Áile Aikio (she/her), Luobbal-Sámmol-Aimo Áile, is a Sámi scholar and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lapland. Her ancestral lands are in the Ohcejohka (Utsjoki) river valley in northern Sápmi. Her research is concerned with Sámi cultural heritage and art, museums, decolonisation and indigenisation, and Sámi understandings of relations between humans and other beings. Across her work, she is particularly interested in what happens when Sámi concepts, knowledge practices, and relationships are taken as starting points for rethinking established ways of understanding heritage, time, and justice..

Aikio holds a PhD in Social Sciences and an MA in Ethnology. She currently works in the MultiBEING Centre of Excellence – Towards Multibeing Justice and contributes to the SÁMIPOLITY – Sámi Political Traditions and Thought in Co-becoming with the Environment project, both funded by the Research Council of Finland. Before her academic career, she worked for several years at the Sámi Museum Siida, first with museum collections and later as Head Curator responsible for exhibitions and museum education. Her research draws on this combination of academic inquiry and practical engagement with Sámi cultural heritage.

In her keynote, Aikio turns to duodji and duddjot (duodji-making) to explore Sámi perspectives on time and temporality. She approaches duodji as a cultural and societal practice through which relations between generations, local environments, other beings, materials, and knowledges are maintained and renewed. Through duodji, she asks what becomes visible when time is understood not primarily as linear progression or a scarce resource, but as relational, layered, and bound to responsibilities extending across generations and beyond the human.