's, of course, volatile times, but it's extremely exciting, the villages. - That's really interesting. It's history that I didn't even know about, which I thank you for sharing. And I noticed that you brought in a bit about snow change and how it brought back, I guess, the community-driven winter seining activity. And I guess that can lead to the next question, could you describe what snow change does and the main aims of the organization?

- Snow change is a cooperative, so we are quite unique in Finland to be registered as a nonprofit fishing and cultural organization, research organization. We have been existing for about 23 years, so the first iteration of snow change was founded in 2000, and it was initiated by a Sami radio herder called Stefan Mikkelsen from Sweden. He was the vice president of the Sami Council at the time, Finnish fishermen and researchers, and then an Inuit lady called Jackie Price.

And Jackie was from Nunavut, Canada. And why did we come to, and then a few young people and so on and so on. The idea of why we came into existence was that all of these people felt that first of all, the villages don't have a great voice in the international level. We have the Arctic Council, we have all sorts of scientific processes, and so on and so on, but the actual villages where people are living are facing these, all of these, or I guess we felt in 2000 that things are so bad.

It's so bad with climate change, we have to do something. And then we thought, okay, what's uniting us despite our cultural differences? The Sami are distinct in their place, Finns are not indigenous peoples, but they have certain practices that are similar in the villages. The Inuit are, of course, powerful indigenous people from Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and North Eastern Siberia. And we realized that it's snow, snow belt.

We are connected by the fact that we are the peoples where snow defines our existence. In all of our languages, we have all sorts of dozens of ways of communicating what kind of snow exists. And snow and ice are threatened by this massive warming and changes that were underway in 2000. And we felt as kind of a young punks at the time that we can change it, we can go to big places and tell people how bad things are.

And of course, by now you have realized that we didn't have a great success with that big task, but what grew out of that young people's attempt to do something completely new, I would like to think is a rather unique organization that still represents and works for the villages that way it started. We are having some reindeer herders, hunters, elders that were part of this work in 2000, and they are still part of the work.

So one of the kind of benchmarks of what we have tried to do is to stay on. So many Arctic projects and research initiatives are for four years, two years, five years, and then it's over. Well, we decided to heck with that. Why don't we stay? Why don't we be the ones that stay on and mean something and contribute to long-term community-based observations or data and so on and so on. So to summarize what and who we are, there's a big research component.

We tried to be mechanism by which indigenous observations, local observations will meet with the best science to communicate what's going on actually in the North. And in order to understand the present, you have to understand the past. We don't know about the future, but we did realize that most of the Northern oral history, for example, is completely missing in the understanding of what Alaska actually is as a place or Canada or Finland. And secondly, we have a large cultural heritage unit.

So we are archiving, storing, and revitalizing the Northern cultures, some of them indigenous peoples, others, local communities like my own, where we have focused on supporting the children.

We have financed nomadic schools for nomadic communities in Northeast Siberia with the Chukchi and the Yuka gear installed solar panels in remote camps so that they can switch from diesel into more safe and clean ways of energy production and participated in a couple of UNESCO World Heritage processes where now that the land is being again looked at by different actors in the North, mining companies, wind power, hydropower, so on, we need to be able to demonstrate to all parties

of what's actually going on, place names, lived history, the landscapes, and so on and so on. And finally, and the most exciting part is, of course, our landscape rewinding program. So this is a mechanism by which, and I'll be very short here, but I'll just say that people outside the North are often in a place where they think it's all pristine. It's all polar bears and Rudolph the reindeer and the Santa Claus and some Inuits on the ice flow and something like that.

In fact, the European North has been heavily utilized by a range of industries for hundreds of years, timber companies, mining companies, infrastructure, energy, and so on and so on. And the same story is in Siberia, in Canada, and Alaska, as well as Greenland. That's why after 15 years of trying to communicate our messages to the US Senate, to the Arctic Council, we participated in the IPCC and many other activities.

