T H E SÁ M I WO R L D

This book provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of the Sámi society
and its histories and people, offering valuable insights into how they live and see the
world.
The chapters examine a variety of social and cultural practices, and consideration
is given to environment, legal and political conditions and power relations. The
contributions by a range of experts of Sámi studies and Indigenous scholars are
drawn from across the Sápmi region, which spans from central Norway and central
Sweden across Finnish Lapland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sámi perspectives,
concepts and ways of knowing are foregrounded throughout the volume. The
material connects with wider discussions within Indigenous studies and engages
with current concerns relating to globalization, environmental and cultural change,
Arctic politics, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and neoliberalism.
The Sámi World will be of interest to scholars from a number of disciplines,
including Indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, history and
political science.

Sanna Valkonen is a Sámi scholar and Professor of Sámi Research at the University
of Lapland, Finland. She is co-editor of Knowing from the Indigenous North: Sámi
Approaches to History, Politics and Belonging (Routledge, 2018).

Áile Aikio is a Sámi scholar and doctoral candidate of sociology at the University of
Lapland, Finland. In her PhD research, Aikio examines indigenization of the museum.

Saara Alakorva is a Sámi scholar, doctoral candidate of political sciences, and university
teacher of Arctic world politics at the University of Lapland, Finland. In her PhD research,
Alakorva studies Sámi political history and contemporary Sámi political thinking.

Sigga-Marja Magga is a Sámi scholar and post-doctoral researcher at the University

of Lapland, Finland. Her work focuses on duodji handicraft and duodji epistemes.
 T HE ROU T L E DGE WO RLDS

Titles include:

THE MAYA WORLD

Edited by Scott Hutson and Traci Ardren
THE WORLD OF THE OXUS CIVILIZATION
Edited by Bertille Lyonnet and Nadezhda Dubova
THE GRAECO-BACTRIAN AND INDO-GREEK WORLD
Edited by Rachel Mairs
THE UMAYYAD WORLD
Edited by Andrew Marsham
THE ASANTE WORLD
Edited by Edmund Abaka and Kwame Osei Kwarteng
THE SAFAVID WORLD
Edited by Rudi Matthee
THE BIBLICAL WORLD, SECOND EDITION
Edited by Katharine J. Dell
THE TOKUGAWA WORLD
Edited by Gary P. Leupp and De-min Tao
THE INUIT WORLD
Edited by Pamela Stern
THE ARTHURIAN WORLD
Edited by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Renée Ward
and Victoria Coldham-Fussell
THE MONGOL WORLD
Edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope
THE SÁMI WORLD
Edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva
and Sigga-Marja Magga

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Worlds/book-series/WORLDS
 THE
SÁMI WORLD


Edited by

Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva

and Sigga-Marja Magga
 Cover image: Dálvadas, by Marja Helander, 1997.
First published 2022
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva
and Sigga-Marja Magga; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga to be identifed
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Valkonen, Sanna, editor.
Title: The Sámi world / edited by Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and
Sigga-Marja Magga.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge
worlds | Collection of essays by Áile Aikio and others. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2021059892 (print) | LCCN 2021059893 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sami (European people)—Social life and customs. | Sami
(European people)—Scandinavia—Social conditions. | Lapland—Social life and
customs. | Scandinavia—Social conditions.
Classifcation: LCC DL42.L36 S2538 2022 (print) | LCC DL42.L36 (ebook) |
DDC 305.894/57—dc23/eng/20220210
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059892
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059893
ISBN: 978-0-367-45815-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26324-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02551-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS


List of fgures ix
List of tables xi
List of maps xii
List of contributors xiii

Introduction: Introduction to the Sámi world 1

Sanna Valkonen, Saara Alakorva, Áile Aikio and Sigga-Marja Magga

PART I GUOÐOHIT 1 – LIVING WITH/IN NATURE 19

1 A window into vanishing Sámi culture? Visual representations
of Sáminess in the shared Siida exhibition by Sámi Museum Siida
and Northern Lapland’s Nature Centre 21
Áile Aikio

2 Gákti on the pulse of time: The double perspective of the traditional

Sámi dress 39
Sigga-Marja Magga

3 Skolt Saami Leuʹdd: Tradition as a medium of individual

and collective remembrance 53
Marko Jouste

4 Trickster blurring expectations and values of Sámi community:

Author Jovnna-Ánde Vest reshaping Sámi muittašangirjjálašvuohta
(reminiscence literature) 72
Hanna Helander and Veli-Pekka Lehtola

5 The river breaks – and freezes: Sámi women in Laestadianism 86

Torjer A. Olsen
1 ‘to herd’; ‘to let the reindeer graze’; ‘to supervise the grazing reindeer’

v
 — Contents —

6 From History to Herstory of the Sámi world: Proposing a feminist

approach to the settlement history of Finnish Lapland 100
Saara Alakorva, Ritva Kylli and Jarno Valkonen

7 Caught in the state’s net? Ecologies of care in Deanuleahki, Sápmi 115

Annikki Herranen-Tabibi

8 Defning the Sámi cultural environment: New perspectives

for feldwork 134
Päivi Magga

9 Frustrated caretakers: Sámi egg gatherers and cloudberry pickers 150

Solveig Joks

10 Sámi food culture: Traditional practices and contemporary challenges 165

Lena Maria Nilsson

11 Understanding Sámi reindeer herders’ knowledge systems

of snow and ice 181
Inger Marie Gaup Eira

12 Issues of Sámi representation in Finnish tourism: A quest

for authenticity 197
Nuccio Mazzullo

PART II GIERDAT 2 – LIVING THROUGH/IN

SOCIETAL RUPTURES 215
13 The futures of Sami languages 217
Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren

14 Residential schooling of the Sámi in the Soviet Union: Historical

development and impacts 232
Anna Andersen

15 The Sámi in the spiral of negative social developments

of the Soviet North 248
Lukas Allemann

16 Changing states, changing Sámi? Framing the state and the Sámi
in studies of history in Finland and Norway 1923–1954 263
Jukka Nyyssönen

17 The Sámi fag(s): From a revolutionary sign to an institutional symbol 276

Saara Alakorva

2 ‘to endure’; ‘to bear’; ‘to be strong enough’

vi
 — Contents —

18 Who are ‘We, the People’? A comparative analysis of the right

to register in the Sámi electoral roll in Finland, Norway and Sweden 294
Ulf Mörkenstam, Per Selle and Sanna Valkonen

19 Toxic speech, political self-Indigenization and the ethics and

politics of critique: Notes from Finland 310
Laura Junka-Aikio

20 The history and current situation of discrimination against

the Sámi 328
Ketil Lenert Hansen
21 Municipal politics in the Sámi homeland in Finland 348
Vesa Puuronen

22 The Stockholm Sámi administrative area and Indigenous resurgence 364

Karin Eriksson

23 The role of the Sámi media in democratic processes: The Arctic

Railway in Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi 382
Inker-Anni Sara, Torkel Rasmussen and Roy Krøvel

24 The Áltá and Deatnu conficts and the articulations of nature 397
Tapio Nykänen

PART III DUOSTAT 3 – ENVISIONING SÁMI FUTURES 413

25 The history of the hybrid Sámi media system 415
Torkel Rasmussen, Inker-Anni Sara and Roy Krøvel

26 ‘It should be her language’: New speakers of Sámi languages

transmitting the language to the next generation 430
Annika Pasanen

27 Ládjogahpir rematriated: Decolonization of the Sámi women’s

hat of pride 446
Eeva-Kristiina Nylander

28 Sámi research ethics under construction 465

Anna-Lill Drugge

29 Driving around with Aunt Máret: Historical consciousness

of the Sámi in transition 479
Veli-Pekka Lehtola

30 The characteristics and legal status of Sámi legal tradition and law 494
Kristina Labba

3 ‘to dare’

vii
 — Contents —

31 Commemorating continuity: Reconciling material representations

in Sääʹm land 507
Natalia Magnani

32 Sámi storytelling through design 520

Britt Kramvig and Trine Kvidal-Røvik

33 Sámi feminist conversations 535

Ina Knobblock

34 Queer Indigenous world-making in the Sámi TV comedy

Njuoska bittut 551
Kata Kyrölä

35 The activism of having fun: Young Sámi in urban areas of Norway

and Sweden 565
Astri Dankertsen

Epilogue: Ways of being in the world 579

Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Index 591

viii
 FIGURES


1.1 and 1.2 A Sámi man slaughtering a reindeer in the yard of a Sámi
house. Both photographs are taken from the same yard at the same
time in 1997. 30
2.1 Enontekiö gákti in dark blue fabric in 2018. 43
2.2 Enontekiö man’s gákti in light blue fabric in 2018. 43
3.1 Jääkk Sverloff in Če'vetjäu'rr 1961. 57
3.2 Taisja and Mekk Kalinin in Ǩeeu'ŋes 1926. 63
7.1 Undated hand-written text by Luobbal Sámmol Sofe, estimated to
have been written between 1980 and 1995, found among her
personal papers in December 2017. 120
8.1 The Sámi cultural environment. 138
9.1 One nature, many cultures. 155
9.2 Social and material practices generate different versions
of culture and nature. They also interact with one another. 155
10.1 A pyramid showing the ordinal economic impact of different food
items in a Sámi diet in the past and present day. Fish includes local
wild-caught fsh. Meat includes locally produced reindeer, game,
cattle, goat, mutton, dairy products, poultry (wild and tame) and
eggs. Plants include locally harvested wild herbs, berries and roots.
Trade includes sugar, salt, coffee and grains (in the past) and any
imported non-local food including meat, fsh, and plant
foods (today). 168
10.2 Small-scale tapping of birch tree sap in a modern setting. 176
11.1 Reindeer herder vocabulary of snow and ice is divided into fve
subsystems. 184
11.2 Seaŋáš/depth hoar. 190
11.3 The melt – freeze cycle with the previously mentioned seven concepts.
The different shades of grey denote the different metamorphisms: dark
grey: melt – freeze; grey: destructive metamorphism; light grey: melting
metamorphism; white: constructive metamorphism. 190
17.1 The offcial Sámi fag. 288

ix
 — Figures —

20.1 Type of self-reported discrimination by ethnic groups. 333

20.2 Settings where Sámi youths experienced discrimination. 334
20.3 Perpetrators of discrimination. 335
20.4 Prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination by ethnic groups,
in SAMINOR 1 (2003–2004). 336
20.5 Prevalence of self-reported discrimination by ethnic groups
(SAMINOR 2 in: Brustad et al. 2014). 337
20.6 Type of discrimination experienced by Sámi and non-Sami
population (SAMINOR 2 in: Brustad et al. 2014). 339
20.7 Experience of negative societal treatment due to Sámi ethnicity.
Sámi youth (12–18 years old) (n =121) and young adults
(18–28 years old) (n = 516). 340
20.8 Prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination (1997–1998)
by gender and living area in Sweden. 341
27.1 Outi Pieski in 2017 wearing the ládjogahpir, inspired by the
ládjogahpir worn by her máttaráhku (ancestor) Golle-Gáddjá.
“When I go to the presidential residence wearing ládjogahpir,
my ancestor Golle-Gádja meets the President of Finland. I am
the mediator. In the current context, this power hat can also
be seen as a symbol of the vitality of the Sámi woman, that
we seek strength for the challenges posed by colonialism, even
from our ancestors. This is a way to show the power we have
and the desire to commit to and cherish our own traditions.
This is a clear message. We are still here.” 447
27.2 Čiske Jovsset-Biret-Hánsa Outi (Outi Pieski) and Elle-Biehtár-Arvo
Hanna (Hanna Helander) in the repatriation exhibition Bååstede
in Trondheim 2017 admiring the ládjogahpir used by their
foremother. 455
27.3 Kolonialisttalaš metamorfosa 1852/Colonialist Metamorphosis
1852, mixed media, 2018, by Outi Pieski. This artwork is inspired
by the end of the use of ládjogahpir and the beginning of the use
of jollegahpir. The ferra is cropped away from the hat, and it is
lying on the ground, abandoned. 459

x
 TA B L E S


1.1 The distribution of different types of images in the Siida exhibition 26

1.2 The distribution of photographs in the Siida exhibition according
to dating. The emphasis is on the pre-war era: i.e. the photographs
depict mostly premodern Sámi culture. 28
1.3 The locations of photographs in the Siida exhibition 32
10.1 Nutrients, minerals and energy content per 100 grams of
the following fsh species: luossa (Salmo salar), tjuovttja
(Coregonus lavaretus), sjilla (Coregonus albula) and rávddo
(Salvelinus alpinus). 169
10.2 Nutrients, minerals and energy content per 100 grams of meat
from moose, reindeer, beef and pork. 173
11.1 Parts of the reindeer herder snow and ice knowledge system 185
11.2 Snow categorization according to factors affecting reindeer
and herders, respectively. 187
11.3 Overview of topics in snow physics used by reindeer herders
to describe snow properties. 188
11.4 Different snow concepts regarding quality of snow and
snow metamorphism. 189
21.1 Members in municipal council (2017) by party. 355

xi
 MAPS


14.1 Map of the Murmansk region, the Kola Peninsula, showing three
districts where boarding schools operated for the Sámi during the
Soviet period. The boarding schools covered by Andersen’s research
were in Gremikha and Lovozero. 233

xii
 C O N T R I B U TO RS


Áile Aikio, Luobbal-Sámmol-Aimo Áile, is a doctoral candidate at the University of

Lapland and has a master’s degree on ethnology. In her PhD, Aikio studies Sámi
museums and museum practices: the Sámi ways to work in museums. From
2005–2019, Aikio was a curator in Sámi Museum Siida in Anár/Inari in Finland,
frst in collections and, since 2016, as curator of exhibitions and museum peda-
gogy. Aikio is interested in indigenizing and decolonizing processes, especially
how to indigenize cultural heritage management and heritage institutions.
Saara Alakorva, Piera-Jovnna-Leena Saara, is a doctoral candidate and a univer-
sity teacher of Arctic world politics at the University of Lapland. In her PhD
research, Alakorva is interested in Sámi political history and contemporary Sámi
political thinking. As a Sámi scholar herself, Alakorva has deep knowledge of
issues of the modern Sámi society. She also has practical experience working
with Indigenous issues nationally and internationally. She has earlier published
using her former name Tervaniemi.
Lukas Allemann has a background in oral history and Russian studies. He has been
working on the anthropology research team of the Arctic Centre, University
of Lapland, since 2013. He earned his PhD in 2020, with an inquiry about
the Soviet policies towards Indigenous minorities from a grassroots perspective,
based on research among Russia’s Sámi people. Another strand of research has
been anthropological inquiry into young peoples’ aspirations and well-being in
Arctic single-industry towns. Methods of oral history, participant observation,
archival work and media analysis are equally represented in Allemann’s work.
In all his research, Allemann puts an emphasis on long-term feld commitment
and bringing back research results to the communities they stem from.
Anna Andersen is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at UiT – the Arctic University
of Norway. She holds a PhD in history and an MA degree in Indigenous
studies from UiT. In addition, she holds an MA equivalent in pedagogy from
the Murmansk State Arctic University. Andersen is a Kildin Sami scholar, with
her background from the Ársjogk area of the Kola Peninsula. Andersen’s main

xiii
 — Contributors —

areas of competence are Indigenous histories, archival studies and community-

based research. Prior to her current position, she conducted research on forced
resettlements of her people from their traditional territories and the experiences
of three Sámi generations at residential schools. She has earlier published using
her former name Afanasyeva.
Astri Dankertsen, associate professor, is Head of Division for Research on
Environment, International Relations, the Arctic and Security at the Faculty
for Social Sciences at Nord University. She holds a PhD in sociology and has
taught primarily in circumpolar studies and sociology. Her research has been
mostly concerned with Sámi and Indigenous issues, youth, gender and commu-
nities in the Arctic. She is a member of the Council of Native American and the
Indigenous Studies Association. She is of Norwegian and North Sámi origin
and is also the leader of Sálto sámesiebrre, the local Sámi association in Salten,
Norway.
Anna-Lill Drugge, associate professor, forest- and lulesami, is a teacher and
researcher at the unit of Sami Studies, the Department of Language studies at
Umeå University. Her research interest has mainly focused on issues in relation
to Indigenous research ethics, gender studies and education. She was the editor
of the anthology Ethics in Indigenous Research. Past Experiences – Future
Challenges (2016), and she has a special interest in developing pedagogical
strategies for education and teaching of Sámi and Indigenous issues within and
outside the academic context.
Inger Marie Gaup Eira, associate professor, Sámi Allaskuvla/Sámi University of
Applied Sciences, Norway. Her main research areas are traditional knowledge
and reindeer husbandry, which were also the basis for her doctoral research.
She has developed the study ‘Theoretical approaches for traditional know-
ledge and methods for documentation and dissemination’ and has since 2013
been responsible for this. She is also a part of the research project Rievdan –
rapid change – challenges and/or opportunities for sustainable reindeer hus-
bandry supported by the Research Council of Norway, which is about to end
in 2021–2022.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of
Oslo. He has carried out research on various aspects of globalization, including
ethnicity, nationalism and creolization, and has recently studied local responses
to accelerated change, using the concept of overheating to connect climate
change, politics of identity, waste, technological change and other contemporary
trends. His latest monographs in English are Overheating: An Anthropology
of Accelerated Change (2016) and Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the
Queensland Coast (2018).
Karin Eriksson is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Scandinavian Studies,
University of Washington, Seattle. She is a settler Swede with Forest and Ubmeje
Sámi ancestors from Likssjuo (Lycksele) municipality who currently resides on
Coast Salish lands. She holds a master’s degree in anthropology from Hunter
College, City University of New York. She has been an embedded researcher

xiv
 — Contributors —

on two long-term projects: Stockholm becoming a Sámi administrative area

and the museum project Ohtsedidh, centering erased Sámi history in central
Sweden. Her research interests include contemporary Sámi and Swedish state
relationships, Swedish settler colonialism, Indigeneity and Swedish nationalisms
and Sámi museum representations.
Ketil Lenert Hansen is an Indigenous (Sámi) public health professor at UiT –the
Arctic University of Norway. His research interests include research on discrim-
ination, bullying, health inequality, violence, disability, resilience, child wel-
fare and somatic and mental health among Sámi youth and adults. Today, he
serves as a member of the Lancet Commission on Arctic Health: Accelerating
Indigenous Health and Well-Being and is a Fulbright Arctic Initiative Scholar.
Lenert Hansen grow up as a member of a Sámi reindeer-herding family in
Gánasvuotna (Linnasuolu). His ancestors came to Norway from the Swedish
part of Sápmi, in the middle of the 18th century.
Hanna Helander, Elle-Biehtár-Arvo Hanna, is a doctoral candidate at the University
of Oulu, Giellagas Institute, and she has a master’s degree in comparative litera-
ture. In her PhD, Helander studies Sámi storytelling and upbringing. Helander
is a literature teacher, and she has a wide range of experience in the feld of edu-
cation. Currently, she leads the pilot project on distance education in the Sámi
languages. She is also a researcher at the University of Lapland on the ADVOST
research project.
Annikki Herranen-Tabibi is a medical anthropologist and a PhD candidate in social
anthropology at Harvard University. Her doctoral research concerns trans-
formations in caregiving practices and relationships in the Deanuleahki and
Deanučázádat regions of Sápmi, both in the context of intergenerational kinship
ties and with respect to land, water and livelihoods. Woven into this work are
histories and present-day processes of colonization, assimilation and decolon-
ization, and at its heart are public mobilizations and intimate acts of Indigenous
Sámi resurgence. She’s an alumna of Yale University, the London School of
Economics, and the United World College of the Atlantic.
Leena Huss is professor emerita at Uppsala University, Hugo Valentin Centre. She
belongs to the Sweden Finnish minority in Sweden, and the maintenance and
revitalization of minority and Indigenous languages have long been her main
felds of research. She has published on language revitalization in northern
Scandinavia, contact linguistics and multilingualism and edited and co-edited
anthologies on managing multilingualism in Sweden, language revitalization in
education and language emancipation in Europe and beyond. Her present focus
of interest is the revitalization of South Sami in Sweden and the impact of lan-
guage loss and local revitalization efforts on health and well-being in Indigenous
communities.
Solveig Joks is an associate professor at Sámi Allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied
Sciences, Norway. Her main research interest is Sámi traditional knowledge gen-
erally, especially salmon fshing and gathering practices. Currently, she is a pro-
ject manager for a three-year research project fnanced by the Research Council

xv
 — Contributors —

of Norway. The project deals with gathering practices in coastal Sámi areas
in Norway and investigates how traditional knowledges are expressed in Sámi
languages, narratives and place names.
Marko Jouste is an ethnomusicologist, historian and musician specializing in Saami
music cultures. He earned his PhD degree in 2011, with an inquiry about histor-
ical Inari Saami music tradition found from various sound archives. Currently,
he is a university lecturer in the Giellagas Institute of Saami Studies at the
University of Oulu. From 2015 to 2018, he was the principal investigator in
projects ‘Historical Turning Points of Multilayered Music Tradition among the
Skolt Saami in Finland’ and ‘Skolt Saami Memory Bank.’ As a musician, Jouste
has a long history of performing and recording Saami music with Saami artists
in the groups Vilddas, Ulla Pirttijärvi & Ulda and Suommkar.
Laura Junka-Aikio is a politics and cultural studies scholar who works at the Arctic
University Museum of Norway, UiT. Her research is concerned with the politics
of knowledge and identity, contemporary colonialism and social change. Junka-
Aikio is the author of Late Modern Palestine: The Subject and Representation of
the Second Intifada (2017, Routledge), editor (with Jukka Nyyssönen and Veli-
Pekka Lehtola) of Sámi Research in Transition: Knowledge, politics and social
change (2021, Routledge) and the project leader for the Research Council of
Norway–funded research project New Sámi Renaissance: Nordic Colonialism,
Social Change and Indigenous Cultural Policy.
Ina Knobblock is Sámi, Tornedalian and Swedish. Her family originates from the
area of Jiellevárre, Sábme/Sweden. She is a doctoral candidate in gender studies
at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University. In her research, she
explores Sámi contributions to feminist theory and activism.
Britt Kramvig is a professor at the Department of Tourism and Northern Studies at
UiT, the Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests include decoloniza-
tion, memories, landscape and Indigenous artistic practices. She engages with
how research projects need to be designed in order to refect the concerns of
Arctic communities. She is of Norwegian and North Sámi origin, and decolon-
ization is for her both a personal and ethical question: What new stories do we
need to heal, (re-)learn and (re-)claim Sámi ways of knowing?
Roy Krøvel is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at
Oslo Metropolitan University and an adjunct professor at Sámi Allaskuvla/Sámi
University of Applied Sciences, Norway. His latest book is Breidlid, Anders;
Krøvel, Roy (eds.). Indigenous Knowledges and the Sustainable Development
Agenda (Routledge, 2020).
Trine Kvidal-Røvik is a professor of Communication and Cultural Studies and the
leader of the research group Narrating the Postcolonial North: Travel, Writing,
Performance at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway in Alta. She does critical
cultural research on place, identity, media and communication. In her research,
she seeks to address issues of relevance to national minorities and Indigenous
Peoples in Sápmi.

xvi
 — Contributors —

Ritva Kylli is a docent of Finnish and North European history, and she works as
a university lecturer in Arctic and Northern history at the University of Oulu,
Finland. Her thesis (2005) dealt with the cultural encounters and confrontations
between the church and the Sámi during the 18th and 19th centuries. She has
most recently concentrated on food, health and the environmental history of the
Arctic.
Kata Kyrölä is a lecturer in media studies at University College London and a docent
in gender studies and media studies at the University of Turku. Kyrölä’s current
work focuses on queer Indigenous theory, Indigenous media and posthuman
methodologies. Their previous research has addressed topics such as embodi-
ment, gender, race and sexuality in popular culture; feminist fat studies; body
image and the media; affect theory; porn studies; and Indigenous, postcolonial
and Black feminisms.
Kristina Labba is an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at UiT, the Arctic
University of Norway. Her research interests are in the feld of Sámi and
Indigenous Peoples’ rights and Sámi law. She has North Sámi as her mother
tongue, and she is from a Sami reindeer-herding family which since time imme-
morial has pursued Swedish-Norwegian border-crossing reindeer herding in
the northernmost area of Norrbotten County in Sweden and Troms County in
Norway.
Veli-Pekka Lehtola is a professor of Sámi culture in the Giellagas Institute at the
University of Oulu. He is a (North) Sámi from Aanaar or Inari in Northern
Finland. As a researcher, he specializes in the history of the Sámi and Lapland, in
modern Sámi art, as well as in the development of Sámi representations. In add-
ition to several articles in English, he has published The Sámi People – Traditions
in Transition (Alaska University Press, 2004) and Surviving the Upheaval of
Arctic War (Puntsi Publisher, 2019). His main work in Finnish, Saamelaiset
suomalaiset – kohtaamisia 1896–1953 (SKS 2012) is a historical study on Sámi-
Finnish encounters. He has written the manuscript for the main exhibition of
the Sámi Museum Siida in Inari, opening in 2022.
Anna-Riitta Lindgren is professor emerita at UiT, the Arctic University of Norway,
Department of Language and Culture. She is a Finn from Helsinki and has lived
since 1982 in the village of Gárasavvon in the Sami Land with her spouse, who
is a Sami reindeer herder from that region. Her main feld of research has been
language conditions in multilingual societies in Scandinavia. She has published
on maintenance of minority and Indigenous languages, linguistics in multilin-
gual villages in Northern Norway and language emancipation. She has co-edited
anthologies on minorities and multilingual societies in Europe and beyond.
Päivi Magga, Piera Päivi is a PhD candidate at the University of Oulu, Finland, and has
a master’s degree in cultural anthropology. Since 2011, she has been working as
a researcher in the Sámi Museum Siida, which is located in Anár/Inari, Finland.
Magga, together with her colleagues, established a Cultural Environment Unit
in the museum. Currently, Magga is working as part of the Arctic Architecture
and Environmental Adaption research team in the Oulu School of Architecture.

xvii
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Her research focuses on questions concerning Sámi cultural environment and

traditional knowledge as a part of it. In her work, Magga uses community-based
methods and has also used flming.
Sigga-Marja Magga is a researcher of Sámi cultural studies. She specializes in Sámi
handicrafts, duodji with her own duodji production but also in academic studies.
Her special interest is connected to the tensions between the institutionalized
duodji and the growth of cultural and social polyphony in the Sámi society:
how the Sámi react and construct cultural, political and social changes with and
through duodji. She studies gákti, the Sámi dress and its meanings, as a tool in
cultural and political resistance and how the gákti creates different kind of real-
ities and meanings in Sámi society.
Natalia Magnani is an associate professor of social anthropology at UiT: the Arctic
University of Norway. She has been working with artisans and other commu-
nity members in Sápmi since 2014, especially in Čeʹvetjäuʹrr and Aanaar, on
transformations of material relations and politics – from duodji to large-scale
infrastructural development.
Nuccio Mazzullo works as a senior researcher for the Anthropology Research Team,
at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland, Finland since 2007. He received
his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2005. Since
1990 he has conducted extensive feldworks for different research projects
focusing on indigeneity, perception of space and territoriality, oral history and
narratives in Finnish Lapland working mainly with Sámi people. Among his
topical interests there are human-environment relationships, reindeer herding,
landscape and perception, environmental politics and Indigenous rights, cultur-
ally sensitive tourism, Indigenous knowledge and handicraft, Sámi narratives
and identity and anthropology of circumpolar peoples. Currently is working for
an Academy of Finland funded project (WIRE; n. 342462): ‘Fluid Realities of
the Wild’.
Ulf Mörkenstam is a professor in political science at Stockholm University, Sweden.
His major felds of research are policy studies and political theory, with a spe-
cifc focus on Indigenous Peoples’ rights. He has been principal investigator
for the frst two electoral studies in conjunction with elections to the Swedish
Sámediggi. Previous projects include studies of Swedish Sámi policy from a his-
torical perspective. He has written extensively on the Swedish Sámediggi and
its ability to safeguard the recognized right to Sámi self-determination and has
recently co-edited two anthologies (2016, 2021) based on the electoral studies.
Lena Maria Nilsson has a PhD in public health (2012), with her thesis focusing
on traditional Sami lifestyle factors as determinants of health. Other research
interests are food security and various aspects of traditional food and life-
style in the Arctic. The total scientifc production of Nilsson includes more
than 70 peer-reviewed papers and ten book chapters. From 2019 to 2021,
Lena Maria Nilsson was the deputy director of Várdduo, the Centre for Sámi
Research at Umeå University. Since January 2022, Nilsson has moved to the
Department of Epidemiology and Global health, as a member of the research

xviii
 — Contributors —

group Lávvuo  – research and education for Sámi health. Her Forest Sámi
roots are from Máláge/Malå, located in the Northern inland of Västerbotten
County, Sweden.
Tapio Nykänen, adjunct professor, works as a university lecturer at the University
of Lapland, Finland. His research interests include political geography, pol-
itical theory, religion and politics and material culture. He has written, for
example, about the political thinking of Sámi artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, land-
use disputes in the Finnish side of Sápmi and late-modern identity projects in
Finnish Lapland. Occasionally, Nykänen has worked as a hired man for a Sámi
reindeer-herding family.
Eeva-Kristiina Nylander is a repatriation specialist currently fnalizing her PhD
‘From repatriation to rematriation. Sámi objects and the change of paradigm’ at
the Giellagas Institute/University of Oulu. She has a master’s degree archaeology
(University of Helsinki) and osteoarchaology (Stockholm University). She has
worked in Sámi museums in Finland and in Norway and done several surveys
on Sámi collections in museums and archives in Nordic countries and Europe.
Now she works with the new permanent exhibition at the Sámi Museum Siida
in Finland. Nylander has a long history of working with the Sámi community,
and she is the mother of a Sámi child. She has earlier published using her former
name Harlin.
Jukka Nyyssönen, senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage
Research, has studied Sámi history for over 20 years and published in the felds
of environmental and animal history, the history of minorities, educational his-
tory and the history of science. His research interests include historiography,
Sámi research, minority politics and the relationship between reindeer herding
and forestry. The location of Nyyssönen concerning the Sámi World is at a
respectful distance: One of his academic interests is in the historical conditions
in which Sámi societies have found themselves at different periods.
Torjer A. Olsen is a professor in Indigenous studies and the current academic dir-
ector at the Center for Sámi Studies, UiT, the Arctic University of Norway.
Olsen’s research interests include Indigenous education, gender and power in
Indigenous studies and Sámi Christianity. Olsen is of Sámi and Norwegian des-
cent from the Sea Sámi areas around Tromsø/Romsa.
Annika Pasanen is working as a professor of Sámi sociolinguistics at the Sámi
Allaskuvla, Sámi University of Applied Sciences. She has a PhD in Finno-Ugric
studies, and the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation is the revitalization of the Inari
Sámi language. Her interests cover language endangerment, language politics,
multilingualism and especially language revitalization. She has both researched
and participated in revitalization activities among several Indigenous and
minority peoples, especially in Sápmi and the Arctic regions of the Russian
Federation. She is Finnish, originally from Central Finland, lives in Inari and
speaks Inari and North Sámi languages.
Vesa Puuronen, professor, is a Doctor of Social Sciences (sociology). His research
interests are in youth political participation, experiences of institutionalized

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 — Contributors —

young people, racism, right-wing populism and governance in Finland.

Professor Puuronen has managed the Academy of Finland research programme
‘Marginalisation, Inequality and Ethnic Relations in Finland.’
Torkel Rasmussen, Ádjuš Biret-Ánná Gunvora Torkel, associate professor, has a PhD
in Sámi language sociology from the Arctic University of Norway – UiT. He has
also studied journalism at the Norwegian Journalism College and is an associate
professor of journalism at Sámi University of Applied Sciences, where he has
worked with bachelor studies of Sámi journalism since 2001 and, most recently,
with the master’s program of Sámi Journalism from an Indigenous Perspective.
His research interests are both in the feld of Indigenous journalism: language
revitalization and vitality of Indigenous languages. At present, he works as a
senior advisor for the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Inker-Anni Sara, Oulin Ánne Issáha Inker-Ánne is an associate professor of jour-
nalism at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Guovdageaidnu, Norway.
In recent years, Sara has worked in the master’s program in Sámi Journalism
from an Indigenous perspective. Currently, Sara focuses on Indigenous jour-
nalism and strategic communication related to the planned Arctic Railway. Sara
seeks to link the theme of the Arctic Railway to the broader research interests
in the Sámi media and Sámi public debate, especially the meaning of the Sámi
media for the Sámi public debate and democratic process in the Sami society.
Her research interests are also in Indigenous participation.
Per Selle is a professor of comparative politics, University of Bergen, and a professor at
the Norwegian Arctic University, Tromsø. His major felds of research have been
comparative Indigenous research, Sámi institutionalization, the welfare state and
the role of the voluntary sector in democracies. Among recent publications are
the books Sametinget – institusjonalisering av en ny samepolitikk (2018, with
Torvald Falch) and Finnmarksloven – en milepæl? (2021, edited with Hans-
Kristian Hernes).
Jarno Valkonen, Áibmejot-Jovnna-Anna Jarno is a professor of sociology at the
University of Lapland and adjunct professor (docent) on nature and nature
resource politics at the Tampere University and on Environmental sociology
at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests are wide ranging
and include nature politics, human-nature relationship, human-animal relations,
tourism work, ethnicity, local knowledge, material sociology, natural cultural
theory and waste studies.
Sanna Valkonen, Vilgon Biret-Ánne Inger-Ánne Sanna is a professor of Sámi research
at the University of Lapland and adjunct professor (docent) of research on
Sámi society at the University of Oulu. Her research felds include the pol-
itics of indigeneity and belonging, cultural heritage and traditional knowledge,
gender and religion and related power relations in the Sámi context. Central to
her current work is developing Sámi research concepts as well as artistic and
tradition-based research methods.

xx
 I N T RO DU C T I O N
Introduction to the Sámi world

Sanna Valkonen, Saara Alakorva, Áile Aikio
and Sigga-Marja Magga1

Maŋimuččat geat ledje sabet alde

– vuogáiduvvamin, guorraseamen
Vuosttamužžan skohteriin rassagohte
– siiddat duoddariidda dávisteamen
Áibbašitgo duođas doložii go
– vuogáiduvvamin, guorraseamen
Go áiggit rivdet, de sieiddit viidot
– gilit ođđa dilis dávisteamen

The last who were on skis

– adjusting, adapting
The frst who started working with snowmobiles
– siidas [village units] refecting/answering the felds
Do we really long for the past
– adjusting, adapting
When times change, the sacred rocks widen
– the villages adapting to the new situations

This quote is an extract from the lyrics of the North Sámi2 song ‘Viidon Sieiddit’3
(‘Widened sacred rocks’) by Sámi rap artist and contemporary philosopher Ailu
Valle. In the lyrics, The last who were on skis . . . The frst who started working with
snowmobiles refers to the words of the renowned Sámi linguist, professor and polit-
ician Ole Heandarat, Ole Henrik Magga. According to Valle, this quote from Magga
illustrates the core of Sámi culture as it has often been defned: the ability to adapt
and adjust while maintaining the Sámi essence. Valle describes the song as being
about the challenges of living in the world today as Sámi: The struggle of sustaining
Sámi culture and traditions in a rapidly changing world where the key to being Sámi

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-1 1
 — Va l k o n e n , A l a k o r v a , A i k i o a n d M a g g a —

is the responsibility towards the land they live in and whom they live with – siiddat
duoddariidda dávisteamen.
The name of the song,‘Viidon Sieiddit,’ refers to the contemporary Sámi lifeworlds
where Sámi are at the same time part of the global and majority cultures and soci-
eties while still having strong bonds to their own communities and traditional ways
of life. Sacred rocks have had – and continue to have – signifcance to Sámi individ-
uals and Sámi society. In the thinking of Ailu Valle, they demonstrate the centrality
of nature as the foundation of Sámi society but also the way in which we all, as
citizens of the global consumer culture, are connected to worldwide natures. Hence,
we should widen our understanding of sacred rocks and build a relationship with
natures globally.
We have chosen this quote with an intertextual reference to be a frst step on the
path to the Sámi world(s). The Sámi concept máilbmi (in English, ‘world’) is derived
from Proto-Uralic and has its counterparts in Fenno-Ugric languages – for example,
maailma (Finnish) and maailm (Estonian). The etymology of máilbmi differs from
its English and Germanic counterparts: It is an example of ancient word formation
in Fenno-Ugric languages, in which the parts of the word are in parallel with each
other. This is most clearly illustrated by the Finnish version, in which the word is a
combination of maa (‘earth’) and ilma (‘sky’).
In the North Sámi language, máilbmi can get different bearings depending on
the utterer. The word encompasses the concept ilbmi, which has several meanings.
Ilbmi can be translated as ‘weather’ but also as ‘reality.’ In North Sámi, there is the
expression albma ilbmi (‘real world’) in which the word albma refers to proper, true
and real. The expression makes a difference between the reality of everyday life and
other realities. The existence of this expression suggests that that the Sámi concep-
tion of the world is characterized by plurality.
A person can end up being ilmmiid gaskkas (‘between worlds’) or guovtti ilmmi
gaskii (‘between two worlds’) – a state considered undesirable. When a person dies,
the phrases sirdasit nubbi ilbmái (‘move to next world’) and son ii leat šat dán ilmmis
(‘she is not in this world anymore’) can be used. There can be also someone or some-
thing that is not from this máilbmi or reality – dat ii leat dán ilmmis (‘not from this
world’). The way the concept of ilbmi is used conveys the Sámi understanding that
there are multitudes of realities and possibilities to traverse them by moving from
one reality to another, in one or many directions.
The concept of máilbmi encompasses everything between the earth and the sky.
Máilbmi – like the sacred rocks – has been widening, and today the concept refers to
the global world as well. The word is also used to structure the different micro real-
ities with their own ecosystem principles and conditions. There is duottarmáilbmi
(‘the world up in the mountains’), muohtamáilbmi (‘the world of snow’) and
bievlamáilbmi (‘the world where the land emerges under the snow’). In addition
to the physical or spatial differences between the worlds, there are also social
differences, wherein máilbmi can describe mental worlds such as dáččamáilbmi (‘the
world of non-Sámi Scandinavians’).
The Sámi conception of the máilbmi underpins the contributions to this book,
also forming its ontological foundation. The understanding of ‘the Sámi world’ we
adopt in this volume is that of a pluriverse – the idea of the coexistence of multiple
worlds. This approach perceives worlds as becoming real and being enacted in and

2
 — Introduction —

through practices: different practices create various realities, not interpretations of

the same reality (Mol 1999, 2002; Blaser 2012; Joks and Law 2016). The pluriversal
perspective – ontological pluralism – allows analyzing how these realities exist and
intertwine and under what kinds of power relations and structures they are being
constructed and maintained.

MANIFOLD SÁMI MÁILMMIT

The ancestral lands of the Sámi, generally referred to as Sápmi, are located in what
today is the territory of four nation-states, spanning from central Norway and cen-
tral Sweden across Northern Finland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The term
Sápmi means ‘a region,’ ‘a language’ and ‘a human,’ and it exists in all the Sámi
languages. Its derivative sápmelaš (‘a Sámi individual’ in North Sámi) has equivalent
concepts in every Sámi language which are currently nine.4 All of them are classifed
as endangered or seriously endangered. With its 20,000 speakers, the North Sámi lan-
guage is the most widely spoken Sámi language, and its position is more secure than
those of the other Sámi languages with a signifcantly smaller number of speakers.
In this volume, Sámi people are mainly referred by the ethnonym Sámi following
North Sámi spelling, but other forms in English (Sami, Saami) and in different Sámi
languages can also be used. Among majority people and dominant societies, the
Sámi have formerly been known by the exonyms Lapp or Laplander. As an ethnic
term, Lapp is considered derogatory or even racist today, but for example in his-
torical archive material, it is a property law concept referring to a person who as a
resident of a Lapp village (Sámi siida) has paid taxes to the Swedish crown. It has
become the practice of Sámi research to leave the wordings of the original sources
unchanged.
Sámi society is composed of many cultural, societal and linguistic subgroups with
their own particular – however often overlapping and indistinguishable – histories
and traditions. A constitutive structure of Sámi society has historically been siida:
a political, legal and administrative unit sharing common sources of livelihood and
usufruct territories. Siida is a North Sámi word, and it has an equivalent in each Sámi
language. The Skolt Sámi have retained their village administration siidsååbbar. The
Siida system still exists and affects many forms of contemporary societal life of the
Sámi – for example, reindeer herding.
The Sámi are the only Indigenous People of the European Union. The Sámi have,
to a considerable degree, been able to retain their own social, economic, cultural
and political institutions despite the colonial practices of domination and other
restrictions imposed on the Sámi by the modern states. Within the global commu-
nity of Indigenous Peoples, the Sámi are an exception since their lands are part
of Europe. The Sámi are both European and Indigenous – defnitions that, in the
context of other Indigenous Peoples, are seen as opposites. The colonial histories
of the Sámi are therefore also different from those of other Indigenous Peoples.
Many Indigenous Peoples of the world can determine with considerable accuracy
the date of their frst encounter with the (white) Europeans and, thus, the begin-
ning of their history of colonialism. In contrast, the colonial history of the Sámi has
been a process whereby, over millennia, good-neighbourliness and trade relations
have been transformed into unequal power relations and colonial structures. The

3
 — Va l k o n e n , A l a k o r v a , A i k i o a n d M a g g a —

policies of nation-states targeted at the Sámi began tightening from the 19th century
onwards, as a result of which the Sámi began to be viewed and treated as culturally
and racially inferior, although the scale of this varied from country to country.
Since the postwar period, the Sámi in Finland, Norway and Sweden have been
integrated into the Nordic welfare state systems. In addition to various effects of
assimilation – such as the language loss of the postwar generation brought by the
difference-blind ideal of an equal welfare state citizenship – this process has also
created new opportunity structures providing the Sámi with access to equal educa-
tion, welfare state services and growth of material well-being. These developments
have, for their part, contributed to articulation of Sámi concerns and situation as
political and legal questions by the frst educated Sámi generations (Lehtola 2012).
Since the 1950s, the Sámi have organized politically in the Nordic countries and
established cross-border political bodies, such as Sámiráđđi, the (Nordic) Saami
Council in 1956. The joint Sámi conferences held every fourth year since 1953 have
pondered topical Sámi issues and envisioned Sámi futures. The Sámi have also been
pioneering actors in establishing the international movement of Indigenous Peoples
in the 1960s and 1970s and actively worked for Indigenous rights. The cross-border
cooperation has led to an established position of the Sámi people within the Nordic
states. The Sámedikkit, the three Sámi parliaments, have implemented Sámi self-
governance (however restricted), since 1989 in Norway, since 1993 in Sweden and
since 1995 in Finland. A cooperative body of the Nordic Sámi Parliaments, Sámi
parlamentáralaš ráđđi, Sámi Parliamentary Council was established in 2000.
Contemporary Sámi government structures are largely based on Western and
Nordic models. For example, the Sámedikkit have been constructed following the
structures of the Nordic municipal administration – something that has also been
met with criticism (see Kuokkanen 2019). In turn, the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula
have been exposed to the totalitarian system of the Soviet Union (including forced
relocations, collectivization of lands and cultural assimilation), the consequences of
which have been devastating. Subsequently, the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula have not
had similar opportunities to develop self-governance than the Sámi in the Nordic
countries have had. As a result, the situation of the Sámi languages in Russia is par-
ticularly weak.
The plurality and diversity of the Sámi world(s) are consequences of the varied
everyday lives the Sámi have lived in different parts of Sápmi. Concurrently, they are also
a result of the power relations that have infuenced Sámi lives in different times. The Sámi
have been, for instance, divided under Eastern and Western cultural and religious spheres,
importantly enacted in the form of taxation by different sovereigns like the Swedish
Crown and the Russian Empire. Later, the dominance of the four states – especially state
borders – have inevitably continued shaping Sámi realities, although there have also been
periods in history when the Sámi have been able to live their lives and build their society
relatively freely, regardless of the state borders. Then again, there have been times when
the restrictive impacts of the borders and border policies have dramatically changed the
possibilities for the Sámi to sustain their practices. At the time of this writing, the most
recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has temporarily rendered the state
borders more visible again and highlighted them as sites of administrative control.
Thus, the Sámi people and Sámi worlds do not exist separately from the rest
of the world but have always interacted with the peoples surrounding them and

4
 — Introduction —

been subject to diverse cultural impacts as well as imposed societal structures. This has
shaped what have become the distinctive characteristics of Sámi thought and perspectives.
In the words of Veli-Pekka Lehtola (2000, 194–195, translated by the editors),

Flexibility and nomadic thinking are the key to the traditional Sámi insight.
Avoiding one-sided defnitions as well as acknowledging the diversity of things
are integral to it. . . . It is living on boundaries, creative moving between two or
even more life conceptions. It can be considered as a distinctive way of seeing
that positions itself against the myopic views underlying national histories.

