“Salmon is the Bear of Waters” – Killing with Care as Political at River Njauddâm

Njauddâm is an Arctic river that flows through Skolt Sámi homelands, today claimed by the states of Finland and Norway. The Sámi first settled along the river’s banks following the annual spawning runs of Atlantic salmon. Still today, salmon are vital to human culture, social life, and livelihoods in the valley. In the recent years, Njauddâm’s Atlantic salmon population has been dwindling. Locals and researchers alike are puzzled and concerned by the largely unexplainable change. They try to understand the causes to the salmon’s peril and to reverse it. Killing animals is often framed as a managerial, non-politicized affair, which divides human action into legal and illegal, and reduces non-humans into objects. In contrast, care is usually viewed as practices upholding life, not ending it. Leaning on posthuman feminism and existing interventions on more-than-human International Relations, I suggest that the opposite is unfolding at Njauddâm. Killing salmon and caring with it are mutually intertwined, political acts. I have conducted fieldwork at the river in salmon season 2023–2024, studying human–salmon encounters with local and tourist fishers, biologists, journalists and many others, as well as through documents. Based on this ethnographic data, my research portrays Njauddâm salmon fishing practices as forms of multispecies reciprocal care and constant negotiations of what is good for both the fishers, the fish, and the river lifeworld. In my view, these relations are not only caring, but also highly political. Killing salmon, or refraining from it, is concrete action towards living together well in the multispecies river community.