The realization in the organization is that actually, we are not getting the kind of support that we would hope to navigate this tremendous new century. Why don't we rebuild our landscapes? And that became the foundation of the over 70 sites, 52,000 hectares of community conserved and rewilded areas, both for the Sami and Finns. This is mostly operating in Finland.

So in a historic, I hesitant to use that word otherwise, but here I can, because for the first time in a historic turn of events, our villages and the organization actually started to buy lands back to communal use. We started to revitalize rivers, landscapes, lakes, forests, using traditional knowledge and science back into health. And now they have a fighting chance. They will not be under timber company logging. They will not become a mine. They actually are on the recovery.

And on some of our sites, we have seen a comeback of over 205 bird species. And the last point to mention here is, 'cause everybody talks nowadays about the carbon. So a big emphasis on our rewilding program has been the peat lands. And these are the one third of world soil-based carbon is in the Northern peat lands. So by saving them, restoring them and maintaining them for all, we are chipping in on the big climate task and of course try to do what we can.

But these peat lands in the North are in a way the diamonds of our program because they are so massive in keeping carbon on the ground, biodiversity hotspots and so on and so on. Plus they are of course significant sites for the communities. - That's such a diversity of programs.

And I'm really quickly interested in just over the 23 years of snow changes experience, like how, what is the network that you all have to coordinate these very different kinds of efforts from like building nomadic schools to conservation and bringing kind of lands back into your traditional use. Like these sound like a very, they require a lot of different expertise, local expertise and scientific and practitioner expertise.

So I'm curious just what does the network look like and how do you all structure your projects? - So the skeleton or the background of how things work is that we have a range of regional coordinators, dedicated indigenous leaders or local community leaders. As I said, this side of the North comes in many forms. You have in Russia, for example, people like the Komi who are linguistically related again to us, but they don't have the status of indigenous peoples.

Or if I think of Karelia, for example, our region, on this side of the border, we are considered to be, of course, and we are Finns or part of the mainstream society, but Russia considers one of the Karelian groups, the VEPS indigenous peoples. And the work is organized through these regional coordinators that are then working with the villages. They are also living in the villages. So that's the whole point, that they are not in a cityscape and phone up to the village every once in a while.

They are actually in the villages. And for example, in Alaska, the native village of Unala Klet and the tribal council is informing what they want to happen out of snow change. So we never expand. We are not a university. We don't go out and have needs. Instead, we respond to the needs that are put forwards by the villages that are part of the network and the coordinators.

Secondly, we have a steering committee of indigenous leaders to make sure that due diligence and the values of snow change are kept. For example, after the rewarding program started, we were approached by massively big oil companies. And they said, can we work with you for offsetting? Can we generate carbon credits through your program? We'll give you so much money that I don't know the zeros for. It was very big amount or something in that fashion.

And the final answer to your question, Nicholas, is that we have very clear set of values. And those values are essentially saying that snow change tries to advance a certain worldview, which is distinct to every single community where we are. So the Finns can't say that, oh, well, we are actually using Xami knowledge. That's only for the Xami. But it doesn't take away from our understanding of traditional understanding of the boreal forest or the things we see on the lakes and the ice.

And through the decades of work that we have done, we have, of course, through multiple exchanges and conferences and visits, we have realized that despite our differences, we are united in certain respect for land, need to revitalize our culture.

We are living in a world where TikTok and Beyonce or the power to her, of course, but all these megastars and globalization has caused massive shifts in young people's capacity to adapt and adopt also the essential connections with the land as this would be called in North America. So at the heart of, so the one sentence takeaway is that, yes, snow change programs are diverse.

We operate both on the highest UN level and in the village level through the North and actually in New Zealand and Australia as well. But the uniting factor is that we are in solidarity for a certain priority of how we navigate as villages and communities this new century. And at the heart of that realization is the core understanding that all of us have culture and traditions worth fighting for.

And of course, the old people in every single place and every different culture have then informed us of the priorities of what to do. In Finland, it is the landscape rewielding and restoration. The landscape has been devastated. There's no more forest left and big lands have been greatly affected. Fine, that's then what we are doing.