The words The last who were on skis .  .  . The frst who started working with
snowmobiles are inscribed in this fundamental condition of being Sámi: the necessity
and freedom to operate both between and within different worlds. Flexibility, adapt-
ability, openness and enthusiasm to welcome and accept new ideas and innovations
and to apply or adapt them to existing life practices are essential to the Sámi approach
to life. This view of and approach to life can be the key to the Sámi survivance, to be
still here as Sámi. This philosophy is underpinned by an attitude of accepting the inev-
itable while still having the possibility of presence through human activity – the cap-
ability to retain the big picture of life amid the change. This philosophy is assembled
and continues to be reiterated in the Sámi world-making practices.
The title of the frst book ever written in Sámi is Muittalus samid birra (An
Account of the Sámi, Muitalus sámiid birra in current North Sámi orthography)
(Turi 1910). Muitalus is the North Sámi word for ‘a story.’ Sámi scholars (e.g.
Helander-Renvall 2016) have emphasized that storytelling is an integral, constitu-
tive part of the Sámi knowledge system. For the Sámi, dialogue and narrative are not
only ways of seeking knowledge but also ways of producing and sharing knowledge,
hence building a theory of the world (c.f. Helander and Kailo 1999). When editing
this book, we have chosen to respect this Sámi knowledge practice by structuring the
contributions around the lyrics of Viidon Sieiddit by Ailu Valle. We consider these
lyrics, as well as this book, an account of Sámi society and its constitutive practices –
a theory and analysis of the Sámi world.
This volume focuses on various contemporary and historical Sámi realities
through analyzing different cultural, societal, social, political and legal practices and
relations building Sámi worlds with the objective of opening perspectives on and
illuminating different Sámi realities – the manifold Sámi máilmmit. Engaging with
and drawing from various felds of study, the chapters of this book will give a broad
overview of the plurality of the Sámi worlds.

GUOÐOHIT 5 – LIVING WITH/IN NATURE

Guođohit, guođohit ealu
Čuovvumin dálkkiid, čuovvumin sielu
Ráđđemin meriid, várjalit beađuin
Ja návddiin, goađis de juohkimin dieđuid
Málestettiin, máinnastemiin
Siivvot áššiin fuolahemiin
Áššogáttis, muitalemiin

5
 — Va l k o n e n , A l a k o r v a , A i k i o a n d M a g g a —

Luđiin rádjui muittašemiin

Atnit ávvira birrasis, bearrašis
Fulkkiin, siiddain, viššalin, searasin
Humadit áimmuin, čáziin ja eatnamiin
Bivdolihku sieiddiin jearramin
Oahppat bajiid, vuogas sajiid
Ijaid, beivviid, mánuid, jagiid
Giđaid, gesiid, čavččaid, dálvviid
Mášuin givrot návccat, dárbmi

Herding, herding the herd

Following the weather, following the soul
Balancing the numbers, protecting from the predators
And carnivores, in the goahti sharing the info
While cooking, telling stories
Taking care of things humbly
By the campfre, narrating
With yoiks saving, reminiscing
Taking care of the environment, the family
Relatives, siidas, diligently, frmly
Communicating with the air, water and earth
Asking the hunting luck from the sacrifce stones
Learning the seasons, favorable locations
Over nights, days, months, years
Springs, summers, autumns, winters
With patience the strength and vigor increases

These verses perceptively portray the interrelatedness of human and the environ-
ment that underpins the Sámi way of life and worldview. Nature is not something
to be captured or conquered or separate from the cycles of everyday life; all human
action is intrinsically entwined with the environment – the animals, earth, air, water,
weather, sacred sites, the cycles of the year – all of which are knowing and acting
subjects, co-constituting each other. Hence, the entirety of the environment is insep-
arable from the Sámi social worlds.
The lyrics quoted here can be considered as depicting a Sámi reindeer-herding
and hunting society, even the hunter-gatherer life prior to reindeer herding. As, for
instance, Oskal (1995) and Sara (2013) have demonstrated, reindeer herding is a
way of life in which Sámi, reindeer and environmental conditions are jointly existing,
co-constituting and knowing. The importance of reindeer and reindeer herding to
the existence and survival of Sámi culture and Sámi lives through the ages is crucial.
Although the world of reindeer herding is – and has always been – merely one of
many Sámi realities constituting multiple micro realities of its own, the Sámi culture
is often understood through reindeer herding, or even equated with it. The coexist-
ence of the diversity of Sámi ways of life and livelihoods has always been the key to
the survival (and fourishing) of the Sámi.
The frst part of the book takes a particular look at the interdependence and inter-
action of the Sámi and their surroundings, both mental and physical, in different

6
 — Introduction —

contexts. The chapter by Áile Aikio brings forth a notion of Sáminess that continues
to inform, or even dominate, our understanding of Sámi culture within various
spheres of society. By offering a critical reading of a museum exhibition with a
particular focus on the visual Sámi representations assembled by the photographs
displayed in it, Aikio reminds us that museum exhibitions do not unproblematically
refect the worlds the Sámi experience in their daily lives, but are rather refections
of an ideal of ‘authentic Sámi culture’ by exhibition curators.
The understanding – sometimes articulated as a demand – of cultural authen-
ticity and constancy is also often present in the ways in which Sámi traditional
clothing is approached and represented. However, as Sigga-Marja Magga points out,
gákti, the traditional Sámi dress, is undergoing constant change refecting societal
changes (but also fashion trends) of different times. Refecting on her own experi-
ence, Magga shows that gákti has both individual and collective dimensions, and
therefore, changes can only be outcomes of a lived tradition. Gákti is at the same
time an attire, a symbol of Sáminess and a way to communicate both within the
Sámi communities and towards the rest of the world.
A constantly changing and communicative nature is central to the Sámi music
tradition as well. Marko Jouste refers to the Skolt Sámi leu′dd music tradition not
only as a form of art but also as a complete form of communication. He approaches
leu′dds as oral histories, stating that ‘leu′dds are an important source for Skolt Saami
people’s experience and perspective, and through them it is possible to fnd new
interpretations of the history of Skolt Saamis and also of the history of the whole
region.’ By examining leu′dds as oral histories, Jouste gives voice to the Skolt Sámi
themselves and to their understanding of past events.
Hanna Helander and Veli-Pekka Lehtola present another form of remembering
and telling about the Sámi past: namely, muittašangirjjálašvuohta, reminis-
cence literature. In this form of literature originating from Sámi oral tradition,
‘remembering and storytelling serve as a tribute to the person being remembered,
just like yoik.’ In the Sámi understanding, a person is not completely deceased
as long as their yoik is being yoiked or their stories are being told. Helander and
Lehtola demonstrate this by analyzing a book by Jovnna-Ánde Vest, one of the
early Sámi novelists, simultaneously drawing a picture of how the structural
changes in society over the period from the 1950s to the 1970s appeared in a small
and distant Sámi village.
In his chapter, Torjer A. Olsen reminisces about Sámi women who, in their times,
had exceptional roles in their communities. He examines the history of Laestadianism,
a conservative Christian revivalist movement in the sea Sámi area, by telling stories
of the subtle agencies of the silent or the silenced – even mystifed – women. The
chapter highlights the wide-ranging gendered effects Laestadianism has had on Sámi
society and culture, especially infuencing women’s worlds.
The history – or herstory – of Sámi women is also the topic of Saara Alakorva,
Ritva Kylli and Jarno Valkonen, who pay attention to the invisibility of Sámi women
in historical sources, which, as they point out, distorts understandings of Sámi his-
tory substantially. The chapter illustrates ‘how historical sources refect the colonial
and patriarchal power structures of their time and, when interpreted in our time,
can continue to have impacts that reaffrm colonial and patriarchal structures that
underlie today’s Sámi societies.’

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Sámi’s own structures and relations maintaining community cohesion are pre-
sent in Annikki Herranen-Tabibi’s chapter presenting ethnographic vignettes which
illuminate (inter)generational experiences of the dislocation, delegitimazation,
and rebuilding of vital relations of care among kin and amidst local ecologies.
Herranen-Tabibi defnes the concept of resurgent care (ealáskahtti dikšu, ealáskahtti
áimmahuššan) as intimate and public everyday embodied practices, which continu-
ally strive to revivify relations of kinship and belonging, and conditions of material
livability within the local ecology.
The chapter by Päivi Magga further illustrates the relationality of humans and the
environment as it manifests itself in Sámi practices and worldview and the caring
approach towards both nature and research. Introducing the concept of Sámi cul-
tural environment she has developed within projects surveying cultural landscapes in
Northern Finland, Magga creates an important opening, pointing towards the neces-
sity of including the so-far-ignored Sámi perspective in the administrative practices
related to Sámi land-use planning, thus paving the way for dialogue between Sámi
and Finnish worlds.
Solveig Joks brings up rarely studied, smaller-scale sources and practices of
Sámi subsistence: namely, egg gathering and cloudberry picking in coastal Sápmi.
According to Joks, in these kinds of practices, ‘we not only look at the world but
we are also acting on and constituting that world.’ Her contribution demonstrates
the situated nature of traditional knowledge and its inseparability from the people
carrying out the activities. These practices constitute what can be referred to as
caring knowledge – knowledge centred around care towards the environment and
people.
By combining experiential and scientifc knowledge, Lena Maria Nilsson presents
Sámi food culture, imperative to which is the austerity of the Arctic nature. Contrary
to what is generally believed, the nutritional value of traditional Sámi food is rich.
The chapter describes how maintaining Sámi food culture and diet when many Sámi
no longer live in Sápmi can be challenging. A reason for this is connecting the trad-
itional Sámi livelihoods with market economy: the former everyday food products
of the Sámi region (e.g. reindeer and arctic char) have become luxury products due
to higher proftability.
In her chapter, Inger Marie Gaup Eira highlights the deep knowledge the Sámi
reindeer herders have concerning snow and ice. Her contribution illustrates how
the comprehensive snow knowledge and vocabulary of the Sámi derive from their
relationship with the reindeer and herding. For example, the concepts guohtut (‘to
graze’) and guohtun (‘pasture’) are the preconditions for the well-being of both
humans and reindeer. The knowledge and knowledge production examined by
Eira presents an example of Sámi knowing as emerging through joint efforts when
carrying out everyday activities with others, as well as through communicating and
acting with the environment.
The frst part of the book closes with the contribution of Nuccio Mazzullo, who
examines the Finnish tourism industry’s ways of exploiting stereotypical notions of
the Sámi and the ways in which the Sámi respond to and resist such stereotypical
representations. In dialogue with Sámi reindeer herders, who are also involved in
the tourism business, Mazzullo emphasizes that there is a difference between telling
about the Sámi culture and sharing it through their own biographies. He states that

8
 — Introduction —

the foundation of the Sámi traditions is in the social relations of the Sámi rather than
in visual representations of Sáminess.

GIERDAT 6 – LIVING THROUGH/IN SOCIETAL RUPTURES

Vai galggašii máhccat vel ovddežii
Áigihan ii lean gal návddašit
Vai asttašii vuoiŋŋastit galggai leat
Gal jámma ohcamin birgemii čovdosiid
Dál lea olu álkit, dálki go dálki
Skohter, mohtor, sáhtu cealkimiin
Vejolaš gádjut heakka leš dal
Stoarbma dahje goalki
Galhan mii dieđusge birget daid hagage
Vai sáhttitgo šat
Birgetgo šat
Vuvdetgo fas, ostetgo fas, girdetgo fas
Muhto naba dat olggobeal fámut
Bealkimin, cealkimin duomuid
Buktimin jámu, huksemin buođuid
Fallehit beaivit, fallehit skámus, buktimin jámu
Ráddjehusat, ásahusat
Lágat, mirkkot, bázahasat
Dolvot saji lagaš čearuin
Seammás gáiddus árbevieruin

Oh we should return to the past

There was no time to enjoy actually
To have time to rest you had to be
Constantly searching for ways to survive
Now it is much easier, weather the weather
Snowmobile, engine, ordering a ride
It is possible to save a life no matter is it
Storm or still
Well of course we survive without them
Or can we anymore
Do we fend anymore
Did you sell again, buy again, fy again
But what about the outside forces
Denouncing, condemning
Bringing death, building barrages
Attacking by day, attacking in the dusk
Restrictions, regulations
Laws, poisons, pollution
Eating space from near by lands
And at the same time from distant traditions

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While the frst verse of Viidon sieiddit refects the harmonic coexistence of humans
and their environment, the second verse draws a picture of societal change –
‘development and modernization’ – and the challenges it brings along to the Sámi.
These changes are part of the processes that have pushed the Sámi towards greater
integration into majority societies and their practices. In addition to borders, laws
and policies imposed by state powers which have left Sápmi fragmented – both geo-
graphically and mentally – the Sámi are now facing new and even more complex
challenges.
During the last hundred years, as a result of accelerating modernization and glo-
balization, interest in Arctic regions and resources has grown exponentially. Today,
the Sámi homeland, like many other areas in the High North, is perhaps more than
ever a battlefeld for different competing claims, strategies and interests, both eco-
nomic and geopolitical. Together with global warming and its large-scale and far-
reaching effects, the pressures on Sámi and their livelihoods are disproportionately
hard. Thus, there is a constant concern regarding the continuity of the Sámi culture
and way of life.
The chapter of Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren takes a look at the recent
history and current situation of the Sámi languages: How have we ended up in a situ-
ation in which all Sámi languages are endangered? They describe different historical
processes of Sámi languages and observe how, in spite of language shifts and con-
tinuing lingual assimilation, there are also positive developments: lingual revitaliza-
tion and new speakers. The authors also pay attention to attitudes and atmosphere
that can prevent or promote language revitalization, as well as to administrative
structures that can either slow down or support the construction of Sámi-speaking
worlds.
The situation and futures of the Sámi languages (and culture) in the Kola
Peninsula, Russia, are exceptionally diffcult due to the recent history of the region.
The processes that have led to the current situation among the most eastern Sámi
are opened in the chapters of Anna Andersen and Lukas Allemann which both deal
with the experiences of the Sámi in the Kola Peninsula. The chapters of Allemann
and Andersen are of particular signifcance in that they make visible the little-known
histories of the Sámi behind the iron curtain.
Anna Andersen describes the history of boarding schools and their dramatic
impacts on the life of the Sámi under the Soviet regime. On the one hand, the
boarding schools offered formal education to Sámi children, but on the other, they

simultaneously violently broke the contacts of the children to their families, lan-
guage and culture, even traditional lands. Education in boarding schools greatly
distanced children from the traditional way of life of their parents, gradually
impairing the family relations and the transmission of the Sámi languages from
one generation to another.

Lukas Allemann’s chapter further analyzes the spiral(s) of negative social

developments that alienating people from their language, culture and land have
caused the Sámi in the Soviet North. It discerningly points out how the Sámi had
little or no possibility to resist the changes or their negative impacts in a totalitarian

10
 — Introduction —

regime. However, Allemann suggests expanded perspective on the concept of

resistance:

While it is the most straightforward choice to see alcohol abuse and other forms
of self-harming as acts of resignation, one can also see them in this case – and
not in a mutually exclusive way – as resistance to attempts to streamline social
organization according to a high-modernist ideology.

Jukka Nyyssönen examines whether any change happened in the studies of

Sámi history – specifcally in Lappology – after the Second World War, which is
usually perceived as a turn towards ‘democratic’ values in European and Nordic
historiography. However, simultaneously, the role of the nation-state was, in fact,
strengthened in the Nordic countries. By analyzing one set of texts from the 1920s
and another from the 1950s, Nyyssönen shows that the subject position of the Sámi
did not actually change considerably within research: the Sámi were still seen as the
weakest non-state actor, but the reasons for this were not explained through the
evolutionary frame but through the state-pronounced formalist frame. Nyyssönen
states: ‘This new, more rightful frame was rights generating, but it was also restricted
which kinds of rights the Sámi could legitimately claim; the claims could not go
beyond those granted by citizenship of the current state in which they lived.’
The Sámi have, however, put effort into building a collective transnational agency,
which is sometimes referred as pan-Sáminess. Having been separated from the other
Sámi for over 50 years, the Sámi in Russia have not been able to take active part in the
political development strengthening the collective agency of the Sámi as a nation and
a people. However, there have been attempts to sustain contacts during the cold war.
Saara Alakorva shows in her chapter how the history of the Sámi fag, as an integral
symbol of the Sámi nation-building and organization as one people, is linked both with
the mobilization of the young Sámi radicals in the spirit of ČSV and with Sámi geo-
politics in the Nordic context. Thus, the process of the Sámi fag refects the anticolonial
ethos and wider institutionalization of the Sámi society from 1960s onwards.
The development of Sámi self-governance has been different within different
Nordic countries. The divergence of the processes is analyzed in the chapter of
Ulf Mörkenstam, Per Selle and Sanna Valkonen, who compare the sámedikkit, the
Sámi parliaments, in Finland, Norway and Sweden specifcally in relation to the
Sámi defnitions of political demos. The particular focus of the contribution is on
the Finnish situation that is shadowed by the ongoing and long-lasting debate on
who can be defned as ‘Sámi’ or ‘Indigenous,’ and on what criteria. The comparison
illustrates how the policies of boundary maintenance have assumed different forms
in different national contexts.
Related to the Sámi debate in Finland, Laura Junka-Aikio shows how the Sámi
and the Sámi parliament are targets of ongoing anti-Sámi speech taking place in
various arenas of society, increasingly in social media. By analyzing these narratives
and discourses as toxic speech, she demonstrates how hate speech against the Sámi
grows into an epidemic that is particularly harmful to those who are intersectionally
most vulnerable. Thus, hate speech becomes a toxic reality for the Sámi, in which
individual acts of hate speech accumulate to form an exhausting whole.

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Ketil Lenert Hansen draws a wider picture of the discrimination faced by the
Sámi, particularly in Norway and Sweden. In his chapter, he presents an overview
of the institutional discrimination the Sámi have experienced in the past, as well as
of the contemporary forms of inequity and prejudice. The chapter shows that the
multiplicative effects of these forms of discrimination are a threat to the health and
well-being of the Sámi.
The majority-minority relations are at stake in Vesa Puuronen’s chapter, too. He
investigates the municipal politics in three municipalities situated in the Sámi home
region in Finland. Although the Sámi have the right to vote in Finland’s municipal
elections by virtue of their citizenship, according to Puuronen, the municipal institu-
tion in Finland can, however, be viewed as part of state colonialism conficting with
the Sámi right to self-determination. This receives a particular emphasis in land-use
issues as the municipalities in Finland have a strong independence in managing their
own affairs related to land-use planning.
Today, a substantial number of Sámi live outside the Sámi homeland. The
chapter of Karin Eriksson observes how the Sámi in Stockholm try to make Sámi
life, including the use of Sámi language, possible in a city by demanding and
developing services targeted to Sámi. The problem, however, is that the Sámi are
not recognized as an Indigenous People in most spheres of the Swedish society, but
are rather seen as one of the linguistic minorities. Acknowledging the position of
the Sámi as an Indigenous People would enable taking their particular needs and
concerns better into account, thus making the Sámi stronger among dominant
society.
Inker-Anni Sara, Torkel Rasmussen and Roy Krøvel address in their chapter the
multiple roles of Indigenous media. The case they examine is the news coverage of
Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi, public broadcasting companies in Sámi languages in
Finland and Norway, related to the Arctic Railroad project – a development project
that has made visible the vulnerability of Sámi livelihoods in the face of global eco-
nomic and political forces. It has been challenging for the Sámi media to bring the
multiplicity of Sámi voices to public debate. The authors point out the ways in which
the Sámi media sometimes needs to ally with Sámi civil society and activists to be
able to challenge the hegemonic frames of public debate.
Conficts over the use of the resources in the Sámi homeland are also discussed in
the chapter by Tapio Nykänen. He examines what kinds of political alliances the Sámi
created during two events: The Áltá controversy which unfolded in the late 1970s
and the early 1980s in response to the planned dam project and water reservoir that
threatened the grazing lands and the Deatnu fshing rights dispute which started in 2016.
Although the conficts are similar in that their primal force was a young generation of
Sámi activists and the target of resistance was the planned transfer of control over Sámi
resources to non-Sámi, the arguments for justifying the resistance have changed.

DUOSTAT 7 – ENVISIONING SÁMI FUTURES

Dálážis váldit viidábut vuhtii
Danhan dat cuiggodeaddji vajálduhtii
Mo dat lea nu váttis oaidnit
Ahte mii diktit beare luonddu min oaiviliid báidnit

12
 — Introduction —

Čalmmehis luohttá indiviiddaide

Ja válddi pyramiiddaide
Go áidna doaibmi vuohki lea máhcahit válddi báikkálaš siiddaide
Fápmu lea mis go duostá
Dáistalit ovttas stuorra biruid vuostá
Eallima beales dát vástu juohkehačča guoská
Min áššiin mearrida luondu
Min áššiin mearrida boazu
Ieža mii máhttit dáid guovlluin mearridit
Ii gii lea luonddus luovus

Today’s situation must be taken into account more extensively

That’s what the criticizer forgot
How is it so diffcult to see
That we only let the nature colour our opinions
Blind ones trust the individuals
And the pyramids of power
When the only functional way is to return the authority to local regimes
We have the power when we dare
To fght together against the big devils
For the sake of life this is everyone’s responsibility
Our things are governed by nature
Our things are governed by the reindeer
We ourselves know how to determine these lands
Not the one who is separated from nature

In the third verse, Ailu Valle turns the gaze to the future and back to the Sámi relation-
ship with nature. In spite of all the changes, ruptures and trends, the way in which we
situate ourselves in relation to the living environment and nature in a broader sense is
the determining factor in our lives. This idea has a wider signifcance for humankind
at large in the face of the global threats posed by the climate crisis. Valle encourages
us to embrace our own Sámi agency and reminds us of the power of acting together.
The verse encourages the Sámi to take responsibility for their future(s), and it strongly
conveys the idea of Sámi self-determination: Fápmu lea mis go duostá – We have the
power when we dare. In the end, we turn back to nature: We are reminded that futures
are made through communication with nature – which exercises agency of its own.
Like Sámi art, the role of Sámi media is also essential in outlining and making
visible the multiple Sámi worlds. Otherwise, the structures and relations of the Sámi
society may remain invisible both to dominant societies and even to the Sámi them-
selves. Media provides an arena wherein Sámi public debate and discussions can take
place, which contributes to making Sámi futures. In their chapter, Torkel Rasmussen,
Inker-Anni Sara and Roy Krøvel provide an overview of the historical development
of the Sámi media, the success stories as well as failures. They consider the Sámi
media system as a hybrid: It is part of the broadcasting companies of the Nordic
states while at the same time operating partly independently, based on the historical,
social, cultural and political premises of the Sámi society. The authors urge the need
for further research on why the Sámi media sector still lacks autonomy.

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Intergenerational language transmission is the topic of the chapter of Annika

Pasanen. She introduces Sámi perspectives to a phenomenon that has recently
become a growing response to the loss of languages among Indigenous Peoples: The
question of taking back one’s lost native language in adulthood and transmitting it
to the next generation. The chapter discusses the backgrounds, motivations, choices,
challenges and resources of new speaker parents transmitting Sámi language to their
children. With the three spoken Sámi languages in Finland – Inari Sámi, North Sámi
and Skolt Sámi – as research cases, Pasanen stresses the following point: ‘[N]ew
speaker parents do have one very important special need: the message from the Sámi
community, and also the entire society, that speaking and transmitting a Sámi lan-
guage as a second-language speaker is accepted and supported.’
Eeva-Kristiina Nylander portrays in her chapter a revitalization project concerning
Sámi women’s headdress ládjogahpir, which, for various reasons, was abandoned
in the 19th century. In a process Nylander calls rematriation, she examines the
collected knowledge about the ládjogahpir headdress, which today exists mainly as a
museum object, and brings this knowledge to Sámi duodji sewing workshops she has
organized with her collaborator partner. The purpose of the workshops has been to
encourage Sámi women to make and wear ládjogahpir again. Nylander emphasizes
the emotions connected to the ládjogahpir and points out that its revitalization can
contain elements of emancipation and healing for the women involved.
In her chapter, Anna-Lill Drugge refects on the recent developments of Sámi
research ethics, drawing attention to the need to regard ethical principles of research
from the viewpoints and needs of the community under scrutiny. She points out
how the fact that the Sámi in four countries have different societal histories entails
refecting on ethical questions in relation to the particular context in question. She
also discusses how, in Sweden, the policies based on race biology research have
created persistent power hierarchies and tensions between different Sámi groups and
damaged the trust in research as such.
Veli-Pekka Lehtola underlines the fact that Sámi historical knowledges have been
passed on as oral traditions and shows that they are more likely to be connected
to places than temporality. Lehtola reminisces in his contribution about how his
aunt used to tell him stories connected to different persons and locations they were
passing while driving from one place to another. Viewed from the window of a car,
the landscapes and places make way for new ones more quickly than, for example,
when travelling by foot or when pulled by draught reindeer. This has changed how
stories are shared, but simultaneously, the Sámi awareness of history has changed
even more rapidly and dramatically. In this, the greatest role is played by media, art
and memory organizations.
Kristina Labba points out the need to study more extensively the law of the Sámi,
which is partly recognized but the implementation of which requires more research.
According to Labba: ‘Sámi law should not be understood only as law fxed from
time immemorial and expressed through Sámi customs.’ She calls for Sámi legal
opinions that can be seen as constituting Sámi law. Sámi law should include present-
day understandings of law which are ‘embedded in resources deeply rooted in the
Sámi society, culture, traditional livelihoods, languages and cultural expressions.’
In her chapter, Natalia Magnani presents her observations of the process of
taking back the tradition to build a vuäʹddvõõnâs (root-sewn boat) and the boat

14
 — Introduction —

launching ceremony in a Skolt Sámi community. She depicts how the ceremony
reenacts relations to the land but also to loss. Moreover, through its material associ-
ations, the boat serves to connect multiple places and temporalities. The spatial and
temporal dimensions of the boat-building and consecration process ‘constituted the
boat’s saliency as an idiom for continuity and vehicle of collective remembering.’
The topic of Britt Kramvig and Trine Kvidal-Røvik is modern Sámi design and the
ways in which it is connected to traditions through stories. They examine how the
designers tell stories in and through objects, and these stories enact Sámi world(s).
According to Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik: ‘Knowledge and stories are embedded in
design – as are the relationships to multiple non-humans that come together in an
object.’ The chapter engages with the Sámi concept and practice of verddevuohta,
which is about creating and maintaining relationships with others, as well as with
dialogue as a method that respects the existence of diverse worlds.
In her chapter, Ina Knobblock takes a comprehensive look at Sámi feminism and
feminist thinking and how it relates to and enters into dialogue with Indigenous
feminism internationally. Knobblock presents an interesting example of dialogic
research by approaching her topic through engaging in discussions with Sámi
feminists whom she encounters as co-researchers instead of mere informants. This
accentuates the voices of the Sámi feminists and challenges the traditional roles of
the researcher and the individuals who are the subjects of research.
Kata Kyrölä examines Sámi comedy and the possibilities of approaching Sámi
worlds through humour by analyzing the Sámi TV series Njuoska bittut, which was
broadcast nationwide in Finland in 2012–2013 by the national public broadcasting
company Yle. Kyrölä analyzes Njuoska bittut as queer world-making that in many
ways balances between different worlds and audiences as the frst Sámi TV comedy
in Finland. According to Kyrölä, the quintessentially Sámi humour of the program
is not always accessible to the majority audience, but when analyzed more closely, it
can reveal essential factors about the Sámi world, including queer and gender diverse
dimensions. Through this approach, Kyrölä highlights the separateness of different
worlds and indicates that they can be identifed, although they are not always accessible.
The chapter by Astri Dankertsen, too, is built around the theme of laughter and
fun. She shows how important it is to pay attention to positive forces in Sámi com-
munities, in order to connive Indigenous survivance and nourish the Indigenous
ways of knowing. Dankertsen describes how Sámi youth in cities construct new
ways of being Sámi in an urban environment. In this new setting, old symbols such
as gákti and duodji are given new meanings, and they are used to communicate new
kinds of messages. Dankertsen and the Sámi youth she has conversed with build a
new Sámi narrative, where joy, having fun and survivance are more important than
losses and grief, and they become key factors for vital Sámi futures.

SAJÁIDUVVAT – SETTING OF THE BOOK

By the beginning of the song Viidon sieiddit, Ailu Valle paints a picture of the
nature-based Sámi way of life, which is also deeply intertwined with producing and
sharing knowledge (juohkit dieđuid). Indigenous knowledge is often considered to
be based on experientiality, whereby knowledge is being produced through obser-
vation and evaluation, but it is also associated with innovation, which has enabled

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the survival, or survivance, of Indigenous Peoples as well as their societal develop-

ment. What we now refer to as ‘tradition’ or ‘heritage’ was once something new and
innovative. In the words of Elina Helander-Renvall (2016, 152):

Traditional knowledge is cumulative; it comprises knowledge, skills, practices

and beliefs passed on from one generation to another through cultural transfer.
It is collective knowledge that has been reproduced and transmitted over a long
period of time and been shaped as life and survival has required. It is oral and
tacit in nature, acquired through a variety of practices and oral upbringing and
story-telling. One salient point here is that Indigenous peoples themselves feel
that traditional knowledge is dynamic and changing. In addition, traditional
knowledge is an entity that encompasses language, names, classifcations, rit-
uals, the manner in which resources are used and a person’s worldview.

The chapters of this book showcase a wide range of knowledge produced from mul-
tiple Sámi perspectives and also address the emergence of knowledge. At the same
time, the chapters show how the Sámi world(s) are being constituted in and through
practices while maintaining an ongoing dialogue with other world(s).
As a result of societal changes and ruptures, the Sámi practices have diversifed,
and Sáminess has become more manifold and intersectional than ever. Providing a
straightforward outline of the Sámi society is not entirely unproblematic because
it overlaps and intertwines with the dominant power structures – sometimes being
overwhelmed by them. Sámi society is constituted simultaneously through local
practices and relations and transborder regional networks that are not separate from
other global structures and phenomena. The chapters of the book indicate that the
Sámi world-making creates opportunities to live Sámi life in this messy world while
looking towards the future.
Contemporary Sámi research is a multi- and cross-disciplinary feld of study com-
bining a range of perspectives to form human, more-than-human and multispecies
understandings. Sámi research examines and promotes the Sámi knowledge –
which continues to be produced, maintained, tested and doubted in and through
Sámi practices – and addresses various historical and contemporary phenomena
of the society by drawing from and contributing to diverse academic discussions.
When planning this book, we did not want to predetermine what belongs to the
Sámi world and what kind of information should be conveyed about it and how.
Instead, we started from the assumption that by inviting contributions from the feld
of Sámi research, we would get what we were searching for: Insights into the various
realities of Sámi worlds. We are aware of the fact that the way the chapters of this
book have been selected and arranged create only one (of many possible) narratives
of the Sámi world(s). Also, our choice to organize this book around the lyrics of
Ailu Valle strengthens a story of a particular kind. However, our aim has not been to
create a comprehensive picture of the Sámi world – different choices would have shed
light on different things and phenomena. Above all, our goal has been to pay par-
ticular attention to the fact that the studies of the Sámi world(s) provided in this book
represent a Sámi-driven perspective that emerges from Sámi realities. Acknowledging
Sámi worlds as ontologies in their own right is also refected in the practices of know-
ledge construction, the objective of which is to account for the diversity of Sáminess.

16
 — Introduction —

The new direction of Sámi research does not settle for examining Sáminess from afar
and discussing it within the frameworks imposed from the outside. Instead, it delves
deeper into the Sámi world and looks at the world from that perspective.
Editing this book has itself been a practice of constituting a Sámi world. A joint
effort of four Sámi women, the editing process has created space for the academic
Sámi world: Scientifc dialogue, debates and discussions and all kinds of scholarly
work from Sámi starting points. We extend our warmest gratitude to the authors
of this book, with whom we have gathered siivvot áššiin fuolahemiin, áššogáttis,
muitalemiin – taking care of things humbly, by the campfre, narrating. We also
would like to sincerely thank Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who provided the epilogue
for this book. His experience and insight allow him to grasp the big picture of the
phenomena of the Sámi world(s) and Sámi research – across disciplinary borders.
As he points out, dialogue between different worlds and ontological and epistemo-
logical foundations is crucial, especially at the university.

NOTES
1 This work was carried out during the following projects: Árbi and Logi – The ontological
politics of Sámi cultural heritage, funded by the Academy of Finland (Árbi, 2019–2023)
(Project: 324427) and Kone Foundation (Logi, 2019–2021). We would also like to thank
Sari Kokkola for proofreading the introduction and for helping with many language issues.
Ollu giitu!
2 Ailu Valle has translated the lyrics into English.We want to thank Ailu for his wise words
and Mio Negga (Petrichord Records) for the permission to reprint the lyrics.
3 Ailu Valle created the song and the album Viidon sieiddit as part of the Sámi art and
research project Viidon Sieiddit – The new dimensions of the Sámi nature relationships
(PI Sanna Valkonen), funded by Kone Foundation (2016–2017). See Valkonen et al.
forthcoming.
4 The current Sámi languages are Inari Sámi, Kildin Sámi, Lule Sámi, North Sámi, Pite Sámi,
Skolt Sámi, South Sámi, Ter Sámi, and Ume Sámi.
5 ‘to herd’; ‘to let the reindeer graze’; ‘to supervise the grazing reindeer’
6 ‘to endure’; ’to bear’; ’to be strong enough’
7 ‘to dare’

REFERENCES
Blaser, M. 2012. Ontology and indigeneity: On the political ontology of heterogeneous
assemblages. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), pp. 49–58.
Helander, E. and Kailo, K. 1999. Ei alkua ei loppua – Saamelaisten puheenvuoro [No
Beginning No End – The Sami Speak Up]. Helsinki: Like.
Helander-Renvall, E. 2016. Sámi Society Matters. Rovaniemi, Finland: Lapland University
Press.
Joks, S. and Law, J. 2016. Sámi Salmon, State Salmon. LEK, technoscience and care. The
Sociological Review, 65(2), pp. 150–171.
Kuokkanen, R. 2019. Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-determination, Governance,
and Gender. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lehtola, V.-P. 2000. Kansain välit – monikulttuurisuus ja saamelaishistoria [Inter nations –
Multiculturality and Sámi history] In: I. Seurujärvi-Kari, ed., Beaivvi Mánát. Saamelaisten
juuret ja nykyaika, Tietolipas 164. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.

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 — Va l k o n e n , A l a k o r v a , A i k i o a n d M a g g a —

Lehtola, V.-P. 2012.  Saamelaiset Suomalaiset. Kohtaamisia 1896–1953 [Sámi Finns.

Encounters 1896–1953]. Helsinki: Suomaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Mol, A. 1999. Ontological politics. A word and some questions. The Sociological Review,
47(1), pp. 74–89.
Mol, A. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham and London: DUP.
Oskal, N. A. 1995. Det rette, det gode og reinlykken [The Right, the Good and the Reindeer
Luck]. Tromsø: Universitetet i Tromsø.
Sara, M. N. 2013. Siida ja siiddastallan. Å være en siida – om forholdet mellom siidatradisjoner
og videreføringen av siidasystemet [Being Siida – On the Relationship between Siida
Tradition and Continuation of the Siida System]. PhD. Faculty of Humanities, Social
Sciences and Education. The Arctic University of Norway.
Turi, J. 1910. Muittalus samid birra: Atlas med 14 tavler [An Account of the Sámi: Atlas with
14 Tables]. Stockholm: Cederquists grafska aktiebolag.
Valkonen, S., Valkonen, J., Aikio S. A., Helander, M. and Valle, A. (forthcoming) Citizens of
the globe – Sámi art envisioning Indigenous environmental citizenship. In: H. Igloliorte, A.
Prouty, C. von Harringa, eds., Arctic Prisms: Contemporary Arts Across Inuit Nunaat and
Sápmi. Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University.

18
 PART I

GUOÐOHIT1 – LIVING WITH/

I N N AT U R E
 


1 ‘to herd’; ‘to let the reindeer graze’; ‘to supervise the grazing reindeer’
 CHAPTER ONE

A W I N D OW I N T O VA N I S H I N G
S Á M I C U LT U R E ?
Visual representations of Sáminess in the
shared Siida exhibition by Sámi Museum Siida
and Northern Lapland’s Nature Centre1


Áile Aikio

INTRODUCTION
The devastation of the Sámi homeland in the Second World War and Finland’s
tightening postwar assimilation policies made the Sámi fear for the future of their
people, language and cultural heritage. As a response to the threat, the Sámi associ-
ation Sami Litto (Sámi Union) founded the Inari Sámi Museum in 1959. The new
museum allowed the Sámi to manage, conserve, communicate and exhibit their cul-
tural heritage; to beneft from the growing tourism; and to gain control over the Sámi
representations exhibited to the public (about growth of tourism in Finnish Lapland,
see Mazzullo in this volume). In the frst decades, the Sámi Museum functioned as an
open-air museum until the main building Siida was opened in 1998. Today, the Sámi
Museum Siida is a prominent attraction and an important source of information
about the Sámi for the Sámi and non-Sámi alike.
The Sámi Museum shares facilities and exhibition responsibility for the main
building Siida with the Northern Lapland Nature Centre of Metsähallitus.2 The
most visible manifestation of the cooperation is the shared main exhibition that
presents Sámi culture and northern nature as one entity. The theme of the frst Siida
exhibition (1998–2021) was the survival strategies of humans and other species
in nature in extreme northern conditions. During its 23-year life, the Siida exhib-
ition was visited by 1,166,295 people – approximately 50,000 visitors annually.
In this chapter, I examine this frst permanent Sámi exhibition of a Sámi museum
in Finland and its representations of Sáminess. During its life, the Siida exhibition
has been an important part of the Sámi world, and it has been widely studied both
as a whole and at the level of detail from various perspectives (e.g. Thomas and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-3 21
 — Áile Aikio —

Koskinen-Koivisto 2016; Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen 2016; Potinkara 2015; Levy

2006; Webb 2006, 2001; Olsen 2000). The exhibition was closed in April 2021, and
the spatial and bodily experience it offered can no longer be relived. The new Siida
exhibition – again, a cooperation between the Sámi Museum and Metsähallitus’s
Nature Centre, named ‘Enâmeh láá mii párnááh – These lands are our children,’ is
to be opened in May 2021. Thus, in addition to a study and an analysis, this text is
also a memoir of an exhibition that now can be looked for only in books, for it is no
more than a dream remembered.
The Siida exhibition is divided into two rooms. The smaller introductory exhib-
ition presents the history of nature and human activities in the area by a linear
timeline. In the larger main exhibition hall, the layout is divided into two spheres:
‘the sphere of nature’ surrounds the ‘sphere of Sámi culture,’ similar to the way
that nature surrounds and sets boundaries to Sámi culture. The overall look of the
dark blue exhibition hall is dim, the primary light source being the backlight illu-
mination of the showcases and photographs. The amount and colour of light varies
in different parts of the room: the months of polar night are dark compared to the
bright sunshine of early spring. The visual exhibition experience is complemented
by lighting and a constantly changing soundscape of animal sounds and ambient
sounds of nature. Human sounds, such as music or speech, are not included in the
soundscape.
The nature section is dominated by 12 gigantic nature photographs – one for
each month of the year – that cover the outer walls of the room. In the middle
is the Sámi culture section, presented in a square formed by glass cabinets placed
slightly oblique to the outer circumference. The culture section is subdivided into 12
panels, each presenting a different theme. The frst panel by the entrance is entitled
Reindeer herding, the basis of traditional culture (panel VII) and, moving clock-
wise, is followed by Foods, a basic need (panel VIII); Clothing, a basic need (panels
IX and X); Transportation, Know-how, a basic need (panel XI); Siida, the Social
Background (panel XII); Traditional Dwelling Patterns (panel I); The Skolt Siida
(panel II); The Artist Background (panel III); The Religious Background (panel
IV); The Consolidation of Sámiland (panel V); and Fishing, Farming, the Basis of
Traditional Culture (panel VI). Under these themes, Sámi culture is approached
through text, objects, images, maps and some videos. A display area in the middle of
the culture section presents Sámi culture in seven installations consisting of museum
objects, taxidermy specimens and props.
I understand the exhibition to be stories of realities purposefully chosen for the
exhibition to display the idea and theories behind it rather than a refection of reality
that passively documents or exhibits Sámi culture. In this chapter, I approach both
the Sámi Museum and its exhibitions as heritage practices that constantly enact and
assemble a multitude of Sámi realities and further Sámi futures (c.f. Harrison 2015).
Since its opening in 1998, the Siida exhibition has taken part in assembling the Sámi
realities we Sámi now live in.
In this study, I analyze the photographs of the Sámi culture section of the Siida
exhibition and the Sámi representations assembled by them. I examine, interpret
and evaluate the exhibition and its photographs from the dual perspective of an
Indigenous Sámi and a Sámi researcher and ask how the exhibition’s representations
of the Sámi appear from this perspective. What photographs – and, through them,

22
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

what kinds of Sámi representations – have been selected for the exhibition? My text
offers a critical reading of the exhibition and its photographs. I begin my analysis
by examining what kinds of photographs have been chosen for the exhibition. Then
I identify the eras and areas that are emphasized and underemphasized by dividing
the photographs into groups by date and location. In addition to refecting on the
individual photographs and their representations, I also study the photographs in a
more abstract sense as expressions of the theoretical idea behind the exhibition and,
more comprehensively, the research traditions in Sámi studies. Finally, keeping in
mind the idea of the Siida exhibition as a window into Sámi culture, I ask what kinds
of views the exhibition opens to Sáminess: what kind of Sáminess is shown through
the exhibition ‘window’ and what is left ‘out of its frame.’
Photographs are one element of the exhibition alongside texts, objects, sounds,
videos and exhibition structures. Photographs contribute to the story of the exhib-
ition and interact with, complement and reinforce the other elements; open up new
perspectives and approaches to the topics; and combine the individual elements
into a polyphonic whole. Hence, investigating the individual elements separately
can do wrong to the exhibition as a whole (Potinkara 2015, 34). Then again, an
exhibition can be understood as a combination of separate narratives embodied
by the medium that tells them. Thus, photographs assemble their own narratives
both singly and jointly with other photographs. In this regard, my analysis of
photographs as independent exhibition elements opens up new ways of perceiving
the Siida exhibition.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE SIIDA EXHIBITION

In the 1980s, the Sámi voiced a need for an exhibition space that would comple-
ment the information about the Sámi and Sámi history provided by the open-air
museum. The process was stopped due to lack of funding for years, and in 1990,
the process resumed, and a board of experts was set up to plan and construct a new
Sámi Museum building and its main exhibition. Professor of anthropology Jukka
Pennanen was chosen as the chair of the board, and Tarmo Jomppanen, the then-
director of the Sámi Museum, was chosen as the secretary. The third main fgure of
the board was Professor Juhani Pallasmaa, a well-known Finnish architect, who had
been chosen to design the Siida building. The other members were Sámi linguist and
ethnologist Samuli Aikio, director of the Nature Centre Timo Kukko, the curator for
Sámi collections at the National Museum of Finland Martti Linkola, design architect
Sami Wirkkala, conservation biologist Matti Mela and – according to some sources –
Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi, then a student of anthropology, who also compiled the manu-
script. A year before the exhibition was opened, archaeologist Leena Hiltula joined
the board and became its only female member (Pennanen 1998, 46).3
The composition of the board of experts can be scrutinized from different
perspectives. First, until its last year, the board was an all-male panel. Second, only
three of its members were Sámi, and the majority and all the key positions were held
by Finns. Third, considering that the exhibition was to exhibit Sámi culture and
northern nature equally, natural scientists were under-represented: only two of the
members were natural scientists. The board’s membership refected the situation and
atmosphere in Finland at the time the exhibition was planned and constructed. Then,

23
 — Áile Aikio —

Western education was considered superior when producing objective information

about cultural heritage, and the Sámi were seen as objects, rather than actors, of
museum activity. Thus, it was normal and acceptable to implement a Sámi exhibition
project practically entirely by non-Sámi men. Until today, the number of Sámi with
university degrees has been relatively small. In the 1990s there were only three Sámi
who held degrees in so-called Finnish museum subjects: i.e. archaeology, ethnology,
history or art history. Two of them, Aikio and Näkkäläjärvi, were members of the
board of experts, and the third, Aslak Outakoski, long-time director of the Oulu
County Archive, was in his 80s at the time of the exhibition process.
Quite early in the planning process, it was decided that the process would be
implemented in cooperation with the state-owned enterprise Metsähallitus. The new
Siida construction was to unite the responsibility areas – the northern nature of
the administrative area Northern Lapland and the Sámi culture – of two different
organizations and build an exhibition entity in which ‘the cultural-historical and
ethnographic content are put in proportion to the natural historic content’ (Pennanen
and Näkkäläjärvi 2003, 9). To unite exhibitions of a nature centre and a cultural-
historical museum was a unique idea in Finland, and the union was not without
challenges. The relationship of the Sámi with Metsähallitus is burdened by several
historical and ongoing disputes as Metsähallitus manages the Sámi lands in Finland
and its land use competes with – and sometimes threatens – the livelihoods and
cultural survival of the Sámi (see also Puuronen in this volume). For Metsähallitus,
the collaboration was challenging for different reasons: exhibiting culture and
nature together and aligning perspectives with a cultural institute was very different
from what had been done in Metsähallitus’s nature centres, and the new approach
required rethinking.
The Siida exhibition and its design were based on the anthropological theory
of human ecology and its ecosystem approach. Drawing from these, the exhibition
has three focus areas: the natural environment surrounding the culture, the com-
munity as an interactive system surrounding the individual and the relationship of
the individual to the dominant culture. The exhibition focuses on survival strat-
egies of nature and culture in the extreme conditions of the north, and its central
idea is the interaction between nature, people and culture. The exhibition design
distinguishes human ecosystems from natural ecosystems. For example, the large
nature photographs in the nature section show the changing seasons and bear no
trace of human presence. Likewise, in the inner cultural sphere, the essential cul-
tural practices are portrayed by month of their occurrence for the visitor to link
the natural events to cultural practices and vice versa (Pennanen 2003a, 208, 210–
211, 2003b, 215). The aim of the exhibition is to ‘provide the Sámi with an insight
into their own ethnicity and thus strengthen their self-esteem. For non-Sámi the
exhibitions should provide an understanding of the essence of what it means to be
Sámi’ (Pennanen 2003b, 215).
Since its inauguration, the exhibition entity has been kept mostly intact. In gen-
eral, the design of the exhibition – print on glass structures – makes it practically
impossible to make changes or even to correct errors. Nevertheless, there have been
some changes. Originally, there were video interviews with fve Sámi individuals,
four men and one woman, from different regions. These were removed shortly after
the opening because – according of the board of experts – the sound of the videos

24
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

disturbed the exhibition soundscape. The decision to remove the disturbing videos –
both literally and fguratively – silenced the Sámi voice in the exhibition: Sámi
language was no longer spoken in the exhibition, which further reduced its Sámi
perspectives. After this, there have been only some minor changes: individual objects
have been replaced by similar ones because of damage or theft or, in some cases, by
more up-to-date items. The only larger change was made in 2010, when the content
and presentation of the duodji glass cabinet was renewed.4 The new set-up consists
of contemporary duodji by several Sámi artisans, and it highlights the living duodji
heritage. This presentation differs from the rest of the exhibition as the names of the
makers are presented.
The Siida exhibition was planned and produced in the analogical era, but it has
lived most of its life in the digital era. The fuorescent tubes, CRT televisions and
grainy photographs taken with slide technology are indicative of the age of the
exhibition. Concurrently, the obsolescence of the Sámi representation in the exhib-
ition is less striking. During the life of the Siida exhibition, the museum institution,
museum practices and museum’s relations to minorities and Indigenous Peoples
have changed, and the position of the Sámi in Finland, the Sámi society and Finnish
society and its sentiments towards the Sámi have taken a new course. The need to
renew the exhibition partly or completely has grown as the exhibition has aged,
and the different possibilities have been discussed in the Sámi Museum more or less
actively at least for ten years. An active process towards a new exhibition started in
2016 as funding for the frst part of the renewal process was granted, and writers for
the new manuscripts were chosen.5 In April 2021, the Siida exhibition reached the
end of its life cycle, and it was closed, and the building of the new main exhibition
has started.

