The International Conference on Sami Research Data Governance 2023 was held from 25-27 of January 2023. The conference, which was hosted by The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, Norway, was the first of its kind designed to launch the GIDA-Sapmi network. The GIDA-Sapmi network consists of researchers and advocates across Sweden, Finland and Norway raising awareness and policy efforts to improve Sámi peoples’ sovereignty and governance over Sámi data.
Through the LICCI project’s proof-of-concept Research on Indigenous Data Sovereignty Protocols (RIDAGOP), Adrien Tofighi-Niaki and Ramin Soleymani from ICTA-UAB were invited to present their research around Indigenous consent protocols and research guidelines across Indigenous institutions and communities, as well as potential solutions via the creation of a toolkit that could facilitate custom data management processes for diverse repositories. The presentation can be accessed here.
The conference included many inspiring and important talks. A few of these included:
Sámi (non-)presence in official statistics in Norway by Torrun Pettersen, Sámi University of Applied Sciences (NO);
Towards data sovereignty in Aotearoa/New Zealand by Tahu Kukutai, University of Waikato (NZ);
History of GIDA and CARE principles – towards Indigenous governance of data by Stephanie Russo Carroll, University of Arizona (US);
A First Nations Data Governance Strategy and Exercising our Rights Over Data by Erin Corston, First Nations Indigenous Governance Centre (FNIGC) (CA);
Ensuring Indigenous data sovereignty and governance in European arctic research: a roadmap towards decolonial Arctic research” by members of the Saami Council and members of the Indigenous Voices research group at The Arctic University of Norway (NO).
Thank you GIDA-Sapmi and The Arctic University of Norway for welcoming us so warmly in the heart of winter!
Dr. Tahu Kukutai presents Towards data sovereignty in Aotearoa/New ZealandMembers of the Saami Council and the Indigenous Voices research group discuss decolonial Arctic research practices.A boat with the Sámi flag in the Port of Tromsø.
Giulia, one of our LICCI partners, has recently defended her Ph.D. Her work focuses on Hutsuls, a small ethnolinguistic group living in the Ukrainian and Romanian Carpathian Mountains. Giulia conducted cross-border research on how the political context can affect the use of wild food and medicinal plants. Indeed, Hutsul communities used to live under the same political entity, Bukovina, until the 1940s when it was split between the Soviet Union and the Kingdom of Romania. This complex, fascinating and beautiful region of Eastern Europe hosted her Ph.D. research, which she conducted within the framework of two ERC-funded projects, DiGe and LICCI.
Read the interview here:
Bukovina, I have never heard of it! Could you tell us a bit more about this region?
Bukovina -called “Europe in miniature”- is an incredible example of how a harmonious coexistence of different ethnic and religious groups can occur. Such multiculturality was fostered by the complex Bukovinian history; it was the easternmost region of the Austro Hapsburg Empire, before becoming part of the Kingdom of Romania and subsequently split. It is now Ukraine in its Northern portion and Romania in its Southern area. This peculiarity made Bukovina and its Hutsul and Romanian communities, an ideal case study.
What about the Hutsuls?
Hutsuls are a small ethnolinguistic group. For centuries, they have interacted with the surrounding landscape, the endless forests, and the meadows created for feeding their animals. Over time, Hutsuls built a complex knowledge system, that makes them privileged observers of environmental changes in their landscapes. Yet, their local knowledge systems are being increasingly jeopardized by the rapid environmental and socio-economic changes, including the tumultuous political history.
So, what was the purpose of your research?
My objective was to study how political borders (specifically the Bukovinian border created in the 1940s) affect local knowledge of the use of wild food and medicinal plants and its transmission, as well as local environmental perceptions.
What are your main findings?
I came up with three main findings.
First, the corpora of knowledge related to plants, especially medicinal plants, are richer among Hutsuls and Romanians living in Ukraine than among Hutsuls and Romanians living in Romania. This difference probably originates in their political (and multilingual) context, which was possibly incorporated during the Soviet times.
Second, local knowledge transmission occurs in divergent forms across the border.
Hutsuls and Romanians living in Ukraine, rely on written and visual sources for obtaining information regarding wild food and medicinal plants much more than communities living in Romania, which conversely transmit their knowledge orally within the family or by local elders. This could be due to the bibliophily of the people of Ukraine.
