Wearing your belonging – governance systems going beyond speech
It is not that we speak aloud about the spaces which belong to us, or rather which we belong to.
We rather show it, most in our regalia. When dressing to our land rights´ evidences, it is a practical, aesthetical and visual form of announcing something, rather than saying aloud this is where I am from/ this is who I am/ these are my Guardian Spirits.
When discussing the effects of climate change, change in land use, man-made damages on land, or the attempts to repair and recover the damages done in a meaningful way, we always speak about the land rights. That is inevitable. Because unclarity of land use causes horrific land management- it is no-one´s responsibility and not happening in my backyard, and therefore the rules of best possible conduct and management don´t apply.
Losing land rights means losing a right to an endemic legal system- the meaningfulness of traditional (customary) law- with its punishments, if you do not follow the land use law- , which leads to the corrosion of traditional practices that are alive only in every- day use, which leads the collapse of the threads that binds a people together, and makes us being the we: we are the ones who are the guardians of this place, this space, this is where we are rooted and this is where we belong. And without we are no more.
But when we are speaking about land rights in the previously mentioned contexts, we are usually speaking (or disputing) about the ownership and the power that follows from it, from the current legal perspective. When applying traditional concepts to that discussion, the translation always goes so that the end product is the current legal perspective. Which cannot be translated to traditional concepts fully. We do have traditional concepts for sovereignty and different processes of making decisions, but not about ownership, even in the case Finnish law experts say that Skolt Sámi are the only Sámi group in Finland who has had ownership to their lands.
Our concepts speak about belonging, right to take a living and family continuation.
When discussing the restoration work done in Sevettijärvi lake watershed, it is done both for and with the land and the people. The question of belonging is especially urgent for our people in there, since we have been living in the place and space (traditionally Njauddam Skolt Sámi winter area) only a bit less than 80 years now, in a settled manner. We are merely settling in.
That creates timidity in telling aka wearing your belonging- do we have the permission to do that, yet?