In Australia, to give you a final example, our regional coordinator Victor Steffensen, who is an indigenous Australian, was raised up by two very old indigenous Australian elders, Tommy George and Dr. Musgrave. And these ancient knowledge holders raised Victor to revitalize traditional burning on the country. And now Victor has been able to revitalize this across Australia, traditional land management and burning to take care of the country.

So those are some of the examples of how in every distinct place, people are doing the work in their way, but we are united by the priority of what we need to do as a network as well. - This is awesome.

And this is already tapping into the kind of information that we wanna share with early career scholars who are more grounded in Western scientific disciplines and in the academy in terms of thinking about their accountabilities and their solidarities in these processes of working in remote communities, working on issues of climate change and making sure that all of this ultimately does, that it's done in an ethical way and that it's done with the purposes of contributing

valuable and practical knowledge to the broad base of adaptation, the needs to build resilience in these small remote communities that, yeah, have done the least to impact or to cause climate change and are unfortunately the frontline communities when it comes to seeing their life ways and their environments challenged.

So this draws into the next question, which in you, feel free to kind of reiterate some of the points that you just made, but this phrase, co-production of knowledge has come into parlance in a lot of spaces. And I was curious kind of how that term or terms that bear a similarity to it.

I don't know if you're familiar with two-eyed seeing or the two canoes lashed together, but like where science and indigenous knowledge meet, how do you all, yeah, how does that exchange happen in any of the work that Snow Change does, especially both with you having a more anthropological background and as well as natural scientists working with traditional knowledge holders? - A minor question.

Well, today, of course, it is very clearly articulated that there's indigenous knowledge and local knowledge. For example, the Inuit Circumpolar Council has been very clear and vocal in saying that only indigenous peoples have this form of knowledge.

Things are a little bit different on this side of the Arctic in the sense that I would add into the mix, even though this is not the favorite concept in North America, that there are still communities that are having traditional knowledge that are not indigenous by legal status, for example. Earlier, I was talking about the Komi who are a distinct Northern ethnic group, but they are not indigenous peoples, yet they maintain nomadic reindeer herders culture.

They live off the land, they are hunters, fishers, and so they have maintained a distinct culture in the Russian boreal forest for thousands of years. So we have to be mindful of not getting too easy pass on this concept of suddenly in 1990s or 2000s, we wake up in a world where indigenous knowledge is somehow available and then there's science and science has been really naughty and now everything will be much better when we do, do I'd see.

So in order to answer this in a concise but precise way of how we are looking at this actual thing, I would say the following that traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge, depending on the context, has been under attack for centuries in the Arctic. There was a sustained campaign, for example, in Finland, to eliminate holders of traditional knowledge, both in the Sami and Finnish villages by the church and the state in the past centuries.

Equally so, tremendously horrible events unfolded in North America, in Greenland, and other parts of the world where traditional or indigenous knowledge was seen as pagan or lower or primitive way of barbarians for the lack of better term. In fact, 100 years ago in Australia, indigenous Australians were hunted. There was a bounty on people's head as well as some parts of Africa.

There has been some horrible events and that's why societies that possessed or possess indigenous knowledge survived these centuries. They are survivors of tremendously unique ways of knowing that are still here. So one of the things is no change. What we try to do is to, of course, be in full awareness of history, what actually happened.

And then if the work requires, for example, an engagement with indigenous peoples, why don't they define what's appropriate using free prior informed consent and based on their need? Who are we or any other outside party should the village of Unala Klet, for example, in Alaska, who is one of our long-term partners over 20 years, come in and say, this is what's going on. So the humble understanding of the past is number one in our work.

The second, where things get a little bit more complex, Nicholas, is that the context for the second realization is that a large portion of today's conversations on indigenous knowledge builds on Canadian and partly Alaskan, and in some ways New Zealand, Australia, common law countries where indigenous peoples have a treaty or land claim or co-management arrangements that are legally binding to include indigenous knowledge.