THE ANALYSIS OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The most important source for my study is the list of images of the Sámi culture
section. Compiling lists of images, objects or taxidermied animals is a museum prac-
tice connected to exhibition work. The frst versions of the lists are made during the
planning process while mapping out what kinds of photographs would be available
and which ones of them would meet the requirements of the exhibition plan and
design. The photographs included in the exhibition presentation and the additional
information accompanying them form the fnal list of images. This fnal list is a tool
for exhibition building and panel design, according to which the images are placed
on panels. Later, during the life of the exhibition, the list of images can be used as a
source of additional information for the museum staff and visitors. For this purpose,
a copy of the list was placed at the Siida customer service.
The list of images indicates on which panel a photograph is placed; its index
number, title, name of the photographer, date and location; and, in some cases, add-
itional information about the content. In Siida, the physical exhibition and the list
are not uniform in all parts. For example, only the images on the vertical exhib-
ition panels are included, and the images on the smaller horizontal panels are not
included, and thus, the latter are left out of my analysis. In addition, images on
two panels (panel XI, Transportation, Know-how, a basic need, and panel XII, The
Siida, the social background) are not on the list. As these are the last two panels, it is

25
 — Áile Aikio —

possible that the last pages of the list have been lost. For these, I have compiled the
list according to my photographs of the exhibition panels and additional informa-
tion collected from different sources.
The Sámi culture section of the Siida exhibition features a total of 245 images
of which 202 – a clear majority – are photographs. In addition, there are maps,
drawings, videos and facsimiles and excerpts from different publications.
The amount of information given about each photograph on the list of images
varies. In most cases, all the information found about the photographs in their
original source (museum collection, etc.) is included. The quantity and quality of
information vary not only according to the collecting practices of different memory
organizations in different times but also according to the information individual
photographers have been interested in. Generally, the oldest photographs contain
the least and most generic information. The amount of information increases over
time, and the information accompanying 20th century photographs is more detailed
and includes, for example, the exact location and names and relations of the persons
depicted. What is striking in the list of images is the lack of information accom-
panying the newest photographs that date to the 1980s and 1990s. For them, only
the title and the name of the photographer are given, although more detailed infor-
mation must have been known to the photographer.
The quality or quantity of information on the list of images does not seem to have
affected the content of the captions in the exhibition. In general, the captions contain
only generic information, and all specifc information is left out. The captions explain
the function of the photograph in the exhibition story rather than giving detailed
information about the photograph: its location, date or subject. For example, only
in the captions of 23 photographs (11%) is some location information included. The
names of the individuals depicted are generally not mentioned, the only exceptions
being the Näkkäläjärvi family tree in panel XII (Siida, the Social Background), in
which the individuals are presented with their Finnish names, and the portraits of
two well-known Sámi men, priest Lars Levi Laestadius and the author of the frst
Sámi book, Johan Turi.
According to ethnologist Helena Ruotsala (2003), in publications, the role of the
Sámi in ethnographic photographs is primarily decorative or illustrative. Instead
of presenting individuals with names and identities, their role is to anonymously
represent the collective Sámi people. Similarly, in the Siida exhibition, the Sámi
are not depicted as individuals with identities but as samples of Sáminess in the

Table 1.1 The distribution of different types of images in

the Siida exhibition

Type of image Pcs % of total

Drawing 11 4%
Video 2 1%
Map 16 7%
Facsimile 14 6%
Photograph 202 82%

26
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

same manner as a taxidermy specimen does not represent an individual animal

but its species. The Sámi in photographs are not chosen for the exhibition to tell
their story or the story of their family but to function as representations of the
Sámi people. Simultaneously, the information the Sámi visitors might fnd relevant
or interesting, such as names, relations or details, are discarded as well. The way
photographs are presented in the exhibition does not fulfl the needs of the Sámi
to connect with the persons in the photographs or reinforce relations to the lands
depicted.
Early photography was expensive, and only a few in Sápmi could afford it.
Almost without exception, the old photographs of the Sámi have been taken by
outsiders: researchers, travellers and travelling photographers (see Jouste; and
Nyyssönen in this volume). Gradually photography became more affordable, and
by the 1980s, photography had become part of everyday life in Sápmi, and the
number of photographs of and by Sámi grew exponentially. Nevertheless, the range
of photographs in the Siida exhibition does not refect this change; rather, on the
contrary, only 11% of the photographs are dated after 1980. Also, the topics of
the newer photographs are different. Almost 80% of the older photographs depict
Sámi individuals, and less than a third (32%) of the photographs dated from 1980
to 1996 depict persons. Instead, the newer imagery emphasizes different structures,
landscapes and reindeer.
Ethnologist Nika Potinkara (2015, 77) has noted that the Siida exhibition text
examines the Sámi culture from an outsider’s perspective. This perspective is fur-
ther enhanced by the photographs chosen for the exhibition. The majority of
the photographs represent an outsider’s perspective on Sámi culture. Only two
photographs, both depicting reindeer, are by Sámi photographers. In addition, the
perspective of the photographs is very masculine: the vast majority of the photographs
are by male photographers. The exhibition featured only 11 photographs (5%) by
three female photographers, and none of them are Sámi.
The dominance of the white male perspective is a fact both in research and in
photography. In the Siida exhibition, the working group has not sought to correct
this distortion and lack of Sámi and female representation by selecting photographs
by Sámi and women when possible. Rather, the exhibition largely ignores Sámi
photographers and Sámi perspectives. One may ask whether the group of experts –
most of them Finnish men – recognized or paid any attention to this equality question
in the 1990s. In any case, through the distorted representation, the perspectives
of Sámi women are multiply marginalized due to their gender, their ethnicity and
the combination of these. (About Sámi women in multiple margins, see Hirvonen
1999, 32–35; see also Alakorva et al. and Knobblock in this volume.) The mar-
ginal possibilities for women, the Sámi and especially Sámi women to participate
in exhibition planning and execution have resulted in the Siida exhibition and its
Sámi representations being permeated by the perspective of the non-Sámi man while
downplaying other perspectives.

Dating
To interpret the photographic data, I have divided the photographs into fve
subgroups according to their dating.

27
 — Áile Aikio —

Table 1.2 The distribution of photographs in the Siida exhibition

according to dating. The emphasis is on the pre-war era: i.e. the
photographs depict mostly premodern Sámi culture.

Dating Pcs % of total

19th century 8 4%
1900–1939 71 35%
1940–1979 34 17%
1980–1996 22 11%
1996 27 13%
no dating 40 20%

The categorization shows an emphasis on photographs from the pre-war era: i.e.
representations of Sámi culture prior to the period of postwar modernization.
According to the designers of the exhibition, the Siida exhibition is anthropo-
logical and based on the theory of human ecology (Pennanen 2003a, 208–212).
However, my analysis shows how it also connects to other research traditions. The
majority of the photographs (150 pcs, 71%) are black-and-white ethnographic
photographs taken by non-Sámi researchers to document the Sámi people. The
strong focus on ethnographic photographs links the exhibition with Lappology and
its way of representing the Sámi.
Lappology is a multi-disciplinary body of research on Sámi language, culture and
society from the late 19th century to the 1950s. The linkage with the comparative
physical anthropology and nation-building processes of their time later stigmatized
Lappology, and the Sámi have criticized Lappology for colonial knowledge pro-
duction (Nyyssönen and Lehtola 2017; Lehtola 2017b; see also Nyyssönen in this
volume). In Finland, Lappology was strongly affected by Finno-Ugric research and
its idea of hierarchies between cultures. The cultures in the lower levels of the hier-
archy were understood as remains of an ancient Finno-Ugric cultural form; hence,
the study of them would reveal the features of the primeval Finno-Ugric mentality
and society (Lehtola 2017a, 85–88). Drawing from this, Lappologists directed their
documentation and collecting practices in the spirit of salvation ethnography to
what they thought to be the oldest and most authentic forms of Sámi culture. The
perspective of Lappology highlighted the otherness of the Sámi. What was different
from the majority culture was understood to be ‘more Sámi’ and ‘more authentic’
because these cultural traits were considered untouched by foreign infuence. The
ethnographic photographs of the Lappological research tradition thus cannot
be understood as refections of Sámi culture, but rather as representations of the
Lappological conception of ‘authentic Sáminess’ (about authentic Sáminess, see also
Mazzullo in this volume).
The prioritizing of ethnographic photographs overemphasized the Lappological
perspective and its distorted representations of Sáminess in the Siida exhibition.
Thus, the representations of Sáminess in the photographs are based on non-
Sámi understanding of Sáminess and pay little or no attention to actual Sámi

28
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

paradigms and epistemologies and Sámi ways of understanding, classifying or

categorizing Sáminess. One of the aims of the Siida exhibition is to become a
means of strengthening Sámi ethnicity (Pennanen 2003b, 214). By choosing ethno-
graphic photographs as the main photographic material, the designers ended up
confrming Sáminess as defned by non-Sámi and placed it as the foundation of
Sámi ethnicity.
Lappological research reached its peak in the 1930s and then diminished.
Correspondingly, the number of Sámi ethnographic photographs in collections
grows markedly smaller (Linkola 1970, 377; Puurunen 2002, 99). The range of
photographs in the Siida exhibition refects these changes in collecting practices. As
newer photographs of the Sámi in museum collections were scarce, fnding contem-
porary photographs required a different approach. One solution would have been
to utilize the collections of private Sámi individuals or Sámi media. This would have
reinforced the Sámi perspective in the exhibition and created a counterweight to the
earlier ethnographic representations of Sáminess. Instead, the vast majority of the
contemporary photographs in the exhibition were commissioned from a Finnish pro-
fessional photographer, Matti Silvennoinen. Although Silvennoinen’s photographs
account for only 13% of the total number of photographs exhibited, they represent
more than half the exhibition’s total of 48 colour photographs and thus dominate
the visual representations of contemporary Sáminess.
Silvennoinen’s photographs differ from the earlier ethnographic photographs
that aimed to document Sámi culture. In contrast, Silvennoinen photographs appear
to be illustrative; visuality seems to be more important than documentation. For
example, the photograph in panel VIII/2 depicts a Sámi man slaughtering a reindeer
wearing a gákti from the Ohcejohka/Utsjoki region (Figure 1.1). When the photo-
graph was taken in 1997, the Sámi men wore almost without exception Western
clothes in their everyday activities. As I know the person in the photograph, it
puzzled me; the gákti in the photograph is not the type he normally wears; he and
his family belong to a different, more decorated Enontekiö/Eanodat gákti trad-
ition (see Magga, S.-M. in this volume). According to him, he was asked to wear
a gákti the photographer had brought with him. My assumption is that his own
gákti would have looked too modern for the archaic atmosphere pursued by the
photograph. The staged quality of the photograph is further enhanced by the lávvu
tent placed in the background (about lávvu as a symbol of the Sámi, see Mazzullo
in this volume).
The venue of the photograph is the home yards of the man depicted. All contem-
porary elements, such as snowmobile tracks, cars and modern buildings, have been
carefully cropped out of the picture. For another photograph (Figure 1.2), taken at
the same time in the same place but from another direction, the man was asked to
drive all his vehicles to the front of the house. As a result, the difference in the atmos-
phere of the two photographs is striking. In Figure 1.1, the visual elements strongly
connected with the traditional Sámi culture such as gákti and lávvu obscure the tem-
poral origin of the photograph. These elements are again cropped out of Figure 1.2,
which enhances the break between traditional Sáminess and the contemporary Sámi
way of life. The impression is heightened by the caption: ‘Reindeer were formerly
skinned out in the open, on the bare ground,’ which further strengthens the impres-
sion that the photograph depicts the Sámi past.

29
 — Áile Aikio —

Figures 1.1 and 1.2 A Sámi man slaughtering a reindeer in the yard of a Sámi house. Both
photographs are taken from the same yard at the same time in 1997.
Source: Photographs by Matti Silvennoinen, the Photo Archives of Sámi Museum Siida.

Although historical re-enactments are common in museums, illustrative photographs

such as the ones shown here are different as their staged nature is not revealed
in captions. This is not consistent with the common understanding that museum
exhibitions should be based on facts. Visitors without inside information of the Sámi

30
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

worlds cannot know that the photographs are staged, which can create an impres-
sion of them being documentations of Sámi life.
The Siida exhibition focuses on the Sámi past and premodern Sámi culture. The
contemporary Sámi content is presented by a snowmobile diorama in the centre of
the exhibition furthest removed from the nature section as ‘a symbol of vanishing
of traditional culture and way of life’ (Pennanen 2003a, 211, caption to image
386; Pennanen 2003b, 215). This choice of layout leaves little room for contem-
porary photographs and, to some extent, explains the exhibition’s emphasis on old
photographs. Accordingly, the choice leaves the Sámi of the late 20th century and
their practices excluded from the visual storyline of the exhibition. For example,
the impact of Western fashion on Sámi clothing practices remains invisible.
Although the wearing of the Sámi clothing in everyday life diminished throughout
the 20th century, in the Siida exhibition, the Sámi are depicted wearing Western
clothes in only six photographs. The over-representation of photographs of the
Sámi wearing Sámi clothing conficts with existing realities. Instead of depicting
the reality of existing Sámi clothing practices, the exhibition designers chose to
use Sámi clothing as a visual means of distinguishing the Sámi from the majority
culture. Simultaneously – whether intentionally or unintentionally – this way of
representing the Sámi maintains the impression that the Sámi wear only Sámi
clothing or that the Sámi wearing Sámi clothing are ‘more authentic’ or ‘closer
to nature.’ (For more about Sámi clothing and how it has changed over time, see
Magga, S.-M. in this volume.)
Another consequence of the emphasis on old photographs is the absence of
contemporary Sámi children. With the exception of the two boys portrayed in
the Näkkäläjärvi family tree, there are no photographs of contemporary Sámi
children in the exhibition. The youngest person depicted was born in 1975: i.e.
was in his twenties when the exhibition opened. The exhibition features a series
of photographs of people wearing a gákti by Silvennoinen. All the persons in
these coloured gákti photographs are middle aged or older. The overall impres-
sion given is that there are no Sámi children or, at least, that Sámi clothing is only
worn by older generations.
The choice to represent Sáminess through a number of undated ethnographic
photographs turns the representation ahistorical and places the tense of the exhib-
ition in the ethnographic present. The ethnographic present always describes cultures
in the present tense, regardless of the time of collecting the data. In anthropology, the
ethnographic present describes how a culture or a society functions and ignores the
historical processes that have led to the moment, how the culture has evolved to its
current state (Eriksen 2004, 53–54; Eriksen 2000). In the Siida exhibition, the ethno-
graphic present and the lack of dating make it diffcult for visitors to estimate when
the photographs were taken. I think that the choice of tense is not unintentional,
but rather refects the understanding of Sáminess behind the exhibition, according
to which Sámi culture and its most essential features had emerged by the late 18th
century, and, since then, ‘in principle, this Sámi way of life survived until the 1960s’
(Pennanen 2003c, 32). Consequently, the message conveyed to the visitor is that
when presenting Sáminess, time is irrelevant: the Sámi culture is static and unchan-
ging. This choice leaves out historical perspectives and the presence of modern
Sámi worlds; Sáminess becomes synonymous with ‘unmodern,’ and contemporary

31
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Sámi and their culture appear to be deteriorated the former way of life. The only
change presented is the transition from traditional to contemporary, which promotes
the understanding of Sámi culture as ‘static’ and the Sámi as a people as ‘ahistorical.’
Such an approach prevents visitors from perceiving Sámi history as consisting of
periods and leaves them ignorant of the constantly changing nature of Sámi culture.

Location
On the list of images, in 147 photographs (73%), the location is marked or can be
inferred. The Sámi are one people divided by the borders of four nation-states, and
the Sámi Museum Siida ‘stores, researches and showcases Finland’s Sámi culture’
(Siida.f, 2020). However, the Siida exhibition also features photographs from areas
in today’s Norway (11 pcs, 6%) and Sweden (7 pcs, 3%). This is mentioned in the
captions of two photographs from the 1950s, while the others are presented without
location. The photographs from Sweden differ from the Norwegian material in their
number, topic and age. They are from the frst half of the 20th century and mostly
depict different structures and handicrafts. In contrast, eight of the Norwegian
photographs date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries: i.e. to a time before the
nation-states of Finland and Norway. These have clearly been chosen to present the
oldest Sámi clothing traditions, of which photographic material is quite limited.
Two more recent photographs depict the Sámi ethnopolitical movement, the Alta
controversy and the frst building of the Nordic Sámi institute,6 all of which can
be considered border-crossing pan-Sámi phenomena located in Norway. (For more
on the Alta controversy, see Nykänen in this volume.) The rest of the Norwegian
photographs depict landscapes or reindeer, which is harder to justify, given the
exhibition’s focus on Finland.
To gain a more thorough understanding of the regional representativeness of the
photographs, I divided the photographs from today’s and former Finnish territories
into subgroups according to municipality.

Table 1.3 The locations of photographs in the Siida

exhibition

Location pcs % of total

Soađegilli/Sodankylä 2 1%
Eanodat/Enontekiö 14 7%
Ohcejohka/Utsjoki 24 12%
Petchenga 41 20%
Anár/Inari 48 25%
Sweden 7 3%
Norway 13 6%
no locality information 53 25%

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 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

In the exhibition, the Sodankylä municipality has the poorest representation:

only two photographs (1%) of Sámi dwellings from the 1800s are included. The
Sámi settlement history in the Sodankylä area is particularly interesting as the
current Sámi population settled in the area as a consequence of the border closure
in 1852.7 These Sámi families were again relocated in the 1960s when Finland
built two large reservoirs, Lokka and Porttipahta, in the region, drowning reindeer
pastures, homes and villages. Although these forced relocations are a signifcant
part of the Sámi colonization history, they are omitted from the visual story of the
Siida exhibition.
The exhibition includes 14 photographs (7%) from the Enontekiö municipality.
All except one are black-and-white ethnographic photographs. The only colour
photograph is from 1996 and depicts a sacred sieidi stone. (For more about Sámi
sacred places, see Magga, P. in this volume.) The second-newest photograph, and
the most recent one depicting persons, is dated 1964. The decision to present both
the Enontekiö and Sodankylä Sámi exclusively through ethnographic black-and-
white photographs leaves the visitor perplexed about their current situation: Have
they and their culture ceased to exist? Then again, one may ask: Do the Sámi from
different regions represent themselves, their families or the Sámi of their region, or
are they merely included as examples of ‘generic Sáminess’ or different ‘levels of
Sáminess’ in hierarchies of cultural evolution?
There are clearly more photographs from the Utsjoki municipality (24 pcs, 12%),
and the area is presented more diversely. The photographs bring out a variety of
landscapes and livelihoods, among them reindeer herding, fshing, handicrafts and
agriculture. While the photographs from Enontekiö only introduce reindeer hus-
bandry in the mountain landscape, the Utsjoki photographs cover the munici-
pality region quite well, including the major river valleys, highlands and lowlands.
Nevertheless, the same lack of contemporary Sámi worlds burdens the representations
of both municipalities. Also, the majority of the Utsjoki photographs (19 pcs) are
black and white; only three are colour photographs, and only one of them depicts
persons.
The Sámi museum Siida is situated in the Inari municipality. The municipality
is dominated by Lake Inari and belongs to the traditional lands of the Inari Sámi.
(For more about Inari Sámi, see Pasanen in this volume.) In addition to the Inari
Sámi population, other Sámi groups have a long history in the area; the northern
and western highlands are traditional grazing lands for the nomadic reindeer Sámi,
and after the WWII, the Skolt Sámi from the ceded Pechenga area were relocated
to the area (about Skolt Sámi relocation see Jouste; and Magnani in this volume).
At the end of the 20th century, the Inari village became the administrative centre
for the Sámi in Finland, and the main buildings of central Sámi organs, such as the
Sámi Parliament, Sámi Radio and the Sámi Educational Centre, were situated there.
The related employment opportunities have attracted Sámi from other areas to the
village, which has brought about an increase in both the quantity and diversity of
the Sámi population.
Given all this, one would expect the Inari municipality to appear frequently in
the photographs. The number of photographs from Inari (48 pcs, 25%) is indeed
the largest compared to the other municipalities of today’s Sámi homeland area. The
photographs by Silvennoinen signifcantly contribute towards the total number of

33
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Inari photographs, and if they are excluded, the number of Inari photographs is as
low as 23 (11%). The topics depicted cover most of the smaller villages of the muni-
cipality, but there are no photographs from the Inari village or the administrative
centre Ivalo. For example, the development of the Inari village to its current status as
‘the Sámi capital in Finland’ is not part of the exhibition. Maybe the human ecology
theory, which concentrates on the dependence of culture on nature, ineluctably pays
insuffcient attention to the built environments of the Sámi. Likewise, Lake Inari,
which dominates the municipality’s landscape and is the heart of the Inari Sámi cul-
ture, is almost completely missing from the imagery. Also, the majority of the Inari
photographs are old, and the only more recent photograph featured is one from the
1980s depicting a sacred island.
The area best represented by photographs (36 pcs, 17%) is the former Finnish
municipality of Pechenga, an area ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945. Pechenga
is situated on the traditional lands of the Skolt Sámi, and all the photographs are
black-and-white ethnographic photographs of Skolt Sámi culture. There are no
recent photographs of the area. In addition to the Pechenga photographs, the Skolt
Sámi and their culture are depicted in the photographs from the Inari area. Skolt
Sámi photographs account for one fourth (50 pcs, 25%) of all photographs in the
exhibition. I suggest that the overrepresentation of Skolt Sámi photographs is a
consequence of the Lappological mindset informing the exhibition. In Lappology,
the Skolt Sámi were considered the most archaic of all Sámi groups, and they had
preserved ‘authentic’ Sámi practices that the other groups had lost because of for-
eign infuence and assimilation (see e.g. Hämäläinen 1938, 18; see also Nyyssönen in
this volume). In their quest for ‘the most archaic’ and ‘authentic’ forms of Sáminess,
Lappologists discarded the other Sámi groups as ‘too assimilated’ and turned their
gaze to the Skolt Sámi. For example, the Inari Sámi, a Sámi minority whose popula-
tion equals that of the Skolt Sámi, are barely present in the Lappological represen-
tation of Sáminess. This under-representation of the Inari Sámi is refected in the
ethnographic photographs of the Siida exhibition: only 15 photographs (7%) have
Inari Sámi content.
The exclusion of the Inari Sámi as a group was not intentional. The central idea
of the exhibition is interaction of nature, people and culture as the foundation of
common ethnicity for all Sámi groups (Pennanen 2003b, 215). Hence, the presen-
tation of different Sámi groups is not necessary as the exhibition does not aim to
present Sámi diversity but to introduce general Sáminess from the perspective of
human ecology. The Skolt Sámi photographs are not included in the exhibition to
depict Skolt Sámi culture, but to represent ‘authentic’ or ‘archaic’ Sáminess. As the
Inari Sámi had no such role to the big picture of Sáminess, they have been left out
as a group.

CONCLUSION: A VIEW INTO VANISHING

SÁMI CULTURE?
In this chapter, I have scrutinized the photographs in the Sámi culture section of
the Siida exhibition and the representations of the Sámi assembled by them. The
exhibition emphasizes black-and-white ethnographic photographs from the frst
half of the 20th century, and the number of more recent photographs from the

34
 — A window into vanishing Sámi culture? —

1970s and 1980s is small. Also, their topics are different; the older photographs
show Sámi performing different activities, whereas the new ones depict landscapes
and structures. The photographs in the exhibition can be divided in two groups,
according to their nature and aim. The ethnographic photographs in the frst group
sought to document ‘authentic’ Sámi culture. In contrast, the second group, the
colour photographs commissioned particularly for the exhibition, did not aim to
document contemporary Sámi life but rather to illustrate the story of Sáminess
written by the designers of the exhibition.
The exhibition is built on the anthropological theory of human ecology.
Nevertheless, my study shows that the photographs the designers chose for the
exhibition inevitably anchored it to Lappology and its understanding of Sáminess.
The Lappological understanding of Sáminess is also clearly visible in the exhibition’s
focus on the Sámi past at the expense of the contemporary Sámi and their life. In
the Lappological vein, the exhibition seeks to present Sáminess as ‘authentically’
as possible by tracing its archaic features from different parts of Sápmi. This quest
also explains the over-representation of the Skolt Sámi in the exhibition. In the
exhibition, these photographs are not visual storytelling about the Skolt Sámi,
but rather, they are presentations of ‘authentic’ and ‘archaic’ Sáminess. The visual
storyline of the exhibition is based on old photographs, presented undated, as if
time would be insignifcant when exhibiting Sámi culture. Similar to Lappological
understanding, Sámi culture is presented in the exhibition as static and unchan-
ging, or change is seen as stemming from assimilation into majority cultures.
This understanding of Sáminess is further enhanced by the long duration of the
exhibition. If ‘authentic’ Sámi culture is understood to exist only in the past and
not in the present, it can be represented for decades in an unchanging exhibition.
Over time, representations provided by exhibitions are perpetuated and become
hegemonic – even more ‘authentic’ than the realities the Sámi themselves assemble
through their practices. The Sámi realities assembled by a museum exhibition
can come to defne ‘authentic’ Sáminess, what Sámi culture is and, eventually,
who is Sámi.
Throughout the process I tried to remain aware of the circumstances in which
the exhibition was planned and constructed. It is unreasonable to expect that an
exhibition planned in the early 1990s would still be current 20 years later. From
the perspective of the 2020s, the anthropological theory, the composition of the
board of experts and their choices for photographs and the Sámi representations
they assemble are as outdated as the analogical solutions of the exhibition technique
in today’s digital world. During the life of the exhibition, the status and social situ-
ation of the Sámi have changed, and the possibilities for the Sámi to produce a more
Sámi-based exhibition have improved considerably. Simultaneously, Sámi studies as
part of Indigenous studies and postcolonial theory have changed the understanding
not only of Sáminess but also of expertise and ways of producing knowledge (see
Drugge in this volume). The planning process and end result of the forthcoming
second Siida exhibition, which is to open in June 2021, differ from the frst in many
respects. In the upcoming exhibition Sámi women have the leading role, and Sámi
communities are engaged in the process in many ways.
When the Siida exhibition opened in 1998, it was praised for its creative
approach and design; the exhibition presented Sámi culture and northern nature in

35
 — Áile Aikio —

an unprecedented way. Throughout its life cycle, the exhibition has received highly
positive feedback and the exhibition has been meaningful and important for the
Sámi, too. The long lifespan of the exhibition can be interpreted as evidence of
success: the Siida exhibition succeeded because it attracted visitors for over two
decades. The Siida exhibition was the frst attempt in Finland to create an exhibition
for a Sámi museum, and it had to take the Sámi into account in many new ways. To
fulfl this challenge, the Siida exhibition was to examine ‘the cultural environment
through the eyes of the sustainers of the culture – the Sámi’ (Pennanen 2003a, 208).
At least in terms of the photographs, this was not achieved: The photographs quint-
essentially depict the Sámi and their lands as seen through the camera lens of Finnish
men. The photographic assortment chosen for the exhibition ignores the Sámi gaze
on themselves. It is, thus, the non-Sámi gaze that defnes the Sámi – to the exclusion
of Sámi perspectives.

NOTES
1 I wish to thank the Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation for funding this study.
2 Metsähallitus (Meahciráđđehus), the Forest Administration, is a Finnish state-owned enter-
prise that uses and manages the state-owned land and water areas in Finland, among others:
90% of the Sámi homeland area.
3 The list of the members of the board is slightly different in different sources. According
to the Siiddastallan book, members were Pennanen, Aikio, Linkola, Näkkäläjärvi, Mela,
Pallasmaa, Wirkkala, Hiltula ja Jomppanen (Pennanen and Näkkäläjärvi 2003, 9), and
according to a table in the exhibition, members were Pennanen, Jomppanen, Aikio, Hiltula,
Kukko, Linkola, Mela, Näkkäläjärvi, Pallasmaa and Wirkkala.
4 As the curator for collections, I was part of the working group for the renewal of the duodji
glass cabinet in 2010.
5 The manuscript for the Sámi culture section was one of the objectives of the project
Culturally and Socially Sustainable Museum: Reframing the Policies of Representing
Indigenous Sámi Culture in the Sámi Museum Siida, funded by the Academy of Finland.
6 (Nordic) Sámi Institute (founded in 1973) is a Sámi-governed research institution located
at Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino), Norway, the mission of which is to strengthen and
develop Sami language, culture and social life seen in a pan-Sami perspective through
research.
7 The border of current Norway and Finland was frst defned in 1751 in a treaty between
Sweden and Denmark, and the Sámi were granted the right to cross the border freely
with their reindeer. In 1852, the border was closed, which blocked the natural migration
of the reindeer and caused wide-ranging problems for Sámi reindeer husbandry. The
consequences of the border closure still affect Sámi reindeer herding and the Sámi cul-
ture in many ways.

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38
 CHAPTER TWO

GÁKTI ON THE PULSE OF TIME

The double perspective of the traditional
Sámi dress1


Sigga-Marja Magga

This is how áhkku (grandmother) used to wear the scarf but you can wear it that
way, too.

Generations, kinship, change, continuity. All these are included in this brief comment
made by my mother when I, as a young girl, was learning to attach the silk scarf
to my gákti.2 I remember standing in front of the mirror trying to drape the scarf
beautifully. As far as I can remember, my mother was standing by my side, looking
at my dressing efforts, until she decided to show me how her mother used to wear
the scarf. She avoided showing how she would have done it herself, thinking instead
that I would be more receptive to my grandmother’s way of arranging the scarf. The
way I did it changed the way of wearing the scarf slightly, but the change was not
too great and, therefore, acceptable to my mother.

***

INTRODUCTION
The traditional Sámi dress, in North Sámi referred to as gákti, as an entity com-
prises the garment itself, a belt, a headdress, shoes, shoelaces and – depending on
the region where gákti is used – a detachable scarf or a collar and various kinds of
jewellery and ornaments, as well as bags. Gákti is seen as a fascinating and colour-
ful part of Sámi culture, one of the most central symbols of the Sámi identity, and it
is no wonder, because gákti forms not only the basis of the traditional Sámi way of
dressing but also that of community and societal life. Gákti was originally a practical
garment, the basis of which was made of reindeer skin and fur. The purpose of these
materials was to provide protection against elements such as cold, moisture and
northern insects. Later on, gákti developed into a garment worn mainly on festive
occasions, although it has not lost its signifcance as an everyday garment.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-4 39
 — Sigga-Marja Magga —

Gákti is duodji, handicraft, which enjoys a particular position at the core of the
Sámi world. This core includes the conception of traditional Sámi knowledge passed
on from generation to generation, which Jelena Porsanger and Gunvor Guttorm
summarize as follows:

Árbediehtu (traditional Sámi knowledge) is the collective wisdom and skills of

the Sami people used to enhance their livelihood for centuries. It has been passed
down from generation to generation both orally and through work and practi-
cal experience. Through this continuity, the concept of árbediehtu ties the past,
present and future together.
(Porsanger and Guttorm 2011, 18)

Continuity is a central characteristic of the traditional knowledge pertaining to both

duodji and gákti. This also applies to the gradual change of the Enontekiö gákti
towards forms that were more heavily decorated and adorned than the previous
gáktis that had been worn every day. The transformation of Enontekiö gákti – and
other gáktis, too – takes place constantly with different intensity and in different
ways everywhere the gákti is worn. Therefore, the history, present and future of the
gákti exist simultaneously.
Gákti is a way to communicate nonverbally with others. This way of com-
municating was particularly important at the time when the Sámi had no writ-
ten communication (Guttorm 2006, 224). Gákti tells, for example, what part in
Sápmi the person wearing it comes from, it is a sign of a person’s gender and age
group, and sometimes it also indicates whether a person is married or unmar-
ried. The messages of gákti are conveyed through the accessories, jewellery or
decorations attached to the garment, and sometimes messages have been hidden
in the seams of gákti. The messages can indeed be so subtle that they may remain
invisible to the untrained eye. The dress as a whole is often referred to with
the metaphor of language because, much in the same way a language must be
learned, gákti must be learned, too, in order to understand its messages (Harlin
and Pieski 2020, 67).
While gákti expresses things that are important to the Sámi community, it simul-
taneously contributes to producing different social relations. For example, gender
roles are sometimes built into the traditional ways of dressing. For example, a wom-
an’s ability to clothe her family have been highly valued. As Rauni Magga Lukkari
(1993, 76) says, a woman has her ‘solo exhibition’ when the family attends a festive
occasion dressed in their best clothing. By this she means that, through the gáktis of
her family, a woman can showcase not only her technical and aesthetic prowess but
also her social skills and status in Sámi society.
Some practices related to making and wearing gákti are very old, and they may
relate, for example, to the Sámi worldview refected in the symbolism of the decora-
tions in different parts of the dress. Gákti and the act of wearing it may also refect
something of the overall values, events or processes of Sámi society. Interaction with
other peoples and groups that took place a couple of hundred years ago may still
be visible in the cut or decorations of gáktis. Some gáktis or parts of gáktis have
disappeared as assimilation has weakened Sámi gákti traditions. Some of these have
been readopted along with the revitalization of the Sámi languages. Over the past

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two decades, the traditional dress has become a signifcant means of Sámi cultural
emancipation and political resistance (Gustafsson 2019, 110).
In this chapter, I examine some practices of the Sámi dress through the histories
and family narratives related to my own gákti. I have learned the knowledge related
to my own gákti gradually over time, through conversations with my relatives and
when sewing gáktis with my mother and sisters. My understanding of gákti has also
been structured in the broader context of the Western educational system and way
of life and the attitudes displayed by the mainstream population towards the Sámi.
In this chapter, I combine my family narratives and my own experiences of gákti to
the larger Sámi social context and ask how social changes and histories of the Sámi
can be communicated through gákti.
In my analysis, I apply the concept of double perspective introduced by Wilson et al.
(2020). With this concept, they refer to Indigenous People’s everyday existence and way
of acting in a world which has a double character, embodying features of themselves as
an Indigenous People and the dominant mainstream culture within which they live. The
double perspective refers not only to Indigenous Peoples’ dual experiences of one reality
but also to the coexistence of two overlapping realities (Wilson et al. 2020, 139). In my
analysis, this refers to the worlds of gákti in the context of Sámi society and mainstream
society. As discussed in the introduction of this volume, the phenomenon of guovtti ilmmi
gaskkas, living between and through two worlds, is experienced in and with gákti. The
Sámis’ own worldviews and social norms and the majority’s, with its political and eco-
nomic impacts, are all interwoven in gákti. My aim is to show with some examples how
this intricate system of Sámi society attends in gákti.
My gákti history started to form in my early childhood because wearing gákti
has always played a role in my family. Some members of my mother’s family wore
gákti on a daily basis until the 1990s, and there have also been times when gákti was
worn less frequently, but the act of wearing gákti has continued uninterrupted. In my
youth back in the 1980s, gákti was generally worn relatively rarely because Sáminess
as a phenomenon was rather invisible in the Finnish society of that time. In my own
reindeer-herding Sámi community, gákti was, however, being worn to all kinds of
events that called for a festive dress code. I sewed my frst gákti when I was 20 years
old, after which I made gáktis for my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, my children and
many of my Sámi friends. My sisters have done the same and, of course, my mother,
from whom we learned the skill of gákti making. Her personal history as a member
of a semi-nomadic reindeer-herding Sámi family has been a central factor in the for-
mation of my own relationship to gákti.
My mother was born in the 1930s in Käsivarsi in Finland – an area which today
forms the western part of the Municipality of Enontekiö – and lived in a goahti, the
Sámi tent, for the frst seven years of her life. When she began attending residential
school, she was living in her childhood home goahti part of the year until she was
about 15 years old. My mother’s experiences of the everyday life of Sámi women in
the semi-nomadic families of the Käsivarsi area have infuenced my knowledge of
gákti and the values I associate with gákti in general. One of the key values – and
one informing my research on gákti – is knowledge of one’s own family history. I
consider it essential to understand the conditions in which my family lived through
times under the infuence of Finland, Norway and Sweden and in the presence of,
and in interaction with, Sámi of three nation-states.

41
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CHOOSING A GÁKTI: WHERE DO I BELONG?

The Sámi have different ways to categorize the gákti types: for example, according
to the regions where the Sámi families live or according to the Sámi language groups.
The number of different gákti types varies between 20 and 30, depending on defni-
tions. Gáktis differ from each other by name, cuts, decorations and accessories like
headdresses and shoelaces. I wear the Enontekiö gákti3 through my mother’s side of
the family. The garment is characterized by an extensive use of colourful ribbons at
the hem and sleeve ends, and in the men’s garment, the back is decorated, and the
collar is high. Accessories belonging to the gákti are a headdress, a scarf tied with
brooches (solju), a belt, and footwear worn with shoelaces (Näkkäläjärvi 2010, 73).
In Figure 2.1, I am wearing a gákti made of dark broadcloth, a woven wool
cloth, because the occasion on which the picture was taken was particularly festive.
However, a gákti can be of nearly any colour. In fgure 2.2 my son wears his light col-
oured Enontekiö gákti. Both pictures were taken in 2018, which means that the gák-
tis represent the taste that I had at that time. After a couple of years, the style would
be a bit different because my style and the style of gáktis over will change a bit. In
my dress, only the red hem is pleated, but many other wearers of the Enontekiö
gákti prefer to have the entire skirt of the dress pleated. Pleating became fashionable
around the 1950s in Kautokeino in Norway, from which the fashion spread across
Sápmi. Personally, I have never pleated the whole gákti hemline but have preferred
the garment to be sleek. That, too, is a matter of taste.
The Enontekiö gákti belongs to the same dress tradition as the Kautokeino gákti
of Northern Norway and, in part, also the Karesuando gákti of Sweden. This is due to
the fact that the shared history of these areas dates back centuries through the church
and the state administration systems, as well as the nomadic routes of the siidas in
the areas. Towards the onset of summer, the nomadic migrations were east-west and
northwest bound, with the coastal islands and peninsulas of Northern Norway as a
destination, and when winter was coming, the herders travelled along the routes that
led inland to the upland areas and forests of Karesuando, Enontekiö and Kautokeino.
Given the relative proximity of the migration routes to each other, the siidas were
in constant interaction with each other, and the members of many siidas were often
related to each other (Jannok Porsbo 1988, 9; Korpijaakko 1989, 138–140). The
closing of the borders between Russia and Norway in 1852 and between Russia
and Sweden in 1889 brought the annual movement of the reindeer-herding Sámi to
a halt. Many families moved to new areas in search of new pastures. In the 1890s,
my father’s family, like many others, moved to the areas that today are located in Vuotso
and Sodankylä regions. In the aftermath of the latter border closings, my mother’s family
stayed in Käsivarsi, in Enontekiö region (Lehtola 2015; Magga-Miettunen 2002).
According to duojár (craftsperson) Anne-Maria Näkkäläjärvi, the gáktis of Enontekiö
and Kautokeino derive from the same garment pattern and have developed their
distinctive characteristics over time (Näkkäläjärvi 2010, 73). Today’s established
practice of referring to gáktis according to the area of their provenance refects the
history of the Sámi families and the fact that the postwar institutionalization process
of Sámi society was refected in the gákti-naming practice (see Lehtola in this vol-
ume). The practice of naming gáktis by the Sámi regions – for example, Enontekiö
gákti, Vuotso gákti and so on – was established as one indicating provenance in
terms of place, which highlights local identity. It is similar to the mainstream society
42
 — Gákti on the pulse of time —

Figure 2.1 Enontekiö gákti in dark blue fabric in 2018.

Source: Mika Salo.

Figure 2.2 Enontekiö man’s gákti in light blue fabric in 2018.

Source: Mika Salo.

43
 — Sigga-Marja Magga —

naming practice used in the context of folk costumes in Finland and Sweden and
bunad costume in Norway. They refer also to regional costumes which have been
named after the geographic area they are associated with (Eriksen 2018). However,
Sámi society is strongly based on kinship networks and home areas of different fami-
lies. This kinship knowledge assumes a concrete form in the details of gákti, such as
the hemline decoration bands, and they are part of the Sámi code of communication
used to convey kinship information (Tervaniemi and Magga 2019, 84).
Considering this, the region-bound gákti-naming practice, which is also contextu-
alized within the borders of a particular nation-state, does not cover the entire kinship
history of the garment wearer. The kinship-driven nature of the Sámi society – and,
with it, the logic by which kinship information is communicated – do not align with
state borders. The Enontekiö gákti worn by my family does indicate that our fam-
ily originates from Enontekiö, but looking a few generations back, the borders of
Enontekiö municipality and the nation-states surrounding it become blurred and are
replaced by the siidas of Sámi families and their old nomadic routes.
Thus, the view presented by Näkkäläjärvi that the Enontekiö gákti and the
Kautokeino one are ‘the same’ holds true. But the difference between these gáktis is the
result of both the national borders and the family histories. In my family, my moth-
er’s mother, áhkku, was born in a family that lived in Kautokeino, but she moved to
Enontekiö after getting married in the 1930s and lived there for the rest of her life. The
impact of Koutokeino gradually abated in her life, and the decorations of the gáktis of
her children and husband didn’t follow the changes in gákti tradition in the Kautokeino
area. In addition, my grandmother’s husband, my áddjá, has kinship ties to Karesuando
in Sweden. This also had important impacts on changes in our family gákti tradition,
which can be seen in some details, like the colouring of the ribbon decorations.
Often, a person receives his or her frst gákti as a child, but it is almost equally
common to receive the frst one, for example, for a confrmation ceremony at the
age of 15 or upon high school graduation at the age of 18 or 19. There are various
practical reasons for this. Children grow fast, and not everyone has the means – or
the need – to make or purchase a new gákti throughout the growth stages of a child.
Children often wear gákti and gákti accessories of their older siblings or cousins, but
when an individual’s height is no longer increasing considerably, a new gákti with all
its components is made or made to order (Somby 2011, 15.)
There are also those who acquire their frst gákti later in their adult lives. Such
cases may involve persons whose family lost their gákti and language as a result of
assimilation, and the decision to adopt the family’s gákti again is a conscious effort
towards its revitalization. The process can be long and hard in that it requires psy-
chological work on the family history and one’s own role in it. However, adopting
the family’s gákti at the end of such a process can be a particularly empowering, or
integrative experience because the signifcance of gákti as an indicator of member-
ship of a particular Sámi family is considerable (Finbog 2020, 131).
Sometimes a gákti wearer may change from one gákti pattern to another or may
begin wearing the gákti of a different area. Even if an individual has been wearing a
particular kind of gákti from childhood on, it does not necessarily mean that he or
she will continue to wear it later in life. For many, marriage can mark the point at
which one may adopt a different gákti. If the parties to the marriage come from dif-
ferent areas, they may adopt the gákti of the spouse alongside their own. Sometimes

44
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it may be decided separately which gákti the spouse will wear in the future. The
reasons behind such a decision can be practical: The husband may adopt the kind
of gákti the wife – or the wife’s family – is making. Occasionally, the husband may
make the decision to return to the gákti he used to wear in his childhood. Thus, the
kind of gákti a person is wearing depends not only on the process of regional sociali-
zation but also on an individual’s family lineage and personal choices. Thus, it is not
uncommon to wear gáktis of two – or even three – different areas (Aikio, Á. 2018;
Guttorm 2006; Magga 2018).
Gákti has been exploited by the tourism industry for a long time, and this injured
the gákti in many disrespectful ways. (See Mazzullo in this volume.) This is the rea-
son the general rule among the Sámi is that only Sámi are entitled to wear gákti.
However, there are many examples of instances when the Sámi have made gáktis for
the non-Sámi people of the mainstream society. Sámi and their families can agree that
a non-Sámi spouse may begin wearing gákti. In such cases, the family may either give
a gákti as a present or teach the spouse to make one. Many priests and offcials who
used to work among the Sámi often – for practical reasons – wore the local gáktis the
Sámi had given them as presents or ones they had bought from the Sámi. For example,
the former presidents of Finland, Svinhufvud and Kekkonen, received gáktis as gifts
when they were visiting the local Sámis in Northern Finland (Aikio, I.-M. 2020, 194;
Itkonen 1970, 362). Also, some members of the royal families of Sweden and Norway
received gákti gifts not so long ago. The gákti gifts to those in power not only are a ges-
ture of gratitude to honour the work they have done in the interest of the Sámi but also
function as reminder to decision makers that they should consider the Sámi perspec-
tive. It also strengthens the verdde relationship between the Sámi and their non-Sámi
friends (Aikio, I.-M. 2020, 194; see also Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik in this volume).

