Gudrun Norstedt

The title of my current research project is "My land, your land. Autonomy and resource sharing in Sami lands before 1886". I am interested in how the Sami used natural resources and shared them among themselves before the introduction of the first Reindeer Husbandry Act in 1886. In particular, I focus on the 17th and 18th centuries, when the Sami were still the dominant group in most of Swedish Lapland, and also held the majority in the district courts. An important part of my research is based upon K.B. Wiklund's collection of excerpts, which consists of more than 2500 excerpts of court protocols regarding Sami lands from the period 1645–1845. I am currently digitizing this collection with the aim of setting up a research data base where these protocols will be searchable and both people and places mentioned will be identified. Also, I conduct more limited studies of specific research questions, for example Forest Sami fishing.