Self-Governance and Adaptation: Rethinking Indigenous Arctic Histories

How can a self-governance perspective reshape our understanding of Indigenous Arctic histories? This paper aims at advancing our understanding about aboriginal societies and their historical use of common pool resources. By applying a self-governance approach, it moves beyond state-centric narratives that have long dominated interpretations of historical change, and highlights how Indigenous agency and internal dynamics have shaped historical trajectories. Aboriginal societies around the world have independently transitioned their production modes throughout history. In northern Eurasia, one such major transition manifested in a movement away from transport reindeer herding towards reindeer pastoralism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Northern Fennoscandia was one of the first regions to witness this shift, and the Indigenous Sami there are an especially suitable case to study. The historical sources are exceptionally rich in the area, and Sami are an interesting case because reindeer pastoralism developed in a foraging culture, with many households continuing on as hunters and fishers long after pastoralism had been introduced. The shift to pastoralism was driven by concomitant, self-governed responses as the transition progressed. By combining historical sources and self-governance frameworks, this analysis advances the discussion about how Indigenous reindeer-herding societies – governance and social relations included – were affected by the transformation from 1550–1800 AD. The Sami case reflects that there was a dynamic interaction between customary rules-in-use and colonial rules-in-form, that complicates interpretations of Indigenous societies as either autonomous or passive in historical shifts.