TWO WORLDS OF GÁKTI

According to my mother, in her home siida, gákti was an everyday garment well into
the 1960s, and when I think back to my youth, I remember that people used to put on
their gáktis whenever they went outside the home. In a wider sense, the most signifcant
transformation in the Sámi way of dressing took place at the latest when the Sámi began
dwelling in houses, and there no longer was the need to wear the traditional warm
clothes made of fur and wool. Many everyday chores that were previously done outside
were now done indoors, although the early houses were often rather lightly built and
cold. According to Päivi Magga (2004), houses with central heating, which were being
built from the 1970s on, were too warm even for sewing fur garments because the high
room temperature and low indoor air humidity damaged the reindeer skins.
The Sámi also adopted the snowmobile as a tool for performing reindeer-herding
duties back in the 1960s. (About the snowmobile revolution in reindeer herding, see
Pelto 1973; Valkonen and Ruuska 2019.) This had an impact on the clothing choices
of reindeer-herding men, who still wore Sámi clothes in everyday life. In other liveli-
hoods, such as fshing and agriculture, not to mention modern occupations, Western
clothes, which were easier to maintain, had already replaced gáktis in the postwar era.
The traditional fur boots made of skin from a reindeer leg for the purpose of work in
winter wore out quickly through contact with the footrests of the snowmobile. The
footwear and mittens of the same material could also get burned through contact

45
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with the hot engine surface; thus, reindeer herders transitioned to wearing more prac-
tical thermal boots and mittens. Today, Sámi reindeer herders’ way of dressing is
often a combination of traditional and contemporary elements of clothing: While
they wear modern thermal overalls and protective jackets, they also continue to wear
mittens and shoes made of fur taken from the legs of reindeer, as well as hats made of
different kinds of furs. In addition, the aforementioned traditional footwear is often
designed in such a way that it fts inside modern thermal boots. Many hold the view
that accessories made of natural materials are superior in terms of their heat and
moisture insulation properties, and they continue to be preferred over other options.
The greater diversity of materials available for gáktis, together with the introduc-
tion of the sewing machine in the late 19th century, accelerated the process whereby
gákti, especially Enontekiö gákti, began to assume its present decorated forms
(Hermansson Hetta 1999, 79). The sewing machine and, later, the development of
electric sewing machines made the gákti-making process considerably faster, and the
diversity of fabrics and decorative ribbons available for purchase from shops and
merchants paved the way for the decoration styles of present-day gáktis character-
ized by an extensive use of decorative ribbons. The sewing machine made women’s
lives considerably easier, providing them with a greater opportunity to develop the
traditional gákti decoration practice of their family as well as their area at large.
Change took place one gákti – and one gákti maker – at a time. That is why it is
not possible, and perhaps not even necessary, for a contemporary observer to tell
at which point exactly the decoration practice associated with the Enontekiö gákti
began and why it assumed exactly the form it did. From the perspective of continuity
of tradition, it is essential that the change is embraced by the community, frst by the
immediate family and, later, within the larger Sámi community.
However, the changes in making and wearing gáktis also refect processes that
have been independent of, and beyond the infuence of, the Sámi – often ones that
have undermined the position of the Sámi: The colonial practises by the nation-
states surrounding the Sámi, including ones affecting transborder movement; the
transformation of the European conception of the human being towards one based
on categorization of people into races; the Norwegianization policy implemented by
the state of Norway towards the Sámi; the industrialization of the Kola Peninsula
in the early 20th century; and the forced relocation of the Kola Sámi from their tra-
ditional areas to cities in the 1960s. (About forced relocations of the Kola Sámi, see
Allemann in this volume.) They all have had wide-reaching implications for the Sámi
way of life and, thus, the practices around and about the gákti.
During the postwar period from the Second World War to the 1970s, the Sámi
living in Finland also struggled with an identity crisis and questions of cultural self-
esteem. After the Lapland War, the Sámi, who had been evacuated, returned to a
Lapland that had been burned by the Germans (Lehtola 2019). Massive quantities
of tangible Sámi heritage were burned to ashes, and the postwar scarcity of materials
did not make things easier. Gáktis were soon replaced by the frieze trousers, fannel
shirts, skirts and blouses worn by the mainstream population, and at the same time,
many objects and tools that were traditionally made by hand were replaced by ones
made of enamel, plastic and other new materials. The time in residential schools –
the period from the 1940s to the 1970s – alienated many Sámi children from their
homes for years, and the short Christmas and summer breaks were not enough for

46
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maintaining duodji skills (Rinno 1987; Magga 2018; see also Hansen; and Andersen
in this volume). The general societal climate did not support wearing traditional
Sámi clothing, and for many Sámi, the gákti began to signify old-fashioned views –
regression even – and the young Sámi wanted to be part of the development of the
modern world to which gákti no longer seemed to belong. Many of them moved to
cities to study or to work, and life there seemed to be easier with no visible signs of
Sáminess, such as the Sámi language or gákti (Jernsletten 2020).
Gákti and the ways of dressing in my mother’s home area also underwent a gradual
transformation. According to my mother, young girls who used to sew their own gák-
tis invented new ways of decorating the garments, following particular gákti trends
among the Sámi. They would, for example, make a garment using the Enontekiö
gákti pattern but with hemline decorations resembling those of the women’s gákti
of Karesuando in Sweden. The girls also started to wear gáktis made of cotton when
they went ‘to town,’ which was frowned upon by the elders of the siida because the
gáktis made of foral-patterned cotton fabric had originally been an underskirt or a
dress to be worn at home and, as such, inappropriate to be worn outside the home.
Today, gáktis made of cotton with a foral pattern are commonly worn, and this gákti
type has its own fashion styles and periods during the recent history.
The history of society in which gákti is embedded refects the presence of two par-
allel and simultaneous worlds – the Sámi world and the world of the mainstream
society – in an interesting way. According to Wilson et al., given the simultaneous pres-
ence of two worlds, Indigenous Peoples have at their disposal a particularly wide rep-
ertoire for communicating the realities emerging from these worlds (Wilson et al. 2020,
139). One of the repertoires used by Indigenous Peoples is double communication,
whereby the system of codes that Indigenous People use to perceive reality communi-
cate towards the Indigenous community itself and towards the surrounding world at
large. Double communication is also exemplifed by the aforementioned gákti-wearing
practices of the young girls of Enontekiö, who wore the summer gáktis made of foral-
patterned cotton. By engaging in this act, the girls communicated using the traditional
gákti code developed within the Sámi community while commenting on the changes
taking place in the mainstream society. The young girls’ repertoire for double commu-
nication with and between the two worlds is embodied by the gákti made of cotton.
Dankertsen (in this volume) brings forth in contemporary context how the visual signs
of Sáminess have become important for the urban Sámi youth. They wear parts of
gákti or Sámi design, and, as a means of double communication, they send messages
to the other Sámi that ‘I’m Sámi, too,’ but at the same time, they enjoy the visual part
of Sámi design. (About Sámi design, see Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik in this volume.)

GÁKTI ON THE PULSE OF TIME

The late 1960s saw the onset of Sámi cultural revitalization in politics, art, music –
and gákti. In particular, the signifcance of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää (1943–2001) is cen-
tral to this development. Valkeapää was a Sámi artist and an activist who represented
the notion of Sámi youth, which took on novel meanings throughout the Western
world, in particular through popular culture (Lehtola 2015; Valtonen et al. 2017).
My mother reminisces about the times when Valkeapää, who belonged to same gen-
eration as she and lived in the same area, used to invite young people of his age

47
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to perform joik at various events. Usually, he was wearing his Enontekiö gákti and
encouraged young people to wear theirs. It was precisely that period of time from the
late 1960s and the early 1970s that can be considered signifcant to the gákti tradi-
tion because at that time, particular attention was paid to gákti – and duodji more
generally (Magga 2018, 53; Guttorm 2006, 213).
A few decades earlier, the traditional society, driven by Sámi knowledge related
to nature, reindeer herding and fshing, had begun dividing into different cultural
categories. The ethnopolitical movement started to reassemble, as it were, Sámi cul-
ture, which had become dispersed as a result of the assimilation process, and now
the objective was to make efforts towards achieving Sámi self-determination and
equality. (See also Lehtola in this volume.) Against this backdrop, gákti, too, was
seen with new eyes, and it was elevated to the status of a symbol of Sáminess  –
comparable to the reindeer, the Sámi language and the Sámi fag (see Alakorva in this
volume). At the same time, the view of the regional differences and characteristics of
local gákti forms began to take shape in a way comparable to the national costumes
of Finland and Sweden and the Norwegian bunad. These other costumes were con-
nected to gákti in that there was a lively discussion in the Sámi world regarding vari-
ous questions surrounding gákti, such as to whom gákti belongs and what makes a
gákti authentic. The purpose of these discussions was to encourage the Sámi to wear
gákti again and, in particular, to wear it in the right way as part of their emerging
and shared Sámi reality (Eriksen 2018; Magga 2012; Tervaniemi and Magga 2019).
In his pamphlet,4 Nils-Aslak Valkeapää wrote:

Those who speak of preserving a culture are airing their views without realizing
that their prattle is absurd. Everything I do, I do with my premisses. . . . My peo-
ple can evaluate everything I do; if they accept it, that’s fne. If not, I’m a spiritual
refugee from a country which doesn’t exist. . . . So, when I am wearing trousers
in the colour turquoise with my gákti, it is an act of protest: Now that my people
have seen it ft to wear synthetic fbres, it is none of my business, for my busi-
ness is . . . to live in this world and keep my fnger on the pulse of time. . . . It
also seems dubious when the Sámis become aware of their culture only after the
preservation experts have become interested in homecrafts. . . . Once rules and
regulations start coming in, the decline will soon be underway too. The sign of
a living culture is precisely fux and constant change.
(Valkeapää 1971, 62–63; 1983, 57)

Valkeapää summarizes two central features that continue to characterize gákti today:
the role of gákti as a social practice of the Sámi and gákti as an entity undergoing
a constant transformation. The social practice refers to those aspects of clothing –
particularly innovations – that the immediate community either accepts or rejects. In
the late 1960s and the early 1970s, wearing pants in turquoise together with a gákti
was, in principle, entirely acceptable, especially in areas where gákti was being worn
every day, because men wore the pants they happened to have available at any given
time. However, as Valkeapää himself put it, turquoise pants could be worn with a
gákti in protest, too, as was obviously the case in the context of the 1970s. In order
to establish the status of gákti in Sámi society, a new set of norms was associated
with it (Magga 2018, 28–29).

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Among other things, a Sámi duodji association was founded in Finland, and its
purpose was to control the authenticity of duodji and guide the Sámi towards tra-
ditional duodji. The efforts to bring Sámi people back to the forgotten duodji tra-
dition required common guidelines establishing what counts as duodji (Lehtola, J.
2006; Magga 2018; see also Mazzullo in this volume). In addition to the distinctive
properties of the gáktis of different areas, certain colours that departed from tra-
dition were not accepted as belonging to the authentic duodji tradition. Turquoise
was one of these colours – and this was undoubtedly known by Valkeapää.
There has always been some friction at the interface of the dress that is being
institutionalized and the dress that is undergoing a constant transformation because
persistence and predictability are the prerequisite and purpose of institutionaliza-
tion. However, human social practices are never stable, or fnished, and the commu-
nicative nature of gáktis in particular has always provided the Sámi with the means
of communicating both change and persistence. Because the Sámi have never lived in
isolation from the rest of the world, Western fashion reached the Sámi, in particular
the young Sámi women who were making gáktis, relatively early. Looking at old
photographs from the early 20th century, we can see that, for example, the sleeves
of the women’s gapta of the Southern Sámi of Norway can be large puffed sleeves,
comparable to those of Swedish women’s dresses of that time. Also, the American
bell-dress style from the 1950s found its way to the gáktis of young Sámi girls, to say
nothing of the miniskirt fashion of the 1960s, which was refected in gáktis in the
form of above-the-knee hemlines. The economic boom of the 1980s was refected in
the Enontekiö gákti in particular. The hemline decorations became wider, and so did
the decorations on the back of the men’s gákti.
When I made my frst gákti at the beginning of the 1990s, the hemline trend of
the women’s gákti was almost ankle-length. Gákti of that time also had a wide cut,
which, from the perspective of today’s trends, would be somewhat out of place on
a small woman. The silk scarf worn with the Enontekiö gákti, as well as the other
women’s gáktis in Finland, is decorated and lined with long fringes. The fringes
are tied to each other with a knot, and the knot rows form a pattern resembling a
fshnet. In the early 1990s, the knot rows were high, up to one span, and the knot
maker’s prowess was measured by the evenness of the work done. In the 2010s, the
knot-making trend changed, after which only a few rows of knots were preferred.
While this change may sound small, it made a difference in the Sámi woman’s life
because fringing the scarf was no longer particularly time consuming.
This reference to the scarf-making technique that ‘made a difference in the Sámi
woman’s life’ should not be understood solely as a manifestation of superfcial
trends and fashions. Clothing the family; sewing and repairing gáktis, furs, trousers,
footwear, mittens and headdresses have always been women’s work, and handicrafts
made by women were sometimes also one of the main sources of income for the fam-
ily. The identity of Sámi women continues to be largely defned through their skills
in duodji, which is an ongoing social practice of Sámi society (Finbog 2020, 131;
Magga 2014; Hirvonen 1999, 184).
At the same time, the Sámi are prone to defne a Sámi woman’s competence in
traditional knowledge through what is communicated by the gáktis made by her: If
a woman can sew gáktis, she is considered to have ample cultural capital. Those who
make gáktis are usually more knowledgeable than average in matters pertaining to

49
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gáktis and the backgrounds of families because knowing these is key to the world
of gáktis. That is what I have experienced, too; making a gákti for someone whose
family background is unknown to one is impossible. As a seamstress, I want to know
the essential details about a person – the particular links the person has to a specifc
Sámi family – and it is only after this that I become interested in the wishes the per-
son may have regarding materials and other details of the garment.
However, the practices related to making and wearing gákti also provide a site
for social and economic competition. Early on, many of the wealthiest Sámi families
took to wearing gáktis made of precious fabrics and accessorized them with ample
silver jewellery. Today, too, the economic situation continues to infuence the Sámi
way of dressing: for example, how famboyantly or modestly a garment is decorated
or how many gáktis a person can afford. The situation becomes problematic if the
Sámi identity is equated with exuberant decoration of gáktis and the number of
gáktis a person can buy. Many feel inferior in the face of such an ‘arms race’ because
they feel that they are unable to live up to the expectations of Sáminess. Many Sámi
people have already given up the idea of gákti as a sign of a person’s social or eco-
nomic status and taken to wearing the kinds of gáktis that were worn previously as
everyday clothes. For many, the return to simple gáktis and jewellery also represents
a stance against overconsumption and exploitation of natural resources. The idea is
that the less you decorate, the less jewellery you wear and the fewer gáktis you own,
the more effective the message of your gákti is nowadays.

CONCLUSION
Gákti has become a garment signifying the status of the Sámi as an Indigenous
People. Although gákti sets the Sámi apart from the mainstream population, above
all, gákti brings the Sámi together with other Indigenous Peoples through the tra-
ditional knowledge it conveys. According to the concept of double perspective,
the layers of Indigenous traditional knowledge are present in today’s reality while
simultaneously dating back many generations. Gákti is perceived as an entity that
strengthens Sámi communities precisely because of its double communication. Gákti
can be part of contemporary life, and, at the same time, the gákti practices and
meanings associated with gákti retain their strong links to old Sámi traditions.
As the quote from my mother which opened this chapter exemplifes, gákti and its
transformation may happen in the slightest of ways. Then again, gákti practices may
also change through exposure to highly traumatic events such as those in the context
of war and its aftermath. However, gákti has always been part of the Sámi world, and
it has never disappeared completely. On the contrary: Today, the position of gákti
appears stronger than ever. As Wilson et al. (2020, 141) put it, the resilience, strength
and fexibility of Indigenous Peoples in the face of various challenges is possible
because Indigenous Peoples make use of a range of different repertoires, which enable
them to experience the simultaneous existence of multiple realities. In the context of
gákti, this means the ability of the Sámi to maintain guovtti ilmmi gaskkas – to exist
in two different worlds and societies simultaneously – namely, the Sámi world and the
world of the mainstream population. Against this backdrop, and following Valkeapää,
it can be concluded that being ‘on the pulse of time’ is a quintessential characteristic of
gákti. A living gákti tradition implies a living Sámi culture. And vice versa.

50
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NOTES
1 I wish to thank the Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation for funding this study. I wish
to thank Sari Kokkola for the English translation of this article.
2 In this text, I will use the word gákti throughout, as it is used in my mother tongue, although
the other Sámi languages have different words to refer to their equivalent attire.
3 The Sámi in Finland have the following traditional dresses: gáktis of Enontekiö, Utsjoki
and Vuotso; mááccuh of the Inari Sámi; and pihttâz of the Skolt Sámi.
4 First published in Finnish in 1971 and translated into English in 1983 (57). The text written
in italics is missing from the translation.

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 CHAPTER THREE

S KO LT S A A M I L E U' D D
Tradition as a medium of individual
and collective remembrance


Marko Jouste

INTRODUCTION
In the beginning of the 20th century, the Murman coastal area in Northwest Russia
was a unique, economically fourishing, multilingual and multicultural meeting
point of different Saami groups (e.g. Skolt, Kildin, Aanaar, Sea and North Saami),
Russians, Karelian, Finns and Norwegians. This area had been the homeland of
the Skolt Saamis for as long as there were historical sources. The First World War
(1914–1918), the Russian revolutions in 1917 and the Russian civil war (1917–
1922) marked the end of the era, and gradually, the Murman coastal area became a
target of various military, economic and political interests. A part of the area called
‘Petsamo’ belonged to Finland from 1921 to 1944, but fnally, after the Second
World War, Petsamo was ceded to the Soviet Union, and the whole Kola Peninsula
was defned as a restricted military area, where civilians could not live on the border
areas like Petsamo (Goldin 2020, 3; Troshina and Kotlova 2020, 54–57; Lehtola
2015, 108–113; Linkola and Linkola 2002, 129–135; Mustonen and Mustonen
2011, 220–241).
How did the Skolt Saami perceive the beginning of these changes? One possible
way to obtain information about this is Skolt Saami leu'dd tradition, which is a
musically performed genre of oral history. It can be seen as a medium of collective
remembrance and personal interpretation of both past and present events as well as
a tool for commenting on the world around those performing it. In general, leu'dd
tradition focuses on Skolt Saami individuals and their life stories, but as these inter-
sect with historical events, this opens a window towards a more general Skolt Saami
remembrance.
In this chapter, I shall examine these concepts – individual and collective remem-
brance, performers’ interpretations and means of storytelling – by analyzing leu'dds
describing two specifc historical events. The frst leu'dd I will analyze is named after
Jääkk Sverloff, a village elder. However, the lyrics do not focus on Sverloff but on his

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-5 53
 — M a rko Jo u s t e —

bride, Duna Gerasimoff, while she is considering whether she will continue to wait
for Jääkk to return from the Russian civil war (1917–1922) or marry another man.
The second leu'dd describes how the Russian civil war enters the Skolt Saami area
as Finnish and Bolshevik troops battle in a village called Čuä'lmm in April 1920.
A Skolt Saami perspective is offered by a story of how a Skolt Saami child, Mäkkri
Titoff, is baptized while the confrontation takes place.
Both historical events are also documented in research literature and archive
material. Analyses of the leu'dd lyrics are supplemented with additional archive
material and historical interviews as well as with research literature. As leu'dds are
a form of oral tradition, it is also interesting to explore what kind of information is
recalled, how stories are constructed, what the means of storytelling are and what
defnes the relationship between the storyteller and historical events. Since the topic
in this chapter is oral history and not music, only the lyrics are discussed here. As
this is not a linguistic analysis, I have not attempted to translate leu'dd lyrics word
by word, but rather convey the meaning and essence of each phrase.
There is a notable amount of research on the Skolt Saami, especially from the frst
half of the 20th century, when the Skolt Saami, like other Saami people, were defned
by scientists as representing a ‘primitive culture’ in the context of various ‘culture
evolutional’ theories (see Nyyssönen in this volume). The scientifc interest not only
encompassed the felds of ethnography, cultural anthropology and linguistics but also
had a role in solving the cultural origins of Finno-Ugric peoples (see e.g. Paulaharju
1921; Tanner 1929; Nickul 1948; Itkonen, T.I. 1931, 1948, 1958). Nevertheless, this
research has indispensable value also for present-day research into traditional and
historical Skolt Saami culture, due to the radical cultural change after the Second
World War, forced migration in Finland and the stifing regime in the Soviet Union
(see also Magnani in this volume). The period of ‘Finnish Petsamo’ also saw an exten-
sive output of non-scientifc writings, which often articulated colonialist and social
Darwinist views (Lehtola 2015, 108). During the latter part of the century, modern
research emerged in the felds of cultural anthropology, sociology, history and also
ethnomusicology, an orientation continued up till the present day (see e.g. Pelto 1962;
Ingold 1976; Laitinen 1977, 1981; Saastamoinen 2000, 2008; Jouste 2006, 2020).
Research activities have also produced a vast collection of historical material of Skolt
Saami oral history, preserved mainly in Nordic, Estonian and Russian archives (see
Jouste 2014). The collections consist of various forms of narratives: e.g. both histori-
cal and mythical stories, fairy tales and also a vast variety of traditional music. The
earliest written material dates back to the 19th century, and the earliest audio record-
ings were made in 1913. Skolt Saami material has been collected throughout the 20th
century till the present day. (See Jouste 2014; Laitinen 1977.)

LEU ' DD TRADITION IN THE CONTEXT

OF EARLY 20TH-CENTURY CULTURE
In the beginning of the 20th century, a notable part of Skolt Saami culture was
fundamentally founded on remembrance, although some societal activities (for
example, Russian administration or church registers) involved literary measures.
Remembrance involved practically every aspect of Skolt Saami culture: e.g. events
concerning the entire community and personal life, relations between people, histories

54
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

of families and their living areas, life stories of earlier generations and sources of
livelihood. These can be defned as a part of more general traditional knowledge of
the Saami, which consists of knowledge with long historical and cultural continuity
(see Helander-Renvall and Markkula 2017, 104).
There are notable differences in traditional knowledge and oral history between the
different Saami groups, and often these can be derived from characteristics of local envi-
ronment, local culture, sources of livelihood and contacts with neighbouring cultures.
The basis of research of Skolt Saami culture is to treat it as particularly and essentially
Skolt Saami. However, in order to understand the historical culture of the early 20th
century, one has to take into consideration the fact that the Skolt Saami also applied a
signifcant amount of shared traditions from the northwest of Russia to their own cul-
ture. Until the 1920s, majority of the Skolt Saami lived in Russia and were its citizens,
and therefore the actions of the Russian empire and later the Bolshevik regime affected
the Skolt Saami. Shared history is present also in the Skolt Saami oral history (Jouste
2014, 362–363, 2017, 70; Laitinen 1977, 12–14).
Since leu'dds have preserved oral history over generations, the tradition forms
a bank of collective memories and shared experiences of the Skolt Saami society.
Finnish researcher T. I. Itkonen (1891–1968) described this in 1913 as follows:

In storytelling the Skolt Saami have become masters in their social life during
wintertime and it is incomparable to the other Saami groups. . . . [T]hey discuss
thoroughly even the least matters, memories and happenings.  .  .  . The Skolt
Saami have these kind of songs generally of every known person.
(Itkonen, T. I. 1913, 186–187, 1991, 103.
English translation: Marko Jouste.)

During the performance of a leu'dd, the performer recalls characteristics of a person and
often his or her story. Leu'dds consist of rather long lyrics, and the contents are often
organized into several ‘scenes.’ The performer leads storytelling by making allusions to
the character of the subject or to some important events in his or her life. Though these
are often very detailed descriptions of people’s lives and of commonly known happen-
ings, there are many enigmatic elements in the way the events are presented. It is not
necessary to reveal everything about the character of the person because it is expected
that participants are acquainted with the person. Often, leu'dds describe events that
did not happen personally to the performer of a certain leu'dd. This is evident when,
for example, a leu'dd recalls people who lived well before the performer was born.
Typically, some leu'dds deal with older events like the story of Jääkk Sverloff and Duna
Gerasimoff presented here, which was still recalled four decades after the actual events.
There are leu'dds referring to ancestors who lived two or three generations before the
performer (Jouste et al. 2020, 38, 2007, 13; Jouste 2017, 73).
Leu'dd tradition can be studied in the broader context of local oral tradition.
Leu'dd and storytelling form a network of remembrance in which the same events
can be recalled in both genres. Sometimes the performance can involve several per-
formers, who take turns and continue the story from their own perspective. Itkonen
states by his observation in Suõ'nn’jel in 1913 that the performance can continue
even half an hour (Itkonen, T.I. 1991, 102–105). Thus, in a performance of a cer-
tain leu'dd or a story, one does not have to include all information on the event or

55
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a certain person but can rely on the ‘audience’ in a traditional performing context
to be aware of that specifc history. This principle can be called a referential system,
as one can ‘refer’ in a performance to information given in different genres of oral
tradition.
Some features in the performances of oral history have interesting similarities to
neighbouring cultures. Russian ethnographer Nickolay N. Kharuzin (1865–1900)
suggested in 1890 a parallel between Skolt Saami oral history and concept ‘byvals-
china’ in Russian folklore. According to Kharuzin, the contents of a song or a byvals-
china usually refer to a real event; it is put up when something remarkable happens
in a village or in a Saami family, when someone sets up on a wooing trip to a foreign
village or when someone dies in a surprising way. A song or byvalschina transmits
the event in precise way, offering a detailed description of it. The main difference
between a Saami song and byvalschina is the way it is performed: a song is sung, and
a byvalschina is told (Kharuzin 1890, 376).
As the lyrics also contain personal interpretations, it is possible to obtain both
an individual and a collective worldview within this material. This brings forth
a historical Skolt Saami perspective on their own history (Jouste et al. 2020,
36–38; Jouste 2017, 73–74; Jouste et al. 2007, 13–14). In the following, I shall
examine two different leu'dds and how oral history is presented and interpreted
in them.

‘JÄÄKK IS A BRISK SOLDIER IN THE RUSSIAN LAND’

Jääkk Sverloff (1894–1977) was a highly respected village elder and a leader in
Skolt Saami society for many decades. When the First World War began in 1914,
Jääkk was a young man and was called to military service in the Russian Army.
He left his home village Suõ'nn’jel in January 1915 and was trained to be a soldier
and an offcer. He participated in some of the worst battles of the First World War
on the Polish frontier, was wounded and was sent back to St. Petersburg. After the
frst Russian revolution in February 1917, Sverloff was able to return to Suõ'nn’
jel. However, the next year, he was drafted into the White Army, a party in the
Russian civil war (1917–1922) taking place right after the Russian revolutions.
The war in Northwest Russia was a series of conficts in ‘the “Great Game” in
Murman, with participation by Soviet Russia, regional and local authorities, the
Entente countries, Germany, socialist Finland, and White Finland’ (Goldin 2020, 9).
The two main combatant groups were the Red Army fghting for Bolsheviks and the
White Army representing loosely allied forces of various combatant non-Bolshevik
groups of diverse political interests. In 1919, the White Army was defeated after
the withdrawal of Allied forces of the Entente, and Sverloff was captured by Red
Army soldiers and sent to a labor camp, from which he was freed in 1921. Back
home in Suõ'nn’jel, nothing was heard from Jääkk for years, and he was thought
to have died in the war. When Jääkk fnally returned to Suõ'nn’jel, he found that
things had changed while he was away. His home village was now part of Finland
instead of Russia, his bride Duna Gerasimoff (b 1901) had chosen to stop waiting
for Jääkk’s return and had decided to marry Jääkk’s older brother Ǩiurrâl Sverloff
(1891–1942) (Jouste et al. 2021; Goldin 2020, 15; Lehtola 2012, 255; Pelto 1962,
235–244; Linkola 1985, 99).

56
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

Figure 3.1 Jääkk Sverloff in Če'vetjäu'rr 1961.

Source: Photograph by E. Ala-Könni. (The Folklife Archives, Inari/056).

In Skolt Saami oral history, the story of Jääkk Sverloff appears in two main forms:
in his own autobiographical material and in leu'dds addressed to him and performed
by several other members of the Suõ'nn’jel Skolt Saami (Jouste et al. 2021). It is
notable that all recordings of Jääkk Sverloff’s leu'dd are performed by women. It
was recorded the frst time in 1955, roughly 35 years after the events described in
it. During the period from 1955 to 1972, three people performed it on tape fve
times in total, which indicates that the story of Jääkk Sverloff in the First World War
was still recalled frequently. However, in these leu'dds, Jääkk is mainly portrayed
as an absent person or even one who was supposed to have been killed in the war.
The main character is Duna Gerasimoff (b. 1901), a young woman from village of
Njuõ'tˈtjäu'rr who was presumably engaged to Jääkk in the late 1910s. In all dif-
ferent versions of this leu'dd, events are described from Duna’s point of view, and
they focus on Duna’s decision to stop waiting for Jääkk’s return and marry Jääkk’s
brother Ǩiurrâl Sverloff (1891–1942).
Next, I shall analyze the lyrics performed by Va'ss Semenoja (b. 1924) in 1961.
I have divided the text into several scenes according to the contents of the leu'dd.
Typically, these scenes are organized so that in the beginning, the main characters
and the site of events are presented. Then the story continues with frequent dialogues

57
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between the characters. The end of a leu'dd contains usually a comment made by the
performer. (See Sammallahti 1984, 161; Jouste et al. 2020, 40.)
Text example 1. Leu'dd “Jääkk Sverloff” performed by Va'ss Semenoja in 1961
(The Folklife Archives, AK/0563). Transcription: Elias Moshnikoff and Seija
Sivertsen. English translation: Marko Jouste.

1. Duna Gerasimoff and Ǩiurrâl Sverloff are presented:

Duna, Duna lij Säävu nijdd-a
Di Ǩiurr-â-laž-a õ'sǩǩe I'llep-i _g-â'lǧǧ.
A kooum-a vuâra neä'tt-e-lest-a
Pâi Ä'llep-i jeär_gaž
di luâd̄a kää'cǩikˇ
Õ'sǩǩe pâi-i vuä_gg_-a-škuõ'tted-di
Dunuža-ji Säävu niõd̄-a årra.
Duna is the daughter of Sää'vu,
And Ǩiurrâl is the son of I' llep
Three times a week
a reindeer bull named ‘Butterfy‘
And the one that nature had castrated
Began to run to see
Little Duna, the daughter of Sää'vu.

2. Duna’s sister Sandra and aunt Sandra are presented. They ask Duna about her
plans for marriage to Jääkk Sverloff.
A Sandra emmam There is Sandra, Duna’s sister
di Sandra vuäbbam and Sandra, Duna’s sister-in-law
Di sij â'tte pâi-i õ'sǩǩe cie'lǩǩ-e-sâ'stt-e: They said:
di mâi'd-â-di Dunusaž ton tääj-u-d-ak-a ‘Why are you impatient, Duna?
Di mää'nn jõs-i ton-u jiõk-i vue'rdd-e-lââ'st. Why can’t you wait?’

3. Duna’s reply:
Sääldat-i mooččâs Jäkk-u-ja-ja ‘Jääkk is a brisk soldier
Di ruõšš-a jânnam lij ääkk-a-laž. in the Russian land.
Di tõn ve't-i mon-a jiõm ni tie'tt-e-d-ââ'st But I don’t know,
Da pâi Dunusaž-i cie'lǩǩ-e-sâstt. Little Duna says,
Hå't su'nne le'žže gu čõnnum-až-ža Whether there is a
Di ruõ'psses-i pirr-a čeäppat-i repp-a-ka-ja a red scarf tied around his neck
Di viõ'lǧǧes-i pirr-a čeäppat repp-a-ka-ja or a white scarf tied around his neck.
Di pue'rab-i mon-a õ'sǩǩe vue'lǧǧ-e-d-am-a Maybe it is better to choose
Pâi pärnna puä'res-i Ǩiurr-â-lõ'žže. the old man Ǩiurrâl.’

The leu'dd consists of three parts. It begins with a scene in which the narrator presents
the main characters, Duna and Ǩiurrâl, and offers a picture of Ǩiurrâl, a groom candi-
date visiting the Dunas home regularly. In all versions of the leu'dd, he is strangely por-
trayed as an old and incompetent man, even though he was only in his early 30s and just
three years older than Jääkk. Here, he is compared to a reindeer that has been ‘castrated
by nature.’ The second scene and main part of the text consists of a dramatized discus-
sion, which is a typical feature in leu'dds. Duna’s sister and aunt, both named Sandra, are
accusing Duna of impatience and not waiting for her frst fancé, Jääkk. Duna answers
she does not even know if he is dead or alive, and uses a metaphor of Jääkk having a
‘white scarf’ or a ‘red scarf’ tied around his neck. This interpretation is also present in
Va'ss Semenoja’s interview, in which she tells the story concerning the leu'dd:

58
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

Duna and Kiurrâl. Duna’s frst fancé was Jääkk but then Kiurrâl begun [to drive
with a reindeer sledge] to visit Duna. Duna’s relatives question her behaviour
and ask: “Why don’t you wait for that beautiful soldier Jääkk? Why are you
wooing with old man Kiurrâl?” Duna replies: “The Russian land is so vast and
he [Jääkk] might not even be alive anymore.”
(The Folklife Archives, AK/0563.
English translation: Marko Jouste.)

The leu'dd opens a window of remembrance, particularly to Duna’s life and her feel-
ings, but one can also notice how multiple paths of memories emerge in storytelling.
There are fve people mentioned, and all their life histories can be followed with the
referential system. The historical background of the story is also diverse as it brings
forth the First World War and how Skolt Saami men were recruited to the Russian
army and ended up being absent from Suõ'nn’jels’ everyday life. Even the situation
in 1961 can be taken into consideration since the leu'dd’s main character, Jääkk
Sverloff, was at that time a village elder and leader of the Skolt Saamis. Even though
all this is not mentioned in the actual text, a listener in a traditional performing
context is supposed to be aware of it, and only then do these specifc pieces of oral
history unfold. This is an important feature in the referential system of Skolt Saami
music and oral tradition.
There are some ways to date the events described in the leu ' dd. Firstly,
Suõ'nn’jel is mentioned to be in a foreign land. Duna’s home village is
Njuõ'tˈtjäu' rr, and the border between Russia and Finland was set between
Njuõ 'tˈtjäu' rr and Suõ ' nn’jel in 1920. Secondly, Duna’s decision was made
before Jääkk Sverloff returned home in June 1921. At that time, Duna had
already chosen Ǩ iurrâl for her husband. This did not affect the relationship
of the brothers as they remained close and worked together until 1942, when
Ǩ iurrâl passed away. In the 1920s, Ǩ iurrâl was elected village elder. Later, Jääkk
was chosen to continue his brother’s work as the village elder and remained
in that position until 1968. Jääkk himself got married in 1922, and his family
lived in Suõ 'nn’jel until the end of the Second World War. Then the area was
ceded to the Soviet Union, and Skolt Saamis had to migrate to the Inari area in
Finland ( Pelto 1962 , 244; Nickul 1948 , 25, 1970 , 46–47, Sverloff 2003 , 80–84;
Jouste et al. 2021 ).

A CHILD IS BORN, AND BOLSHEVIKS HAVE

COME TO VILLAGE OF ČUÄ ' LMM
The second leu'dd offers an example of how historical hostile occupation is recalled
and commented on in Skolt Saami oral history. By March 1920, the Red Army had
defeated the White Army in the Russian civil war and taken over the northwest
region of Russia. Earlier, in February, Finnish voluntary troops led by major Martti
Wallenius (1893–1984) had launched a paramilitary campaign to Petsamo region,
convinced that the occupation of Petsamo would ensure its belonging to Finland in
alleged peace negotiations in spring 1920. The expedition triggered the Bolsheviks

59
 — M a rko Jo u s t e —

in Murmansk to attack Petsamo in order to exile the Finns. The fnal confrontation
took place when the Bolsheviks seized the village of Čuä'lmm (Finnish: Salmijärvi)
on 1 April, and the Finnish troops fed to Finland and Norway. This marked the
beginning of the Bolshevik regime in Petsamo, which lasted until the beginning of
1921, when the area was ceded to Finland according to the Peace Treaty of Tartu
(Goldin 2020, 14; Harjula 2007, 204; Wallenius 1994, 106; Itkonen, O.V. 1929, 94;
Tanner 1929, 157).
The events described in the leu'dd are focused on Čuä'lmm, the centre of habi-
tation on the Paččjokk River area. It was located on peatland between two major
lakes on the area, Čuä'lmmjääur and Kuõššjäu'rr. However, only few years earlier,
most Paččjokk Skolt Saami lived in wintertime in Čuõnnjujokk sijdd, ‘the village
of Gooseriver,’ located ten kilometres south of Čuä'lmm. This location was aban-
doned during an earlier Finnish military expedition to Petsamo in 1918, as the local
population fed the area fearing the terror of the Finnish troops. The Čuõnnjujokk
sijdd was not rehabitated as a winter village, and this marked also the end of the
traditional semi-nomadic life of Paččjokk Skolt Saami. Skolt Saami families settled
on the shores of Paččjokk River and its numerous lakes. From these sites, some of
the Skolt Saami confronted the second paramilitary expedition in 1920 and the
Bolshevik occupation that followed it. However, the majority of the people living
in the Paččjokk River area had fed to Norway when they heard of the coming
expedition (Tevlina 2020, 72; Tanner 2000, 59, 1929, 157; Alavuotunki 1999, 50,
556; Andresen 1989, 135; Vilkuna 1971, 218–220; Itkonen, O.V. 1927, 144–150,
1929, 94; Wallenius 1994, 77. See also Kuussaari 1939, 302–322).
In the archive collections, there are several leu'dds and stories describing these
events from the Skolt Saami point of view. The earliest documented source is from
1926, six years after the actual historical incident. The leu'dd was performed by
Mekk Kalinin (1879–1942) and researcher A. O. Väisänen (1890–1969), who wrote
down the lyrics and melody as well as the following remark about the context of the
story recalled in the leu'dd:

When a child is born, mother always makes a leu'dd for the child and sings it
when she pleases. Now, on the day Mäkkri [Titoff] was born, it so happened
that the Bolsheviks came and for that reason the story of this incident is attached
to this leu'dd.
(SKS KRA, Folder 6, Ms. ‘Petsamo 1926’.
English translation: Marko Jouste.)

It is notable that during the six years between the actual events and the frst perfor-
mance of this leu'dd, the story of Mäkkri Titoff and the arrival of the Bolsheviks had
become a commonly known event in the Skolt Saami oral tradition, and the leu'dd
was also performed by community members other than just the child’s mother. The
coincidence of these two events made it a remarkable story, although it also referred
to some unpleasant memories of the harsh Bolshevik governance in 1920.
Text example 2. Leu'dd ”Pä'rnn lij Čuä'lmest jo šõddâm” performed by Mekk
Kalinin in 1926 (SKS KRA, Folder 6, Ms. ‘Petsamo 1926’). Transcription: A. O.
Väisänen. Transliteration to modern Skolt Saami orthography: Markus Juutinen.
English translation: Marko Jouste.

60
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

1. Mäkkri Titoff, the Bolsheviks and the site of events are presented:
Pä'rnn-e lij Čue'lmest-e jo šõddâm da. A boy is born in Čuä' lmm
Bolševik Čuälmma lij jo puâttam da. Bolshevik has come to Čuä ' lmm.
Mäkkri lij Järmman-a jo â'lǧǧ-e da. Mäkkri is son of Järmman.

2. A description of the actions of Bolsheviks in Čuä' lmm:

Mâid-e te'be bolševik jo a'lǧǧe da? What is Bolshevik going to do?
Käälvid puk They took all kinds of things
ääi'test-e jo va'ldde da. from the storage house.
Ääi't-e jiijj uusid-e puõ'ldde da. They burned the door of the
storage house.
Šuur lie see'st-e pe'l-e. They have masters,
Kam-i-da-jo-saar-a da commissars
i-_gõl si'jje ni kaallâš-a caarr da. don’t need a precious Czar.
Puõ'rid sij ni mi'jje pe'l-e aštt-â-da-jo-â'll-e da. They promise good things for us.
Puärrsid jiijj peägg-a-pe'l-e-jo-tõ'lle da. They mock the old ways [and say
that:]
jie-_gõl mi'jje ni veäncõõd̄-a jo uo-da-da, We [Skolt Saamis] don’t have to
be married
jie-_gõl ni ristt-a-da-jo-niõd̄-a da. and there is no need for godsisters.

3. Performer’s comment:
Oolmid puk Muurm-a-na jo no'rre jo. They collected all the people to
Murmansk,
Jiijj kid̄d̄-e puk čiõrm-a-kaid jo po'rre da. ate all the calves from last spring.
Kâ'l-han da tõt durak-i-jo ra'sǩǩii da The fool [Bolshevik] sheared every
sheep,
ko ääkkain puk saauʒ-â-id-e jo pie'sǩǩii. owned by our women.

The text can be divided to three parts. The leu'dd begins with a scene in which the
main characters of the leu'dd are introduced to the listener. These are Mäkkri Titoff,
the newly born Skolt Saami boy, and the Bolsheviks who have come to seize the
village of Čuä'lmm. However, the temporal relation of these is not specifed in a
detailed manner. The middle part begins with a question: ‘What is the Bolshevik1
going to do?’ and this scene focuses on describing how they looted and terrorized
the village during the siege. The text ends with the performer’s general comment
on the year 1920 and on how Bolsheviks mistreated people in northwest Russia,
stealing reindeer and sheep from the Skolt Saami. They forced at least some part of
the population to be relocated from their old living areas to the city of Murmansk.
In literature and contemporary sources, this period is described as a hard time for
the local people, as Red Army troops were located in the Petsamo area. Bolsheviks
forced the locals to sell provisions, mainly fsh, only to Russia, which meant a huge
loss of income since the Soviet ruble had such a low value as a currency. Bolsheviks
prohibited all trade across the border to Norway, which led the population to an
economical disaster because Norway had been the main market for local goods.

61
 — M a rko Jo u s t e —

Some men were also forced to join the Red Army. There was also looting, the steal-
ing of valuables from the Orthodox monastery being a well-documented example
(Uusimaa 6.9.1920; Suunta 6.11.1920; Panteleimon 1990, 60–61).
These events must have been a shock to the locals as the new ‘war time’ Bolshevik
regime, lasting nearly a year, turned out to be strikingly different from the old
Russian governance to which people had been accustomed. Hence, there is a strong
separation of the Skolt Saami and Bolsheviks in the leu'dd. The Skolt Saami are
defned as ‘us’ and the Bolsheviks are referred to as ‘the other.’ However, the story
is mainly told as a narrative in which a Skolt Saami describes the events and some
ideals of the Bolsheviks. As we can see from other examples, a leu'dd text usually
utilizes both narration and dialogue.
The events in Čuä'lmm were well recalled in the oral history of the Skolt Saami.
Four decades later, Jääkk Sverloff performed a leu'dd describing the same histori-
cal event. In addition, he also explained the contents of his version of the leu'dd to
interviewer Israel Ruong (1903–1986) in Upsala, Sweden:

Mäkkri [Titoff] was born and he had to be baptized to the Orthodox church.
Then they had a godfather Vä'sǩǩ [Afanasieff]. A priest came and began to
baptize the child. Then a sound tak-tak-tak-tak is heard on the other side of
Lake Kuõššjäu'rr. The priest says, ‘God dammit, what is this!’ Vä'sǩǩ says
that whatever comes, we shall baptize this child, so he will get the Orthodox
faith.
At that time, the Finnish [troops] left Čuä'lmm and the Russians came in. They
converted in haste a house to a theatre and gathered all our Skolts in it. They took
a stick and put a red fag on top of it. They point it with one fnger and say that this
is our precious fag. It is so precious since so much blood has been shed for it. They
say: ‘Now there is no Czar in Russia, there are only commissars. Now there are no
godchildren, no priests. Only our commissars have authority.’ And Vä'sǩǩ said: ‘that
is just the same old Russian regime speaking now.’
(SOFI, DAUM, Bd 1128a. English translation: Marko Jouste.)

