| Summary: | 87 pages Indigenous peoples are among the most severely impacted groups by the effects of the climate crisis despite their negligent role in engendering environmental degradation. To many Indigenous peoples, the violence of the climate crisis is not a novel violence but rather an exacerbation of already existing violence. Crucially, the impacts of the climate crisis perpetuate historic and contemporary colonialist aims against Indigenous peoples. The Sámi, an Indigenous people in Fennoscandia, have contended with centuries of colonialism and are currently facing the dire impacts of the climate crisis as Earth’s new human-dominated geological epoch—the Anthropocene—unfolds. In this thesis, I argue that both the direct ecological impacts of the climate crisis and “development” in response to this crisis are essentially continuations and exacerbations of colonialist violence against Sámi in Sweden. Utilizing a political ecology framework and primarily qualitative analyses of existing literature pertaining to the Sámi, colonialism, and the climate crisis, I explore the historical and contemporary intersections of colonialism and ecological breakdown in a Sámi context while arguing for the political institutionalization of the Sámi in Sweden.
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