Drowned Homelands: Intergenerational Impacts of Lokka and Porttipahta Reservoirs in Northern Finland

Abstract

At the turn of 1960s and 1970s Kitinen and Luiro rivers in Sodankylä municipality were dammed as part of a larger hydropower development objective in Kemijoki-river and its side streams. Local communities of Sompio and Yli-Kitinen were displaced and 640 people relocated. The impacts of dispossession are still being felt and continue to accumulate today. Northern Finland faces growing outside land use pressure that has only intensified since the construction of Lokka and Porttipahta reservoirs.

In this thesis I examine the ongoing intergenerational impacts of Lokka and Porttipahta reservoirs on local communities, situating these within the broader landscape of extraction in Northern Finland. To address these consequences, I aim to understand what the drowning of lands and homes has meant and continues to mean for local communities across generations, and how Lokka and Porttipahta connect to broader discourses of historical and ongoing colonial land dispossession in the Arctic.

The primary data in this research consists of oral histories from displaced and relocated communities, including second-generation who have grown up with the presence of the reservoirs. I collected the data through in-depth interviews. Several interviews were conducted alongside the reservoirs, close to interviewees’ previous homeplaces. To understand the consequences of relocation and dispossession, I have analyzed the data using thematic narrative analysis drawing on three theoretical frameworks: place, trauma and colonial dispossession. I identified rootedness to place and intergenerationally transmitted impacts of place attachment disruptions and situated Lokka and Porttipahta within broader discourses of resource colonialism and extractivism. I identified four main narratives: a narrative of Sompio and Yli-Kitinen as homelands, a narrative of essential longing, a narrative of intergenerational environmental trauma, and a narrative of dispossessed home and contested agency. These narratives explain the deep attachment of local communities to their socio-physical environments and the consequences of losing them. This thesis presents Lokka and Porttipahta not only as historical events set in time; they are also intergenerationally defining the displaced communities and have an ongoing influence particularly on the current extractivist landscape of the Central Lapland region.