In contrast to the previous example, Sverloff offers plenty of new orally memorized
information and enhances the storytelling by adding dialogue between people. He
has dramatized the story with many details, and a narrator is placed as a witness
in the middle of the events. The description of these events is a part of Skolt Saami
oral history, and it cannot rise from Sverloff’s own experience since, during the
actual happenings in spring 1920, he was still in Russia as a war prisoner of the
Red Army. However, it is possible that the encounters with the Bolshevik also refer
to some of his own experiences and memories in the Russian civil war.
Text example 3. Leu'dd ”Mäkri šõõddi” performed by Jääkk Sverloff in 1960
(SOFI, DAUM, Bd 1128a). Transcription: Markus Juutinen. English translation:
Marko Jouste.

1. Mäkkri Titoff, Vä'sǩǩ Afanasieff and the site of events are presented:
Mäkkri vuänak ve't šõõdd-â-jo-di-ja See, Mäkkri was born.
Mäkk-a-ri ve't go šõõdd-â-jo-di-ja Mäkkri was born

62
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

Figure 3.2 Taisja and Mekk Kalinin in Ǩeeu'ŋes 1926.

Source: Photograph by A. O. Väisänen (The Kalevala Society, Väi 1926:002).

Risttveâr ǥ-õõlg-a-či vä'ldde-jo-d-e-de and he should be baptized.

A Vä'sǩǩ ât ve't-a lij ku- ku- kue'mm veâlain Well, Väʹsǩǩ was a godfather
Mij ve't go ŋ-aa'ljim go risttâ-jo-d-e-de We begun to baptize him.
Mäkkri ŋ-âlgg-a risttâ-jo-d-e-da Mäkkri has to be baptized

63
 — M a rko Jo u s t e —

2. Baptizing ceremony, Bolsheviks entering, a dialogue between the priest and

Vä'sǩǩ:
Mij ve't-e go Mäkk-a-ri rist-a-jo-škuõ'đim. When we began to baptize
Mäkkri
Paappaž ve't-i-jo ŋ-aa'lji-ja risttâ-jo-d-e-da [and] the priest is beginning to
baptize.
Tak, tak, tak pâi gu kuull-a-jo-stââll leäi [a sound] tak, tak, tak was heard
di rââst veâl ni Kuõššjääu'r-i ŋ-ääkka over the lake Kuõssjääu'r.
Vuâsppå'd-i vuänak pomiluj, [Priest says:] ‘God have mercy.
mii-ǥõs täätt-a go šõd-â-jo-škuõ'đi What is beginning to happen?’
Vä'sǩǩ vuänak go pâi nõmm-â-jo-d-i-ja Vä'sǩǩ just said:
Mäkkri ǥ-âlgg ristt-a-veâr vä'ldd-e-jo-d-e-de ‘Mäkkri has to take Christianity
Mäkk-a-ri ŋ-âlgg-â-go risttâ-jo-d-e-da Mäkkri has to be baptized.’

3. Voice of a narrator describing the actions of Bolsheviks:

Mäkkri ve't ristt-a-veâr go väldd-a-jo-di-ja-di-ja Mäkkri took Christianity
Di bolševik ât lie puätta-jo-m-až-a And Bolsheviks have come
[to Čuä'lmm]
Mij vuänak go oummu jo See, our men [Finnish
voluntary troops]
vue'lǧǧe veâlain de ääkka-jo are leaving,
kåå'tt kaammipie'lest di kåå'tt sââ'veǩpie'lest. who with one shoe, who
with one ski.
A sij ve't go leäkku tuejj-a-jo-ste- veâlain They [Bolsheviks] built
in haste.
teatrpõõrt-e go tuejj-a-jo-ste-ja A theatre house they
built in haste.
pukid saa'mid sij kååčč-e-jo-ste-ja Every Skolt Saami they
called up.
puk vuänak sij saa'mid ve't kååčč-e-jo-ste-ja See, every [Skolt] Saami
they called up.

4. Scene two, a travesty of a fag ceremony, a monologue of a Bolshevik:

A, čokk vuänak-a veâl suä'bb-e-jo de'ce veâlain. Well, stave was sharp.
kooumas ruõ'ppses, kooumas kooška go pijj-a-jo-je-la Three men put it in the
middle [of the crowd].
õõutin suõrmin son čuä'j-a-jo-ti-ja, One man pointed it with
one fnger
ruõšš-a ǩiõ'lle veâl muäl-a jo-ti-ja and babbled in Russian:
tät vuänak mij ât lij kaallõs vuänak-i znaa'men ‘See, this is our precious
sign.
tät vuänak lij mij kaallõs go znaa'men This is our precious sign.
åå'n vuänak jeä'la ni ruõšš-a ni caar. Now, there does not
exist a Czar.
åå'n jeä'la ve't mee'st ni caar-a, Now we don’t have even
a Czar
64
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

åå'n pâi lij ǥo-la- komi-da-saar-a Now there is only a

commissar.
åå'n vuänak mee'st jeä'la ni paapp veâlain See, now we don’t have
even priests.
åå'n vuänak i'lla ni ristt-a-vuä'bb-e, Now we don’t have even
godsisters,
ni vu[ä'bb]ristt-a-vuä'bbruått-a-ni-vuõđâž. not even godsister-
relationship.’

5. Voice of a narrator, Vä'sǩǩ’s comment:

Åå'n i'lla risttvuä'bbruått-a-ni-vuõđâž Now there is no godsister-
relationship.
jo ǥo veâlain Vä'sǩǩ-e-kue'mm And then Godfather
ât ve't-i pâi nõmm-a-jo-d-i-ja Vä'sǩǩ just said:
tõt-a â'tte lij tuâl’-a-ja ruõšš-a-jo-laž-a ‘He is just (the same) old
Russian.
tõt vuänak lij tuâl’-a-jõž lij ruõšš-a-jo-laž-a See, he is just (the same)
old Russian.’

The leu'dd begins with the voice of the narrator, presenting the main characters and
setting up the frst scene, in which the baptizing ceremony of Mäkkri Titoff is about
to begin. Mäkkri and his godfather Vä'sǩǩ Afanasieff are introduced. The frst scene
consists of a baptizing ceremony. An unidentifed priest is baptizing Mäkkri, but the
event is suddenly interrupted by distant sound of guns.
From the research literature and the writings by members of both sides, this gun-
fre can be traced to the three machine guns of the Aunus Karelian and Finnish
Bolshevik ‘skiing troops’ attacking Čuä'lmm from the east side of Lake Kuõššjäu'rr
(A.M. 1927, 115–123). Bolsheviks invaded Petsamo in two groups, Russian troops
came with a ship from Murmansk and the others skied across the inland. The battle
took place roughly from 3:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m., and it is not possible for a baptiz-
ing ceremony to have taken place in the middle of the night. However, in the leu'dd,
priest is alarmed by the gunfre during the baptizing ceremony. We do not know the
exact date, and this could also refer to a different event during that restless period.
Word-by-word dialogues can be seen as an essential way of dramatizing the nar-
ration in leu'dds. Often a character and his or her function in a story are encapsu-
lated to a line in a dialogue. All we learn from the unnamed priest are his scared
words: God have mercy, what is beginning to happen? This gives a chance for Vä'sǩǩ
to act as a voice of reason and ensure the baptizing of Mäkkri by saying: ‘Mäkkri
has to take Christianity; he has to be baptized.’
The next section begins again with a voice of a narrator, who prepares the sec-
ond scene and tells that the Bolsheviks have come to Čuä'lmm, and the Finnish
troops have left the village. This is told with ironic remarks describing how the
Finns are feeing in panic, ‘who with one shoe, who with one ski.’ Besides irony,
an element of sarcasm can also be seen as the Finns are portrayed as ‘our’ men.
At the time of the performance of this leu'dd in 1960, the Skolt Saami had been
Finnish citizens for 40 years, but in 1920, this military expedition was not wel-
comed by them (Kuussaari 1939, 211). The second scene depicts a travesty of a
65
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fag ceremony and a monologue of an unnamed Bolshevik, who paints the ‘new
Bolshevik order’ and its new social practices, including that they do not have a
Czar, priests, godfathers or even ‘godparenthood’ as the signs of religion. This is
enhanced by using the word ‘now’ at the beginning of every sentence. The fag
ceremony may have a connection to a burial of Bolshevik soldiers who had died
in a battle which took place on the day after the battle of Čuä'lmm. A member
‘A. M.’ of the Bolshevik troops recalls the event: ‘The frst time a red fag futtered
in the village of Čuäʹlmm just on the Norwegian border and echoed the tones of
International’ (A.M. 1927, 123).
In the fnal section of the text the voice of the narrator states, again with sar-
casm, that ‘godsister-relationship’ does not exist anymore. However, godfather
Vä'sǩǩ says that the Bolshevik is not an advocate of the new society but is just ‘the
same old Russian’ speaking, allegedly referring to the times before the revolution.
Obviously, godfathers are still present, and maybe it is the Bolshevik who is lying.
As mentioned earlier, one way of dramatizing a leu'dd is to end it with humour-
ous lines, a feature that is described even in the earliest historical descriptions of
leu'dd performances: ‘One sets up a leu'dd of a neighbour and gets a devout audi-
ence that rewards a fne performance with laughter’ (Itkonen, T.I. 1913, 186–187,
1991, 103).
It is notable that only the Skolt Saami are identifed with proper names (see Jouste
et al. 2021). For non–Skolt Saami people, Sverloff only uses general names like the
priest or a Bolshevik or refers to their nationalities, like Finns and Russians. In
this text, pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ are used both by the Skolt Saamis and by the
Bolsheviks. There is also a stylistic feature employing a lot of parallelism: e.g. ‘We
began to baptize him. Mäkkri has to be baptized’; ‘Every Skolt Saami they called up.
Look, every Skolt Saami they called up’; and ‘Now, there is no Czar. Now we don’t
even have a Czar.’
Sverloff told Ruong that he had learned the leu'dd from Trofm Gavriloff, a Skolt
Saami living in Sverloff’s home village Suõ'nn’jel. He also claims that the leu'dd is
‘made by’ Gavriloff. Probably this refers to the dramatized version of the story, since
that differentiates the later version from Mekk Kalinin’s version. Nevertheless, this
shows the essence of collective remembrance in Skolt Saami oral history.
The battle of Čuä'lmm, as well the events leading to it, are well documented in
memoirs of several members of both the Finnish and Bolshevik troops. Events after
the battle are hardly mentioned, which can be understood in light of the fact that
the Finns fed right after the battle, and Karelian Bolshevik ‘skiing troops’ were relo-
cated to Viena Karelia relatively soon after the events. According to contemporary
sources, Karelian troops were substituted by Red Army soldiers from other parts
of Russia, and they constituted the major part of the Bolshevik regime in Petsamo
in 1920. However, there is a lack of academic research on this exact period. On a
general level, it is also notable that the journals of both sides are highly biased; they
contradict each other and contain hardly any descriptions of malpractice towards
the local population, even though the alleged terror practiced by the enemy is occa-
sionally described. Finnish researchers have also only expressed minor interest in
the Bolshevik regime. Wallenius, the leader of the Finnish voluntary troops, wrote in
his memoirs: ‘Now began a nine-month red regime in Petsamo. It had only a scarce
effect on the locals, practically just economic downturn – the only result of the new

66
 — Skolt Saami leu'dd —

form of society was that nobody cared to fsh or work.’ (See A. M. 1927, 115–123;
Itkonen, O.V. 1927, 150, 1928, 120–128; Antikainen 1930, 76; Pekkola 1930, 161–
174; Vaara 2020, 134–136; Kuussaari 1939, 302–322; Wallenius 1994, 61).

CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have analyzed examples of the historical Skolt Saami leu'dd tradi-
tion. Focus has been on the individual and collective remembrance in leu'dd texts,
as well as on the references to other genres of oral history. These two leu'dds offer
examples of how a story can be told in the Skolt Saami leu'dd tradition and how
particular events of Skolt Saami history during World War I (1914–1918) and the
Russian civil war (1917–1922) can be interpreted. In the leu'dd named after Jääkk
Sverloff, the focus is on Sverloff’s bride Duna Gerasimoff’s life and feelings as she
considers whether she will continue to await Jääkk’s return from the First World
War. She is advised by her relatives, and these discussions are also presented in detail.
All recordings of Jääkk Sverloff’s leu'dd are performed by women, and all the active
people described are female. On the other hand, the other example of Mäkkri Titoff’s
baptizing and the occupation of both Finnish and Bolshevik invaders has only active
male characters, and it describes a crisis of several occupations of hostile military
troops. There are differences in the performances: in the earliest performance, the
events might have represented a traumatic memory with no real solution, but the
second, performed four decades after the events, offers an ironic view as well as a
Trickster character, who makes fun of both the Finnish and Bolshevik invaders. In
both cases, the ongoing war stops the normal life of the Skolt Saami society; the
absence of Jääkk Sverloff and many other soldiers from the village and the continu-
ing Finnish and Bolshevik occupation make ordinary life challenging.
As an art form, leu'dd tradition offers rich material for studying Skolt Saami culture.
Often the ‘window’ to culture and Skolt Saami history is broadened by supplementing
it with other pieces of traditional knowledge found from the network of remembrance,
other historical sources or research literature. Furthermore, leu'dds are an important
source for Skolt Saami people’s experience and perspective, and through them, it is pos-
sible to fnd new interpretations of the history of Skolt Saamis and also of the history
of the whole region. For example, the research on Finnish paramilitary expeditions or
the Bolshevik regime in 1920 barely mentions the impact on the local people. The Skolt
Saami oral history provides an opportunity to see the other side of these actions.
Leu'dds represent both individual and collective remembrance, but they are often
heavily impacted by the performer’s personal interpretation. The performer decides
the details and the context of a story represented in a leu'dd and often dramatizes the
lyrics. In other words, interpretation and dramatizing are means of remembrance, a
method of storytelling. Recordings of the same leu'dd even by the same performer
reveal different particulars. It is also notable that performances recorded during for-
mal interviews may have been shorter and performed in a more concise way than in
a traditional context. On the other hand, it is important to remember that, similarly,
performances in a traditional environment were not meant to be full descriptions of
their subjects. The referential system and the network of remembrance combined the
information of oral history, personal experiences and the memories of the listeners.
This principle is naturally reminiscent of other Saami oral traditions as well as of the

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fact that, in general, various sources form a base for more comprehensive percep-
tion and interpretation of a certain historical event. However, as a form of art, the
leu'dd tradition is in itself a complete form of communication and a way of human
expression.

NOTE
1 Here the word ‘Bolshevik’ can refer to a single person or a group of people like the word
‘enemy’ in English.

REFERENCES
Sources
The Finnish Literature Society, Folklore Archives (SKS KRA), Helsinki, Finland. The A. O.
Väisänen Collection. SKS KRA, Folder 6, Ms. ‘Petsamo 1926’. Mekk Kalinin: ”Pä'rnn lij
Čuä'lmest jo šõddâm”, Ǩeeu'ŋes 1926. A Transcription by A. O. Väisänen.
The  Institute for Language and Folklore (SOFI), Stockholm, Sweden. The Institute for
Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research in Umeå (DAUM). SOFI, DAUM, Bd
1128a. An interview of Jääkk Sverloff containing leu'dd ”Mäkri šõõddi”, Upsala 1960.
Recorded by I. Ruong.
The Folklife Archives, Tampere University, Finland. The A-K Collection. AK/0563. An inter-
view of Va'ss Semenoja containing leu'dd ”Jääkk Sverloff”, Če'vetjäu'rr 1961. Recorded
by E. Ala-Könni, K. Nickul and E. Ertesuo. Inari/056. Jääkk Sverloff, Če'vetjäu’rr 1961.
Photographer E. Ala-Könni.
The Kalevala Society, Helsinki, Finland. The A. O. Väisänen Collection. Väi 1926:002. Taisja
and Mekk Kalinin, Ǩeeu'ŋes 1926. Photographer A. O. Väisänen.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

TRICKSTER BLURRING
E X P E C TAT I O N S A N D VA L U E S
OF SÁMI COMMUNITY
Author Jovnna-Ánde Vest reshaping Sámi
muittašangirjjálašvuohta (reminiscence literature)


Hanna Helander and Veli-Pekka Lehtola

INTRODUCTION
The new time came billowing to my childhood Roavvesavu. Our family life
revolved restlessly like events on a flm reel rotating too fast. By the time
people were longing to buy something new, Dad had already rejected it many
times.
(ČNB, 36)

Narratologist Dorrit Cohn has stated that norms only arouse interest when they are
violated (Cohn 1999, 37–38). This is why exceptional individuals and marginal per-
sonalities are typical characters in literature. They enable the author to reveal the
subsurface structures and contradictions of our society when the protagonist does not
meet the expectations and norms that are normally presumed. Such exceptional char-
acters include, for example, children, rebels, drunkards and the insane, whose descrip-
tions often trace back to more or less true narratives. (See Halliwell 2004, 51–52.)
The protagonist of Jovnna-Ánde Vest’s novel Čáhcegáddái nohká boazobálggis
(1988) (The Reindeer Path Ends at the Water’s Edge, henceforth ČNB) represents
a non-normative case in the small Sámi community of Roavvesavu. ‘Pikku-Vest’
is an exceptional character in his own Deatnu Sámi community in the 1950s and
1960s, where values do not meet his character. He is also exceptional compared to
the general Sámi image. Especially in ethnographic descriptions, peoples living close
to nature are often seen as solid, traditional and practical, even uncomplicated or
simple people (about ethnographical descriptions, see Aikio in this volume). Vest
paints a completely opposite image of his father, a Deatnu Sámi. Instead of everyday

72 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-6
 — Tr i ck s t e r b l u r r i n g e x p e c t a t i o n s a n d va l u e s —

work, he is childishly enthusiastic about everything new and impractical, blurring

the normal life of his family and community.
Vest’s novel can be positioned between oral tradition and written prose. The
protagonist´s experiences and blunders are typical of Sámi oral tradition. He is related
to many powerful characters in Sámi oral tradition, from the all-wise Stiihka-Piera of
old folk tales (Kuusi 1971) to the later great liar Stuorra-Jovnna (Huuskonen 2004)
and the controversial reindeer patron Kadja-Nilla (Saressalo 1989). Pikku-Vest also
evokes the mythical character of Indigenous Peoples in North America, Trickster,
who disobeys normal rules and defes conventional behavior. While Trickster is often
a conscious rascal, Pikku-Vest, whose actions produce unintentionally comical situ-
ations, is rather a reluctant Trickster, an antihero whose excessive enthusiasm con-
fuses the values and customary order of a small community.
The premise of Jovnna-Ánde Vest’s book, in which the son reminisces about his
childhood and his late father, looks like an example of muittašangirjjálašvuohta
(reminiscence literature), which is typical of Sámi literature. The term is derived from
the Sámi verb muittašit, which refers to recollection, especially the remembrance of
something pleasant. According to Hirvonen, the material of muittašangirjjálašvuohta
is heterogeneous: Books contain mythological and historical material, as well as
autobiographical perspectives, going through the whole variety of oral storytelling
tradition. Therefore, Hirvonen considers the term muittašangirjjálašvuohta a bet-
ter description of these books than (auto)biography or memoirs (Hirvonen 1999,
75–76).
Hirvonen considers ČNB to be impacted by muitalus – discourse of Sámi litera-
ture. However, she does not consider Vest’s book muittašangirjjálašvuohta as such
but thinks that the author has shaped historical material into fction (Hirvonen
1999, 76.). Also, Lehtola has stated that the difference between Vest’s book and
typical biography lies in his ‘fctional approach and perspective’ (Lehtola 1995, 66;
Lehtola 2004, 100). In our chapter, we are interested in this demarcation between
muittašangirjjálašvuohta and fctional prose: How oral storytelling is turning into
reminiscence literature and/or fction; thus, should Vest’s book be read as a ‘true
story’ or fction?
The blending of documentary and fctional (or fction-like) expression is not very
exceptional in Sámi art, however. This is partly due to the need for Sámi artists to
operate in different felds of artistic production, starting from Nils-Aslak Valkeapää,
who was a yoiker, a poet, a composer, a painter and even an actor. The similar bor-
der crossing has been obvious even inside the conventional art genres, especially in
Sámi flm, in which Paul Anders Simma, for instance, has challenged the established
borders of documentary and fction. Lehtola has even characterized the documen-
tary flms of the beginning of the 2000s as ‘a prominent genre of art’ since not only
do documentarists use the means of art, but their works are also often personal
interpretations and statements in a strongly artistic way (Lehtola 2004, 124–126;
Lehtola 2015, 153). Jovnna-Ánde Vest has made his career consistently in the feld
of literary art, widening his skills for essays, translations and to other languages,
publishing books also in Finnish (Fredriksen 2012, 12–25).
Thus, we take the genre defnition as our starting point only to help us fnd
deeper thematic meanings in the book. We start from a preliminary assumption that
compared to muittašangirjjálašvuohta, aiming to construct a precise Zeitgeist or a

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picture of the period, Vest focuses more on the protagonist, an exceptional person,
whom he considers to illuminate something essential in those individuals and in that
community that he wants to describe. The character of Pikku-Vest, the father, and
his doings create many humourous or even comical situations in the book, suppos-
edly revealing the values and opinions of the small community.
We study these situations as the author’s interpretation of the rupture in the Sámi
society from the 1950s to the 1970s through the prism of one family. We focus on
the perspectives of three persons in the book: the mother, who is a guardian of tradi-
tions; the father, who represents the new era even in a comical way; and the son, who
falls between these two levels. The role of the frame story, focused on the experiences
and emotions of the son as the narrator, seems to become important for understand-
ing the central theme of the book.
Our reading is guided by the Sámi term gulahallat, which means ‘to be able to hear
each other, fnd out each other’s speech, understand each other, discuss, hear from
each other.’ An interpretation of a literary text is a kind of discussion or interaction
between the reader and the text, in which the understanding of context and culture
is considered essential (Fredriksen 2015, 77). The experience of the Sámi ways of
discussing, debating, arguing, telling a story and joking opens an understanding of
the culture and frames that serve as the primary source for interpreting the book.
The triangle of the narrator, audience and cultural discourse changes from oral
storytelling to literary expression. The oral storytelling forms a shared memory of
a family or a small community. As we recall experiences, we organize and shape
memories into a narrative format, recreating the past (Abrams 2016, 79). We com-
bine the information stored in our autobiographical memory with the immediate
situation (Conway and Rubin 1993). This process is shaped by the context of telling,
and we take advantage of the social frameworks of memory (Abrams 2016, 79, 96).
Although the stories are adapted to the situation and the audience, the narrator does
not need to explain much of the context for listeners.
While memory may seem personal to us, it is always infuenced by shared memo-
ries. The framework of collective memory limits and binds our most personal memo-
ries to each other (Halbwachs 1950, 53). This way, while remembering, we also
gulahallat, discuss with the framework of collective memory. The author of the book
interacts with the audience he imagines: He himself acts as an interrogator, narrator,
listener and writer (Hirvonen 1999, 92).

THE FRAME OF REMEMBRANCE

Jovnna Ánde Vest’s book ČNB (1988) is son’s narrative of his father, but it also
describes the Indigenous Sámi society in the Deatnu region on the Finnish side from
the 1950s to the 1970s. These were the decades when the Sámi culture experienced
a profound transformation with the arrival of an overwhelming wave of new infu-
ences, changes in livelihoods and, for instance, children experiencing boarding
school. Most of the people living in the region were small-scale farmers and fsher-
men; some of them were reindeer herders (Lehtola 2004, 58–62; see also Alakorva
et al. in this volume).
The Deatnu region is known for its rich storytelling tradition, which is also
refected in the fact that most of the prose literature in Sámi language was produced

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in this area during the 1980s and the 1990s (Lehtola 2004, 96). The revolution of
narrative tradition in the 1960s and 1970s coincides with the changes of livelihoods.
The situation was also affected by the fact that children lived in boarding schools.
The younger generation knew supernatural narratives only by name as they were
no longer suitable stories in the Laestadian atmosphere (about Laestadianism, see
Olsen in this volume). Younger generations renewed the old supernatural tradition
in the direction of the humour tradition (Valtonen 2020). Humour, which has a
central role in Vest’s book, has been essential to Sámi storytelling (see also Kyrölä in
this volume). Even painful things can be remembered from a distance with the help
of humour.
Because Vest did not know a lot about his father’s childhood and youth, he decided
to write what he remembered about him. In the preface, Vest reminds the reader that it
is not an objective historical document of his father – rather, one person’s memories of
him – so the picture is not by any means perfect. Vest cannot ft his father into a model
of a historical biography, in which events are presented in chronological order. The
structure of the book is episodic and acts like a memory: themes form short chapters
in which one memory leads to another, regardless of chronology.
Vest describes his writing process of the book with the Sámi verb duddjot. Its
primary meaning is to make handicraft, but the term can also refer to other kinds of
doing – creating, giving birth, causing, infuencing, modifying. In an interview with
Yle Sápmi in 2017, Vest stated: ‘I thought that I build up the man I have not got
along with, my own father, duddjot my own father. And I probably made him better
than he really was and took certain liberties’ (Näkkäläjärvi and Vest 2017). Thus,
the author admits that his representation of his father does not fully correspond to
reality. He utilizes the freedom of a storyteller to make the stories better and corrects
the relationship with his father by remembering him.
The nature of muittašangirjjálašvuohta includes subjectivity and the presentation
of the limitations of memory as well as a kind of modesty. Vest highlights this in the
preface by saying: ‘This is a booklet compiled from the memories of one person.’ He
seems to have an idea of what biography is like as a genre and what kind of people
it is written about:

I thought Dad was not the kind of person to write books about. He was not a
highly educated, miraculous man and he did not even come from a high family.
He was known only in the northernmost Finnish side of Sápmi. But as I thought
about this for a longer time, I found that there was much worth telling in my
father’s life. So I started compiling my memories and writing them down on
paper.
(ČNB, 5)

Since the memories of his father did not ft into the model of biography, he started
to remember his father in the manner of oral tradition. He decided to write based
on what had ‘gripped inside him during their life together’ (ČNB, 5). Emphasizing
the limitations of memory suggests that the author is familiar with the genres of
Western biographical literature that are based on facts or written documents and
are considered nonfction. Knowledge of autobiographical literature is evident in
passages in which the narrator describes his own experiences and feelings, making

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an account of his past (Lejeune 1989, 4–23). In oral narration, memory limitations
need not be emphasized. In muittašangirjjálašvuohta, however, the story is locked
into written form. The audience is wider, and there is a need for more background
information than in local narration, in which the audience knows the narrator, his
story repertoire and the characters in the stories in real life.
The book begins with a memory of the moment Jovnna-Ánde, the narrator, hears
about his father’s death. It has become etched precisely in his mind, and the narrator
describes the situation so vividly that it seems to happen before the reader’s eyes. It
is a fashbulb memory that has great personal signifcance to the narrator (Abrams
2016, 83).

I turn the radio on so I can hear the midday news while eating. Finnish plane miss-
ing in Norway. The piece of news does not concern me that much. Unfortunate
accidents happen all the time in this world, I am thinking. In addition to the
pilot, there are fve Sámi on board, the news reader continues. . . . We will dis-
cuss this in more detail at the end of the broadcast. Five Sámi, fve Sámi, rings
in my ears.
(ČNB, 7)

The narrator does not describe his emotions, but rather the reaction of his body.
Emotions are hard to recall, but usually people remember the events that caused
the emotion (Abrams 2016, 87). The frst chapter is told in the present tense, as if
the events were happening right now. As in yoik, the narrator draws a picture of the
events in front of us (Hirvonen 1999, 155).
The death of the father creates a frame for remembrance, a motivation for
remembering, as if the narrator would begin to reminisce about his father at that
table. As long as the person is remembered, he will live among us. Remembering
with warmth involves humour. Therefore, remembering and storytelling serve as a
tribute to the person being remembered, just like yoik. The book also serves as a
tribute to the narrator’s childhood Roavvesavu and its people as the author hopes
in the preface.

MOTHER AS A GUARDIAN OF TRADITIONS

In Sámi research, one of the main values of the Sámi society has been identifed as
birgen, referring to coping with problems and taking responsibility for one’s own
actions, being independent in one’s own life (Balto 1997, 122–124). On the other
hand, in her study of boarding schools, Minna Rasmus highlights how birgen
may become a social norm leading to birgenbággu, compulsory coping with any-
thing without any help (Rasmus 2008, 94). It can lead to a situation in which it
is impossible to show weaknesses or vulnerabilities. A Trickster like Pikku-Vest,
however, ignores these kinds of invisible rules by jumping over fences, making
these borders visible. He is an impatient character who randomly shifts from one
interest to another and recklessly takes on new infuences. The Sámi tradition
has also taken infuences from the outside, but reasonably by need. In this way,
Pikku-Vest violates both his own community’s and outsiders’ image of what a
‘real Sámi’ is like.

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One way to reveal these invisible values of the community is to study what is it
that Pikku-Vest does not ‘do right’ in the book or what he should do if he would
like to follow the ideal of ‘a true man’ or ‘a true Sámi.’ One basic value mentioned
at the beginning of the book is a work ethic: ‘the value of a man was measured by
how many acres he had plowed into a feld and how many healthy children he had
brought into this world’ (ČNB, 31–32). The father does not follow this norm. He
does not bother, for instance, to make enough hay or frewood for the winter. When
the frewood runs out in the winter, he fells fresh birches that do not burn properly,
and the mother is left to beg dry lighters from the grandmother. Running out of hay
in the middle of winter also requires help from the grandmother.
The norm of birgen prevents the mother asking for help because it is perceived
as humiliating in the family. On the other hand, according to traditional Sámi val-
ues, people are not directly criticized and should not lose face even if they have
made a mistake. These values are refected in the actions of both the mother and
the grandma, Pikku-Vest’s own mother. To respect the norm of birgen and to avoid
embarrassing the father, the grandma and the mother take tremendous pains to
smuggle the hay and keep the situation a secret both from other villagers and from
Pikku-Vest himself. This takes the whole winter. The humour arises from the father’s
careless comment, as he has no idea about the women’s efforts: ‘So we survived
through this winter without a worry’ (ČNB, 10–11). Sámi humour is often subtle
and ironic, a way to turn power dynamics around (Fredriksen 2018).
The mother uses the same tactic when the father now and then falls into an
endless debate with the storekeeper’s wife, forgetting everything else. The father is
needed at home, and he needs a reminder of his duties. However, he must not be
embarrassed in the eyes of the people following the debate. At frst, the mother walks
half secretly through the store yard to the Deatnu riverbank, so that the father will
see her. If the desired result is not achieved, she walks more slowly past the store
stairs and fnally comes to stand on the stairs, if necessary ‘Then Pikku-Vest used to
get out in a hurry, no matter how unfnished the debate was’ (ČNB, 23). Humour
arises from the complex process or play by which the mother picks up the father
from the store. The father looks like a child who cannot control himself, and the
father’s persuasion is seen as upbringing.
These examples show how women keep everyday life going and take care of
birgen in many ways, instead of the father, who only appears to be the head of the
family. The mother is the guardian of the traditions who takes care of the family’s
relations with the community. She has control over many things, such as religious
life: ‘Even if the father was the one with control over weekdays, the mother decided
how Sundays were spent’ (ČNB, 28). The father must come with the mother to
Laestadian gatherings although he is not very interested on them, and every Sunday,
the family reads Postilla at home (about Laestadian gatherings, see Olsen in this
volume).
The mother also tries to take care of the kinship, which has traditionally been
very important to the Sámi. Pikku-Vest is not interested in kinship, as the narrator
states: ‘I have never heard him say “how are you, dear cousin?” People who were in
the habit of talking to cousins and reminding of kinship, did not like the Dad’s chilly
attitude’ (ČNB, 122). Compared to the father, the mother stays as a background fg-
ure. Only after the father’s death and when the huge debts are revealed, ‘the mother

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hiding behind the father’s back becomes like another person’ (ČNB, 154). With her
persistence, the mother guides the family out of the debt spiral.

FATHER – ALWAYS LOOKING FOR

SOMETHING BIGGER
Traditionally the Sámi gained their self-confdence inside their own community
by working as well as by their special skills. However, wartime represented a
break when the men spent up to fve years on the battlefront. As elsewhere in
Finland, the effects of life on the front manifested themselves as a kind of over-
excitement and unrest among the Deatnu Sámi. For some, this meant alcohol
abuse and violence; others resorted to the stringency of the Laestadian faith
(Lehtola 2004, 48). Pikku-Vest’s exuberant zest to search for new ways seems
to be a refection of the same unrest, although his kind of character had always
appeared in Sámi society.
The narrator points out, however, that wartime did not mean merely negative
things: ‘I believe that war has infuenced my Dad more than many others. He had
embraced everything new that the world could give.’ Most importantly, on the
front ‘Sámi boys had discovered that in a tight spot they were at least as good as
Finns, and that boosted their self-esteem. They were the frst generation to get better
acquainted with that famous láddelaš, a southerner’ (ČNB, 19–20). These observa-
tions are the context in which Pikku-Vest ventures to new livelihoods and also tries
his wings in the activities of the Finnish society, such as municipal administration
and Sámi politics.
The father no longer regards traditional Sámi occupations as the sole possibility
in life, which is also refected in his wish to educate his children beyond the common
primary school. They consider it just as another case of Vest arrogance, since the
people have always ‘earned their living with their hands so far’ (ČNB, 49–51). The
father follows the schooling of his children, evaluates textbooks and unexpectedly
reveals that he knows even Swedish, which he has studied during wartime through
a correspondence school. He gets angry when he notices that his son’s grade for
classroom behaviour has dropped from 10 to 9, until it turns out that the reason
was smoking: ‘I was afraid you had started tinkering with that damn liquor’ (ČNB,
49–51).
The protagonist’s aspirations to look for new possibilities escalate to exaggerated
proportions, however. In his self-indulgence, Pikku-Vest reminds us of a Trickster,
a North American Indian ‘selfsh-buffoon’ character whose actions, guided by his
desire for food and sex, seem incredibly foolish (Carroll 1984). Instead of food
and sex, Pikku-Vest desires motorcycles, cars, tractors and better cows that produce
more:

When Ville bought a car Dad in turn acquired a motorcycle. I remember mom’s
shame when dad showed up on a Jawa motorcycle in the yard. What a fool
again, mom seemed to think. People went to see the vehicle and asked dad to
ride a little on it. Grandma gasped for breath, almost choked as we few on the
Jawa to grandpa’s yard.
(ČNB, 31)

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The narrator describes the father´s enthusiasm: ‘He was almost drunk from the
machines that were starting to appear in the northernmost Sápmi’ (ČNB, 31).
There is always something new and better in his sight, and when he fnds some-
thing brand new, he abandons earlier fndings. As in the citation at the beginning
of this chapter, the family’s life revolves restlessly ‘like events on a flm reel rotating
too fast’ (ČNB, 36).
Native American Trickster stories serve social purposes: while entertaining, they
guide and act as tools for social control by highlighting community norms and
behavioural limits (Ballinger 2004, 60; Carroll 1984). Equally, Pikku-Vest tests the
values and norms of the community through his actions and omissions. Although
the community does not consider his actions very sensible, Pikku-Vest acts as a her-
ald of the new age. The comedy arises from Pikku-Vest’s overblown opinions of him-
self. Confdent of his own driving skills, he almost runs people over and causes other
accidents with his car. He does not trust specialist help even in such tasks as building
a boat, which was traditionally entrusted to professionals in the Deatnu area. When
others see his poor effort of a boat, he explains that ‘the boys have started making a
boat, but it seems to become a sledge’ (ČNB, 106).
High opinions and limited skills often result in amusing failures. As a breadwin-
ner, Pikku-Vest is a hopeless idealist. When he goes to catch salmon, he carries only
the biggest lures, which attract no ordinary salmon, because he fantasizes about the
‘biggest one.’ He never goes to a cloudberry fen where he could certainly fnd cloud-
berries but wanders with his children through wilderness in search of the absolute
best cloudberry fen. He does not want to be on the same cloudberry fen as others.
Such behaviour violates the common law in which families have their own territo-
ries, including cloudberry fens (see Labba; and Joks in this volume). This is another
reference to Father’s reluctance to pay attention to traditional values.
Although the right kind of silence is highly appreciated in Sámi traditions, the
ability to speak sharply to public servants or other Finns, for example, can win high
praise. The self-confdence and skills in Finnish language, both acquired in the war-
time, encourage the father to debate with any Finn, like the storekeeper, or rather
his wife, since the storekeeper himself cannot cope with Pikku-Vest (ČNB, 20). The
father’s way of forgetting all other duties puts his actions in a comical light since
the family is almost left without bread at the dinner table. As shown earlier, for the
mother as a guardian of traditions, the father’s actions appear to be foolishness
because a debate or a new moped cannot be utilized at everyday work; thus, it does
not promote the birgen of the family. Trickster stories are discussions between the
individual and the community, and the humour arises from this confict (Ballinger
2004, 60).
The family faces tragedy, and the tone of the book changes when the house that
the father had built over ten years burns down. The fre is caused by electricity that
had just been drawn into the house. The event is represented as bad luck, but it
also seems to involve sloppiness since the burning starts while the father is painting
inside. Pikku-Vest has visited every house in the village to talk about the importance
of insurance. Nevertheless, he has insured his own house for only part of its value.
The burning of the house leads to the slaughter of reindeer when a new house must
be paid for with loan money. The irony of fate is that the modern times that Pikku-
Vest has been bringing to Roavvesavu destroy his life’s work as a reindeer herder.

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Although Pikku-Vest has not previously cared about haymaking or cow care, he
dedicates himself to farming after the house burns. He sees it as a new beginning after
he has fnished his reindeer. The father’s impatience and lack of persistence comes
forth when he starts to buy continuously better and better cows: ‘With the same
excess as he had previously bought motorcycles and cars, he now began to buy cows’
(ČNB, 90). Eventually he buys so many cows that they cannot ft in his barn. After the
death of the father, it turns out that he is heavily in debt because of the cow trading.
Pikku-Vest’s ambivalence is refected in how he impatiently wanders from one
task to another and does not succeed in any feld. The Trickster fails to ft into the
social world, and the behaviour is at the same time funny and dangerous. The stories
themselves are not funny, but people laugh at the behaviour of the Trickster. Thus,
laughter serves as an instrument of social control (Ballinger 2004, 60–66). On the
other hand, the Trickster is an ambiguous character just like the father. Coping,
birgen, means something different to the father than it does to the mother. It can
also be seen as an ability to adapt to different conditions and new situations (Gaup
2001, 21–22).
With his way with words and self-confdent attitude, the father drifts to a career
of a spokesman. During the narrator’s childhood, the father rises to municipal gov-
ernment and becomes a well-known Sámi politician. When describing his father’s
toil at the typewriter, the narrator refers to the expectations that the Sámi have of an
ideal to continue living like the ancestors: ‘Dad never adopted the touch typing sys-
tem, but his fngers were probably not even created for that. They should have been
earmarking reindeer, mending a net or scratching livelihood from the earth for the
family’ (ČNB, 54–55). However, the father found his innermost self in a completely
new occupation and his own line of action, which is quite different from what it is
at home:

He had a marvellous skill to change with the environment. With strange people,
he was an archetype of moderation, great reason itself. When Dad explained
something quite thoroughly, most people largely believed that the thing was
probably so. . . . Dad never exhibited any kind of feeling of inferiority when
dealing with ‘masters.’ There was no person so highly educated that Dad could
not consider an equal.
(ČNB, 108)

The completely new occupation becomes the factor that also connects Pikku-Vest
to other locals. People start to come to fll out their papers with him. He is patient
and hardworking in dealing with people’s applications, tax papers and other off-
cial documents. ‘When he had to work with a wide variety of papers, he was very
patient – which otherwise was not his strongest point’ (ČNB, 107).

SON’S NARRATIVE – LONGING FOR SOMETHING

THAT DOES NOT EXIST
The love-hate relationship between the father and the son forms the frame story for
the book. The narrator describes, on one hand, his admiration for his father and
his active search for new opportunities. On the other hand, he is ashamed that his

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father is ridiculed for his mistakes and failures. The insight of the son – ‘I knew that
dad was different from others’ – comes to refect both sides of his feelings. When the
father buys a motorcycle and the villagers come to marvel at the vehicle, the narrator
describes his feelings as a boy: ‘These were the happiest moments in my life’ (ČNB,
31–32). Later, he speaks about frustration and even anger in a very similar situation.
The narrator describes his confusing role in the middle of ‘traditional’ Sámi com-
munity expectations and infuences brought by the new society. Through his mother,
he somehow belongs to the traditional community, while the father struggles in his
desire to reach out to something new. In a way, the son is left foating in between.
When the narrator is a little boy, he goes with his father everywhere – salmon
fshing, reindeer roundups and sale trips. Reindeer roundups are otherwise nice, but
when the father is drunk and plays cards in the evenings, the son hates his father. In
his fshing frenzy, the father drags the son with him in the small hours and uses him
as a rower and, furthermore, as a builder for fshing weirs. Instead of encouraging
him, however, the father gets angry at the son over small matters, which kills the
son’s interest in fshing. As the oldest son, he gets a lot of responsibility, such as sell-
ing fur shoes to Kárášjohka storekeepers. As a shy boy, he did not want that job, but
‘whether I wanted to or not, I had to leave’ (ČNB, 74). When the son does not receive
the shoes at the price set by the father, the matter is entrusted to the younger brother.
The narrator describes his father as a restless and impatient person who is critical
of his son. The burning of the house appears to be a turning point in their relation-
ship, and the tone of the narration changes. Instead of the humourous memories of
childhood, we hear the young boy’s critical, even bitter memories, of his father.

Painting became my job. There was a lot of work for an incompetent painter
like me. Worse than the work itself was that Dad came all the time to judge
my work. He thought I could not paint properly, and the work did not go fast
enough. He was standing behind my back, which I did not like at all. At the
beginning, tears came to my eyes when I heard Dad’s words behind my back.
The further my work progressed, the less I was interested in Dad’s grumbling.
I felt how anger flled me. The anger seemed to rise from the stomach to the
throat which it then squeezed viciously. I have learned afterwards that this kind
of squeezing in the throat is a sign of hurt feelings.
(ČNB, 64)

Pikku-Vest must overcome anxiety about the livelihood of his family, caused by his
own carelessness. The anxiety takes the shape of irritability and impatience, which
begins to bias the son’s opinion of his father over the years. The son does not fght
back but is silent and gathers anger inside: ‘All these misunderstandings accumu-
lated so tightly inside me that Dad had to disappear at frst, before they started to
gradually melt.’ According to him, it is ‘forbidden to reveal one’s feelings in front of
people’ in a Sámi community (ČNB, 98–99).
In the book, the narrator openly expresses his negative feelings and includes the
self-refection typical of autobiography (Lejeune 1989, 4). Expressing one’s own feel-
ings is not part of Sámi oral narration, although they might be referred to briefy (see
Lehtola in this volume). The frustration of the boy is refected in his feeling that the
father is more interested in animals than his children: ‘I got so angry when I saw Dad

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talking with the cows. There he is, pretending again, I thought bitterly’ (ČNB, 98).
The impatience of the father seems to affect the son. As he cannot express his anger
at his father, it releases in rage at the cows his father seems to love.

– Should shoot that damn cow!