For example, Inuvialo with final agreement from 1984, the longest running co-management regime in the world, that codified the use of indigenous knowledge alongside with science in a shared management of resources, fish, marine mammal hunting, and all sorts of other caribou and other mechanisms that we're trying to ratify and guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples.

And through that mechanism, also the respect and understanding that indigenous knowledge is vitally important and will be authored by the people alongside with scientists to come to a place of solutions. We don't have that in European North. There are no land claims, there are no treaties, there are no legally binding mechanisms that respect traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge when decisions are made.

Therefore, a lot of the practices from North America have in a way been exported to the European North and Siberia and been trying to be implemented here. And sometimes, funnily enough, it has even become an imposition. And what I mean by that is that these North American practices from the Inuit or the Dene or Kwicheng or others are then unfit for the realities of the socio-historic context here.

This is a continental law space and the SAMI, for example, have certain limited advances, CBD article HA, and some recognitions of SAMI knowledge, but these are weak defense mechanisms, for example, against mining, or how do we decide about boreal forest? How do we decide on reindeer herding in Finland?

And that's why the task of the organization to come to an end has been to try to be brutally honest about what indigenous knowledge then means in Finland, in Sweden, in Greenland, and in Russia, using the best practices from where success has been able to happen, like in Canada, also learning from the critics of indigenous knowledge formalization with the likes of events of Paul Nadasdi, who wrote about Kuan'i First Nation and how indigenous knowledge, once it became codified in a legal context,

eliminated the actual land use, because people started to get money for their life and the hunting stopped. And this had, according to him, adverse impacts on the living knowledge. I'm not here speaking on behalf of the Kuan'i or offer any criticism of their choices. I'm just quoting Nadasdi's deduction that formalization of indigenous knowledge may not always go well. This has been very important to conclude.

I think we are known around the Arctic and especially these parts as an organization, that that's a stout defender of using indigenous knowledge and science in ecological restoration, community-based observations, or detection of species on the move or whatever the context. However, it has to be from here. It has to look, finish, if it's traditional knowledge from my village, for example, or if it's work by Asla Komburg in Oceoka in the Sami area, it's Sami knowledge.

I don't have any rights or way of defining what they may think is a priority or how to use this. They will choose and tell us, and then we'll try to figure out if they want to work with snow change. So that's kind of pros and cons of massive impact of Canadian and partly Alaskan practices. And I'm also nowadays a bit sad. Maybe I can add it here because we so rarely get to discuss this particular question.

So I'll just say a sentence that personally, being at it now for 25 years, I think it's a bit sad that the indigenous knowledge has evolved into an industry in the academia in North America. People have research licenses, they tick the box, and off you go. So the need and the focus comes from a university student or a research project or from the outside.

And that's partly to blame given the recognition which has had tremendously important benefits, but it has also created an industry that we should talk about on how it's very exciting to study indigenous knowledge. Now it's very exciting to learn about how the Inuit understand the sea ice or is there something sacred in that knowledge or whatever the case. None of that is our business.

I think it should be still defined by the knowledge holders, still in the language that the knowledge operates in that landscape. And that's in a way the raw and dynamic nature of how we are looking at that in the villages probably, while of course upholding and respecting all the rights and good practices and protocols. - That's really interesting.

And it also sort of leads into the next question that I had because we were going to ask a bit about, because in our previous podcasts, we've spoken to people from Alaska and the Canadian North and a big emphasis is that thing of it's not community-based research that's important. It's the community-driven research, that change of mindset, it's the research that comes from the community itself and not just, as you said, a tick box on a student or a researcher's application form or proposal.

I guess, how has Snow Change tried to bring in this community-driven research into your local communities that you work with and not just the Canadian and Alaskan communities and Greenland communities?

- Well, the starting point, which is a bit of the same as I said earlier, but the it's so important fact that it needs to be clearly stated is that the big society, Asian states, and their agencies like the churches had a concentrated attack on indigenous and traditional knowledge systems for centuries. And science was clearly linked as we have heard from Maoris Gollaris, Linda Tuhiwi-Smith and many others.

