“And that main artery's name is life”: Ecosocial injury and resurgent care in Deanuleahki, Sápmi

Abstract

Based on 28 months of ethnographic research in Deanuleahki—a river valley in Sápmi, the transborder Indigenous Sámi homeland—this article traces my interlocutors’ striving to reclaim and repair ecological and kin relations through the everyday praxis of care. I trace this striving through the unmaking and remaking of local relations of care amidst encroachment by post‐Second World War Nordic welfare states and regimes of environmental stewardship. I propose a dual conceptualization of ecosocial injury and resurgent care to account for, on the one hand, care's alienation from its social and ecological contexts; and, on the other, the intimate everyday labor of revivifying relations of kinship and belonging, and conditions of material livability, within local ecologies. This defiant and desirous politics of care carves out an opening to attend ethnographically and theoretically to both dislocation and repair in spaces of Indigenous resurgence. In conceptualizing such a politics of care, the article brings into conversation key literatures in medical anthropology and in the interdisciplinary scholarship on care and Indigenous resurgence.