Based on Naja Dyrendom Graugaard’s collaborative research on relations between land, body, and healing in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), this talk discusses Inuit relational epistemologies and narrative sovereignty as central to Indigenous wellbeing. Through this approach, healing is recognized as a relational process shaped through connections between land, water, community, and story, as well as lived experiences of colonial disruption and extraction.
From this starting point, the presentation examines coloniality and decolonial possibilities within Arctic knowledge production. Engaging the concept of academic extractivism, it explores how Indigenous knowledge risks being treated as a resource to be accessed, translated, and circulated, while the authority to interpret and theorize often remains located elsewhere. Here, extraction operates not only through material histories of resource exploitation, but through epistemic practices that shape whose knowledge counts, whose stories travel, and whose analyses come to define Arctic realities. Building on her work on epistemic dispossession and Inuit narrative sovereignty, Graugaard argues that centering Inuit knowledge is not simply a matter of inclusion, but of epistemic justice. This involves approaching Inuit concepts not as empirical contributions, but as intellectual and methodological interventions that challenge how research relationships, authority, and responsibility are understood. Reflecting on collaborative research processes, Graugaard finally asks how relational accountability and community-based Indigenous research ethics might contribute to more reciprocal forms of Arctic knowledge production. Her presentation draws on research conducted as part of the EU Horizon project “BIRGEJUPMI: Bridging knowledge systems for inclusive, resilient and prosperous Arctic coastal futures.”
Naja Dyrendom Graugaard is an associate professor at the Centre for Gender, Sexuality and Difference in Copenhagen University’s Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics. She is a Danish-Kalaaleq (Inuk) researcher with an expertise in past and present colonial relations between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Concerned with the dominance of colonial knowledge regimes and Danish exceptionalism in contemporary cultural manifestations of Scandinavian colonialism, her research attends to decolonial, intersectional, and Indigenous narratives, Kalaallit lived experiences, land/sea relations, and Inuit knowledge systems. Besides her academic endeavors, Graugaard also engages in different forms of public dissemination on Nordic colonial histories through talks, poetic and theatrical writing, and recently, through her engagement in the documentary film Orsugiak—The White Gold of Greenland (2025). Graugaard is also an affiliate scholar at the Research Institute for Sustainability at GFZ in Potsdam. She is an editorial board member of the Women, Gender & Research journal, and a recipient of the Emma Goldman Award 2025.