Her husband, Crayhem, who is a good friend, that the research and scientific exploration was associated for centuries with the European expression of power. So a lot of the expeditions that were carried out between 1400s and of course in the Arctic, then the North was the last place to be the target of both natural resources, extraction like whaling and also the scientific expeditions. Research was a mechanism by which things were ruled over.

If we name it these species or this land or rename these, it becomes in a way a detachment from the realization that all of, or let me put it this way. In some ways, there is no Arctic at all. And I warn sometimes people to try to be very open-minded when I say that, but what I mean by that is that the Arctic is a concept that these researchers and explorers made or the European civilizations that look to the North conjured up.

Instead, the physical and geographical space of what we call the Arctic was for thousands of years in most cases, said or amalgamation of many distinct indigenous homelands, all of which had their own justice systems, orally based, often orally based, high society, poetry, music, they had customary law, they had resource mechanisms, natural resource management regimes like the Sami Sida that were just functioning rather well.

Actually, they were so well-functioning that when the European explorers arrived in many Arctic locations, people thought they are arriving in pristine wilderness. They, what they thought looks like untouched wilderness of no man's land and we can claim it under the King, this and that, or Queen was carefully coexisting, for example, with the Inuits or the Dene or the Quichen or Haida or others further south.

And it was just that most of these indigenous peoples managed and owned their lands so well that there was no collapse. And the Europeans could come to a land of abundance and in their blindness, they didn't realize that it's having enormous resources that are what they thought available. So what I'm trying to say is that there's a historic context of why this kind of indigenous knowledge has been looked down on, tried to be destroyed at its worst and discontinued.

One of the worst damages for how Europe is responsible and Finland, the state of Finland in its own part on the destruction of these knowledge systems was of course the boarding schools and the horrible idea that we must weed out the indigenous person from a child and have a proper member of society, which meant mental elimination or banning of speaking of indigenous languages around the North in the Soviet North and also in North America and in Finland.

So we were trying to destroy as European civilizations, if I call it that, the living engagement that's best expressed in the indigenous languages. And of course the language contains the knowledge. So that's in a way the context of where we come from.

And when you are then living in 2000s onwards to now or 2023, it's really continuing on the understanding that it can only be the community today or the family or the individual that informs how they want to be engaging with science and what's meaningful to them. Especially now that we are entering in conclusion to a new era of massive extractives in the Arctic, world has to switch to electric vehicles.

It needs the rare earth minerals and oh well, well, this will imply another wave of large mining operations, for example, in the Sami home area or in the Boreal. My own house has been claimed by nine different international mining companies because we are on a very rich area of metals and uranium. And we have to fight these processes and entities as a part of striving to maintain just the existence of non-traditional community.

So in many ways, the research needs are driven by the factors of every day. Certainly climate change is one of them. It is very concerning. It's now plus six in our village when it's supposed to be minus 30, 25 in Celsius. It's plus six. Last week I was in Greenland and we heard that it's the warmest in thousand years in Greenland. So clearly climate change is part of this and we need to study it.

But often I think that it's actually the land-crabbing and the land use driven changes that are far more urgent as well as the loss of knowledge with many young people moving on to big cities, not finding self-esteem, hope or interest in the life of a reindeer herder or a fisher. And we were kind of trying to manage that with our master apprentice program for our fisheries.

But those are some of the levels or stratification of urgency is where research needs to happen to tackle timber logging, for example, or staving off a mine and creating a land use and occupancy mapping. And then thirdly, somewhere on the list nowadays is climate. But those are some of the examples of trying to answer your question.

- Thanks so much, Tero. And yeah, thinking this is definitely a topic that I've been focused on a lot, which is we're here conversing in English and English being the international language of science really since the 1990s, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it really achieving that level of dominance. And that English has a very particular way of approaching categorizations, distinct lines between different things.

