“There is so much intrusion from all sides and corners,” a Sami reindeer herder tells me, reacting to a government decision to grant a mining permit in Gállok in the Sápmi region in Sweden’s far north.

Sápmi is the communal land of the Indigenous Sami people. Their land ranges through northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

This particular reindeer herding community in Sápmi has already been affected by expansion of huge levels of industry related to forestry and hydropower. And now there’s a planned iron ore project. A new mine and its associated infrastructure will place additional pressures on grazing lands and migratory routes.

The mining plans are a sign that history is repeating itself, another reindeer herder tells me. It is important to resist “for myself and for my children and everyone who comes after us who wants to live the life that I have lived”.

The plans to bring more industry into these lands are symbolic of how the Sami way of life has been ignored in the past. Over hundreds of years Sweden has seized land and resources in Sápmi.

Indigenous Sami land has historically, and continues to be, framed as the “land of the future”, a space that is presented as open for extraction and can be sacrificed for national development.

Industries such as mining, forestry, energy production, land intense green industry projects, and infrastructure expansion place

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