Dad suddenly asked what I said in the feld.
– That I should have shot the damn cow, I replied rudely, still in anger.
– Well, what if you shot it?
– There would be one less, I fred squarely.
– What would we live with if you always shot a cow you have to run after?
Dad asked me calmly. He didn’t start shouting like he used to.
(ČNB, 99)

The narrator describes the situation from the perspectives of both the young boy and
the adult narrator. The young boy’s voice contains frustration, but the adult narrator
seems to understand that the father was a man with faws just like he himself. The
written form allows for the refection of his own feelings as if it were a fnal state-
ment about their relationship.
The father’s anxiety fnds relief only in nature, and the father and children’s joint
cloudberry picking trips became important family memories: ‘But once he got to the
edge of a fen, he became like a new person. The anxiety relaxed its pressure, and he
could breathe again more lightly for a while’ (ČNB, 84). The father forgets the wor-
ries that haunt him at the house. These trips help the children learn again about the
good sides of the father: ‘In these cloudberry picking journeys, I learned to know my
father better – and many other things’ (ČNB, 82). During these trips, he patiently
teaches his children the skills that are necessary in the wilderness.
The relationship with the father emerges to refect the son’s relationship with his
whole Sámi community: the tone is tender on one hand, very ironic and critical on the
other. Going to school, entirely away from the home area during secondary school,
signifes a transition phase in the son’s relationship with both his parents and his own
community. School opens new views on the world for him, but bullying in the boarding
school causes him traumas that do not raise great confdence in his own birgen.
Even if both the father and the son have similar experiences, the gap between them
grows wide: he does not understand what his father had to go through in the war,
and his father does not understand what his children have to bear in the boarding
school. In this contradiction and lack of mutual understanding, the narrator reveals
the same feld gap between postwar generations that became a large part of Sámi
studies during the next decades, mostly after Vest´s novel. The son´s character also
illuminates the emotions and experiences of insecurity, bitterness and trauma, which
are depicted in the research literature both as a burden of that dramatic change and
as a subsurface force for the revivalist actions of the later Sámi movement. (See e.g.
Sámi Culture in a New Era 1997.)
Studies on the boarding school life of the Sámi have established that many
children developed a contradictory attitude between home and boarding school.
Boarding school was a strange environment, and gradually, the relationship to home
became similar (Rasmus 2008, 90). The frame story of Vest’s book describes this
constant feeling of unfamiliarity, which extended to his later life. The book begins in

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a lonely bachelor apartment in a nameless city. The description reveals that the son
has adopted many bad habits that his father either warned him about or set a bad
example of himself.
Besides excessive use of alcohol, the narrator mentions his gambling debts; play-
ing for money, which was so resented by his father, is part of his life, too. It becomes
evident that the son cannot process his feelings but hides in the superfcial pleasures
of the city instead. He pretends to be a tough man who does not let his feelings show,
even among his best comrades. When the father dies, he does not ask for leave from
work. Once, when sipping beer with the guys, he suddenly bursts out crying. He
is sure that they will drive him out ‘like [a] no-good dog.’ To his great surprise, his
friends comfort him, asking to tell them about his father (ČNB, 153).
The father’s death releases some pent-up feelings in the son’s mind. Even in adult-
hood, he seems to be foating between his home area and the new city environment
in some sort of limbo. He would like to live in Roavvesavu and dreams about it, but
when he returns there, he already longs to be elsewhere. ‘Another week and I can
hide again in the human sea of the big city which should be my home and where
every other night I dream of my father and old Roavvesavu. While it was still alive’
(ČNB, 129). The last sentence illustrates that the son longs for the home area of his
childhood, which no longer exists; nor does his father. The childhood home area
has changed, and when the son’s relationships to his kin are also weak just like his
father’s, he soon hurries away.
The death of the father is also unusual, as you can expect from a Trickster. The
lost plane with fve Sámi politicians is never found, leaving the family foating in
uncertainty for a long time. The father’s journey ends at the water’s edge as the plane
is suspected of crashing into the sea off the coast of Norway. The case is followed by
rumours: according to one, the plane was suspected of being lost on its fight path
to Soviet territory, and Sámi politicians would be imprisoned there; according to
another rumour, the accident was believed to be related to NATO military exercises
in the vicinity of the suspected disappearance site. Finally, a memorial service is held
at an empty grave. With the death of the father, the old Roavvesavu is slowly fading
away as the old generation dies and the young move out. The title of the book (The
Reindeer Path Ends at the Water’s Edge) also refers to this.
The contradiction between childhood memories and reality has a lot in com-
mon with a theme that was essential to the whole of Sámi art from literature to
song music in the 1970s and 1980s. Numerous poems and hit songs contrasted
longing for an idyllic childhood with ‘tainted’ unfamiliar modernity, which made a
Sámi youth feel bad (Lehtola 2004, 106–108). The father and son’s relationship, as
described in Vest’s book, demonstrates that even childhood was not as harmonious
as he imagines later. The father’s death and unlocking memories through writing
trigger a recovery process, in which the imbalance in the narrator’s own life traces
back to childhood experiences and gradually begins to unwind.

CONCLUSION
In the introduction, we raised the question of Jovnna-Ánde Vest´s novel in relation
to muittašangirjjálašvuohta and whether it should be read as a ‘true story’ or fc-
tion. In the context of the Sámi oral storytelling tradition, however, the question of

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whether the story is fact or fction is irrelevant. The storyteller is free to modify the
story aesthetically, and in a way, that suits the audience by emphasizing the points
they want. As said, the blending of documentary and fctional elements is nothing
very exceptional in Sámi art.
The starting point of Vest´s novel is in muittašangirjjálašvuohta, which has been pop-
ular among the Sámi because of the rapid cultural change. Muittašangirjjálašvuohta
brings up experiences and memories from a time which was dramatically different
than the contemporary era. Therefore, they are worth telling now, although they
were everyday life then. Although Vest’s novel resembles muittašangirjjálašvuohta
in many ways, the narration of the book approaches fction. The narrator frames
his father’s story inside his own story, bringing in the self-refection typical of
autobiography.
What is interesting in Vest´s novel is that he takes this dramatic change in focus
in order to analyze it rather than just depict it as in reminiscence literature, in which
the reconstruction of the Zeitgeist often takes even nostalgic tones. The protago-
nist Pikku-Vest, the father, does not follow the pattern of everyday life among the
Deatnu Sámi or Sámi in general – he is more an exception in this context. He is like
a born fctional character, a Trickster, who, with his seemingly random choices and
actions, sets off unexpected processes which reveal subsurface structures by shed-
ding light on the contradiction between traditional life and the new era in a small
Sámi community.
However, with his exaggerated attitude and self-indulgence, Trickster makes vis-
ible the unbalance of this change. Moreover, the frame story of the narrator, the son,
gives the story a double exposure, refecting the change as a more general phenom-
enon. The son in the novel represents the generation which was caught between
the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ Sámi lives. Vest’s novel gives a detailed, everyday
scale depiction of the process that was mostly studied later in Sámi research – the
rift which meant a deep and many times even a painful key experience for the Sámi
generations during the postwar decades.

REFERENCES
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ČNB = Čáhcegáddái nohká boazobálggis.
The quotations from the ČNB have been translated by the authors.
Vest, J.-Á. 1988. Čáhcegáddái nohká boazobálggis [The Reindeer Path Ends at the Water’s
Edge]. Kárasjohka: Davvi media.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

THE RIVER BREAKS – AND

FREEZES
Sámi women in Laestadianism


Torjer A. Olsen

PROLOGUE
It is early June in the village of Birtavarre/Gáivuonbahta. From the Sea Sámi farm
Holmenes you can sense that something is happening. As you look up to the moun-
tain, you both hear and see the river Vuoksajohka breaking. From being frozen
throughout winter and all the way through spring and spring-summer, the river is
now ready to change form, direction and speed. The water is almost jumping down
the mountain, and the waterfall of Vuoksajohka is once again open for all to see.

INTRODUCTION
The village Birtavarre/Gáivuonbahta in Gáivuotna-Kåfjord-Kaivuono was the home
village of Berit, who lived from 1875 to 1951. Berit was a Sea Sámi woman who was
highly respected and spoken of warmly within the village and the Laestadian con-
gregation. However, she could not – and never asked to – be a preacher as women
cannot be preachers in most Laestadian congregations. But she was remarkable:
‘God had given her extraordinary spiritual gifts, to such an extent that many meant
she would have become a preacher if the calling could be given to women’ (Nyvold
1951, author’s translation).
With the story of Berit as a starting point, I will present Laestadianism, focus-
ing in particular on women and the situation and role of women in this move-
ment that is and has been important in parts of Sápmi since the mid–18th century.
Laestadianism, even in its diversity, is a conservative Christian (Protestant Lutheran)
revivalist movement with clear pietist characteristics. It highlights the need for the
individual to ‘wake up’ to become a true Christian and join a community of true
Christians: i.e. the Laestadian congregation. The Laestadian way of reading the Bible
and the confessional scriptures is a literal one that resembles fundamentalism.

86 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-7
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Further, I will tell the story of some of the silent or silenced women in Sápmi
and discuss the relationship between Laestadianism and the Sámi communities.
As suggested by the use of multilingual place names, the chapter also provides an
insight into the multilingual and multicultural context of the Sea Sámi areas. The Sea
Sámi were and are living alongside both other Sámi groups, Norwegians and Kvens
(one of the peoples of the north, living across the borders of Norway, Sweden and
Finland, with a language that is closely related to Finnish). With Norwegianization
entering into this, the already-blurry lines between the different groups have become
blurrier – in some places more so than in others.
Writing about Sápmi, women and Laestadianism requires looking to both the
past and the future. Laestadianism, in particular in the works of scholars from
Norway, has been connected strongly to ethnicity (Olsen 2010, 2017; Larsen 2020;
Drivenes and Niemi 2000; Bjørklund 1985; Nergård 2006). Laestadianism is even
described as Sámi Christianity. I reject this. Laestadianism does have a special place
in Sámi history, as do Sámi culture and language in Laestadian history. But this
does not apply all over Sápmi. It is worth noting that Laestadianism in Finland is a
quite different story. Here, the movement is stronger among Finns than among Sámi.
Laestadianism is the largest revival movement to grow out of the Nordic countries.
In conservative Christian movements, there tend to be three ideal types for the posi-
tion of women – the traditional or conventional woman’s role, the formal elite posi-
tion and the informal elite position (Seland 2002). This clearly resonates also with
Laestadianism. In addition to these three, I will argue that there is another ideal type to
be found in the Laestadian Sámi context: The mythical Sámi woman. There are at least
two of this kind in Laestadian history: Karen Nilsdaughter Nirpi/Jerpe Gáddja, who is
described as ‘mother of the Christians,’ and Milla Clementsdaughter/’Mary of Lapland,’
who is described as have played an important part in Laestadius’s proper awakening.
My perspective in the writing of this chapter comes from different sides. As a
researcher on issues of gender in Laestadianism, and mainly through a feminist per-
spective, I have a special interest in telling the stories of the often rather marginal-
ized women in this conservative Christian movement. The women in the branch of
Laestadianism that I know best, Lyngen Laestadianism from the coast of Norway/
Sápmi, were silenced in more than one way as many of them came from Sea Sámi
and Kven communities. They faced hard pressure from assimilation. My own back-
ground and heritage are also potentially important. A big part of my family heritage
is Sea Sámi, from the villages around Tromsø.
The research on Laestadianism, especially on the Norwegian side, has so far been
rather limited (Larsen 2020; Andreassen 2020). Some research has been pursued,
but it has been dominated by social scientists focusing on ethnicity and countercul-
ture. On gender and Laestadianism, there is some but not much work done, most of
it with women in Laestadianism as the primary or secondary topic (see cf. Snellman
2011; Jensen 2019; Kristiansen 2005, 2011; Elgvin 2018; Valkonen and Wallenius-
Korkalo 2015, 2016; Olsen 2008, 2010, 2017, 2018).

LAESTADIANISM IN SÁPMI
The Sámi world is and has been diverse. The religion of the Sámi prior to coloniza-
tion, assimilation and the transition to Christianity was a diverse nature religion

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about which there are limited sources of knowledge. It was a set of practices and
narratives that would vary from one area to another. Today, the majority of Sámi
are Christian in one way or another. The transition to Christianity in Sápmi hap-
pened gradually and not without force or resistance. There are many ways of being
Christian, from the more secular humanist version, via orthodox traditions in the
East Sámi area, to different conservative movements. Laestadianism is one of these,
found primarily in the North Sámi and Lule Sámi areas in Norway, Sweden and
Finland.
Laestadianism is a revivalist movement rooted in Northern Scandinavia. The
founder, Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–1861), was from Arjeplog/Árjepluovve and
worked as a minister in the Church of Sweden. His frst congregation was located
in Karesuando, a small village on the borders between Finland and Sweden, with a
large number of Sami inhabitants. A revival happened in the congregation early in
1845, when an increasing number of people started to attend the services, and the
word spread around to other areas. A few years later, the revival had reached both
Finland and Norway, and a growing number of ‘Laestadians’ were found in the
northern areas of Sápmi.
The movement grew steadily up to 1900. As part of the great emigration to
America in the late 19th century, Laestadianism moved overseas. This great out-
spread is part of the explanation of the many schisms that took place at the end of
the 19th century. Because of personal conficts, dogmatic changes, challenges from
a changing society and Protestantism’s internal tendency to schism (Bruce 1990),
the Laestadian movement was split into several fractions. They may have changed a
great deal but can still be counted as Laestadian due to their own understanding of
being rooted in the original Laestadian revival.
The history of Laestadianism has some striking and interesting correlations
both with the history of assimilation and with the places and peoples of the north.
Karesuando is in the middle of Sápmi, and it connects travelling routes to all direc-
tions, to Norway in the north and west, to Finland in the east, and south to the rest
of Sweden. The people dwelling in the area, past and present, are Sámi, Kven, Finnish,
Swedish and Norwegian. The seasonal migration routes of the reindeer herds and
herders of the area are important factors in the rapid spread and growth of the move-
ment. The Karesuando area has been a winter grazing settlement for many reindeer
herder families, who, come summer, migrated to different places along the coast of
Norway until the new border treaty between Norway and Sweden in the 1920s.
With its starting point located in a cross-ethnic and predominantly Sámi and
Kven area, the Laestadian movement became a cross-ethnic and predominantly Sámi
and Kven movement. At least this is descriptive of the early years. Many of those
living in the area were bi- or trilingual. When the movement grew and spread to new
areas, the number of Sámi and Kven members declined, relatively speaking, as the
number of Norwegians, Finns and Swedes increased.
The events in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino in northern Norway in 1852
were important in the grand narrative of Laestadianism as a Sámi movement.
Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino is a Sámi village in the inland of Norwegian Sápmi, not
far from Karesuando and the borders of Finland and Sweden. In 1852, there was a
violent uproar, in which a local police offcer and a merchant were killed, and several
others were hurt by an angry mob. The uproar came as a culmination of a series

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of events (Zorgdrager 1997). It was a confict with religious, psychological, social,

cultural and political aspects, affected by the state borders and related to changes in
reindeer herding and grazing lands. The rebellion is a confict with a history of its
own when it comes to its consequences and representations. It is not a story of Sámi
versus Norwegian. There were Sámi on both sides of the confict.
In order to look at and perceive Laestadianism as a particular Sámi type of
Christianity, there are a few criteria that need to be met. First off, a clear-cut major-
ity of the Sámi would have to be Laestadians. Secondly, a clear-cut majority of
Laestadians would have to be Sámi. Thirdly – and more complicated to deal with
– there should be a recognizable connection and continuity when it comes to mental-
ity or worldview. This means that Sámi and Laestadian mentalities and worldviews
need to coincide and be connected on a number of things.
Still, even though almost all North Sámi communities have been to some extent
affected by the movement, the majority of the Sámi are not Laestadians. Laestadian
meeting houses are not found in all Sámi villages. As a matter of fact, there are no
Laestadians at all in the South Sámi community. Even though there are Sámi in many
Laestadian congregations, the majority of Laestadians are not Sámi. In Finland,
home of the biggest Laestadian congregations, the number of Sámi members is rela-
tively small. Finally, there is the question of connected worldviews. The idea would
be that, within the Sámi population, there is some kind of cosmology, epistemol-
ogy or ontology that can also be found among Laestadians. This implies an idea of
continuity and of a way of thinking that is maintained through historical and social
changes – even through changes in ethnicity (cf. Myrvoll 2011 for the Lule Sámi
area; Nergård 2006 for the North Sámi area; and Outakoski 1991 for the historical
dimension). As Laestadianism today has moved far beyond the boundaries of Sápmi,
it is diffcult to draw far-reaching conclusions about a more general continuity.
What is evident is that Laestadianism has affected the Sámi society and its
practices in many ways. Gender is a part in this. Sanna Valkonen and Sandra
Wallenius-Korkalo (2015) have argued, from interviews with women who have left
Laestadianism, that Laestadianism clearly has had an impact on several aspects of
Sámi life and practices. A visible expression of this is clothing and the design of the
gákti, the Sámi dress. In Ohcejohka, the gákti is more modest than in other areas,
something that could have come as a result of the Laestadian claims of modesty
and judgement of silk and silver (Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo 2015; see also
Nylander in this volume). This is interesting and may seem to coincide with other
areas, across the different branches of Laestadianism. The gáktis of areas like Skánik
and the entire Sea Sámi area are all similarly modest and downplayed in design.
However, this requires more research in order to come to clear conclusions about the
causalities as, for instance, the Guovdageaidnu gákti is highly decorated despite the
local Laestadian tradition and presence (about Guovdageaidnu gákti, see Magga,
S.-M. in this volume).
The same goes for the impact of Laestadianism on the view and sentiment on gender
and sexuality in Sámi communities (see also Kyrölä in this volume). Laestadianism,
along with other conservative Christian movements and ideologies, has introduced
a strongly patriarchal gender ideology (more on this later). Valkonen and Wallenius-
Korkalo (2015) argue that Laestadianism may have given Sámi culture a more dis-
paraging attitude towards women and even caused some to downplay some of their

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visible Sámi traditions (see also Kuokkanen 2007). Here, it is important to note that
their participants have all left the Laestadian movement and are clearly biased in
their critical stories. There is room for more research with Sámi Laestadian women
on these issues.
I take Laestadianism in the Sea Sámi area as starting point in this chapter. It is a
way of turning the tables, of letting a Sámi periphery be the center. Writing about
Laestadianism does not require this as the movement is found in larger parts of
Sápmi. However, it is a way of proving a point and of telling the story from some-
where. The Sea Sámi live – as the name suggests – along the coast. It is a complex
category as the Sea Sámi are not a group with fxed boundaries. An example from
the Sea Sámi and Laestadian village Kaldfjord/Gálláferd outside Tromsø, a place I
will return to later on, can illustrate the fuidity and complexity. At the end of the
19th century, there were three different Sámi dialects spoken in Kaldfjord/Gálláferd:
‘Appe-samme,’ or ‘ocean Sámi,’ a particular dialect of this village and some neigh-
bouring small islands; ‘vuönn-samme,’ or ‘fjord Sápmi,’ a mixture of the Sea Sámi
dialect of the fjords around Tromsø and appe-samme; and the North Sámi language
spoken by reindeer-herding Sámi who had the island of Kvaløya/Sállir as summer
homeland (Pedersen 2013). From the 1700s onwards, quite a few Sámi families who
had been moving between the coast and the inland chose to settle in coastal areas on
the Norwegian side of the border. In the Sea Sámi areas, some of them would mix
with the ones already living there.
When it comes to the Laestadian revival, there were existing connections already
in place before the revival. The spread and growth of the revival around 1850 that
coincided with the start of the Norwegian assimilation policy. This Norwegianization
policy struck all minorities in Norway hard. It struck all Sámi hard. But the coast
was hit the hardest. As many Sea Sámi became Laestadians, the congregation cre-
ated spaces for the continued use of the Sámi (and Kven and Finnish) languages.
This aspect of Laestadianism has been well known and highlighted by scholars (cf.
Bjørklund 1985). Still, as Norwegianization lasted for approximately 100 years,
it changed the Sámi communities. Thus, the Laestadian congregations were also
Norwegianized.
From the 1970s onwards, the revitalization process caught momentum in the
Sea Sámi areas, leading many in the Norwegianized villages to look into their close
family history. In Berit’s home area, Norwegianization had marginalized the Sámi
language, forcing many Sámi to leave or hide their Sámi identity. Still, this area was
to regain its position as a Sea Sámi place in the decades that followed, especially
through the important annual international Indigenous festival Riddu Riđđu. At the
same time, within the Laestadian parts of the communities, not that many would
take part in the revitalization (Olsen 2018; Lervoll 2007).

GENDER AND ORGANIZATION IN LAESTADIANISM

The leaders of the Laestadian congregation are preachers. The level of organization
varies from place/fraction to place/fraction, but most common is that the group of
preachers is led by a council of the most prominent ones. The preachers are all men.
When it comes to gender, the preachers speak in favor of a gender structure with a
clear-cut male dominance. The man is supposed to be head of both the family and

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the congregation. The organization was and is run by men in all formal roles. No
Laestadian ‘feminism’ has emerged to challenge the traditional view, but there are
some changes to be found as to how gender is both structured and practiced. Young
people, young women especially, see themselves as being to a certain extent free from
the traditional boundaries (Snellman 2011; Olsen 2008).
A rare exception to the rule was the Swede Mathilda Fogman (1835–1921), who
had a function as the secretary for Juhani Raattamaa, who was Laestadius’s suc-
cessor as leader of the growing movement. Fogman has not been talked or written
about much within the movement. However, a 2007 book (Palo 2007) published by
a Laestadian publisher had the title Mathilda Fogman – andlig moder i tidiga laes-
tadianismen [Mathilda Fogman – Spiritual Mother in Early Laestadianism (author’s
translation)]. In this sense, even Fogman is presented, in almost mythical terms, as a
spiritual mother.
Through decades of institutionalization, all branches of the Laestadian movement
turned into a number of organizations with a number of different ways of doing
things in different local communities. As the movement offcially split into several
fractions – and new congregations – in 1899 and the years following, it is impossible
to speak of Laestadianism as one congregation, one organization or even one kind
of organization. Still, there are some joint features – such as when gender is a factor.
In Finland, it has been argued that Laestadianism had to adjust to the patriarchy of
the Finnish church (Snellman 2011). Something similar may have also been the case
in Sweden and Norway.
Further, within Laestadian discourse, there is a tendency that women are located
in home and family and presented as having a primary function as mothers (Snellman
2011; Olsen 2008, 2010). This, alongside the male responsibilities as leaders, is
framed by the idea of vocation: God calls men and women to different areas and
duties. An asymmetrical relationship between men and women is characteristic of
Laestadianism’s – and most pietist Christian movements’ – basic ideas on gender.
With reference to the Bible and the scriptures, a patriarchy is articulated, giving
men authority over women (and other men). Conservative Christian movements
that came to life in the 19th century generally remained within the gender ideology
of that century, even when moving into the next one (Olsen 2008). In the majority
of Laestadianism, only men have access to formal public and ritual leadership posi-
tions. On the informal side, the picture is different. As shown in previous works
(Olsen 2008, 2010, 2018), however, the patriarchy of the Laestadian movement has
been contested, as is common with the patriarchy of conservative Christian move-
ments (Nyhagen Predelli 2000).

MILLA AND KAREN: THE SPIRITUAL MOTHERS

Milla ‘Mary’ Clemensdaughter has been granted an important role in relation to
the origin and spread of the movement, as the redeeming mother of the Laestadian
movement. Laestadius’s encounter with Milla took place in 1845. Almost ten years
passed, however, before he told the myth-like story of what happened:

In the winter of the year 1844, I came to Åsele Lapland to conduct exami-
nations. Here I met some Readers, who were of the more moderate kind.

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Among them was a certain Lapp girl named Mary who, upon having heard
my communion sermon, opened up her entire heart to me. This simple girl
had experiences in the order of grace which I have never heard before. She
had travelled long distances in her search for light in the darkness. In her
travels she had fnally come to Pastor Brandell in Nora, and when the girl
opened up her heart to him, Brandell freed her of doubt; through him, the
girl was led to living faith.
And I thought: ‘Here is another Mary who sits at Jesus’ feet. And only now’ –
I thought – ‘now I see the way which leads to life; it had been hid from me, until
I had opportunity to converse with Mary.’ Her simple story of her wanderings
and experiences made such a deep impression in my heart that the light dawned
for me also; I was able to feel that evening, which I spent in Mary’s company, a
foretaste of heavenly joy. . . .] Upon returning to my parish in Karesuando, my
sermons took on a more strident coloring.
(Læstadius 1979)

Gustaf Dahlbäck (1950) has gone furthest in the investigation of the historical
aspects of the Milla event. And he has managed to identify ‘Mary the Lapp girl’ as
Milla Clementsdaughter, a Sámi girl who was taken care of by the minister Johan
Berglund. Milla was part of the revival around Pehr Brandell in Nora. Milla was a
usual nickname for Mary.
The description of Mary was put together by elements that were of great impor-
tance within the Laestadian movement. Mary’s location in the wilderness, in the
periphery, distinguished her from the established and central church and Christianity.
As a Sámi, she was distinguished from the Swedes. As an awakened Christian, she
was distinguished from the many without a ‘living faith.’ As a simpleton, she was
different from educated people. Finally, as being the one who redeemed Laestadius,
Mary became the role model for a revivalist movement in which any awakened
Christian can give absolution.
By letting the term ‘mythical’ enter, I open a large feld of theorizing. Although
the stories told about Milla are diffcult to place entirely under the category of myth,
they share some aspects. The stories are not to be read as objective refections of
actual history. Characters with mythical functions are hence characters who point
beyond their frst appearance. In this sense, myth is seen as an ideological utter-
ance (Lincoln 1999). They are told of in a way that serves the storyteller or his or
her group, strata or ideology. The myth becomes a symbolic narrative, a narrative
that points beyond what is immediately given. In this sense, particular persons can
become useful – in a mythical sense – as they are able to communicate. Here, ‘Milla’
becomes ‘Mary of Lapland.’
In some of the research on Laestadianism as well as in internal historiography,
Mary is considered a proof of a positive attitude towards women and a proof of
women not being oppressed within the movement (cf. Elgvin 2018). It is, however,
both possible and more plausible to analyze it quite differently. Gender-related sym-
bols may refer to gender in ways that affrm or reverse, or they may even have little
at all to do with male and female roles (Bynum 1986). Laestadius’s story of Mary
does not necessarily have any consequences for the understanding of Laestadian
gender roles and gender construction.

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The femininity of Mary of Lapland can be seen as being part of the representation
of Mary as a peripheral character. Her main mythical function is to be the mother
of the awakening, both Laestadius’s own and the movement as such. In a gender
situation like this, womanhood or femininity seems to be used in a particular way in
the interpretation of history. The spatial dimension in the story of Mary is a major
one. Being named ‘Mary of Lapland,’ Milla was given a certain location. That is, the
location is not that certain and univocal. The signifer ‘Lapland’ points in different
directions, towards the ethnic dimension and towards aspects of periphery. This set
her apart from the greater society, from the Swedish state, from the church. Her
Sáminess put her closer to nature, closer to what Laestadius considered ‘real’ and
pious. And it gave her a certain aspect of mystique (about Sámi representations, see
Aikio in this volume).
Karen Nirpi (1830–1886) is known to be the one who brought the Laestadian
revival to the Marka Sámi area in Norway. Karen was from Gratangen and was the
daughter of the noaidi (religious leader) Jerpe. She is often known by her Sámi patro-
nym Jerpe Gáddja. Because of seasonal migration, many Sámi in this area had homes
on both sides of the state borders. Thus, Karen attended to confrmation school in
Jukkasjärvi on the Swedish side at the time the Laestadian revival came there. She
became active in the movement and took part in bringing the revival to her second
home in Gratangen. The exact course of affairs and what role she played are diffcult
to pinpoint exactly from the sources we have. Nonetheless, she is talked of within
the movement as ‘the mother of the Christians.’ Roald E. Kristiansen (2005) argues
that Karen, being the daughter of the noaidi and the awakened Christian, was the
perfect symbol and expression of the new dawn. Further, he argues that through this,
Laestadianism was articulated as a vernacular Sámi kind of Christianity. Breaking
with the old religion of noaidevuohta – a North Sámi term chosen to describe the
Indigenous Sámi religion from before Christianity (Kaikkonen 2018) – in order to
bring Laestadius’s new pietist Christianity, Karen – and the Sámi community in the
area – changed. There is a parallel to the story of Milla here: In the narrative – and
here, Kristiansen’s scholarly presentation touches the religious one – Karen is the one
who brings true faith (2005).
In both Milla’s and Karen’s narratives, their Sáminess is a central point. In Karen’s
story, there is clearly a similar element to Milla’s story: Her being Sámi is a way of
reversing the grand narrative. Instead of true Christian faith coming from the male,
Swedish center, it comes from a Sámi woman on the periphery. At the same time,
the position and standpoint of the narrator in both stories is an intriguing one.
Laestadius was the main narrator of the Milla story. He was the one who turned her
from Milla to Mary through his story. The Sámi identity of Milla played a part in the
narrative. In Karen’s case, there are several narrators. The preacher Anton Karlsen
(1986), in his history of the Laestadian revival in the area, emphasized the fact that
it was the reindeer-herding Sámi (‘the Lapp nomads’) who brought Laestadianism
to the area. Karen was presented as having the key role in this, but not without
resistance from the Norwegian locals, who frst termed the emotional expressions
of the religious sermons ‘fnnetusse’ (Sámi madness, author’s translation). The nar-
rative remains fairly balanced and respectful towards the Sámi. Kristiansen moves
closer towards mythifcation: ‘She became most of all the symbol of the good and the
strongest life force, the force of God, who does not only help to provide happiness

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in this life, but also for the eternal life’ (Kristiansen 2005, 97). Thus, both Karen and
Milla are examples of mythical women in the Laestadian movement. In the myth-
like stories, their Sáminess clearly plays a part.

BERIT AND NORA: EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN

The gender order of the Laestadianism was not made fully explicit before the
coming of the women’s movement in greater society and the growing number of
women in paid labor in the 1960s. Prior to this, there was little need to explicate
what women and men should do. It was taken for granted. When this was con-
tested by pressure from the majority society, Laestadian leaders saw the need to
produce texts and sermons with explicit statements on the God-given roles of men
and women respectively (Olsen 2008; Snellman 2011; Valkonen and Wallenius-
Korkalo 2015).
The stories of Berit and Nora from the Sea Sámi communities of the coast of
Sápmi are good examples of the early attempt to say something about women and
their roles not through a normative text, but through stories of individuals. Berit
was part of the ‘Lyngen Laestadian’ or the ‘Lutheran Laestadian’ movement, which
is and has been the only faction solely found in Norway. Geographically, this faction
exists in the Sea Sámi and Kven areas that were strongly Norwegianized. Berit was
one of the very few women who received an obituary in the monthly bulletin from
the preachers. She was presented as the daughter of a preacher and as a frm believer.
Important in the description was the story of a mother with great care for her chil-
dren. At the same time – and this was where the story of Berit diverted from the story
of the more typical woman in the movement – Berit was presented as remarkably
knowledgeable on matters from the Bible and the scriptures:

God had given her extraordinary spiritual gifts, so that many meant that she
could have been a preacher if the preacher’s vocation were given to women.
She could recite long passages from the Bible as well as old important hymns
and spiritual songs by heart. She had such a good memory that she often could
recite sermons given by preachers a year earlier. But these gifts were given in His
service who had given them. In private hours she would raise her voice both in
meetings and elsewhere. She gave words both of encouragement, comfort and
warning. In this sense she can be compared to Johan Raattamaa’s wife Eva, who
also would raise her voice in the meetings by saying to the preachers: ‘Make sure
that you live as you teach.’ We are not saying that Berit ever spoke such words
to the preachers.
(Nyvold 1951, author’s translation)

In the obituary, Berit was presented as a special person. Despite Berit’s extraordinary
qualities, she only used them in ‘private hours.’ Hence, Berit knew her place and
would only speak when allowed, according to the gender order of the congrega-
tion. As an active woman, Berit was located in the border zone between center and
periphery in the ritual sphere of the congregation. Berit’s obituary articulated an
ideal story of extraordinary women: They may have important roles in the congrega-
tion, but they are clearly inferior to the preachers.

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Another Sea Sámi woman who, in 1949, was spoken of in positive terms was the
then 87-year-old Nora in Kaldfjord/Gálláferd. The preacher Karl Lunde met her on
a journey and presented her in his story:

We went to visit old Nora who is now 87 years old and has lived for 19 years
as a widow. A prophetess like Hanna Fanuelsdaughter from the tribe of Asar. It
is worth the trouble of visiting her and listening to her ‘Bible lectures.’ She also
remembers a lot from her catechism that she studied as a child. She uses the
word of God as a guidance for her faith and her life. As she said, both kings,
bishops, ministers and all people have to bend for the word of God.
(Lunde and Pedersen 1948, author’s translation)

When the preacher in the text called Nora a ‘prophetess’ and compared her to a bib-
lical woman, he emphasized her special qualities and what set her apart from others.
She was – similar to Berit – extraordinary and could be spoken of through biblical
references. At the same time, the quotation marks framing the Bible lectures were
not put there by coincidence. Nora was giving ‘Bible lectures.’ This was clearly due
to the fact that she was a woman. Quotation marks were needed in order to describe
what she did when interpreting and talking about the Bible. This is in line with the
story of Berit. Both these Sea Sámi women were located in a ritual periphery as they
raised their voices in private hours and gave ‘Bible lectures.’ The preachers telling the
stories thus did two things at the same time: They saw the two women, told their
stories and situated them in relation to the congregation. But they also put them on
the sideline or in the margins. Thus, the strong and remarkable women were women
who – at least in the stories – did not break with the order of the congregation.
Berit and Nora were strong women with informal roles. Consequently, their roles
were different from Mathilda Fogman’s formal position, from the mythical roles
of Milla and Karen, and from the silent acceptance (or resistance) of the major-
ity. Neither Fogman nor Milla nor Karen can be seen as contesting the patriarchy
directly. Nonetheless, they do represent women’s roles that differ from the most
common one. Hence, they also represent a careful contesting of the patriarchy. Berit
and Nora, as narrated by the preachers, contribute to the articulation of something
that used to be unspoken in the gender order of the congregation.

THE PRACTICE: FROM HOUSE SERMONS

TO MEETING HOUSES
Back in the days of Laestadius and the frst revival, the Christian meetings were
generally connected to church services. As the revival spread, the need for meetings
was greater than the church and ministers could offer. In addition, the role of the lay
preacher alongside or instead of the minister became more important. Hence, the
Laestadians started to have their sermons or meetings in private homes. For a long
time, this was the general rule in the Laestadian movement. (Some local variations
were still found.) The house sermons were run by preachers or other local leaders.
These were men from the local communities. In the frst half of the 20th century,
however, the majority of the Laestadian communities started to have their sermons
in special meeting houses. This had implications also related to gender.

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Today, the different Laestadian fractions organize their sermons in a variety of

ways. In the center of all, though, is the word of God, seen as spoken through or
by the preachers who relate their speeches to texts from the Bible. Absolution, to be
relieved from your sins, also happens through the community of Christians and is
often related to the sermons. All this underlines the importance of the sermons, in
which the community of Christians is and has been articulated, enacted, made and
remade.
House sermons were a traditional practice before the Laestadian revival, as there
could be a time gap between the ministers’ visits to the many rural communities.
Later, they became a key symbol of the Laestadian movement that – with all the
practicalities surrounding them – also came to be a defning factor of the movement.
With preachers travelling in the area and visiting local communities on the demand
from people in the communities, the house sermon contributed to defning a village,
a farm or a family house as a Laestadian locality (Olsen 2018). In Berit’s village, the
house sermons were important and described like this in the obituary of the preacher
Peder Brattland:

Every Sunday a sermon was held in private houses, taking turn. Long planks
were carried in and put on chairs or fsh boxes for people to sit at. Afterwards
there was coffee and food, and the huge copper pots were polished an extra
time for these Sundays. When the message was to be given over the ford to
people in Skardalen that a sermon was happening, white sheets were hung on
the roof of the boathouse. They would see it and row over the ford in fully
loaded boats.
(Nilssen 1997, author’s translation)

This story tells us something about the formal and festive character and the infor-
mality and simplicity of the event. There is no absolute distinction between the
sacred and the profane. Every Sunday the congregation and the Laestadian commu-
nity were relocated again as a new home got the role of meeting house, and a new
family took on the role of host. Thus, in the village, it became clear which houses
and families belonged to the Laestadian community. The gendered aspects of this are
both obvious and hard to defne explicitly. There were families that were hosts. As
such, they would, consciously or not, imitate and repeat the existing practices and
arrangements. Mothers would be mothers, and fathers would be fathers. Especially
in the Sea Sámi areas of the Lyngen Laestadianism, the family was really important
in other aspects of the Laestadian life also. The tradition of home baptism was wide-
spread, and the home and family as frame for the hearing of the word of God was
key. The authority of the man of the house was important. At the same time, in the
coastal villages, the men were most often seasonal fshermen who were away for
parts of the year. This left the women with a huge responsibility at home as farmers
and in small-scale fshery. Thus, having sermons in people’s houses also meant hav-
ing sermons of which women were at least in control, if not in power.
Between 1930 and 1970, the venue for sermons changed among the Lyngen
Laestadians. Gradually, meeting houses and chapels were built in many villages.
This meant the moving of the Christian meetings from a more local, private and
family-based place to a public and central place. The transition from house sermons

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to meeting houses enabled ritual innovation and ritual institutionalization. Many of

the new meeting houses were built to look like or to imitate churches and chapels –
many were even used as such by local congregations (Kristiansen 2000). The new
houses required rules, regulations and formalized boards. For the women of the
Laestadian congregation, the change to central houses implied that the role of the
hostess in the old house sermons was downplayed (Snellman 2011). To give a slightly
simplifed picture: The house sermons were connected more strongly to women and
their roles. The meeting houses were connected more strongly to men and their roles.
Still, the institutionalization through the meeting houses also led to the development
of more roles of both the formal and the informal kind. As a result, the patriarchy
can also be contested when more women are gathered on a regular basis.

EPILOGUE
Going back to Birtavarre/Gáivuonbahta and listening to the river that runs more
slowly and quietly as fall is taking over, it is time to consider some of the changes
that Berit lived through and experienced. When she was born in the 1870s, she
was born into a Sea Sámi and Laestadian family, into a local community where
Norwegians and Kvens were neighbours and peers. She had not reached adulthood
before the impact of the Norwegian state’s assimilation policy was obvious and
felt. Many Sámi and Kven would slowly become Norwegians. Going into the 20th
century, she would soon be part of a Laestadian congregation that was run locally
by preachers from the area after the schism and confict with the main branch in
Finland and Sweden. When Berit was in her 50s, Birtavarre/Gáivuonbahta got its
frst chapel, and the meetings were moved from her and other housewives’ homes
to the chapel. At the end of the Second World War, she would witness the German
scorched-earth tactics when the village was set on fre, destroying much of local Sámi
material culture. The rebuilding was a further step towards becoming Norwegian.
When Berit passed away in 1951, few in the village would wear a gákti any longer. It
took more than 40 years for the local Lyngen gákti to be reconstructed. It remained
modest, true to local traditions. But of the Sámi women who wear it, few go the
Laestadian meetings. Of the women who attend the Laestadian meetings, few wear
the gákti.
Come winter, the river Vuoksajohka freezes again and turns silent. It waits
patiently for spring.

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norra svenska Österbotten åren 1927–2009 [The Daughters of Sion: Laestadian Women
as Mediators of Tradition in Northern Swedish Österbotten in the Years 1927–2009]. Åbo:
Åbo Akademi.
Valkonen, S. and Wallenius-Korkalo, S. 2015. Embodying religious control: An intersectional
approach to Sámi women in Laestadianism. Culture and Religion, 16, pp. 1–16.
Valkonen, S. and Wallenius-Korkalo, S. 2016. Practicing postcolonial intersectionality: Gender,
religion and indigeneity in Sámi social work. International Social Work, 59, pp. 614–626.
Zorgdrager, N. 1997. De rettferdiges strid. Kautokeino 1852: Samisk motstand mot norsk kolo-
nialisme [The Battle of the Just. Kautokeino 1852: Sámi Resistance Towards Norwegian
Colonialism]. Oslo: Vett & Viten.

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 CHAPTER SIX

F R O M H I S T O RY T O H E R S T O RY
O F T H E SÁ M I WO R L D
Proposing a feminist approach to the
settlement history of Finnish Lapland


Saara Alakorva, Ritva Kylli and Jarno Valkonen

INTRODUCTION
The Sámi people have often been portrayed as a people without a history and rights.
According to Paulo Susiluoto (2000, 16), ‘this mindset has been characterized by
something of a permanent settlement model in which history does not begin until
the establishment of a permanent peasant culture.’ Finns as well as Swedes and
Norwegians have often seen the Sámi as nomadic savages and viewed them through
a Nordic nationalist perspective. Little attention has been paid to Sámi-defned
structures of society.
The Sámi people’s own perspectives have remained invisible in the historical nar-
ratives of their home region. Sámi women have been rendered doubly invisible: Their
history and historical status have been largely overlooked in historical research (see
also Aikio in this volume). There are very few mentions of Sámi women in historical
sources, such as tax records, as the status accorded to women in the dominant soci-
ety has not been equal to that of men, and thus, the underlying assumptions inform-
ing documentation have caused attention to be focused on male activity.
In the eyes of the church and state, only men have been considered active agents
and eligible to produce documents in the community. In historical sources, women
are usually mentioned only in connection with an extraordinary event, such as an
act of crime. For this reason, the interpretations also tend to focus on crime or prop-
erty. In other words, women’s everyday lives remain practically invisible in historical
records. The invisibility of Sámi women in historical sources can distort our under-
standing of Sámi history in many ways.
Gendered power structures of historical administrative practices can continue
to affect the relations between the state and the people in our time. In this chapter,
we examine these power structures by analyzing the settlement history and ethnic

100 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-8

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dynamics of the Ohcejohka region. We illustrate how the presence and status of
Sámi women are practically overlooked in historical examination and show that this
results in the marginalization of the Sámi in their region and the multiple marginali-
zation of Sámi women in the context of land and water rights.
We propose a feminist approach to examining the settlement history of Finnish
Lapland. As Rauna Kuokkanen (2007), Vuokko Hirvonen (2017) and Jorunn
Eikjok (2007), among others, have argued, research has not paid enough attention
to the status and history of Sámi women. This is partly due to the fact that the Sámi
ethnopolitical movement has reinforced the myth of strong Sámi women and a
matriarchal society in contrast with mainstream society. According to Kuokkanen
(2019), this has overshadowed the need to examine the impacts of colonial and
patriarchal structures and assimilative practices on Sámi society. Kuokkanen
insists that the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples requires the identifcation
of gendered power structures that are repressive and violent. She has studied the
realization of Sámi self-governmental organizations from the perspective of gender
equality, or lack thereof. Here we pay attention to the same problem, but over a
larger historical time frame. We argue that the roots of colonial and patriarchal
structures go deeper and continue to impact the discussion of the Sámi land and
water rights. In what follows, we illustrate how historical sources refect the colo-
nial and patriarchal power structures of their time and, when interpreted in our
time, can continue to have impacts that reaffrm colonial and patriarchal structures
that underlie today’s Sámi societies.
The context of our examination is the ongoing Sámi debate in Finland. Through
their right to self-determination, the Sámi hold a strong constitutional position in
Finland. However, the development of Sámi rights has been stalled due to Finland’s
inability to ratify ILO Convention No. 169, which would further strengthen Sámi
rights (see Guttorm 2018; Heinämäki 2017). Finland has declared its intention to
ratify the Convention, but before ratifcation, it has wanted to thoroughly examine
the legal basis of the land and water rights of the Sámi people – a matter considered
a threshold question. The Finnish government has supported resolving the matter
from a property law perspective, and numerous studies have been carried out from
this perspective (Vihervuori 1999; Wirilander 2001; Saamelaistoimikunnan mietintö
2001; Lapin maaoikeustutkimusryhmä 2006). The issue of Sámi land and water
rights, however, remains unresolved. In addition, the ongoing political debate in
Finland about fundamental questions such as who is Sámi, how Indigenous People
should be defned and who can be seen as the right holder in the context of land and
water rights are further complicating the matter and delaying its resolution. (For
more about the Sámi debate in Finland, see Mörkenstam et al., and Junka-Aikio in
this volume.)
The main sources used in practically all studies on land rights carried out so far
have been written archival data regarding property ownership and historical docu-
ments related to taxation and the establishment of properties. We argue that address-
ing the matter of Sámi land and water rights from such a perspective is problematic
in many ways. Most importantly, the authorities and the authors of the documents
did not always acknowledge the Sámi rights to residence and land. Sámi people
were not regularly recorded in the property documents because their residence was
seasonal as well as lighter in terms of structure. In addition, examining settlement

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history based solely on offcial archival data can lead to exceptional interpretations.
For example, as late as the 19th century, only men were usually mentioned as tax-
payers in sources related to taxation. Based on written sources, it has been possible
to claim that the Deatnu River valley in the Ohcejohka region was frst inhabited
by Finns (Joona 2019, 27–30). In addition, when old taxation records are used in
making new identifcation claims and demands to be recognized as Sámi and be
able to vote in the elections of the Sámi parliament (see Mörkenstam et al. in this
volume), they are interestingly related mainly to male ancestors, Sámi or ‘Lapp’ men,
who established a farm centuries ago.1 Next, we illustrate that archival materials
and other records that are used as historical data are not free from gendered prac-
tices and power structures. If the materials are not examined critically, studies can
reinforce colonial and patriarchal power structures. For this reason, it is necessary
to pay attention to who created the archival materials and for what purpose and to
identify the underlying gendered power structures.

THE SÁMI AND THE SETTLERS IN THE

OHCEJOHKA REGION
Located in the sub-Arctic region, Ohcejohka (in Finnish, Utsjoki), is the northernmost
municipality of Finland. It was inhabited almost completely by the Sámi, especially
before the 20th century (see e.g. Müller-Wille 1996). Many of the inhabitants have
lived on the southern side of the Deatnu River (in Finnish, Teno, and in Norwegian,
Tana), which has formed part of the border between Finland and Norway since the
mid–18th century. The Deatnu is a renowned salmon river, and it has provided food
and wealth to the region for centuries. According to the Ohcejohka parish archives,
some of the Ohcejohka inhabitants (so-called ‘mountain Lapps’) were reindeer herd-
ers and some of them (‘fsher Lapps’) fshed salmon from Deatnu, hunted and kept
cows.2 Occasionally, residents from areas in southern Finland moved to Ohcejohka,
but they quickly adopted the Sámi language and the Sámi way of life or returned to
the south (Kylli 2005; Aikio 2005; Nahkiaisoja 2016).
The Sámi are unquestionably the original population of the Deatnu River valley,
as evidenced by the strength of the Sámi language in the region, both historically and
at present. The place name Ohcejohka (Utziuckei), which is of Northern Sámi origin,
was mentioned for the frst time in historical sources in the 16th century. The frst
mention was in the travelogue of Vassilj Ivanowitch, who was the Grand Prince of
Moscow, in 1517 and in a letter of protection from the King of Sweden to the Sámi
in 1551. Other frst semi-permanent settlement names in the vicinity of Ohcejohka,
as recorded in 1820, are also of Northern Sámi origin: Karrinjarri, Goadnil, and
Utsjokiabme (Müller-Wille 1996, 17–22).
According to Maria Sofa Aikio (2005), the place names around the Deatnu and
Ohcejohka Rivers are, without exception, of Northern Sámi origin. There are a lot of
names related to the Sámi hunting culture of the past centuries, such as Gottetvárri
(deer hill) and Geatkegielas, which refers to catching wolverines with a trap. There
are also plenty of old deer-hunting pits from prehistoric times to the 18th century
in the Ohcejohka area and also traces of stone fences used to catch deer in the 17th
century. Some names such as Mádjohka (beaver river) also preserve memories of
animals that have not existed in the area for centuries.

