An Indigenous land claim with parallels to Canada could redraw Norway's map

Norway's Supreme Court is deliberating on a case that could grant local control over a vast area in the country's far north - and set a groundbreaking precedent for Indigenous land rights in Europe.

The case will determine whether the largely Indige‐ nous Sámi municipality of Karasjok will get collective ownership over its roughly 5,450 square kilometres of land - the second-largest mu‐ nicipal area in Norway and one of the most productive in terms of natural resources.

The Sámi are Europe's on‐ ly formally recognized Indige‐ nous group, with traditional territories spanning the na‐ tional borders of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. Acrosstraditional territories in four Arctic nations, Sámi communities are already en‐ gaged inhigh-profilecon‐ flictsover land as theappetite for industrial projects on their territories appears to be ever-rising.

Within the northern coas‐ tal area known today as Finn‐ mark, a county roughly the size of Nova Scotia, decisions about land are currently made by a private company, jointly managed by Sámi and a local public government. If the court decides for Karasjok, the community will achieve direct, local control over development decisions in their territory - and call the future of the existing system into doubt.

The case has already proven deeply divisive, with warring op-eds claiming a victory for Karasjok, which has a population of around 2,500 in an area roughly the size of the Greater Toronto Area, would turn neighbour against neighbour andeven compromise national secu‐ rity.

But experts say the case parallels those in Canada that launched the modern In‐ digenous land claim process, and could have further impli‐ cations for Indigenous land rights in Norway and across Europe.

"It might be all of Finn‐ mark by the end," said Oyv‐ ind Ravna, a professor of law at the Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. "You don't have to go far back in time to see that all of Finn‐ mark, apart from the main towns, is Sámi land."

Contested history

At issue in Karasjok is whether the Kingdom of Nor‐ way ever established legal ti‐ tle over the lands of Finn‐ mark, which formed a part of the heartland of the Sámi people long before the coun‐ try took control of the area in the early 18th century.

For millennia, the Indige‐ nous Sámi people have hunted, fished and herded reindeer across a broad swath of Arctic territory from modern day Russia to Nor‐ way. But whether the Sámi can claim legal ownership of their traditional territory hinges on much more recent history.

The area known today as Finnmark, where Norway's coastline curves toward Rus‐ sia, has only been claimed by Norway since it was transfer‐ red from Sweden in 1751. Even then, it is not clear from records whether the Norwe‐ gian state expected actual ownership rights or simply an extension of the king's sovereignty. No treaties were ever signed with the Sámi, Ravna notes, and the first mention of "state land" in a law does not occur until 1848.

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Still, for centuries, Norwe‐ gians carried out programs of forced assimilation aimed at the Sámi, suppressing lan‐ guages and customs and denying many of them prop‐ erty rights in their own lands. That history, experts say, has long muddied the waters of identity and ownership in Finnmark.

"The history of land own‐ ership in Norway is very simi‐ lar to other Indigenous peo‐ ples' areas," said Rune Fjell‐ heim, former director general of the Sámi Parliament of Norway, from Karasjok, who helped convene the local par‐ ties to the case.

"You meet a people that you first of all don't recognize as as good as you, and you disregard their legal system, established practices and ownership traditions and, in that sense, fundamentally disregard their right to the resources in the area."

Background to the case

In the 1990s, after decades of Sámi advocacy, Norway be‐ gan negotiating with the newly created Sámi Parlia‐ ment - a democratically elected Sámi assembly that deals with all matters con‐ cerning the Sámi people in Norway - to address calls for land rights and self-govern‐ ment in compliance with in‐ ternational law.

In 2006, that resulted in the Finnmark Act, which cre‐ ated a company called the Finmark Estate to manage the lands of the North. Man‐ agement of the company would be split evenly be‐ tween appointees of Nor‐ way's Finnmark County, a public government, and those appointed by the Sámi Parliament.

But fearing that Norway would treat the Finnmark Act as "the end of the rights dis‐ cussion," Fjellheim said, Sámi negotiators also pushed for the creation of another body, the Finnmark Commission, that would "thoroughly inves‐ tigate all historical claims … to the ownership of various areas of Finnmark."

In 2019,that commission found, by a narrow majority, that the largely Sámi Munici‐ pality of Karasjok had never ceded title to a territory com‐ prising more than 5,000 square kilometres, repre‐ senting over 10 per cent of FeFo's lands andmillions of dollars in annual income.

FeFo's boardinitially ac‐ cepted the findings when it was chaired by a Sámi mem‐ ber. But when the chairman‐ ship passed to a Finnmark

County appointee in 2020, itchanged direction and de‐ cided to challenge the finding in court.

That lower courtfound for the Municipality of Karasjok by another narrow majority, concluding that the Indige‐ nous municipality owns the land, and sending shock‐ waves through the communi‐ ties of Finnmark's northern coast.

What's at stake

Currently under the Finn‐ mark Act, any resident has equal rights to hunting, fish‐ ing and foresting across the entire territory. Karasjok re‐ mains a popular destination for moose and grouse hunting and is home to a third of Finnmark's most pro‐ ductive forests.

The decisionprompted fears that Karasjok would withdraw those rights for res‐ idents of Finnmark's mostly non-Indigenous coastal com‐ munities. In another split de‐ cision, FeFo's board decided to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

"We believe that the Sami people and other Finnmark‐ ings have jointly used the whole of Finnmark," apage on FeFo's company website explaining the appeal reads. "The Finnmark Commission divides this community with‐ out there being a historical basis for it."

Echoes of Canada's land claim process

For Aaron John Spitzer, an as‐ sociate professor in compar‐ ative politics at Norway's Uni‐ versity of Bergen, the case now before Norway's Supreme Court brings up many of the same questions about the land claims of colo‐

That case saw Nisga'a First Nation in B.C. argue that it had never ceded title to its territory. Though the case was thrown out on a techni‐ cality, the Supreme Court's findings prompted the feder‐ al government to set in mo‐ tion the modern land claims process.

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"This will be the first time in Norway where any sub‐ stantial area of land is going to be subjected to the same kind of question," Spitzer said. "Is there such a thing as collective Indigenous owner‐ ship of a piece of territory, or did that somehow go away?"

If the case is decided for Karasjok, it is likely that sev‐ eral other municipalities in the Sámi heartland will launch similar claims for local control. "This is an area of about 20,000 square kilome‐ tres," Spitzer said, "as big as Slovenia or Israel - so, a small state."

There is no clear indica‐ tion yet what that collective ownership will look like. FeFo has so far ruled out contin‐ uing to manage the land on their behalf. It's possible, Spitzer says, that the Sámi re‐ gions could join together to create their own manage‐ ment board, ruling on fishing, harvesting and development rights across a large swath of Inner Finnmark.

If that happens, FeFo will lose much of its most valu‐ able territory, and perhaps even its reason for being. But if FeFo wins, Spitzer said, the Finnmark Commission - the body demanded by Sámi ne‐ gotiators and charged with settling the land claims pro‐ cess - "will have been effec‐ tively neutered." That may call the legitimacy of the Finnmark Act into question and plunge the country once again into negotiations be‐ tween the government and Sámi Parliament.

"In some sense you have two pieces of the Finnmark Act fighting against one an‐ other," he said. "One of them is going to fail."

To rule on the case, the Supreme Court has ex‐ panded its panel of judges to 11 members from the usual five. With more than 20,000 pages of material to review, there is no clear timeline for a decision, though it is ex‐ pected to come before the end of the summer.