Can a green shift be achieved with a gray industrial mindset and legal violations? The recent “Fosen demonstrations” in  Norway revealed a national failure both as a legal state and in sustainability. However, Sami activism and culture present new opportunities for Norwegian sustainability. Instead of further Norwegianizing of the Sami, how about indigenizing or “Sami-fying” Norwegian culture instead?  

“Sami people are greedy”. “Too much power to a minority”. “Tired of kofte, joik and reindeer.” Social media in Norway has seen a barrage of statements, including attempts to reject the Sami status as an indigenous people. 

This resistance is not new. It must stem from a deep place within our psyche. Why does the Norwegian majority become so upset about the fact that the Sami people prefer ancestral seascapes and landscapes without  “our” modern dams, rotors, power lines, cabins or roads. 

The current crisis in both climate and nature is clearly due to Western grey growth, not Sami culture. Indigenous peoples hold up a mirror to us, revealing that as a people, we still do not live in respectful reciprocity with land and earth. Therefore, a turnaround toward a worldview closer to the Sámi one is called for. That implies letting go of at least three basic assumptions in Norwegian culture: 

1. Human is separate from nature 

The Norwegian state administration views nature as objective resources, something “out there”. Only humans are thinking subjects, elevated above the resources. Sami language and culture operate differently: there is no one word for “nature”. Instead of viewing nature as a single concept, they have hundreds of words for different landscape forms and features, in which both their identity and livelihood are interwoven. It’s more like a living relational field than an “object”. If we Norwegians can complement our separation thinking with relational thinking, we would discover a world of relatives. It will become clear that what we do to our mountains and wildlife, we do to our relatives, and ourselves.   

2. Norwegian reductionism 

In Norwegian culture, physical matter is often considered devoid of meaning. Drawing lines and two-dimensional maps in offices reduces multidimensional worlds of life to mere calculations and property. Nature values are unquestioning reduced to monetary value. As a result, the “objective” value of electricity is compared to the price of reindeer meat from the same area, leading to the conclusion that kWh is more valuable.   

But what about the voices that reside in willows, birch, streams, and ponds? What if the mountains and animals also possess, as Professor Arne Næss so eloquently explained, an intrinsic value beyond monetary? Many indigenous cultures value diversity through stories and ancestral or invisible presences in the land, not through numbers. In the face of Norwegian reductionism, these life values are silenced, prompting demonstrators to shout, “Let the mountains live!” 

3. Mechanical understanding of nature 

In Norwegian culture, things are mechanically analyzed. Combustion explodes the gases in an engine, which drives pistons and wheels. Such cause-and-effect is seen as the only physical and true reality. And economic reality is based on this. But what if sustainability also entails understanding that the mountains are living parts of our ecological Self? What if salmon and reindeer migrations carry our spiritual longings for deep belonging to the earth? This philosophy challenges Norwegian foundations. Because if the river and mountains are alive, they have inviolable inherent values and legal rights far beyond our own generation.   

Two-eyed seeing 

For a long time, Norwegian separation, reduction, and mechanistic thinking have driven intense expulsion of spirituality from places and stones, animals, and mountains. The Fosen conflict revealed all three assumptions in action. OED bureaucrats have refused to acquire knowledge that challenges their basic assumptions, just as priests rejected Sami life knowledge for centuries. Therefore, the restoration of the mountains seems meaningless withing the narrow understanding of reality within the government apparatus.  

To conclude, we do not have a “Sami problem”. Our challenge is to start decolonizing our own minds. After the state’s apology and compensations, the opportunity for an “inner” Sami turn remains among mainstream Norwegians. How can we gain more respect for the ecology and autonomy of landscapes and live in a close relationship with forests, animals, and habitats? We need to learn “two-eyed seeing”: to be able to see with both modern and indigenous eyes. Instead of further Norwegianization, unlearning our own assumptions and drawing inspiration from the Sami can provide greater quality of life and solidarity with the wealth of mountains, lichens, roots, leaves, rivers, and winds.