Oral histories as a baseline of landscape restoration – Co-management and watershed knowledge in Jukajoki River

Abstract

Oral histories as a baseline of landscape restorationCo-management and watershed knowledge in Jukajoki River TERO MUSTONEN Mustonen, Tero (2013). Oral histories as a baseline of landscape restorationCo-management and watershed knowledge in Jukajoki River. Fennia 191: 2, pp. 76-91. ISSN 1798-5617. This article explores local oral histories and selected communal written texts and their role in the severely damaged watershed of Jukajoki [and adjacent lake Jukajärvi watershed] located in Kontiolahti and Joensuu municipalities, North Karelia, Finland. All in all 35 narratives were collected between 2010 and 2012. Four narratives have been presented in this paper as an example of the materials. Empirical materials have been analysed by using a framework of both integrated ecosystem management and co-management. Three readings of the river Jukajoki and the adjacent watershed emerged from the materials -Sámi times, SavoKarelian times and times of damages, or the industrial age of the river. Local knowledge, including optic histories, provided information about pre-industrial fisheries, fish ecology and behaviour and bird habitats. Lastly, special oral histories of keepers of the local tradition provided narratives which are consistent with inquiries from other parts of Finland, non-Euclidian readings of time and space and hint at what the Indigenous scholars have proposed as an intimate interconnection between nature and human societies extending beyond notions of social-ecological systems. Empirical oral histories also conceptualize collaborative governance with a formal role of local ecological knowledge as a future management option for the Jukajoki watershed. Watershed restoration and associated baseline information benefits greatly from the oral histories recorded with people who still remember pre-industrial and pre-war ecosystems and their qualities.

Communal visual histories to detect environmental change in northern areas: Examples of emerging North American and Eurasian practices

“…In the first case, in the southern boreal watershed of the Jukajoki River in North Karelia, Finland, local subsistence fishermen noticed severe damage to the waterway and the occurrence of two instances of fish die-offs (Mustonen 2013) (Fig. 1).…”

“…Roivas observed the fish deaths, which resulted from extremely acidic discharges from a local industrial peat production site. They had gone undetected by the state environmental agencies and the VAPO Company (Mustonen 2013), which is the owner of the site and the responsible body along the watershed. VAPO is a government-owned power company whose environmental record has been contested both in science and in policy (Mustonen 2013).…”

“…They had gone undetected by the state environmental agencies and the VAPO Company (Mustonen 2013), which is the owner of the site and the responsible body along the watershed. VAPO is a government-owned power company whose environmental record has been contested both in science and in policy (Mustonen 2013). The oral histories of Roivas were documented using digital recorders and semi-directive interviews (Bennett and Lantz 2014).…”

“…Mustonen (2013) reviewed materials from 2000 to 2012 regarding the quality and means of monitoring that the company and authorities conducted. The review points to a case where the overall context of the conditions for fish deaths were known to these actors, but the actual events went unnoticed by them for months.…”

“…Methodologically, the first case, Jukajoki, was explored using oral history and visual documentation using field trips (Mustonen 2013) as well as a literature review of the region and ecosystem. Second case relied on co-production of knowledge (Lehtinen and Mustonen 2013) where the Skolt Sámi were provided with digital cameras to record observations.…”