Fishing under the Consent of the Kingdom. From local requests to Indigenous claims in a coastal Sami fjord
Thesis by Camilla Brattland
The work is an account of the development of the coastal Sami rights discourse, especially pertaining to fishing rights, in northern Norway in the period after the Second World War until today. The account is made with cases from the Lyngen region in the north of Norway. The rise in rights awareness among the coastal Sami was prompted by increasing threats to the traditional way of life of the coastal Sami, especially after the 1990 fisheries crises. In public discourses, coastal Sami fishing rights as an issue meet with opposition. One challenge is the history of Norwegianization that hid coastal Sami culture to the point that any mention of Sami history was politically and culturally incorrect. Another factor is the general power structure inherent in Norwegian fisheries management, where communities stand few chances against the press of global market forces and national policies. However, the thesis shows that coastal Sami in the Lyngen region in northern Troms argued for decades that both the fish stocks and their traditional ways of fishing were threatened by the state-introduced fisheries regulations. Coastal Sami thus face a double challenge for the recognition of the right to fish.