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The Sámi were surrounded by spirits and deities, and harmonious coexistence
with them resulted in good fsh catches and large herds of reindeer. There are place
names related to the spiritual world of the Sámi, such as Háldenjárga, Noaiddevárri
and, of course, Áilegas – there are three sacred fells by the name of Áilegas in the
Deatnu River valley. Several names also refer to the signifcance of reindeer. Prior to
the actual reindeer husbandry in the area, reindeer were used as draught animals in
transportation of goods and persons. The Sámi took care of the area’s traffc with
their reindeer before the roads were constructed; the road to Ohcejohka from the
south was not completed until 1957 (Aikio 2005; Lehtola 2012, 232).
A name reminiscent of Sámi women living in the area is Gietkkabeahcci (‘Cradle
Pine’). Women of that area used to leave their breastfed children in a gietkka – a
boat-shaped cradle – and suspended it from a pine tree for the duration of their visit
to church or when moving their sledge reindeer (Aikio 2005).
The place names testify to the strength of the Sámi settlement and belonging in
Ohcejohka. However recently, this history seems to have been distorted by some
researchers. For instance, in his study on Sámi land and water rights, Juha Joona – a
legal historian and a state-appointed expert on Sámi land rights – claims that the set-
tlement of the Deatnu River valley was of Finnish origin (Joona 2019). Joona’s claim
is based, for example, on an 1848 text by Anders Warelius, a Finnish writer and a
well-known Fennoman. The Fennomans were members of the nationalist movement
in Finland that began in the mid–19th century. Many Fennomans wanted to create
in their writing an image of Finnish culture as uniform. Finnish national identity was
built partly on the ideas of receding and weak neighbouring peoples, which was also
refected in the way the Fennomans wrote about the history of the Sámi settlement
(see e.g. Tervonen 2014). Warelius was also a strong promoter of the Finnish-speaking
culture in Finland, while Swedish was still widely used as an administrative language
(Vesikansa 2007). In the Warelius’ text Joona refers to, Warelius argues that the fsher-
men living along the Deatnu River were mentioned as ‘Lapps’ even though they were
almost completely of Finnish origin. Building on Warelius’ text, Joona concludes that
the inhabitants of Ohcejohka at the time were Finns and not Sámi without considering
critically the socio-political context in which the text was written.
As we will see later in this chapter, the view held by many other researchers has
been very much the opposite. Among them is Tarja Nahkiaisoja (2016), who has
studied the use of land in the 18th- and 19th-century Ohcejohka based on wide-
ranging source material and has shown the strength of the Sámi settlement along the
Deatnu River over the centuries.
In the 17th century, the contacts of the Sámi in the region with Finns, Norwegians,
Russians and Swedes were limited to occasional visits by missionaries, merchants
and judges; in addition, the Sámi regularly traded or engaged their other livelihoods
on the Arctic coast. The systematic Christian conversion of the Sámi began during
the 17th century. At that stage, the parishes were established, and the frst Finnish
and Swedish clergymen were nominated for these parishes by the Lutheran Church.
Until the 1740s, Ohcejohka was part of a larger Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino) par-
ish, currently a municipality in northern Norway). Ohcejohka was part of Sweden
until 1809 (see e.g. Kylli 2005).
The frst pastor who resided permanently in Ohcejohka was Anders Hellander
(1718–1757). He moved to the area and was appointed as ‘a Lapp school teacher’ in

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the early 1740s. The church of the parish was built in 1700. The construction work
for the church slowed down due to the fact that the residents responsible for trans-
porting the logs to the construction site spent the summers herding their reindeer
and fshing on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The winter pastures of the parishioners’
reindeer lay in the vicinity of the church, and it was only in winter that the reindeer
herder residents of the area were able to visit the church. There was no permanent
settlement as it is understood today, but near the church, there were church huts,
small dwellings that the Sámi could use when they, for example, participated in the
parish gatherings. The location of the church was chosen entirely on the terms of
Sámi reindeer herders (Kylli 2005, 114). The church huts followed the logic of the
traditional dwelling sites and the permanency the Sámi were used to. Every church
hut was built and named after a specifc family, or coalition of families, and the fam-
ily members always used their own huts. This practice was familiar to the Sámi who
had their own traditional dwelling sites in the areas they used. (For more about the
traditional dwelling sites, see Magga, P. in this volume.)
The intensifcation of Christian missionizing efforts coincided with the time when
the colonization of Sámi lands was initiated in Sweden by the issuance of the Royal
placards on settlement in 1673 and 1695. Before these settlement decrees, the Sámi
areas had been protected from outside settlers, but now the non-Sámi people were
allowed to move to the Sámi villages and the traditional Sámi territories. At the
onset of the settlement expansion, non-Sámi Finns started to settle in the southern
parts of Finnish Lapland that used to be dominated by the Sámi, but in the northern-
most regions, there were not many newcomers, and these areas remained dominated
by the Sámi after the 17th and 18th centuries. (Lehtola 2015; Nahkiaisoja 2016.)
In the latter half of the 18th century, a Finnish settlement started to form in
Aanaar (Inari) in the village of Kyrö – later named Ivalo – a Sámi area located on the
southern side of the Ohcejohka. Many settlers from the south considered Aanaar too
distant and too diffcult to reach. It was not possible to get there by water; reaching
Aanaar would have required crossing the Suoločielgi (Saariselkä) mountain area.
Ohcejohka was less attractive to Finnish settlers because it lay even farther north
and had poor farming conditions. In addition, the best areas along the good fshing
waters were already inhabited by the Sámi (Nahkiaisoja 2016, 112–113). By the
1720s, new Finnish settlers had come from the south to many parts of Lapland so
that only Aanaar and Ohcejohka had no Finnish inhabitants at all (Hiltunen 1978,
122). According to Nahkiaisoja (2016, 120), it was only in 1831 that the frst docu-
mented ‘farm’ settlement was built in Ohcejohka by a local Sámi man, Olof Nilsson
Outakoski. Around this time, many Sámi tried to establish rights of ownership of
the land areas they had inherited and used for ages, while the Sámi areas came under
ever-tighter control of the Finnish government during the 19th century.
Outsiders had historically been allowed to enter the areas of the Lapp villages, or
siidas, only through marriage or the sale of the areas (Lehtola 2015, 38). Ohcejohka
and the inhabitants of the siidas next to it took great care to ensure that no such
people entered the area whose livelihoods were not suitable for the conditions of
the area. In the 1700s, the Indigenous Sámi inhabitants of the area along the river
Deatnu still had close control over the areas of their own siidas. In 1724, two Finnish
men named Mikkel Henriksson and Erik Madsson got a permission from the local
siida board to move to Kárášjohka (next to Ohcejohka) on the condition that their

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arrival would not cause damage to the livelihoods of the Sámi. All in all, the number
of Finnish newcomers was so small that it could not resist the pressure of the major-
ity in the area inhabited by the Sámi (Nahkiaisoja 2016, 50–51).
In 1723, the King of Sweden issued a proclamation about teaching Christianity
and establishing Lapp schools in the Sámi parishes of the Swedish realm. After that,
a school had to be built near each main church, and a schoolmaster was appointed
for each school. In the early 1740s, a Lapp school for local Sámi boys was estab-
lished in Ohcejohka. At the time, the school had six pupils, some of them from the
village of Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino). The schoolteacher, Anders Hellander, also
organized church services as he was the only clergyman in the area. The Swedish
pastor Pehr Högström, who made attempts to promote Sámi as a written language,
visited the Ohcejohka parish in 1746. He was delighted to see that Hellander organ-
ized the examination of Christianity in the parishioners’ own language. The school
was closed down soon after that, but the frst Sámi to become travelling teachers
(catechists) received their training there. According to the Finnish clergymen, the
Sámi who had been raised in the area were qualifed to travel from one Sámi home
to another in the capacity of catechists.
The frst catechists of Ohcejohka were the Tornensis cousins, who had originally
come to the Lapp school from Guovdageaidnu. These young men were descend-
ants of the Finnish pastor Anders Tornensis, who had worked in the parish of
Guovdageaidnu from 1682 to 1705. The family members assumed a Sámi identity
soon after the pastor’s death. Anders Tornensis’s Finnish successor wrote that the
Tornensis’s children had ‘become genuine Lapps’ (Hirvonen 2004; Kylli 2005).
The inhabitants of Ohcejohka spoke the Sámi language and held the majority
position, and all the decisions were made from the Sámi perspective. Religious prac-
tices were very hybridized. Christian views combined with features of Sámi spir-
ituality. Animals had traditionally had a central role in the Sámi religion, and the
signifcance of animal offerings persisted even into the Christian times. According to
the Ohcejohka parish archives, in the 1750s, the parishioners still brought offerings
that they had previously brought to the sieidi altars (sacrifcial sites) to the altars
of their Christian churches. Reindeer-herding Sámi, for example, brought offerings
of reindeer to the church to ensure luck with their livelihood in the future. Sámi
women also participated in this tradition by donating mittens or reindeer cheese to
the Lutheran church (Kylli 2005, 119).
The Finnish clergymen appointed to the parish of Ohcejohka emphasized the
diffculty of working in a Sámi parish where the language and the way of life were
different from what they were used to in southern Finland (Kylli 2005, 122–123).
There are, however, a few scattered references to agricultural settlers throughout the
18th century in narrative sources. In his brief notifcation of the parish of Ohcejohka,
Anders Hellander (1772) wrote mostly about local Sámi who either herded reindeer
or raised cattle and sheep along the Deatnu River. He also mentioned a man living
six miles away who had begun farming six years earlier in a place where soil con-
sisted of mold and clay. Hellander did not explicitly mention this man as a Finn,
but according to the historical documents, there was another Finnish man living in
Ohcejohka besides Hellander and his wife. This was Hellander’s namesake, Anders
Abrahamsson Hellander (1705–1770), who was mentioned as a rural police chief
and a church builder (Kylli 2005, 38). One of Anders Abrahamsson’s sons, Anders

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Andersson (1751–1810), formed the Helander Sámi family in Ohcejohka with his
Sámi wife Ella Olsdotter (b. 1760).
A newspaper article published in 1791 stated that there were 43 households liv-
ing in the parish of Ohcejohka: 28 of them were migrating Sámi reindeer herders,
in addition to which 15 households lived along the Deatnu River practicing salmon
fshing, animal husbandry and hunting. In addition, the news article mentioned two
settlers who had tried to grow barley but failed to produce enough harvest (Sund
1791). These settlers were not mentioned in the Ohcejohka land registers, which
listed the taxpayers and the taxes paid in each Lapp village. People with tax exemp-
tions (settlers with new farms) were also mentioned in these documents. In Aanaar,
however, the land registers mentioned two settlers: Mickel Månsson and a Finnish
settler, Hindrik Kyrö. In the Ohcejohka land register of 1803, which also specifed
the livelihoods of inhabitants, no farm settlers were entered for Ohcejohka either
(Uppbörds- och jordeböcker 1794–1809. Norra Lappmarkens Fögderiarkiv. SNAH;
see also Nahkiaisoja 2016, 112–113).

THE INVISIBILITY OF SÁMI WOMEN IN THE

HISTORICAL SOURCES
It is not possible to form a comprehensive picture of the Sámi world of the past
centuries. One of the reasons for this is the invisibility of Sámi women in historical
sources. Information on the settlement of the Sámi villages and the inhabitants of
these areas has been preserved in many kinds of sources. However, all the sources
have signifcant limitations, and they often even contradict each other. There are a
lot of inaccuracies (e.g. in travelogues written by Finns in particular because they
often wrote in the spirit of promoting a Finnish national identity).
According to Müller-Wille (1996, 20), extremely diffcult natural conditions were
a key reason the Sámi population maintained a majority position in the Ohcejohka
area. The environmental conditions in the area were not suitable for farming. In the
1860s, a Sámi teacher, Aslak Laiti (1862), who had been born in Ohcejohka, was
concerned about the fact that Finns encouraged the Sámi to give up reindeer herding,
which was the most proftable livelihood in the northernmost part of Lapland. In
1925, the municipal council of Ohcejohka suggested that the municipality should be
codifed as a ‘Sámi area of protection.’ Aanaar was a warning signal to Ohcejohka
residents: It had gained many Finnish residents since the latter half of the 19th cen-
tury, and the Finnish population had exceeded the number of Sámi in 1915. As
Ohcejohka was ‘the only whole’ Sámi population in Finland, its residents wanted
to slow down the progress of Finnish agricultural settlement to the north (see e.g.
Lehtola 2012, 220–221).
The concerns expressed by the Sámi were united by one factor: They originated
from the writings of Sámi men. The invisibility of women is even more striking
if examination is limited to offcial documents produced by the church and state
during the past centuries. In the 16th century, when the Sámi-related series of docu-
ments began to emerge in the archival material, the Swedish state was primarily
interested in its residents as taxpayers. Tax records were also compiled in the Lapp
villages inhabited by the Sámi. Only men paying taxes were included in the records
while no other family members were mentioned at all. On the basis of these sources,

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conclusions have been drawn about the growing infuence of Christianity among
Sámi (the spread of the Christian names). At the same time, there is no information
about the Sámi female names at all (Kylli 2012).
The names of the Sámi were usually recorded in the documents in their Swedish-
language form, and the original Sámi-language forms of the names were not used.
Simultaneously, the practice enabled the disappearance of the maternal lines of the
Sámi name-giving practices. In the Sámi name-giving tradition, an individual’s name
can consist of a patronym or a matronym, and a male name can carry reference
to the name holder’s female relatives (i.e. the mother, the grandmother or even the
great-grandmother), especially if they have been strong and well-known personali-
ties in their community. Also, family lines and their homeplaces were sometimes
named after well-known females. For instance, Niiles Vuolab (1856–1929), a leg-
endary reindeer herder man in Ohcejohka, was known by the name Gádja-Nilla. His
mother, Gádja, was a well-known and strong reindeer-herder woman in her com-
munity in the 19th century, and her son Nilla followed her footsteps. Because Nilla’s
mother was a well-known personality in her community, Nilla became known by
her mother’s name (Valkonen et al. 2017, 156; for more about Gádja, see Nylander
in this volume).
Written documents have been compiled and stored in the archives of the states
and churches to support the activities of tax collectors, clergymen, judges and
other authorities working in the Sámi area. Court records include testimonies
of Sámi witnesses and shed light on the daily lives of the Sámi, but even these
Sámi speech acts were interpreted by the scribes and translated into Swedish
(Lakomäki et al. 2020). There was a clear reason for the absence of Sámi women
from the written sources: They had limited possibilities to engage in social and
professional activities. Even the Christian conversion work was primarily tar-
geted to Sámi men (Rydving 1995, 149–156). Also, researchers and other visitors
from the south who encountered and communicated with the locals were men
focusing on men’s activities. Vuokko Hirvonen (1999, 44) emphasized that the
clergymen and scientists determined by themselves which information about the
life of the Sámi was valuable and which was not. Sámi women were not used as
informants, and they did not appear in the texts either – at least, not by their
own names.
Sámi men engaged in public activities with Finnish offcials and were more well
versed in the Finnish language than Sámi women, which also provided men with job
opportunities. Although women’s sphere of life was smaller, they wielded consider-
able power at home. Besides their heavy workload in families, Sámi women held
acknowledged positions in their own communities. By taking care of their children,
women also had responsibility for future generations (Lehtola 2012, 133, 447). The
Sámi are known for their special handicraft tradition duodji (see Magga, S.-M. in
this volume). The making of handicrafts, which included tanning, shaping and sew-
ing leather into clothing (such as footwear), was a special skill of women. Without
this skill, it would have been impossible to cope with the harsh winter conditions in
the area (Somby 2003).
Traditionally, the position of Sámi women had been stronger than the role of
women in the neighbouring Finnish communities. Sámi women had a strong owner-
ship right and the right of inheritance, which were also respected in judicial decisions

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(Korpijaakko 1999; Hirvonen 1999, 178). In 1751, the border between the present-
day Norway and Finland was defned. At the same time, the inhabitants had to decide
which kingdom they wanted to belong to. If a Sámi man living on Finland’s side of
the border married a Sámi woman who was registered on Norway’s side, the family
had the right to take Norway’s (or Denmark’s) citizenship if the wife had her own tax
land in Norway or owned more reindeer than her husband. The man then became a
resident of Norway, and his tax payments on Finland’s side ended (Nahkiaisoja 2016,
234). In reindeer-herding families, girls had – and still have today – their own rein-
deer. Women were able to accumulate signifcant wealth for themselves, which also
had a positive impact on their marriage prospects (Paulaharju 1927, 100–107). Erik
Solem (1970) highlighted the strong position Sámi women in the Deatnu region still
had at the beginning of the 20th century. Solem proposed that Sámi naming customs
and terminology indicate a relatively strong matrilinearity and matrilocality.
The dominant cultures practiced a policy of assimilation, seeking to incorporate
the Sámi into themselves, which also led to the strengthening of patriarchal structures
among the Sámi (see Balto 1997). This does not mean that there used to be gender
equality among the Sámi, but rather that the colonial structures have supported the
patriarchal structures in the Sámi communities and weakened the matriarchal ones
(Kuokkanen 2007, see also Nylander, and Knobblock in this volume). According to
Eikjok (2007), the position of Sámi women in reindeer husbandry weakened after
Sámi reindeer husbandry was integrated into the Norwegian agricultural adminis-
tration in 1945, and men were automatically entered as directors of the siida unit,
and women were entered as (house)wives, which did not correspond to the reality
locally in the reindeer-herding families. Simultaneously with the strengthening of the
national assimilation policies and stronger legislation on reindeer herding and land
rights, the pietistic religious movement Laestadianism gained an increasing foot-
hold in some Sámi areas. Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo (2015) describe how the
religious movement, which increased its infuence in the Deatnu region, manifested
a new kind of gendered power in the region: Firstborn Laestadianism sought to
control femininity and the female body more strictly than was the case with men.
However, membership in the Sámi community and its matriarchal structures also
brought a different kind of freedom to apply the norms of the religious movement
in everyday life.

SÁMINESS OF THE FAMILY LINES IN OHCEJOHKA

While Sámi-related sources refect the colonial and patriarchal structures of states,
they do not address the situation in individual Sámi families or communities very
accurately. However, they testify to the strength of the Sámi settlement in the area
of the Deatnu River valley. Nahkiaisoja (2016, 50–51) notes that no source material
from the mid–18th century points towards there having been residents of Finnish
origin among the inhabitants of the area. According to all available sources, the resi-
dents of that time were completely Sámi. One explanation for this was the fact that
the local Sámi women had married Finnish newcomers. Studies in the Sámi region of
northern Norway have shown that early newcomers were required to marry a Sámi
woman and learn the Sámi language before they could move to the area of the Sámi
community (Bjørklund 1985; Aikio 1998, 9).

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In Ohcejohka, there were some Sámi families with Finnish ancestors. One of them
was Anders Andersson Hellander, who, as was discussed earlier, formed the Helander
Sámi family in Ohcejohka with his wife Ella Olsdotter, a Sámi woman whose fam-
ily had lived in the area for generations (Rippikirjat. Utsjoki parish archives. NAF).
According to Anders’s estate inventory deed, the family lived in the same way as the
other Sámi families (living on salmon fshing and animal husbandry in the Deatnu
River valley), in spite of the fact that his estate inventory deed mentioned him as a
peasant. Instead, in the tax records, he was listed among the ‘fsher Lapps’ of the
Deatnu area without any mention of the peasantry. According to the estate inven-
tory deed, the family owned, like other ‘fsher Sámi’ families, a separate winter resi-
dence and a summer house as well as meadows. The property included salmon and
trout nets, boats and milk containers (Tornion tuomiokunnan II arkisto EcI:1. NAF;
Uppbörds- och jordeböcker 1794–1809. Norra Lappmarkens Fögderiarkiv. SNAH).
Similar rapid Sámifcation also took place in the Högman family during the late
18th century. Finnish pastor David Eric Högman’s son Johan Fredrik Högman
(1772–1847) married a Sámi woman, Elli Ivarsdotter Vuolabba (1781–1815), and
they raised their descendants in Ohcejohka as a Sámi family. Högman’s father-in-law
was Iver Vuolab, a Sámi man who was born in Norway around 1735 (Blix 1987,
529). It was very common that male residents of Ohcejohka married Sámi women
from Norway’s side of the border. Reindeer herders, for example, crossed the state
border at least twice a year as part of the seasonal migration of reindeer. They moved
each year with their reindeer to the Norwegian coast, where they spent their sum-
mers and met many local people (Aikio 1998, 84; Nahkiaisoja 2016).
Finnish men who moved to the area from elsewhere quickly became Sámi through
adopting the Sámi way of life after marrying Sámi women. The situation remained
the same even after the 18th century: When a Finnish man married a Sámi woman
in the Sámi area, their descendants adopted the Sámi identity very quickly, and only
the surname entered in offcial documents remained reminiscent of the Finnish ori-
gin of the family (Morottaja 2017, 6). However, many Finnish writers have sought
to emphasize that the settlement of the Sámi area had a Finnish origin. Joona men-
tions examples of men who have been interpreted as Finns of the Deatnu River
valley (2019, 27–30). One example was the Laiti family, the members of which
had told the Finnish ethnographer Samuli Paulaharju in the 1920s that their ances-
tor Laides-Aanundi had arrived in the Deatnu area hundreds of years ago from
Finland. The frst Laiti recorded in the parish registers of Ohcejohka in the 1740s
was Anund Nilsson Laiti (1697–1751) (Rippikirjat. Utsjoki parish archives AI:1.
NAF). Anund Nilsson might have been the ancestor of the Laiti family, but it is dif-
fcult to say anything certain about his or his wife Brita Olofsdotter’s ethnicity or
background because no moving records or moving certifcates were deposited in the
parish archives at this stage. According to the oral histories, it is also possible that
the frst Laiti in Ohcejohka would have moved to Ohcejohka from a neighbouring
Sámi siida Deatnu. This Ánot Laiti and his wife would have had a winter residence
in the headwaters of the Ohcejohka River (Aikio 2005), so it is possible that Anund
was a Sámi man called Ánot. A separate winter hut at least refers to the Sámi way
of life.
Although Anund Nilsson Laiti might have moved to the area from the south, his
descendants’ Sámi identity seemed very strong based on the historical sources. In the

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early 19th century, one of Ohcejohka’s inhabitants was Matts Anundsson Laiti
(1793–1866), who was a descendant of Anund Nilsson Laiti in the fourth genera-
tion. Matts Anundsson Laiti knew, for example, an old Sámi yoik Same-ædnam
alggo-olbmui pirra, which tells about the intervention of outsiders and the coloniza-
tion process of Sámi lands (Lakomäki et al. 2020). The song was politically toned,
and knowing it suggested a strong Sámi identity a long time before any ethnopoliti-
cal movements (Gaski 1987, 30–46).
The role of Sámi women has often been downplayed when emphasizing the
importance of Finnish men, despite the fact that their role in mediating Sámi culture
and passing on Sámi identity to future generations was very central in the Ohcejohka
region. In Aanaar, where there was a community of Finnish settlers in the village of
Kyrö, the situation was different: Despite the fact that Finnish men married local
Sámi women there as well, the Sámifcation of the Finnish man and his descend-
ants did not take place in the same way as in Ohcejohka. Finnish settler Henrik
Henriksson Kyrö’s (born 1761) frst wife in 1808 was a Sámi woman called Elin
Matssdotter Valle, and his second wife was Ingrid Henriksdotter Kuuva, also a local
Sámi woman (Nahkiaisoja 2016, 27). The difference was that, in the Kyrö village,
the Sámi wives were in a minority position, and the Sámi identity had a stigma. The
Sámi wives of the Kyrö village were not able to pass their Sámi language and identity
on to the next generation on the same scale as in Ohcejohka, where the settler men
were in the minority.

CONCLUDING WORDS
In this chapter, we have illustrated the challenges of obtaining information about
the history of Sámi women from archival materials produced and archived by non-
Sámi outsiders. In the cases we discussed, the gendered structures of the dominant
society contributed to the fact that an agentive role has been ascribed only to men.
Scarce historical documents, which open up something of Sámi women’s everyday
life, show that the position of the Sámi woman in her own society has been stronger
than that of women in the dominant society. This is partly due to the special charac-
teristics of the Sámi culture and way of life. The challenging natural conditions have
dictated the necessity of working towards shared goals. The way of life has required
shifting focus from maintaining distinct gender roles towards readiness to cross any
such roles in order to get the tasks done in the name of survival.
If the archival materials have not been produced from a Sámi perspective, and
examining them has not been able to – or even sought to – respect the position of
the Sámi woman in her own society, it is worth questioning the role of historical
documents and other written sources in refecting the past realities of the Sámi soci-
ety as a whole. Through failure to acknowledge the limits of these biased sources,
some researchers studying land and water rights in Finland have also made very
exceptional – and, as such, limited – interpretations of the settlement history in the
Sámi area. Source materials should, therefore, be critically interpreted and placed in
their appropriate context; one should look at the situation in which they were writ-
ten, by whom and in whose interest. Ohcejohka is culturally and linguistically the
strongest Sámi region in Finland – and it has historically been a Sámi territory since
time immemorial. Therefore, those few settlers from outside also became Sámi after

110
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they married Sámi women. This would not have been possible if the surrounding
community had not been strongly Sámi speaking, as was the case in Kyrö village
and the interethnic marriages there. In Deatnu the established division into upland
people (badjeolbmot) and waterfront people (čáhcegátteolbmot) contributed to the
fact that reindeer herders and people living more permanently in the river valley
did not recognize each other as ethnically different groups but made a conceptual
distinction according to the lifestyle. The Sámi language has separate terms for eth-
nically non-Sámi people.
This raises the broader question of how, for example, issues related to Sámi land
and water rights could be resolved on the basis of historical property documents
alone and how they could determine interpretation of the concept of Indigenous
Peoples in Finland, which has also been proposed in the Sámi debate. (See Joona
2012 and critique of her views e.g. by Aikio and Åhrén 2014.) Is it possible to
form a comprehensive picture of the patterns of residence and land use with the
help of this kind of archival material in the case of a semi-nomadic ethnic group
whose own tradition of history writing is young? Our study suggests that in order
to arrive at a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon, it would be neces-
sary to research the relationship between the Sámi and the lands more closely from
different perspectives and using different sources. For example, we may ask how it
has been possible, in the long succession of Sámi generations and in relation to the
surrounding environment, to form a duodji tradition and all the know-how associ-
ated with it. Without this tradition – and bearing in mind that the Sámi women also
clothed and dressed their settler husbands warmly – they would not have survived
in Ohcejohka’s conditions.
The principle of Indigenous self-determination includes the dismantling of une-
qual power structures; as a human right, it aims to secure the future of Indigenous
Peoples so that they can decide on their own political, social, cultural and economic
relations. According to Esko Aikio (2006), respect for land is central to the self-
determination of Indigenous Peoples because

Land is not just an economic resource for Indigenous Peoples. For Indigenous
Peoples the land is also their library, source of information, and their university;
the land is a repository of history and scientifc knowledge. Everything that
Indigenous People have experienced, and everything they know about human
and good life, belongs to their land and all the stories relating to it.

It is not possible to read these stories from the property law documents. If we rely
too heavily on such documents in seeking a resolution to the question of Sámi land
and water rights – or Sámi identity – instead of focusing on the political will of the
state to secure the self-determination of the Sámi, we continue to reaffrm the related
colonial and patriarchal power structures.

NOTES
1 This differs from new identity claims made, for example, in the Cherokee context, where
the claims are related to female ancestors – a widespread phenomenon also known as the
‘Cherokee princess grandmother syndrome’ (see Sturm 2010, 109–113). This is due to the

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differences between the nature and recording principles of historical materials on which
identity claims are based in the Nordic countries and Canada.
2 In the old archival records, the Sámi are referred as Lapps, which is an exonym originally
used by others than Sámi by themselves.

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Archives
National Archives of Finland, Oulu (NAF).
Swedish National Archives in Härnösand (SNAH).

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 CHAPTER SEVEN

C A U G H T I N T H E S TAT E ’ S N E T ?
Ecologies of care1 in Deanuleahki, Sápmi


Annikki Herranen-Tabibi2

INTRODUCTION
This chapter examines collisions among postwar practices of Nordic state making
on the one hand and relationally and ecologically situated Indigenous Sámi concep-
tions of care and aspirations for well-being on the other, in the Deatnu River valley
(Deanuleahki) of Sápmi. Here, care (dikšu, áimmahuššan)3 itself emerges as an ana-
lytically luminous site of everyday contestation. This contestation in turn illuminates
profound contradictions in the making of postwar Nordic welfare states, which are
often cast globally as quintessentially caring political regimes (cf. Heikkilä et al. 2002;
Pfau-Effnger and Rostgaard 2011). The societal transformations stemming from the
Finnish and Norwegian states’ deepening postwar emplacement in Sápmi are a fraught
issue in the lived experiences of many of my interlocutors.4 They are marked by (inter)
generational experiences of the dislocation, delegitimization and remaking of vital
relations of care among kin and amid local ecologies. The interwoven ethnographic
vignettes at the core of this chapter illuminate not only such experiences but also my
interlocutors’ emergent articulation of what I call resurgent care (ealáskahtti dikšu,
ealáskahtti áimmahuššan) – with resurgence understood, in Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson’s terms, as embodied everyday practices of decolonization and, more broadly,
as practices of regenerating community and mobilizing for systemic change and self-
determination (Simpson 2017, 192–195; Kuokkanen 2020a; Grande 2015; Martineau
2015). I provisionally defne the concept of resurgent care as the intimate and public
everyday practices through which many among my interlocutors continually strive to
revivify relations of kinship and belonging and conditions of material livability within
the local ecology. Threaded through their narratives is a striving to nurture, reclaim
and reimagine salutary social practices – with such practices spanning from emotional
and linguistic repertoires to sensory perception, embodied knowledge and forms of
sovereignty and spirituality. I suggest that it is through practices of resurgent care that
many of my interlocutors, in their narratives of postwar Sámi lifeworlds, have striven
to ensure one another’s health, well-being and survival.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-9 115

 — A n n i k k i H e r ra n e n - Ta b i b i —

In what follows, I begin by introducing the scope, methods and central terms of
my ethnographic research. Through interwoven vignettes, I then situate my interlocu-
tors’ experiences of transformations in care relations amid two distinctive realms of
state making: frst, control over land, water and livelihoods and second, medicine and
public health. Taken together, these ethnographic accounts demand that we examine
the imbrication of the institutions of the postwar welfare-state-qua-caring-state with
the territorial consolidation of state presence and state control over local ecologies.5
They suggest that this imbrication has produced cumulative dislocations in care, both
ecological and interpersonal. Recognition of this imbrication, in turn, demands an
adequately expansive conception of care, one that is capable of encompassing care
for the elderly, ill or otherwise vulnerable and care for the more-than-human ecolo-
gies of Deanuleahki (see Østmo and Law 2018; de La Bellacasa 2017; ‘Cúagilákv
2021). To address these considerations, the chapter concludes with exploratory con-
ceptual refections on the intertwining of loss, care and resurgence.

BACKGROUND: PROCESS, METHODS AND LANGUAGE

The narratives in this chapter are drawn from ethnographic research I have con-
ducted in Deanuleahki since 2014, including for 25 continuous months in 2016–
2018.6 This research is grounded in immersive inquiry into my interlocutors’ (n =
60)7 experiences of post–World War Two transformations in caregiving practices
and relationships among kin and in the context of local ecologies.
To probe my interlocutors’ subjective experiences of these transformations, I
conducted interconnected biographical interviews on care among kin and within
foundational livelihoods (including fshing, reindeer herding, foraging, ptarmigan
trapping, and duodji [traditional craftsmanship]).8 These interviews invited my
interlocutors to refect freely on what had, for them, been signifcant experiences
of giving, witnessing and receiving care over their lifetimes. Here, care was defned
operationally as the ways in which people sought to ensure one another’s well-being
(buresveadjin), health (dearvvašvuohta) and, at a limit, survival (ceavzin). This fram-
ing sought to empower interlocutors to determine what, to them, constituted the
most relevant practices of care, defned as capaciously or narrowly as each interlocu-
tor wished.
Alongside care biographies, I collaboratively constructed genograms (McGoldrick
et al. 2008) with my interlocutors to map intergenerational histories of care and
harm. To complement these interviews and to situate my analysis in relation to
other modes of knowledge production (including journalistic, scholarly and policy
oriented), I examined and collaboratively reconstructed my interlocutors’ intimate
archives of images, texts, flm and other objects that detail such histories.9 Finally, I
conducted constant participant observation in the context of my informants’ every-
day activities related to care. These activities took me from driftnet fshing and clear-
ing brush with elderly River Sámi to assisting with in-home care and being present
at moments of death and in processes of bereavement.
With active input from interlocutors and community members at every stage, this
extended research process allowed me to gradually defne the questions and scope of
my study. Indeed, as scholars of Indigenous research methods and ethics have often
suggested (e.g. Heikkilä 2016; Smith 2013, 125–130), the conceptualization of my

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research is inseparable from the socially embedded process by which I came to know
Deanuleahki – a process that gradually led me to radically more expansive concep-
tions of care than the ones with which I had arrived.
Shared, collaborative labor on land and water and within subsistence livelihoods
emerged here as a vital form of reciprocal caregiving among kin.10 This drew me to
engage directly with the wider spectrum of social institutions through which com-
munities along Deanuleahki have sought to ensure their members’ health, well-being
and survival. Among such institutions, fshing was a particularly illustrative example.
Thus, in the frst care biography interview I conducted, an elder I’ll call Mággá11
focused her narrative on care as embodied by her childhood experiences of fshing
with her maternal uncle (eanu). Over the years, interlocutors young and old similarly
foregrounded the signifcance of learning to fsh alongside one’s kin as a vital practice
of care. In their narratives, this care was moral and material, social and ecological,
intersubjective and interspecies. Mutual care resided in the time spent together by the
child learning to fsh and the adult teaching them – in the stories told and material
and spiritual traditions and bodies of silent and verbalized knowledge passed on and
in the solidifcation of belonging (gullevašvuohta) in a place and in one’s community
of kin (sohka, sohkasearvvuš). The reciprocity of such intergenerational practices of
care was what enlivened such encounters for many: Several insisted that children,
adolescents and young adults could offer abundant insight, perception and wisdom
and must not be cast as passive recipients of knowledge or care. By participating in
such work, one learned to take care of oneself in an unforgiving physical environment
and to participate in taking care of one’s kin and community members by providing
nourishment for them in accordance with long-standing distributive norms. For a
small child, an elder I’ll call Heandárat12 reminisced, this might entail placing tokens
such as small pieces of wood or stone on allotments of fsh and making a draw (vuor-
bádit) to ensure equitable distribution of the catch among kin. For older children
and adolescents, it might mean bringing fsh over to elderly, disabled, ill or impov-
erished community members who were unable to provide for themselves. Through
such embodied practices, one not only learned to recognize how the local ecology
sustained its people, but also learned to care for the ecology according to norms and
knowledge passed from generation to generation.13 Conversely, many interlocutors
spoke of their experiences of familial and communal alienation as resulting from not
learning traditional fshing practices, such as driftnet or weir fshing (golgadeapmi,
buođđun), alongside their kin. For some, this alienation resulted from removal from
their community for long periods of time during years at the residential school (áso-
datskuvla, internáhta); for others, it could be traced to the rapid economic transfor-
mations of the postwar decades, including those caused by the expanding tourism
industry. In this context, several interlocutors emphasized the signifcance of reclaim-
ing those practices and the attendant relationships and knowledge systems in adult-
hood, including for one’s descendants. This, in turn, required not just bringing one’s
younger kin to learn to fsh, particularly at a kin community’s ancestral fshing waters
(guolleáiti). It also required protecting the lifeway itself: Knowledge of practices of
fshing, stability of the habitat of local species of fsh and their surrounding ecosys-
tems and the material and regulatory contexts that shaped people’s access to the
waterways. Tending to these practices, then, fgures in my interlocutors’ narratives as
a kind of care through which one learns to belong.

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From the beginning, my interlocutors likewise foregrounded contestation sur-

rounding care among kin in contexts as varied as elder care, mental health and
child protection and within local ecologies. At stake in this contestation were the
respective roles and responsibilities of state institutions and communities of kin; so,
too, were the reverberating effects of state practice across institutional domains on
(inter)generational and community relations. Time and again, interlocutors drew
attention to the disruptive effects, upon kin and ecological relations, of care’s insti-
tutionalization as health and social services, education and environmental stew-
ardship. In their narratives, an arc was traced of relations of care becoming, as
several of my interlocutors described it, ‘constrained’ (gáržžiduvvon) as a result of
the embedding of state institutions in Sápmi. To some, these constraints refected
a societal shift from care that was embedded in relations of reciprocity (including
collaborative labor and distributive norms) to reliance on care that was narrowly
situated within institutional silos and professional competencies, such as those char-
acterizing the felds of healthcare and social welfare. To others, they refected the
cumulative pressures on foundational livelihoods from regulation and encroach-
ment by state institutions and the cultural values and practices of the dominant
Finnish and Norwegian societies.
The ascendancy of North Sámi as the language of my ethnography cast these
areas of contestation in sharper relief. As interlocutors shared with me words,
expressions and ways of speaking about care, I sought out the views of several local
language masters (giellačeahppi) to further tease out nuances in the language of
care. Strikingly, the words áittardit, áittardeapmi (to care, caring) – which had been
selected in the initially commissioned translation of my intricate informed consent
documents as the key term describing care – brought one giellačeahppi to state that,
while he had certainly heard the words before, they didn’t mean anything to him;
he simply did not know what they specifcally meant. Indeed, another giellačeahppi
explained that although the term áittardit had once been used to describe care in
the capacious sense in which I approached it, it had largely fallen out of that kind
of use through decades of assimilation and the concomitant impoverishment of eve-
ryday language use. In an observation echoed by several others, this giellačeahppi
suggested that the term áittardit had subsequently been reintroduced as translation
for Finnish and Norwegian terms – such as child protective offcer (mánáidáittarde-
addji) – which describe bureaucratic roles and offcial actions through which state
institutions provided care. Here, one might even suggest that the language of care in
its lived history mirrors transferal of care to the realm of bureaucratic institutions
more broadly. In this sense, the centrality of the term áittardit in the offcial docu-
ments governing the early stages of my research refected the unwitting prioritiza-
tion of state-centric conceptions of what constitutes care and where care belongs,
rather than the more expansive notions towards which my interlocutors had from
the outset guided me. The language of my work, as one interlocutor suggested, had
inadvertently gotten caught in the state’s net (darvánit stáhta ferpmádahkii) – just
as, she insisted, care itself often had.
These deliberations brought me to rewrite, with guidance from local mentors and
language masters, the informed consent document and research ethics protocol that
continue to guide my work. These documents now refect the institutional recenter-
ing of kin groups and subsistence livelihoods, the more capacious understanding of

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care encompassed by my work and the geographical primacy of Sápmi and Deatnu
over state-centric categories as descriptors of the region.
The historically embedded texture of living language thus became central to the
practice of continually reviewing my work with my interlocutors, from its premises
to the analysis I produce. As a result, language became not only a vital method14 in
the production and analysis of ethnographic data; it was also ethically indispensable.
Indeed, one language-master interlocutor called on me to recognize how care lives
in language and to participate in the ‘protection of life within words’ (eallima suod-
jaleapmi sániid siste) through my research practice. To include terms in the language
of my work that may have become alienated to some, they suggested, could itself be
a contribution to the revivifcation of language. The terms áimmahuššat and dikšut
are now foremost in the overarching language of my work, appearing as they do to
resonate across social and institutional contexts and capture the capacious, holistic
meanings my interlocutors demand – ranging from care for the elderly, children, ill
or otherwise vulnerable to care for the more-than-human environment (sensu de La
Bellacasa 2017). Nevertheless, to recognize and protect the multifaceted lives and
histories contained in the language of my interlocutors, áittardit is still the frst word
on my North Sámi consent forms.

‘A HEALTHY SÁMI SOCIETY . . . HOW WAS IT?’

(DEARVVAS SÁMI SERVODAT . . . MO LEI?)
One evening in December 2017, in the dim light of a foor lamp, Luobbal Sámmol
Sofe and I hunched over an overstuffed cardboard box spilling newspaper clippings,
photos, reports, meeting memos and the assorted telltale miscellany of a long life
spent in the service of Sámi cultural, linguistic, political and ecological resurgence.
A diminutive elder and traditional knowledge holder from Ohcejohka, Sofe could
command any room with her larger-than-life personality and her authoritative voice
in all matters ecological and political. That fall, she had been forced to sort through
her papers after the roof of the garage where she’d stored them began leaking, and,
as so often before, our discussions were punctuated by rummaging through these
treasure troves. Through freewheeling commentary, Sofe situated each image and
story in the past and present of Deanuleahki, along the arc of events she had sketched
through our discussions. That arc traced the fux that had marked the region in her
lifetime since the Second World War. It encompassed material, psychological and
spiritual transformations occasioned by war, displacement and postwar develop-
ment and rebuilding.15 It spanned, too, the amplifed presence of the Finnish and
Norwegian states and the valley’s rapid and often coercive integration into national
institutional, infrastructural and fnancial orders in the decades following the Second
World War. Amid heightened present-day concerns and mobilizations surrounding
the social, spiritual and ecological well-being of the region’s communities, she had
often drawn my attention to the profoundly altered and ever-more-constrained reali-
ties of life within the region’s subsistence livelihoods and communities of kin. As she
entertained herself by reading aloud photo captions from old newspaper clippings,
she quietly handed me a stray page from an undated meeting memo, on the back
of which she had scrawled in angry black ink what follows (Figure 7.1, author’s
translation):

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Figure 7.1 Undated hand-written text by Luobbal Sámmol Sofe, estimated to have been
written between 1980 and 1995, found among her personal papers in December 2017.
Source: Maria Sofa Aikio.

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the customs authority

the sámi no longer have a societal order,
place? rights
fght!
don’t surrender!
we have no peace
we too are in the same situation as those
Indigenous Peoples in (eg) (Nicaragua) Colombia
Guatemala, Bolivia
though they fght with guns
we have no more peace than they do
we don’t live at peace
we don’t live as a healthy society
a healthy Sámi society lived once before
I have not lived it
nor did my mother live it
but grandma was part of it a little
Though the end she did not come to know
she died during the war far from home
But before that
was society healthy then?
and the generation before
how was it?
***
The language of the ‘healthy (Sámi) society’ had, in recent years, entered the lexicon
of a new generation of Sámi artists, activists and politicians in mobilizations for
fshing rights and self-determination and against extractive industries and sexual
violence (see e.g. Ellos Deatnu 2017a; Suohpanterror 2018; NRK Sápmi 2018). A
striking instantiation of the ‘healthy (Sámi) society’ as a present-day language of cri-
tique and exhortation stems from the Ellos Deatnu! (Long Live Deatnu!) movement.
(About the Ellos Deatnu! movement, see Nykänen in this volume.) Since its incep-
tion in 2017, the movement has sought to reimagine and put into practice forms
of ‘Sámi self-determination and sovereignty’ and ‘reclaim . . . local traditional and
kinship-based governance practices’ (Kuokkanen 2020a, 311). Through nonviolent
direct action, the movement has thus sought to oppose and transcend state-centred
regimes of political rule and ecological stewardship in the region (Ellos Deatnu
2017b; Kuokkanen 2020a). In a poetic manifesto of their own, frst delivered in
public at an Ellos Deatnu! event in Ohcejohka on 25 July 2017 by the local artist
and activist Jalvvi Anna-Liissá Niillas (Niillas Holmberg), the group declared:

Deatnu vuoigadahttá
eallit dearvvaslaš servodagain – jos servodagat buhcet,
de Deatnu vuoigadahttá ja geatnegahttá rahčat hukset dearvvaslaš servodagaid,
danin go servodagat leat oassi ekovuogádagas.

