Truly transdisciplinary approaches are needed to tackle the complex problems that the Arctic is facing at the moment. Collaboration between Indigenous rights holders and researchers through co-creative research approaches can result in high-quality research outcomes, but crucially also address colonial legacies and power imbalances, enhance mutual trust, and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, to be successful, collaborative research projects have specific requirements regarding research designs, timeframes, and dissemination of results, which often do not fit into the frameworks of academic calendars and funding guidelines. Funding agencies in particular play an important role in enabling (or disabling) meaningful collaboration between Indigenous rights holders and researchers. There is an urgent need to re-think existing funding-structures. This article will propose a new paradigm for the financing of Arctic research, which centres around the inclusion of Indigenous partners, researchers, and institutions from the initial planning stages of funding programmes to the final stages of research projects. These findings and recommendations have been contextualized based on critical reflections of the co-authors, a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous partners, who have practiced their own collaborative work process, the challenges encountered, and lessons learned.

This article focuses on the development of professional social work in Sámi areas in Norway after World War II, which coincides with the development of the welfare state. Labour immigration in the 1970s made Norway visible as a multicultural society and welfare professions adopted culturally sensitive methodology, which was also reflected in Sámi social work. Today’s criticism of multiculturalism requires new answers. The integration of the Sámi into the welfare system is an argument for why a decolonizing Sámi approach should build on the aim of post-colonialism in recognizing historical injustice and the emphasis in critical indigenous philosophy on dialogue.

In this article, we conduct an explorative investigation for a participatory research project in the Northern Norwegian Sámi areas. The contextual background is one of increasing conflict with the public welfare services reported by the media and by users. Public employees are unskilled in restorative practices, and the Norwegian mediation service is not adapted to Sámi conditions. We initiated an innovative process to test whether the Norwegian Mediation Service methodology could be used to resolve disputes concerning reindeer herding and whether this cooperation may contribute to mediation methods adapted to Sámi societies.

This chapter will demonstrate the need for decolonization of social work practice especially in indigenous communities in Turtle Island (North America) and for the positive abolition of globalization, capitalism, neo-colonialism, war, patriarchal subjugation of women, and the immediate cessation of relentless extraction of fossil fuels and minerals through mining that disfigures indigenous culture and life. There is a need to halt the serious effects of global warming and climate change, as preconditions for effective and holistic social work practice. To identify strategies for constructive social work transformation and empowerment, the chapter illuminates the historical process of colonization of indigenous peoples, especially in Turtle Island and its lingering effects that have produced cultural genocide, environmental devastation, social disintegration, familial fragmentation, and personal dysfunction.