Photo: Camilla Brattland UiT, project manager for "Sharing our knowledge"

We need your knowledge about the Tana River Basin – invitation to participate in collaboration on research related to the Tana River Basin. At Scandic Hotel Hotel Karasjok

 Joddu hereby invites you to an information meeting in Karasjok on December 2nd at 5:00 PM.

National Wild Salmon Center Tana – Joddu invites, on behalf of several research projects, to participate in research on the Tana River. The Wild Salmon Center has been engaged by UiT to coordinate contact between local communities along the Tana River and research projects that wish to conduct research on topics that particularly involve local, Sami and traditional knowledge about the Tana River.

PROGRAM

1700 Welcome by Camilla Brattland (UiT) and Hege Persen (Joddu). Status of research projects on the Tana River Basin, salmon, local, traditional and Sami knowledge. 

17.15 Briefing on the Sami Parliament's further work on the Karasjok Declaration on salmon management by Elle-Risten Wigelius, Sami Parliament.  

17.30 "Can salmon councils contribute to locally based and holistic salmon management?" Lecture by Stine Rybråten, NINA (digital). 

Questions and answers. 

18.00 Break

18.15 Discussion. Local participation in research and a forum for collaboration on research along the Tana River. What does it mean and why is it important? 

19:00 Dinner for registered participants. 

There are several projects that want to invite local people to participate in various ways and levels in research on the Tana River Basin:

1. The research project RecoSal (2023 – 2026) led by LUKE and in which NINA and UiT participate together with Umeå University, wants to bring together bearers of local, traditional and scientific knowledge and rights holders to plan together what can be done to protect and rebuild salmon stocks and salmon fishing culture along the Tana River and in its tributaries. A reference group with knowledge bearers on both sides of the river, and participation in the project's activities such as workshops and interviews, is desirable.

2. The newly launched project "Sharing our knowledge" (2024 – 2027) in which UiT is part of an international project led by Dalhousie University in Canada. The project focuses on climate risk in watercourses that are the basis of indigenous culture, and will establish an exchange of knowledge with indigenous peoples in Canada about climate change and indigenous leadership in the management of salmon-bearing watercourses. The project wants to identify the need for research on how climate change affects the watercourse, and maps Sami concepts and knowledge about the condition of the watercourse. Local partners are DeanuInstituhtta and Joddu, who, together with the Sami Parliament and UiT, are members of the project's steering group.

The background for the projects is the focus on the crisis of wild salmon, the preservation of river Sámi culture and traditional knowledge as part of the knowledge base for the status of wild salmon stocks in the Tana River Basin. In the fall of 2023, UiT and LUKE organized a meeting in Karasjok under the auspices of the RecoSal project where research needs and issues regarding management and research on salmon were collected and discussed. The Sharing our knowledge project started in 2024 and is based on the principles of equality between indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge and indigenous leadership in knowledge and management practices. The project has established a steering group where UiT, Joddu, DeanuInstituhtta and the Sámi Parliament are working together to develop a knowledge base based on Sámi knowledge about changes in climate and environment in the Tana River Basin, and exchange experiences about this with the Mikma'q Nation in Nova Scotia. The steering group will also help to build a permanent forum for information and discussion about ongoing research on the Tana River Basin in collaboration with other research projects and stakeholders and with participants from both sides of the river basin (planned for February 2025 in Karasjok). An information meeting about the project Sharing our knowledge was arranged in Tanabru on 4 September and the project was one of the main organizers of the public meeting on Tana bridge on 2 October and a research symposium on salmon in indigenous areas in Utsjok on 3 and 4 October. Based on the experiences from these meetings, the steering group of the Sharing our knowledge project sees a need to put together a forum for cooperation on research on the Tana River Basin. We want to facilitate participation in a permanent forum for a broad group of organizations and individuals who want to get involved in research on the Tana River Basin, and in knowledge acquisition in general, such as under the auspices of the Tana River Basin Research and Monitoring Group. The experiences from the meetings and from dialogue with the Sami parliaments in Finland and Norway also show that it is particularly important to inform and ask for collective consent from not only individuals, but also from local communities when the research affects Sami cultural heritage and traditional knowledge. Such a process of collective consent is now underway under the auspices of the RecoSal project at LUKE among the Finnish fishing communities. With this, organizations and village associations on the Norwegian side of the river basin are also invited to this process.

Since we know that the organizations along the watercourse have valuable knowledge and insight, we want to invite a broad audience to participate in these research projects. A long-term goal is to establish permanent forums for collaboration on research with participants from all parts of the watercourse from the sea to tributaries on both sides of the border. We therefore invite all knowledge carriers along the entire habitat of the Tanalaksen from the coast to the upper tributaries to participate. We will need participants to both participate in the data collection itself and to participate in permanent forums that will help to develop research priorities and advice, among other things.

We hope that many will be interested in actively participating in the activities of the aforementioned institutions in the coming years. Participation can be compensated within the project periods of the projects. In particular, we now want to invite village associations and organizations to decide whether and in what way their organization/village association wants to participate in the projects, and what kind of wishes and needs you yourself have for research on the Tana River Basin.

Representatives from the rural associations and organizations will also be invited to a forum for collaboration on research on the Tana River Basin that Joddu will invite to in February 2025.

We serve a simple dinner - therefore we need registration from you.

Contact:

Hege Persen National Wild Salmon Center Tana - Joddu hege.persen@villakssenter.no

Phone 416 28 141

Camilla Brattland, UiT – Arctic University of Norway camilla.brattland@uit.no .