Archaeology in Sápmi – the traditional core area of the Indigenous Sámi people in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Federation – is a contested field of study, closely intertwined with issues of identity, ethnicity, and indigeneity, as well as conflicts over land and cultural rights. In recent decades, Sámi archaeology has emerged as a multidimensional and dynamic movement, engaged with the diversity of Sámi pasts and the complex interrelations between past and present. This chapter reviews current issues in Sámi archaeology and heritage management, and explores some of the political dimensions of archaeology in Sápmi and challenges that archaeologists and other researchers are facing in this field of tension.

Each mining operation has its due date. Each new prospect of Arctic extractivism marks the beginning of another repetitive cycle of boom and bust, while monuments of short-lived prosperity and wounds of environmental destruction mark landscapes long after the machinery goes quiet. What can we learn from the dispossession associated with resource extractivism in the Arctic? What persistent issues remain in the wake of bulldozers, rock deposits, and obsolete construction roads leading nowhere? Resource extraction is not only a driving-force in the Anthropocene, it is also promoted as one of its solutions, through expansion of wind power or mining for rare minerals. The shift away from fossil fuels may perpetuate a pattern of colonial dispossession that has historically been justified in relation to the welfare state and in the name of economic progress, and is now justified as climate change mitigation. This chapter draws the attention to consistent tensions of Arctic extractivism and in Arctic scholarship. It proposes a greater curiosity towards subtle traces in the landscape, to silences, fragments, and gaps as a necessary step toward decolonization or reconciliation.