A couple of years ago, the city of Skellefteå won the competition to house a factory for the production of batteries for electric cars. Shortly afterwards, the state-owned mining company LKAB presented an investment in fossil-free steel production in Gällivare, another company with the same focus established itself in Boden. The arguments for the location were the proximity to renewable electricity production, i.e. hydropower and wind power. Since then, interest in the Norrland region has grown enormously in Sweden. Again.
The green transition and the industrialization that it entails carry many repetitions and traces of the past. It would be possible to talk about a third settler colonial wave that is currently sweeping across Sápmi, the Indigenous Sámi's traditional area. While the first and second waves consist of agrarian colonial and industrial colonial processes in parallel, from today's perspective a gap arises, a silence between the second and the third wave. This presentation analyses, from the perspective of settler colonial theory, the debate about the “Land of the Future” that has re-emerged in the wake of the green transition.