BÁRRU
INDIGENOUS ACADEMIC COLLECTIVE
co-leads
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
Sámi scholar
Dr. Liisa-Rávná Finbog isa Sámi Indigenous scholar, duojár and curator from Oslo, Vaapste, and Skánit in the Norwegian part of Sápmi. As a long-time practitioner of duodji [Sámi practices of aesthetics and storytelling], her work combines her aesthetic practice with an Indigenous research focus, blending Sámi ways of being (ontology), knowing (epistemology), and doing (axiology) with traditional research paradigms of Western academia. Moving between Sámi aesthetics and the materiality of creative practices, she navigates the dynamicsbetween fine art and politics of indigeneity in her work, both as an academic and duojár, but also in her curatorial practice. Due to her deep investment in Indigenous methodologies through creative practices, Finbog was in 2021 appointed as co-curator of the first ever Sámi Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. She is also a founding member of the artist collective, Hásstuheaddj, which has performed at multiple art scenes.
Finbog is currently based in Tampere, on the Finnish side of Sápmi, where she is doing her post-doc research in connection with ‘Mediated Arctic Geographies’, a project that aims to look at how Arctic geospheres are aesthetically shaped and mediated to become vehicles of environmental, [geo]political and social concerns at Tampere University. Her specific focus is on the relation between Indigenous aesthetics in the Arctic and land.
A prolific author, her written works include contributionsto collective works such as ‘Research Journeys In/To Multiple Ways of Knowing
(2019), articles in Nordic Museology (2015) and in the digital platform “Action Stories” (2021), essays in multiple exhibition catalogues (2022, 2023) as well as several upcoming works, including her first book, “It Speaks to You – Making kin through people, stories, and duodji in Sámi Museums” (2023).
Britt Kramvig
Professor of northern studies
Britt Kramvig is Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She has an interdisciplinary orientation and practice collaborative methodologies in all of her research. She is an expert of Indigenous ontologies, ecologies, aesthetics and storytelling. In addition she are working with tourism as a world making practice and how sustainability are performed locally. Ongoing publication efforts engage with everyday practices of reconciliation, memory and landscape – through research in the archive of the Sámi medical expert Knut Lunde. In several publications she argue that we should not merely focus on stories as products, but also on storytelling as an intersection in reciprocity. Storytelling can therefore inform an emergent politics of memory and enact landscapes of remembrance. This emphasizes the importance of not only the substance of the stories, but also the very act of participating in a shared event. It also emphasizes how this event brings our attention to our sense of being with-others, so promoting relation-weaving and world-making in which the past and the future are recalled as well as remade. For that reason she have been engaged in several creative documentaries, such as Dreamland and Firekeepers and have for long been working with Sámi artists.
She has been co-editing the book Recognition, Reconciliation and Restoration: Applying a Postcolonial Understanding in Social Work and Healing, and co-written publication is among others Decolonized Research-Storying Bringing Indigenous Ontologies and Care into the Practices of Research Writing and Improving the relationships between Indigenous rights holders and researchers in the Arctic: an invitation for change in funding and collaboration.
She is a fellow at the University of Durham connected to the project Exploring Arctic Soundscape and a member of the ongoing research project Mediating Arctic Geographies. Kramvig have a seat in the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar research and at IASC The International Arctic Science Committee. At UiT The Arctic University of Norway, she is a member of the research group Indigenous Voices (IVO) - Álgoálbmogii jienat and of Narrating the postcolonial North.
Harald Gaski
Professor in Sámi Culture and Literature
Harald Gaski was born and grew up on the river Deatnu / Tana in Sápmi, on the 70th latitude in the northernmost county of Norway. Gaski was taught the basic skills of survivance and subsistence in a River Sámi culture like salmon fishing, berry picking, and trapping. At that time storytelling was still vibrantly alive, which had an impact on Gaski’s later choice of a career. He wanted to study his own culture, and also do comparative studies within other Indigenous cultures.
Gaski is anauthor, editor, and a Professor in Sámi Literature at Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences and a Professor in Sámi Culture and Literature at UiT – the Arctic University of Norway. Gaski’s research specializes on Indigenous methodologies and aesthetics, and Sámi culture and literature, both oral and written, also including the Sámi vocal genre, juoigan (yoik) – one of Europe’s oldest singing traditions which still is practiced and thriving.
Gaski has been instrumental in establishing Sámi literature as an academic field. He has translated Sámi literature and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s poetry into Norwegian and English. His most recent book is an anthology of Sámi literature, published in 2020, titled Myths, Tales and Poetry from Four Centuries of Sámi Literature. His first book is from 1987, Med ord skal tyvene fordrives, an account and analysis of narrative juoigan (Sámi folk music) texts.
Gaski has been a visiting scholar at several universities internationally. He served on the International Research Advisory Panel of New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence for 10 years (2006-2015). Gaski is also a fiction writer and a playwright, with co-written theater pieces that have been performed internationally, “Johan Turi” and “Juoiggas!”.
In 2006 Gaski was awarded the The Nordic Sámi Language Prize, Gollegiella, and in 2015 Gaski was the recipient of Várdduo /Cesam's research award at the University of Umeå in Sweden.
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Professor of creative writing
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary's Igloo), Alaska. She has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, the National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, the United States Artists Foundation Creative Vision Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, multiple Individual Artist awards & Artist Fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Paul Engle Award,and residencies with the School for Advanced Research, the Lannan Foundation, and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. She has held faculty appointments in creative writing and English at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), in the department of English at Harvard University and at Tufts University, and the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has also served as a lecturer in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, teaching courses in Native American and Indigenous Studies. At Scripps College, she was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism. She is currently an associate professor with an appointments in the department of English at Reed College.