Third, Romanian and Ukrainian Hutsuls, well known as people of the forest, share perceptions of forest benefits but differ in their perceptions of the drivers of forest change, possibly due to the diverging forest management policies.
Which is your overarching message?
Oh, I have learned so much from the people of Bukovina, their way of caring for their fairy-tale landscape. You can feel their embeddedness. They have taught me that „we are one”, with their everyday activities, caring about the forest, and preparing herbal teas for their animals, as „humans, animals, it is the same, just the same”.
I believe that cross-border ethnobiology is a powerful tool to highlight similarities and differences, which is a crucial way to promote transboundary environmental policies. Considering the fast decline of natural resources, common environmental management understandings (and policies) are much needed as peace-keeping strategies.
Next steps?
I am now working on a paper on the perception of climate change impacts among Hutsuls living in Romania, and I regret I did not perform the semi-structured interviews also on the Ukrainian side. It would have been very interesting!
My heart goes to all Hutsuls, Romanians, and Ukrainians of Ukraine suffering from unjustifiable violence. May the peace reigns over Ukraine and its people soon.
Publications:
Mattalia, G., Stryamets, N., Balázsi, Á., Molnár, G., Gliga, A., Pieroni, A., Sõukand R. Reyes-García, V. (2021). Hutsuls’ perceptions of forests and uses of forest resource in Ukrainian and Romanian Bukovina. International Forestry Review, 23(3), 1.
Mattalia, G., Stryamets, N., Grygorovych, A., Pieroni, A., & Sõukand, R. (2021). Borders as crossroads: the diverging routes of herbal knowledge of Romanians living on the Romanian and Ukrainian sides of Bukovina. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 11, 1839.
Mattalia, G., Stryamets, N., Pieroni, A., & Sõukand, R. (2020). Knowledge transmission patterns at the border: Ethnobotany of Hutsuls living in the Carpathian Mountains of Bukovina (SW Ukraine and NE Romania). Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 16, 41
Citizen/community science approaches are fundamental to contribute to #COP26’s Goal 4: “Work together to deliver” since they hold the potential to foster collaboration between scientists, civil society, and governments, which is needed to accelerate action to tackle the climate crisis.
At the LICCI_project (ICTA-UAB) we are very aware about having the voices and knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities be heard in the policy debate, but also the voices of civil society in general. We have been working in this line for already three years and have produced a tool that can help to bring these voices together: the OpenTEK platform.
OpenTEK is a multi-language citizen science platform designed to encourage participation in climate research by allowing anyone in the world to document and classify their observations of climate change impacts. This will make local impacts more visible and provide a more complete picture of the myriad climate change effects on our daily lives. By documenting concrete impacts of climate change throughout diverse communities worldwide, we can help make better policies and develop and share better adaptation measures. Next to creating and viewing local observations, there are other sources and types of information that will be made available with time. For instance, in this first release, we included an archive of more than 100 scientific publications, which report local observations that have been reviewed and classified by a research team. We also have included field study data collected by scientists in partnership with local communities.
We are still prototyping the user interface to work for Indigenous people, the general public, and scientists likewise, so that the OpenTEK platform can become a tool for cooperation. In this sense, with our civil society partners, and with funding from a Proof of Concept ERC grant (LICCION), we are now developing tailor-made platforms designed to not only facilitate the documentation and visualization of local climate change impacts knowledge but also to allow community-specific protocols to be respected and integrated, as well as preferred ownership levels.
Although we still face important challenges, such as the technological divide and the accessibility of some communities to these types of tools, we think that these technologies can contribute to youth and public empowerment and also to more transdisciplinary climate science and innovation.
Dr. Divya Rajeswari Swaminathan works extensively in the natural resources management sector and especially with indigenous people studying about their livelihood conditions in different regions in India. She worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, Central University of Tamil Nadu, India until 2019. She was engaged as a research fellow at the AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland in the field of Geotourism under the umbrella of UNESCO- Poland Fellowship program from 2017-18. In the LICCI project she aims to understand the interrelationship between indigenous forest dwellers and climate change scenario in montane areas of Southern India.