And so as you're pointing out, the Arctic being this purely geoclimatically defined area that kind of supersedes or is imposed upon what happened historical homelands that have been ensconced in nation states, just a need as you've pointed out to historicize, contextualize all these things, contextualize the development of these knowledges and the development of different categories that we're thinking in.

And to your point about the academic industry of traditional knowledge, I even think that just the reduction of these things of that knowledge that is so specific to every single community and so specific to every indigenous nation's history, to reduce that to several abbreviations, TEK, IK, that does exactly what you're saying. It makes them easily consumed, easily kind of integrated into a lot of existing structures. So I wholeheartedly agree with those observations.

And I wanted to go to transition into one of our last questions. We're slightly changing tack here, but you're pointing out how climate change is this very fetishized issue. And it takes center stage in global discussions of environmentalism. And in fact, it's probably displaced a lot of these other issues that are simultaneous and ongoing in terms of land degradation, detoxification of resources.

Everything of that nature kind of seems to take second tier to this broader existential question of carbon emissions. And that's probably partly because carbon is something that seems like you can turn it into a market. You can create these carbon markets like you all were presented with.

And also it's quantifiable and doesn't, isn't the most disruptive to the kind of existing status quo order of the way that land is distributed and used, it still allows us to extract and keep our goodies and keep the civilization, this global modern civilization kind of turning, turning its cranks, maybe with a different energy source, but at the exact same scale and scope.

So with this carbon focus, you've been part of the IPCC work and we're curious if, I know a piece was just released, I can't remember the authors, but kind of assessing the degree to which traditional indigenous knowledge has made its way into IPCC final reports and considerations and calculations.

And we wanna know what your experience of that has been in terms of any kind of cultural shift within the work of the IPCC in terms of better understanding what indigenous knowledge brings to the table and how that works towards biodiversity goals or climate change research. - So do you have like 12 hours left on the show or? - No, I know. - Oh boy. - You approved, Tero, you approved these questions. I know, they're all big.

So the IPCC just, the climate panel just released a bit less than a year ago, the sixth assessment report, which is every five to seven years, how the UN Climate Science Party names and confirms the scientific understanding of where we are. Now, before I say anything else, the panel is subject to number of criticisms. Why seven years, why takes so long and so on and so on. Now that I was, so I served in the panel as the lead author for Europe and also lead author for the Polar Regions chapter.

And in the five years that I was part of the panel, I was then assigned as well kind of the coordinating role for indigenous knowledge and local knowledge as the panel calls these points or ways of knowing. And I was then also part of the summary for the policymakers, which is the most influential part out of the huge report. It's then summarized into the SBM that's read by the governments and they will spend the three minutes of their time on those points.

So when the sixth assessment cycle started, 2017, 2018, we were informed that coming out of the fifth cycle, 2014, and the special report on 1.5, which was very influential around the world, as well as ASROC, which was the special report on oceans and cryosphere, the panel had been hearing from the Inuit Circumpolar Council and many other indigenous groups that it has to do much better on indigenous knowledge.

So the sixth assessment cycle started with the awareness that the panel has to perform so much better. The difficulty is that unlike all people know, the panel can only accept evidence or review things which are peer-reviewed science in journals or very high-end technical reports that's known as cray literature.

It can't accept evidence or testimony from, for example, indigenous knowledge holders, which is often personified, its oral history, its statements given by elders or a community, and it won't fly. And we were not told by the chairs or the chief scientists how we are supposed to be then integrating or including integration, of course, connotates also problematic views. How did we solve it?

In short, we found a group of, founded a group of eight voluntary lead authors around the world, Latin America, North America, Asia, Africa, the Arctic, Europe, and so on that dedicated their time on trying to do better. And we were, of course, hit by COVID and so on. So that was partly affecting the sixth assessment cycle. But following concentrated conversations, so what happens in the panel is that it meets twice a year around the world in different locations.

