Is Nonterritorial Autonomy Wrong for Indigenous Rights? Examining the ‘Territorialisation’ of Sami Power in Norway

• Published in: International Journal on Minority and Group Rights
• Main Authors: Spitzer, Aaron, Selle, Per
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Brill Academic Publishers 2020
• Subjects: Norway; sami
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11250/2758190; https://doi.org/10.1163/15718115-BJA10009

Nonterritorial autonomy (nta) decouples governance of ‘people’ and ‘place’, allowing demographically submerged minorities to protect their cultural – but not territorial – interests. Indigenous peoples are often submerged and culturally vulnerable. At the same time, they are often especially interested in protecting the territories that have long sustained them. So, is nta well-suited or ill-suited for Indigenous self-governance? To explore this, we study Norwegian Sami self-governance, an oft-cited case of Indigenous nta. We make several contributions. We enumerate the variety of Sami-specific rights and powers in Norway, categorising them as either territorial or nonterritorial and tracking their evolution over time. By doing this we reveal that Sami self-governance has recently taken a ‘territorial turn’. We explore why this has happened, concluding it is due to the insufficiency of nta. Finally, we discuss likely limits to further Sami territorialisation. publishedVersion