And in between time is then supposed to be reviewed time when we assess, I think, 39,000 scientific articles to come to a place of consensus on what's going on in climate change. And it's the most influential scientific body in the world. It's also very arrogant in its position, but it's in some ways true because whatever IPCC states becomes often economic choices, policy options, funding, or lack of funding, and so on and so on.

So to be concise on a very complex issue, there was a group of eight voluntary lead authors that decided that we'll, why don't we have something completely new? This is on our watch, and it has to be something that changes things, at least for the next assessment that's now starting in a few years. And we agreed that we'll have a high-end technical report called "Indigenous and Local Knowledge Yearbook."

And what we did was that we issued a call of statements to global indigenous networks by saying, "Look, there's a window here. There's a certain period of time. It was from autumn, 2020 to spring, 2021. Whoever you are out there, wherever you are, if you are a local community or indigenous peoples or a community, tell us what's important. Send in any language available in the UN your statement, or record it, put it out there as a YouTube video, or whatever the case."

And we'll include it in the yearbook. Now we have to understand all of this happened around the world at a time of COVID. So we were, of course, learning from the devastating impact of this pandemic on indigenous peoples, people didn't want to travel and so on. However, we did get enough of materials around the world to have a yearbook. And in that process, we also found a way that it's not an official IPCC document, but we can quote that document in the actual assessment.

And that's what we did. So for the sixth assessment cycle, we had now a resource that the panel could access that had been consented and authored by knowledge holders around the world on key critically important points that we then distributed both into the regional chapters as well as sectoral chapters like water or desertification or the polar chapter. And the second one was much easier. We invited some chapter authors who are indigenous to contribute.

And that was, of course, increasing some of the indigenous authorship in the panel's work. But for me, I think the most important step that we were able to take was to, for the first time in the panel's work, to be able to find a mechanism by which any indigenous or local community can offer evidence, testimony or a statement, and it will flow into the work of the panel.

And the last point, the cherry on the cake, is that as we came out of the SPM, it takes two weeks, you fight the governments, you discuss word by word how naughty they have been or haven't been, and they have to approve it. So it's a big diplomatic effort, unlike rest of the report. That's clear, but the SPM is a big fight. And we were late in the game. We were late two days. The war in Ukraine had just started on the final day.

And then we came to a section where the draft said, climate change is linked with colonialism, both past and present. And somehow we got it through. So it was the very first time ever in an IPCC document that a group of us in the final dying hours of the last day, I guess the governments were too tired, somehow squeezed it through. And for the little that it matters, it became a big statement on why the catastrophic events are here, as opposed to only talking about adaptation and mitigation.

And so on. So those are the three points to summarize. There was a mechanism by which indigenous knowledge was finally included in part, not perfect, but at least a model. Secondly, we were able to increase the chapter authorship of indigenous peoples to participate. And finally, the SPM summary for the policymakers, it actually states that colonialism is the root cause of our problems, both in the past and today. - That is such a powerful statement.

And I know that it's even here in South Africa, the local communities, it's a lot of the problems that stem from colonialization. And it's political, but it's also the ecological and it's the environmental issues that stem from it. So it's a very, very strong statement. Finally get approved, that stamp, it's wonderful.

So for our last question, we usually ask at the end of every podcast that our guests to give some advice to our early career researchers that are listening to what can they do to establish a working partnership with indigenous communities or their local community during their graduate studies, during the research project. Would you mind giving a few tips? - So boys and girls out there in the university, this is Uncle Tero from Snow Change.

I am a veteran of 25 years of Arctic studies with the indigenous and local communities. Here's a couple of points. When you wanna engage with the indigenous peoples, don't if you are not ready for it. So always ask yourself, why am I doing this? Am I doing this because it's exciting, I wanna go off to an Arctic adventure and so on and so on. Think very carefully before you do any kind of outreach.

If it's on your need, your needs, it may be very different than the needs of the actual people living in these villages that have undergone massive transformations not all of them create. They have been part of the colonial impact for centuries. And if they are now rebuilding their lives, they may be on a better place. You have to be in 120% awareness of the past what actually happened. If you don't know, find out.

There are things called books, even today, they have a great interface, no need to recharge the battery. They are in the library. And by reading about the history of the Arctic and research about indigenous peoples, you will find out that this is a very complex field. It's also a very demanding field. So think twice before you go. And ask at every point, why am I reaching out or why am I being going out there? What's the motive?

Maybe I'm better off studying my own community, our fishermen or the coast in Maine or Halifax or wherever. Think about this. Indigenous peoples are unique human beings, but they are human beings swamped with the things that they have to tackle in the Arctic. Climate change is only one of them. They are having to deal with things like mining, infrastructure buildup, oil and gas, tourism, loss of language, youth, suicide, alcoholism, abuse, or whatever the case might be.

And think very carefully why you want to engage down this pathway. And who is in charge? Are you having needs and the feeling of excitement? I will go to Greenland to do something. Don't. It's far more exciting and far more courageous to build up your own community. Or if the context happens where the community in the Arctic reaches out and says, help us to work, for example, on our fish populations or currible, none of these points that I have told you will go away.

They are the keepers of the land. They have been existing with that place for thousands of years in some cases. Respect and be humble in trying to understand that they are living a life and they are part of a civilization that's fundamentally different than where you most likely come from. And that's why the context and the reason to go into the Arctic is of paramount interest. You can learn about the Arctic nowadays in multiple media, all the things that have happened before.

And for example, indigenous-led filmmaking. There are massively important cultural artifacts and films now out there. For example, "Fast Runner", "Acharnayuat", "Sammy Films", "Haida Film", "Edge of a Knife", just came out and so on and so on. You can enjoy the indigenous coexistence and be good allies with indigenous peoples without imposing.

Because the final thing that me, Uncle Tero, will tell you is that research has been associated with colonial power and has been a dirty word for the indigenous peoples for a long time. Therefore, if you have made it past these checkpoints and you are doing Arctic research and continue to do it, here's a piece of advice. Always bring knowledge back home. Whenever you try to publish a PhD or an article or a study, don't parachute and disappear if you work with the local people.

Always get enough funding that you do your work, you do it well in a humble position, respectfully and following the free and informed consent. And then when the laboratory days are over or your actual work is over, then you go back. And you present at the school, you present at elders lunch and you make sure that the people that worked with you approve what you did. I can't tell you who those people are.

They might be the tribal council, the research committee, the family or the individual that you interacted with, but take knowledge back home. Be better than the centuries of worst research. Make a difference and do it now much better than ever before. You are the vanguard of Arctic research. We are living with all the history that happened and we can't be blind to that. And that's why the final word from here is that always bring knowledge back home.

- Thank you, Tero. This has been a really incredible conversation. I'm going to be listening to this podcast and all of our other podcasts with our excellent guests.

Yeah, we really appreciate all of the insight and context and authority that you have in this area, knowledge that you have in this area to share with our listeners and with exactly, as you said, this new generational vanguard of people who are changing science and hopefully can induct us into an age of truly collaborative, paradigm-shifting science because yeah, we're in desperate need of it. So we really appreciate all of your time and yeah, Inga, do you have anything else?

- No, I think you said it all. Thank you so much, Tero, for all your wisdom and advice and the history that you've given. It's amazing and thank you very much. - Keep on rocking. - No, thanks a lot for listening to this podcast. And I want to say thanks a lot to Inge and Nicholas for organizing this mini-series and having this really insightful guest and wonderful conversations that we can listen to.

If you want to suggest a guest or suggest yourself or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to write us at theseapolatimes@gmail.com. Theseapolatimes@gmail.com. And also don't hesitate to rate us and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts. And yeah, thanks a lot again for being here, listening to our podcast and we have a lot of new episode comings and we are looking forward to publishing them for you. Have a great day.

- Please note that whilst this is an APECS production, the views and opinions expressed by the host and any guests are entirely their own. Do not represent the views or opinions of APECS or any other host institution mentioned. (soft music) (soft music)