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(Deatnu gives us the right to

live in healthy societies – if societies are ailing,
then Deatnu grants us the right and obligation to strive to build healthy
societies, because societies are part of ecosystems.)
(Ellos Deatnu 2017a; author’s translation)

As a strategically deployed term of exhortation and critique, ‘healthy (Sámi) society’

and the concomitant conceptions of care had thus attained a wider circulation in the
decades since Sofe wrote her words. What, though, were the visions the term evoked
for her? In the exhortation to fght for a healthy society and not to surrender, how did
she conceive of the objective of that struggle and striving? If the objective was societal
health, how were the concomitant ill(nesse)s and practices of care to be understood?
Returning to our discussion of the document more than a year later, Sofe anno-
tated my photocopy of it, writing and drawing impromptu diagrams with a pencil as
she spoke. Her text, equal parts elegiac and polemic, was of uncertain provenance:
The stray meeting document on the back of which it was scrawled was undated and
unilluminating of any particular events that might have placed it in a specifc his-
torical moment. In a sense, however, the uncertain dating of the text only amplifed
its power. The sorrow, fury and determination of her words could have applied to
practically any part of the postwar sociohistorical arc of Deanuleahki. This attested
to continuities in experiences among generations, even amid drastic societal trans-
formations – continuities not only of communal distress and anxiety but also of an
assertive commitment to the health and vitality of local lifeways.
As we nevertheless attempted to place the text in the temporal fow of her biogra-
phy, Sofe seized upon the passage:

Indigenous Peoples in (eg) (Nicaragua) Colombia

Guatemala, Bolivia
though they fght with guns
we have no more peace than they do

To her, these words pointed to the growing signifcance of global Indigenous soli-
darities as points of reference and resources in mobilizations for Sámi rights, revitali-
zation and resurgence. (See also Nykänen in this volume.) For Sofe and several other
interlocutors who have directly participated in such mobilizations since the 1970s,
these experiences had lent an urgency to their sense that the postwar era of ostensi-
ble peace and plenty in Sápmi was for many not only profoundly unsettling but also
structurally violent (sensu Farmer 2004; Galtung 1969). Sofe’s phrase ‘we have no
more peace than they do’ (mis ii leat dađi eanet ráff) thus evokes the continuum of
harms stemming from rapid and coerced societal change in Indigenous communities
globally. In its insistence that the absence of peace in Sápmi be recognized, her text
nevertheless does not stop at documenting such harms. Rather, it is written as an
exhortation that foregrounds the presence and necessity of struggle and striving. An
earlier passage articulates this imperative more explicitly still, melding English and
North Sámi as though gesturing at the global arena in which that broader struggle
unfolded: ‘Fight! Don’t surrender!’ (Fight! Ále vuollán!)
***

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The customs authority (tuollolágádus), after which Sofe’s text was titled, has
often served as a physical instantiation of the deepening exercise of state power
along Deanuleahki, rendering more visible the region’s division into Finnish and
Norwegian state territories, national administrative orders and citizenries. After all,
Sofe exclaimed, ‘customs authorities are at borders!’ (‘na tuolluthan leat rájáin!’).
The region’s customs posts had grown in number and prominence between 1955
and 1993, forming an integral part of the expanding transportation infrastructure
on both sides of the state border in the postwar decades. As a result, the barriers they
formed emblematized the physical transformations that have accompanied post-
war societal change in Deanuleahki (Tulli 2019; Laukkanen and Kurkinen 2008,
122–124).16 By contrast, the communities of Deanuleahki are historically bound
together by ties that traverse present-day state borders; many have suggested that
Deatnu itself serves not as a boundary, but as connective tissue reinforced by shared
kinship, livelihoods, labor and language (see e.g. Aikio and Müller-Wille 2005, 51;
Kuokkanen 2020a, 2020b). The river as a locus and conduit of relational and recip-
rocal care indeed permeates many of my interlocutors’ narratives of the everyday
labor through which ties of belonging (gullevašvuohta) and kinship (fuolkevuohta)
are made among those connected by the river.
In relation to such labor, the customs authority’s everyday workings could be
highly disruptive. Thus, one elder I’ll call Esáias17 described with warmth the affective
ties and practices of reciprocity, shaped by collaborative fshing and the exchange of
goods and livestock, through which his childhood home in the 1940s and 1950s had
been connected in mutual care to their neighbours and kin on Deatnu’s opposing
shore. Narrating examples of everyday transformations to his family’s lives, Esáias
pointed to the customs authority as vector of such changes. Its growing demand for
documentation, in his telling, came to increasingly shape the practice of subsistence
livelihoods – be it with respect to the transportation of fsh caught, the equipment
used or the ability to sell the fsh one caught or berries one foraged. In these experi-
ences, the customs authority represented the growing reach of the regulatory state
that gradually rendered the border more tangible for those in whose midst it was
drawn.18
The symbolic and practical impact of the expanding postwar infrastructure on
ties of care was central to the threats to societal health that Sofe elucidated. As
several interlocutors underscored, this infrastructure had continually accelerated
cultural and linguistic change in postwar decades, as well as ecological pressures
on the land, water and livelihoods. Accordingly, the construction of roads, at times
cast by outsiders as practically liberatory in its capacity to facilitate integration,
could draw vehement opposition in the region (cf. Lehtola 2012, 214–233). Some
interlocutors specifcally attributed an erosion in practices of reciprocal care among
kin and within subsistence livelihoods to the construction of roads to villages along
the Deatnu river system (Deanučázádat) in Finland and Norway. An elder I’ll call
Iissát19 poignantly described this transformation in relations of care by simply stat-
ing: ‘Freedom ended’ (friddjavuohta nogai).
The transportation infrastructure from which the customs authority was inextri-
cable can thus be interpreted as a representation of life becoming increasingly con-
strained by the norms and structures of the dominant Nordic societies. This sense
of constraint permeated my interlocutors’ accounts of states’ regulation of fshing,

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reindeer husbandry and ptarmigan trapping, as much as it suffused family caregiv-

ers’ experiences of caring for the elderly, ill and vulnerable in roles defned by state
institutions. Refecting on her text in this context, Sofe noted community members’
seeming need for foundational elements of sociality and values to be codifed in off-
cial documents, reports and professional roles and relationships. Whereas she saw
true self-determination, freedom and peace residing in living connections to the land,
kin and spirituality, reliance on such codifcation was indicative of the loss of and
growing distance from such connections. Such disorientation would, she suggested,
at an extreme lead to Sámi society becoming a mere ‘facsimile society’ (kopiaston
servodat), with its institutions and lifeways modeled after those of the dominant
society, at most rendered nominally and superfcially Sámi.
Sofe’s text and commentary powerfully bring to the fore the injurious effects of
Nordic state practice on what she calls ‘social order’ (servodatortnet) among the
Sámi. Consequently, her critique echoes concerns raised by numerous scholars of
(settler) colonialism about the encroachment of the dominant society’s modes of
governance (e.g. Kuokkanen 2020a; Simpson 2017; Grande 2015). Globally, such
processes have included the coercive displacement of Indigenous institutions of care
in favor of colonial regimes and the confnement of ostensible care within institu-
tions of control (Anderson 2006; Forth 2017; Farmer 2020). Yet her critique reaches
beyond these institutional forms. Indeed, the dislodging of care from its relational
context appeared central to what Sofe referred to as ‘being lost.’ That is, losing
one’s connection to the rules that once animated relationships among people and
with ecology was, to use the terms of her text, not only inimical to health; it was
also indicative of the pervasive disquiet, an absence of peace, that trailed the stark
societal transformations of the postwar decades.20 For too many of its inhabitants,
she argued, today’s Sámi society had become fragmented and scattered (hádjánan).
This fragmentation had shifted norms and disrupted vital modes of maintaining
social relations, such as those encompassed by visiting others with ease and with-
out appointment. These practices of visitation – which Sofe evocatively described
with the phrase ‘vázzit gođiid gaskka’ (literally, to walk among huts) – were, she
argued, indispensable for mutual care. Indeed, the need for such visitation was often
emphasized by my interlocutors, several of whom specifcally drew attention to
their signifcance for intergenerational connectedness and care. The signifcance of
a sensory presence for such connectedness and care was crucial here. The prevailing
circumstances, Sofe argued, allowed too few to live in continuous enough contact
with their kin and community to be able to see or sense if someone seemed unwell
or troubled. For the health of the society, she insisted, this was especially worrisome
due to the social isolation experienced by many of the region’s elderly (cf. Heikkilä
et al. 2013, 137).
Likewise, she argued, this fragmentation left many young community members in
a precarious position with respect to their identity and belonging. To her, even much-
lauded institutionalized initiatives that sought to revivify connections to nature –
whether in the name of decolonization or of mental health – could fall prey to a
kind of tokenism that simply reaffrms the absence of that which has been lost. ‘They
seek something because they have nothing better’ (sii ohcaladdet juoidá go sis ii leat
buoretge), she sighed. In the disquiet that trailed these absences, she saw a prime
threat to societal health: ‘If one wants a healthy society, one needs a healthy mind,

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psyche, and a strong self-esteem (nana iešdovdu).’ It was this erosion of a sense of
self that, she suggested, had come to mark the lives of too many, not only in her
generation, but also in generations that followed.

‘WHAT IS DIRTY IN US?’ (MII LEA DUOLVVAS MIS?)

Luobbal Sámmol Sofe’s foregoing narrative vividly describes the experienced con-
tradictions between the increasingly assertive presence of the postwar Nordic states
on the one hand and the conditions of healthful social and ecological relations and
subjectivities in Sápmi on the other. It does so holistically, both in terms of the spec-
trum of state institutions that she depicts as impinging on the societal health of
communities of Deanuleahki and in terms of the capacious understandings of care,
health and well-being that she describes as arising from those communities. In what
follows, I weave her narrative together with a striking experiential account of the
pernicious effects of state making in the realms of medicine and public health, shared
with me by the multidisciplinary scholar, artist, jurist and duojár (traditional crafts-
man) Ánde Somby.
Our conversation began with Ánde’s description of a childhood memory: Witnessing,
at the age of fve or six, Norwegian tuberculosis screening vehicles arrive at his home
village of Sirbmá. He recounted how the vehicles, with their nurses and technicians
and x-ray devices, arrived to examine villagers’ lungs for spots indicative of infec-
tion. While emphasizing that the screening and treatment of community members
for tuberculosis were, in themselves, positive acts, Ánde foregrounded his perception,
as a child, that the atmosphere surrounding the tuberculosis vehicles was marked by
a profusion of fear. Their presence, he said, was that of an ‘authority, not a service’
(eiseváldi, ii fal bálvalus) – that is, of control and surveillance rather than care (cf.
Farmer 2020; see also Allemann in this volume). He continued:

Folks were very fearful that the tuberculosis people would think that they were
dirty, that they smelled, that they had smells that those people would judge and
would then think that they were dirty Sámis. So then what a child experiences
from this is that when the vehicles are coming, people talk about what has
happened in other places, and maybe there some nurse or x-ray technician had
said to this or that person that they were so dirty and they had been shamed
[heahpašattojuvvon], and people feared that the same might also happen to
them.

Here, in the eyes of the child, the revelatory authority of the x-ray was wielded by
representatives of state power in a manner that amplifed racialized messages that
already percolated in the wider society. Indeed, the documented history of tubercu-
losis control in northern Norway is replete with publicly articulated stereotypes of
flth, primitivity, degeneracy and decline among the Sámi (Ryymin 2007, 146–158).
As the tuberculosis vehicles screened community members for the physical markers
of infectious disease, they simultaneously became a site for the articulation of stark
social hierarchies. The fgure of the ‘dirty Sámis’ in Ánde’s childhood memory – a
fgure from which it appeared imperative for his kin and community to distance
themselves – here indexes anxieties about the specifc regimes of purity and hygiene

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represented by the tuberculosis vehicles. It echoes, too, ideologies of progress and

civilization that formed an undercurrent to a great deal of 20th-century Nordic state
practice (cf. Ryymin 2007; Lehtola 2012). Such racialized and hierarchical regimes
of hygiene have fgured prominently in global histories of (settler) colonial rule and
medicine (Anderson 2006), including in what has elsewhere in the Circumpolar
North been dubbed ‘welfare colonialism’ (Paine 1977). Indeed, measures of infec-
tious disease control, including with respect to tuberculosis, have often played a
role in the making of Indigenous Peoples into citizen-subjects (cf. Stevenson 2014,
20–46; Ryymin 2007, 151–158). Against this backdrop, Ánde’s narrative powerfully
illuminates contradictions between an ostensibly caring welfare state’s expanding
postwar reach and the oppressive facets of its medical and public health interven-
tions in the context of racially tinged, assimilatory state practice.
Crucially, Ánde’s narrative illuminates the inescapably corporeal and sensory
reach of these encounters with the expanding postwar welfare state, casting in even
starker relief the pervasive disquiet of which Sofe had written. He continued:

And in practical terms, people went and washed themselves desperately: they
bathed and went to the sauna, so that they wouldn’t be spoken of that way.
And that stress didn’t just affect individuals, but every house in the whole vil-
lage got this kind of stress of cleanliness [buhtisvuođa streassa]. And afterwards,
as I grew, I looked back on these experiences and thought that one of the most
powerful things one can have over another person is if you say to them that you
are dirty, that you smell bad. Then you get, like an eagle, a claw inside the other
person’s feelings and self-esteem [dalle don oaččut, dego goaskin, gacca dan
nuppi olbmo dovdduid ja iešvásáhusa sisa].

In this manner, he argued, the mobile screening facilities left enduring psychologi-
cal marks that could, because of their diffuseness, be even harder to undo than
the wounds associated with the internáhta, the assimilatory residential schools that
commonly epitomize (inter)generational trauma across postwar Sápmi (cf. Minde
2005; Rasmus 2008; see also Andersen; and Hansen in this volume). These traces,
to him, took the form a lingering question, one that continued to reverberate across
generations: ‘What is dirty in us?’ (Mii lea duolvvas mis?) The tuberculosis vehicles
thus served as a visible emblem of the shame that he saw as perhaps the furthest-
reaching tool of the assimilatory Nordic state. It spanned one’s knowledge, one’s
dress, one’s body and one’s regime of hygiene – all of which the agents of the state
scrutinized, surveilled and cast as suspect, degenerate, inadequate and tainted.
Here, his narrative casts in particularly sharp relief the ways in which these exer-
cises of state authority could have deleterious effects for the healthy sense of self
of which Sofe spoke. The multifaceted shame, Ánde argued, amounted to a ‘con-
cert’ that became internalized as a ‘music of oppression (deaddima musihkka) that
teaches people to oppress themselves.’ The ‘music of oppression’ that in his narra-
tive accompanies experiences of rapid and coercive cultural change constitutes a
rich sensorial illustration of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conceptualized as
symbolic violence (Bourdieu 2000 169–171) – that is, the processes by which social
hierarchies become internalized, embodied and enacted by those in a structurally
subordinate position in a manner that naturalizes and perpetuates the categories

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and power relations that defne their subordination. Indeed, to Bourdieu, shame as a
‘bodily emotion’ is a prime example of this ‘inscription of a relation of domination
into the body’ (2000, 169), facilitating as it does the blaming of the oppressed for
their own oppression (2000, 201).
Such symbolic violence, in turn, directly affected the relational and ecological
webs on which, in my interlocutors’ telling, care depended. As Ánde described it:

If you frst take people’s self-esteem and cut, split, and trample – it won’t stop
there, it spreads wider. I believe one of the practical outcomes of the whole
process, of which the idea that you are dirty is just one branch but not the only
one, is that people become analphabetized [analfabetiserejuvvon, i.e. rendered
illiterate]. They no longer value their skills and knowledge, such that parents
stop telling their children what they know because they don’t value it. And then
it doesn’t take long before that knowledge has disappeared.

Crucially, since subsistence livelihoods were often a focal point of inferiorizing ste-
reotypes about the Sámi, this proliferation of shame served to specifcally undermine
practices and knowledges on which care depended. Rattling off resonant examples
of such knowledges – the traditional sled (geres), the reindeer-skin coat (beaska),
the plants that could be used for nourishment or medicine, the forms of spiritual-
ity with which their use was often vitally entwined – he suggested that, for many
in the region, the dominant Nordic societies’ supply chains and forms of economic
exchange long supplanted reliance on these systems of knowledge. Accordingly, he
suggested, if stores were to close or transportation ground to a halt today – a hypo-
thetical rendered more poignant in an era of escalating ecological and public health
crises – many might lack the knowledge necessary to ensure their own or others’
health, well-being and survival. In this manner, at a limit, the symbolic violence
enacted through shame could lead to starvation.
However, Ánde insisted, these interrelated systems of knowledge (diehtoortnegat)
weren’t just matters of life and death for individuals who, for instance, might not
survive a storm or an injury out on the land without their help. They were, instead,
vital and necessary forms of knowledge for a society. Embedded as these knowledges
were in nodes of social relations, their loss and alienation could leave society itself
in a profoundly vulnerable position. Accordingly, a tremendous power of repair and
reclamation adhered to those nodes of social relations. Here, seemingly mundane
acts of presence could serve as vital forms of care: Visiting an older community
member, even if the visit were spent in the near silence of wordless understanding,
or a joke resonating with its listener, reaffrming ties to a shared experiential and
communicative context. Such care, in turn, could contribute to reclaiming and re-
presencing (sensu Martineau 2015) ways of relating that had been lost or rendered
precarious through the postwar decades’ societal transformations.
***
For Luobbal Sámmol Sofe, the delegitimization and loss of knowledge described by
Ánde Somby likewise had profound material and moral implications. Using duodji
as an example, she argued that a disconnect had emerged from the sustainable sourc-
ing and use of material on which the sustenance of life in a punishing physical

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environment tangibly depended (about duodji, see Magga, S.-M. in this volume).
Remarking on what she viewed as the apparent untethering of this vital cultural
practice from Sámi values, she noted: ‘I don’t think Sámi eyes are even necessarily a
part of this anymore – how one sees with Sámi eyes (sámi čalmmiiguin).’ Both the
physical sense of sight and the values animating her sociopolitical vision appeared
to be encompassed by this phrase. With it, she suggested that postwar economic
transformations surrounding the region’s livelihoods had jeopardized the values and
vision that were necessary in order for Sámi society to be healthy. To her, this was
emblematic of the wider disconnect from knowledge of how one ought to live not
only to thrive but also, at a limit, to cope and survive (birget). That knowledge – in
which, Sofe said, medicine and healing (dálkkodeapmi), philosophy and mythology
were ‘all the same’ – needed to be transferred (sirdašuvvat) among people, particu-
larly across generations, for it to remain alive. Such transferal, in turn, required the
cultivation of the sensory capacity to perceive and observe (áicat, áiccadit) – a capac-
ity whose development she depicted as inextricably linked to the ecological contexts
and intergenerational kinship relations on which care depended. The fgure of the
grandmother (áhkku) in her text is particularly evocative with respect to the precar-
ity of those contexts and relations amid drastic social change.
As she wrote:

we don’t live at peace

we don’t live as a healthy society
a healthy Sámi society lived once before
I have not lived it
nor did my mother live it
but grandma was part of it a little
Though the end she did not come to know
she died during the war far from home
But before that
was society healthy then?
and the generation before
how was it?

Áhkku, a kernel of intergenerational kinship relations, is depicted here as still teth-

ered to the ‘healthy Sámi society’ during her lifetime. Indeed, áhkku might also be
read here as a metonym for the healthy Sámi society itself – a society Sofe depicts
as not returning intact from the traumatic experience of wartime displacement (cf.
Lehtola 1994). Yet this fgure is not, in the narrative of the text, simplistically roman-
ticized. It was not trivial, Sofe insisted, that she had concluded the text with a pair
of questions: Before ‘the end’ – that is, before the societal upheaval that began with
wartime displacement and that characterized the transformations of postwar dec-
ades – had society been truly healthy? One might read this uncertainty as an exten-
sion of the doubt that Ánde had attributed to the shame stemming from encounters
with the assimilatory postwar state. Yet the question was also directly rooted in her
awareness of the violence and vulnerability that had marked the prewar lives of
many, particularly women and those living in poverty. Likewise, the fnal lines (‘and

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the generation before/how was it?’) contain a subtle duality. On the one hand, as a
gesture of uncertainty, they are indicative of fssures that had formed among genera-
tions, of disruptions in intergenerational transferal of knowledge occasioned by the
processes described earlier. On the other hand, they can be read as a gesture of relat-
ing, of connecting, of calling out in search of answers: A question, indeed, one might
ask of one’s elder kin. As such, her closing questions encapsulate the sense in which
many of my interlocutors’ experiences of loss and doubt coexist with a continual
striving for and an assertive commitment to the vitality of Deanuleahki’s lifeways.

LOSS, CARE AND RESURGENCE: FROM

ETHNOGRAPHY TO CONCEPTUALIZATION
The narratives of my interlocutors, of whom Luobbal Sámmol Sofe and Ánde
Somby offer illustrative examples, necessitate reckoning directly with the losses
that stem from the injurious effects of Nordic state making upon ecologically and
relationally situated practices of care along Deanuleahki. Indeed, drawing on the
analytic of social suffering frst put forth by the anthropologists Arthur Kleinman,
Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Kleinman et al. 1997), I suggest that inquiry into
everyday practices and relations of care in this context demands examination of the
interconnected harms that are attributable to constellations of social forces – local
and global, past and present, economic and political – that have transformed the
region’s lifeworlds in the postwar decades. Crucially, with respect to my interlocu-
tors’ experiences, the analytic of social suffering emphasizes such forces’ reverbera-
tion through societal institutions and intimate intersubjective relationships alike.
However, my interlocutors’ narratives underscore the need to expand the conven-
tional boundaries of this analytic to explicitly engage with the ecology: they spe-
cifcally demand attention to the manner in which the local ecology – land, water,
livelihoods, and interspecies relations – permeates experiences of suffering and care
alike. Their experiences suggest the necessity of interrogating injuries and practices
of repair that are specifcally socioecological – a necessity that is continually ren-
dered more acute amidst the globally escalating climate crisis.
Yet, as the foregoing narratives make clear, the lifeworlds of Deanuleahki must
not be reduced to the ways in which others have acted upon them or subsumed
under trajectories and effects of state practice. My interlocutors’ assertive com-
mitment to relationally and ecologically situated care is exemplifed in this text by
Luobbal Sámmol Sofe’s poetic exhortation to fght for a healthy Sámi society and
by Ánde Somby’s intricate attention to knowledge systems, modes of communica-
tion and nodes of social relations as sites of reclamation and repair. In my analysis,
this commitment necessitates alignment against what the Unangax̌ scholar Eve Tuck
has critiqued as the ‘damage-centered narratives’ (Tuck 2009) and the anthropolo-
gist Joel Robbins as the ‘suffering slot’ (Robbins 2013) to which the depictions of
Indigenous communities by non-Indigenous researchers (of which I am one) too
often confne their subjects. Accordingly, my analysis of care is situated explicitly in
the context of Indigenous resurgence. Centred on the analytic of resurgent care put
forth in the beginning of in this chapter, my inquiry into the harms of state making
thus continually foregrounds my interlocutors’ efforts to ensure the vitality of rela-
tionally and ecologically situated practices as wellsprings of care.

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CONCLUSION
Flux, struggle and striving animate the narratives of my ethnographic interlocu-
tors on care and state making along Deanuleahki, Sápmi. In them, state-driven
postwar institutionalization of care as public healthcare, education and social wel-
fare is frequently intertwined with experiences of material, psychological and spir-
itual dislocation from the region’s land, water and subsistence livelihoods. These
experiences are shot through with an assertive commitment to relational and eco-
logically situated forms of care, even as they unfold amid structural and symbolic
violence (Galtung 1969; Farmer 2004; Bourdieu 2000) that stems from Finnish and
Norwegian state practice in Sápmi. They demand recognition of intertwined forms
of social suffering (Kleinman et al. 1997), casting as they do in stark relief the injuri-
ous effects of Nordic postwar state practice (including state-provided care) on the
social institutions and intersubjective relations on which care depends. Yet they reso-
lutely militate against narratives of immiseration and decline. Informed by scholarly
and communal mobilizations for Indigenous resurgence, the proposed analytic of
resurgent care thus foregrounds the striving of my interlocutors to sustain, remake
and revivify relationally and ecologically situated practices of care.

NOTES
1 I borrow the felicitous phrase ‘ecology of care’ from Robert C. Fuller’s analysis of ethical
obligations that extend from the interpersonal to the ecological (Fuller 1992).
2 The research, writing and language study drawn on in this chapter have been fnancially
supported between 2014 and 2021 by Harvard University (Minda de Gunzburg Center
for European Studies, Cora Du Bois Fellowship, John Hall Jones Trust, Department of
Anthropology Teschmacher Fund, Frederick Sheldon Fund, Weatherhead Center for
International Affairs and the Jens Aubrey Westengard Fund); the Social Science Research
Council; and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (Suomen Kulttuurirahasto).
3 This terminology and a broader lexicon of care (including fuolahit, áittardit, áibmadit,
váldit vara, atnit fuola, atnit ávvira, bearráigeahččat) are examined in more detail in
my forthcoming doctoral dissertation, Care, State-Making, and Indigenous Resurgence:
An Ethnography of Deanuleahki, Sápmi (Department of Anthropology, Harvard
University).
4 I use the word ‘interlocutor’ here in place of ‘informant’ to emphasize the grounding of
the research process in continual mutual exchange, reciprocity and collaboration. In these
choices, I am guided by wider scholarly debate regarding the relationships upon which
knowledge production rests: see particularly Aimo Aikio’s (2010, 7) discussion framing
his interlocutors as coworker (mielbargi), Aura Mari Pieski’s (2019, 32) framing of hers
as research partners (dutkanguoibmi) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2013, 174–178) foun-
dational discussion of the problematic history of research relationships in Indigenous
contexts. About the settlement history of Deatnuleahki, see Alakorva et al. in this volume.
5 It is signifcant that this control is often couched as stewardship and care; see Østmo and
Law (2018).
6 Formal research activities began in Ohcejohka (on the Finnish side of the state border) in
July 2014 and in Deatnu and Kárášjohka (on the Finnish side of the state border) in May
2018.
7 Of the 60 interlocutors who formally participated in my research in 2016–2018, 31 were
female and 29 male. They ranged in age from 21 to 80, with 40 residing in Sápmi in
Finland and 20 residing in Sápmi in Norway.

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8 See Aimo Aikio’s (2010, 84–87) discussion of the complexities of biographical narration,
specifcally in the Sámi context.
9 The working concept of the intimate archives of care and harm is developed further else-
where in my dissertation. For valuable conceptualizations of archives in other contexts,
see Stoler (2010) and Cloutier (2019).
10 On reciprocity, see Kimmerer (2013, 2014).
11 Mággá is a pseudonym. As part of my informed consent process, each interlocutor is
empowered to choose whether they appear under a pseudonym or under their own
name – and if the latter, they choose the form in which the name appears (e.g. using the
traditional Sámi naming convention or one’s Finnish or Norwegian ‘offcial’ name). This
choice is reviewed with each interlocutor during the process of writing about that which
they have shared.
12 Heandárat is a pseudonym. See note 11.
13 See parallels to Liv Østmo and John Law’s writing on jávre dikšun, caring for the lake
(Østmo and Law, 2018).
14 I thank Áile Aikio for invaluable suggestions on this framing.
15 For discussion of these transformations in the wider scholarly literature, see Lehtola
(1994, 2012, 2015), Ryymin and Andreasen (2009), Müller-Wille (1996).
16 As transportation infrastructure expanded in the postwar years, customs agents were
stationed in Gáregasnjárga in 1955, in Ohcejohka in 1958 and in Buolbmát in 1969
(Laukkanen and Kurkinen, 2008, 122–124). A subsequent bilateral agreement between
Finland and Norway established coordinated customs posts in 1969, commencing their
operations the following year (Tulli 2019). Finally, the joint construction of the Sámi
Bridge (Sámi šaldi) by Finnish and Norwegian authorities in 1992–1993 featured the
opening of a prominent new customs authority building in Ohcejohka (Laukkanen and
Kurkinen 2008, 124).
17 Esáias is a pseudonym; see note 11.
18 The scholarship of Ludger Müller-Wille casts vital light on the manner in which the build-
ing of roads, the growth of settler communities and the guarding of state borders could rep-
resent the infltration of corruptive outside infuences into the region (Müller-Wille 1996,
35–46). His ethnographic research from the decades immediately following the Second
World War indicates how the presence of border guards may have concretely disrupted
family and community networks of care. He particularly points to marriages between
border guards and local Sámi women as a source of considerable friction between the
local community and the newly installed representatives of Finnish sovereignty: Locals, he
argues, viewed these ties as tearing women away from their sociocultural context, ruptur-
ing their family ties, leading to loss of language and accelerating community disintegra-
tion (Müller-Wille 1996, 35).
19 Iissát is a pseudonym; see note 11.
20 Note here the signifcant Galtungian critique of ostensible peace in postwar Sápmi – what
Galtung (1969) might term negative peace characterized by a profusion of structural
violence.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

DEFINING THE SÁMI

C U LT U R A L E N V I R O N M E N T
New perspectives for feldwork


Päivi Magga

I worked as a Sámi expert on a project that aimed to survey the cultural landscapes
throughout the province of Finnish Lapland from 2004 to 2008. Early in the pro-
ject, I noticed that, compared to the rest of Finland, only a few locations in the Sámi
homeland had been classifed as nationally valuable landscape areas by virtue of
their cultural value.1
In Finland, the concept of cultural environment encompasses cultural landscapes,
built cultural environments and archaeological sites that have emerged as a result
of human activity or the interaction of people and nature. A cultural environment
may include both clearly defned geographical spaces and individual sites, and it can
be examined, for example, as a regional, visual, experiential or historical entity. The
concepts of cultural landscape and heritage landscape overlap to some degree, the
latter tending to be rather limited in area and one facet of a broader cultural land-
scape (Cultural Environment Strategy 2014–2020 2014, 9). The concept of cultural
environment is important because the heritage authorities use it to place a value on
and give varying statuses to buildings, built environments and landscapes. The status
of a building or site then determines how it is treated in land-use planning. The con-
cept of cultural environment dictates what kinds of sites are entitled to protection,
while others – which fall outside the scope of the concept – are left unprotected. The
concept also determines what we focus our attention on in a particular area – that
is, what is seen and what remains invisible.
This notion is utterly contrary to the one I grew up with in the little Sámi village
of Vuohčču, Vuotso. Many places that are important to the Sámi are not acknowl-
edged on maps. Early on, I was shown and told where my family’s old dwelling
sites and reindeer fences were. My father would announce that he was going off
into ‘the forest’ when he was actually going fshing, cloudberry picking or up onto
the fells. I knew that we should never take everything the forest could give because
the forest had needs of its own. I learned to move quietly through the forest and

134 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-10

 — Defining the Sámi cultural environment —

was advised that should one come across an object that belonged to somebody
else, it should be picked up and put where it would be easier to spot. In particu-
lar, I learned that human presence in the forest was ideally traceless. Against this
backdrop, one must ask whether the concepts of Finnish cultural heritage manage-
ment, which are structured around the idea of human-made traces, are appropriate
when working with the Sámi cultural environment, which is based on the ideal of
tracelessness.
The Sámi have inhabited the Sámi homeland since time immemorial. However,
the effects of human presence there are largely invisible to the untrained eye and, as a
result, have escaped the attention and understanding of most observers. Traditional
Sámi land use has neither been based on demarcating boundaries nor required con-
structing large-scale infrastructure. In their building practices, the Sámi have used
local natural building materials, which decompose relatively rapidly when the build-
ings are no longer used. In many places, it is only relatively recently that people
have begun living in permanent dwellings, and the Sámi log construction tradition
is rather young. These cultural features – the scarcity of human-made traces – have
made the Sámi homeland appear as wilderness rather than a cultural environment in
the eyes of the non-Sámi. From the perspective of the Finnish defnition of cultural
environment, most of the Sámi cultural environments would be classifed as natural
landscapes and thus denied status as cultural environments – and, with it, the protec-
tion such environments enjoy.
In this chapter, I will discuss different approaches to the concept of cultural
environment. Drawing from two projects I have worked on, I examine how the
introduction of the Sámi understanding of the cultural environment into heritage
practices  – such as feld surveys of cultural environments and landscapes – has
affected those practices. I conclude by refecting on the usefulness of the concept,
including whether it adequately covers Sámi land use and Sámi culture. In my
research, I act as an interpreter, or a mediator, between the Sámi and non-Sámi
worlds in the particular context of Finland, and my objective is to develop practices
that aim at ensuring recognition of the Sámi cultural environments. The defnition
of a Sámi cultural environment plays a crucial role in identifying Sámi cultural envi-
ronments and acknowledging them as such, which, in turn, has implications for the
protection of Sámi cultural heritage.
My research offers a new interpretation of the concept of cultural environment,
which I refer to as the concept of the Sámi cultural environment. This new concept
is broader in that it seeks to embrace that which overfows the traditional concept
of cultural environment: Traditional knowledge (i.e. orally transmitted knowledge
of landscape), as well as skills learned by working together. I suggest that the tradi-
tional Sámi worldview continues to underpin the ways in which Sámi relate to their
environment, act in it and with it and ascribe value to it.

DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE

CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT
Sámi researchers have studied Sámi relations to nature and the environment since
the 1990s. Audhild Schanche, an archaeologist and a pioneer in research on the Sámi
cultural landscape, introduced the concept of samisk kulturlandskap (Sámi cultural

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landscape). With reference to Norwegian and Northern Sámi terms pertaining to

landscape and land use, Schanche (2002, 156–159) refects on how landscape is
understood in the context of environmental protection in Norway. She writes about
the Western penchant for thinking through dichotomies: i.e. framing things in terms
of what are considered to constitute ‘opposites.’ In dichotomous thought, culture is
positioned as the opposite of nature, with the further implication that comparable
pairs of concepts – such as cultural environment and natural environment and cul-
tural landscape and natural landscape – similarly constitute opposites. In this sense,
then, nature comprises the physical world and its ecological systems, which are often
associated with wildness, primitivity and uninhabitedness. By contrast, culture sug-
gests something that has been shaped, cultivated and refned by humans and evokes
notions of civilization and habitation.
According to Schanche (2002, 157–159), the contemporary Western conception
of nature – including the use and protection of nature – entails the idea that nature
somehow lies beyond, or outside, the sphere of human life and needs to be protected
from human activity. In other words, nature is viewed as something that will be
ruined, as it were, through human intervention. What ultimately follows from such
thinking are strict, mutually exclusive categories – the use of nature in a cultural
landscape and human presence in a natural landscape – which results in the Sámi
falling between two stools. This is the nature of the Sámi landscape as a ‘paradox,’
at once both natural and cultural, but not enough of either. Its shape has not been
altered enough, nor has it been cultivated to the extent that it could be considered to
be of cultural value. At the same time, it is a natural landscape viewed as threatened
by the Sámi land use. Curiously enough, for example, practicing agriculture in a
cultural landscape is viewed as sustaining the values of the landscape, whereas Sámi
land use in their local area is seen as threatening, or diminishing, the nature values
of the area.
The areas where Sámi live today span four nation-states, each of whose govern-
ments rely on concepts shaped by the dominant language and culture. The Sámi do
not draw a sharp distinction between culture and nature.2 By virtue of their differ-
ent worldview, the Sámi have own concepts for referring to the environment and
nature. These often differ from those used in the dominant languages of the major-
ity societies in which the Sámi live. For example, the Sámi languages have no con-
cept that would be unproblematically interchangeable with the concept of cultural
environment (in Finnish, kulttuuriympäristö). In the Sámi languages – as well as in
Finnish – terms related to the concept of cultural environment are relatively recent
arrivals. The need for such terminology has not arisen from within Sámi culture,
and the words introduced into the Sámi languages have been imported from other
languages. For the Sámi, the meaning of these translation loans, or word-for-word
translations of foreign words, is not necessarily clear. It is one thing to import a word
from a different language, but it is yet another to make it work in the target culture
in such a way that the concept is understood and embraced. The slow pace of adopt-
ing the new terms is partly due to the fact that the Sámi languages have gained their
status as languages of the authorities relatively recently, and thus, the new concepts
have not become established. The situation is also infuenced by the status of the
Sámi language as a minority language. This means that until recently, the Sámi cul-
tural heritage has been approached through Western concepts – and in the particular

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context of the present study, Finnish ones. What is needed are ways of communicat-
ing information related to cultural heritage, to which cultural environments belong,
both within a culture and between cultures so that the parties involved genuinely
understand the idea behind the words used.
Investigating what the Sámi regard as culture and as nature requires a look at
the relevant expressions in the Sámi languages. Schanche (2002, 162–168) sets out
to determine the Sámi conception of the environment by analyzing the terms refer-
ring to the environment in the Sámi languages. In her view, the meaning of the
Northern Sámi terms luondu, luohtu and meahcci, which convey understandings
of nature, refect the relation between human and nature. Luondu (in Norwegian,
natur; in English, nature) previously meant only the ‘inner nature’ or ‘character’ of
a human or other being, and only recently, in contemporary usage, has its mean-
ing been extended to include nature as ‘the physical world.’ Historically, luohtu (in
Norwegian, villmark; in English, wilderness) was used to refer to an uninhabited
area in the physical world, which exists independent of human presence and inter-
vention. As with luohtu, meahcci (in Norwegian, skog; in English, forest) also refers
to the physical world, but it draws its more specifc meaning from the relationship
between human beings and nature. Meahcci is wherever natural resources used by
humans are found. It is also possible to refer more specifcally to a location where a
particular natural resource can be found by forming a compound consisting of the
word for the resource in question and the word meahcci. These compound words
can be used to refer, for example, to a location where you fsh, cut wood or pick
cloudberries. The opposite of meahcci is báiki, ‘place.’ However, the two concepts
are not categorically opposite. Rather, their meanings depend on how humans are
involved, which is to say that one and the same physical place can be luohtu, meah-
cci or báiki, depending on what we or others are doing there. For example, for
a Sámi reindeer herder, a báiki is wherever one’s dwelling – goahti or lávvu – is
located, and everything beyond this dwelling place is meahcci. Meahcci and báiki
are further defned by whether their use is collective or private. A meahcci3 is an area
where the natural resources are at the disposal of the community at large, whereas
a báiki is a place that a particular family or extended family considers as their ‘own’
(Schanche 2002, 162–168; about meahcci as a taskscape, see Joks in this volume).
The Sámi vocabulary referring to the cultural environment is characterized by
fexibility. The words are bound to the perspective of the utterer in that they are used
to refect the utterer’s relationship to nature and their mode of engagement with it.
Ultimately, it is a question of whether nature is examined in terms of using natural
resources in general or from the perspective of certain users in particular or whether
nature is viewed as an entity in its own right.
Archaeologist Inga-Maria Mulk (1997, 12–13) has put forward the concept of
the cognitive landscape. The cognitive landscape consists of landscape-related sto-
ries, memories and myths accumulated to form mental maps that pass from one
generation to another. Mulk emphasizes that the meaning of a landscape depends
on the person experiencing it; a landscape is viewed differently depending on where
one lives and one’s personal experience, profession, age and gender. A landscape can
be perceived as the landscape of an individual’s, family’s or extended family’s his-
tory, or it can be a landscape where one works. In addition, different livelihoods and
different seasons activate different facets of the cognitive landscape. For example,

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one could speak of the Sea Sámi landscape, the River Sámi landscape, a hunting
landscape or a reindeer-herding landscape. The cognitive landscape is dynamic by
nature and characterized by the simultaneous presence of multiple dimensions. It is
culturally determined, and to understand it, one has to be a member of the culture.
In the Finnish governance of cultural environments, the Sámi land use, and to
some extent, also the Sámi built cultural heritage, have been ignored. Drawing from
the studies of Schanche and Mulk, I have elaborated the concept of the Sámi cultural
environment (Magga 2003). The strong presence of the intangible cultural herit-
age is a quintessential feature of the Sámi cultural environment. The Sámi cultural
environment comprises the archaeological cultural heritage, the built environment
and cultural landscapes, as well as traditional knowledge (Figure 8.1). In my view,
the concept Sámi cultural environment works well because the concept of cultural
environment is used and recognized by the authorities and, as a result, provides a
shared ground for opening dialogue on the particularly Sámi understandings of the
concept. The intersection of the two concepts should be seen as a starting point for
discussion, and the Sámi cultural environment should be understood as a concept
in its own right with a content of its own. This affords an opportunity to develop a
multiperspectival understanding of the concept of cultural environment and to rec-
ognize a multiplicity of interpretations related to it. In the particular context of Sámi
culture, this would mean becoming aware of and acknowledging the long history of
the Sámi presence and activity in the natural landscape of the north.
Sámi history has traditionally rested on orally transmitted knowledge – oral his-
tories bound to places and areas. This kind of knowledge conveys how the areas and
places are used and by whom, and it is refected in place names, beliefs and various
stories, as well as music. Traditional knowledge is the spiritual, invisible dimension
of the Sámi cultural environment; it lives within the community and thus does not
easily reveal itself to, nor is it readily understood by, outsiders (see also Magga 2013,

Figure 8.1 The Sámi cultural environment.

Source: Photograph by the author.

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 — Defining the Sámi cultural environment —

10; about willingness to share traditional knowledge, see Magnani in this volume).
Sámi traditional knowledge is not a thing of the past; it is knowledge which is con-
stantly being applied and enables its user to adopt innovations. A Sámi upbringing
is based on doing things together, and this is still the most import way to learn the
traditional knowledge and skills connected to traditional practices and livelihoods.
Mastery of the traditional knowledge and skills allows the knowledge holder to
interpret their surroundings and, thus, to act appropriately according to what the
situation calls for.
The traditional Sámi community governance was based on the siida system, and
the use of areas in Sámi reindeer herding is still organized on the basis of the siida
(see Labba in this volume). In this system, each extended family has separate areas
for accessing and using natural resources, and other families do not, as a rule, use
areas belonging to others. The siida boundaries are not demarcated; knowledge of
them suffces, and they are respected among the Sámi. Those familiar with the his-
tory of an area and the people there can readily, in a matter of words, describe its
exact location to others. Knowledge on the use of places and areas with respect to
the seasons, various resources and who uses them is a facet of the traditional knowl-
edge that forms part of the Sámi cultural environment. Traditional knowledge is
linked in many ways to the landscape, nature, natural resources and livelihoods and
makes it possible to create a cohesive, rich and cartographically accurate description
of an area (about traditional knowledge concerning snow, see Eira in this volume).
Traditional knowledge allows for interpretation of the environment and the land-
scape, which in turn gives rise to the meanings that render a landscape a cultural
landscape and an environment a cultural environment.
The Sámi built heritage is a unique outcome of the livelihoods the Sámi have
practiced and the semi-nomadic life with the system of seasonal dwelling places. In
order not to exhaust the resources of any one location, the Sámi have been required
to move from one resource to another according to the needs of different livelihoods.
The necessity of constant building and rebuilding has called for a high degree of
movability of built structures. On the other hand, the need to change location fre-
quently has given rise to buildings and structures where property can be kept safe in
the owner’s absence, for example njalla.4
It has thus not been important – or even possible – to expend effort in building
structures for long-term use. Building materials were extracted from the immediate
surrounding nature, which strongly linked building practices to availability of mate-
rials. Thus, for example, the small size of tree stems available locally may have, in
part, infuenced the generally small scale of Sámi dwellings. Given the use of natural
materials in Sámi building practices, the buildings have decomposed relatively rap-
idly after their use was discontinued. This in turn explains why there are only a few
examples left of the older Sámi built heritage. The old buildings that have remained,
a rather modest sample, have not necessarily been considered a valuable built herit-
age nationally. As the standards defning what kinds of buildings are valuable and
signifcant have been determined for so long by the mainstream culture, the Sámi
themselves, even to this day, fnd it diffcult to appreciate their built heritage. The
existing examples of Sámi built heritage are often associated with days long past, or
with poverty, although they could well be interpreted as manifestations of ecological
living, sustainable development and resource savvy.

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According to the view proposed here, the Sámi conception of cultural environ-
ment is characterized by fexibility, the spirit of collectivity and the intertwining of
material and immaterial dimensions of existence. First, the fexibility of concepts
related to the Sámi cultural environment refers to the fact that concepts change
depending on people’s relationship to nature. They can express a variety of relation-
ships, for example, ‘nature in its own right,’ ‘nature in terms of the natural resources
it includes,’ ‘nature in terms of the specifc kinds of natural resources it includes,’
‘nature in terms of its user,’ and ‘nature in terms of the user’s engagement with it.’
Second, the Sámi conception of the environment is characteristically holistic, one
allowing the simultaneous presence of a number of different dimensions. These do
not exclude one another but rather together form a whole in terms of which a land-
scape can be interpreted and understood. Physical remains and the built heritage
indicate how areas were used, how people lived there and how they made a living.
Places with spiritual signifcance, for their part, are signs of the invisible dimension
of the landscape, the symbolic cultural landscape. Oral traditional knowledge, in
combination with values and customs, creates an invisible cultural environment, a
mental map, which gives the environment meaning.

EXPLORING LAPLAND’S CULTURAL

ENVIRONMENTS 2004–2008 5
Each culture is underpinned by a philosophy that guides thinking. Such philoso-
phies also affect what counts as nature and culture – and, by extension, a cultural
environment – in any given culture. Earlier feld surveys, which largely focused
on agricultural sites, have failed to identify Sámi cultural environments and their
distinctive characteristics. The Sámi cultural environment, having little in the way
of buildings, is diffcult for the non-Sámi to read. The conventional concepts and
vocabulary used in discourse on cultural environments were not applicable as such
to the Sámi homeland. This meant that documenting and protecting the Sámi cul-
tural environment had to set about defning the Sámi cultural environment, to cre-
ate terminologies to defne site types (e.g. dwelling), extent (group of buildings) and
use (Magga 2003, 2007a, 2007b). Terminologies created elsewhere in Finland were
not applicable to northernmost Finland. The idea was to avoid the excessive infu-
ence of former terminologies, and new terms were coined to allow the distinctive
feature of the region to come to the fore. The terminology was also revised as the
feld survey progressed (Magga 2007a, 18–21).
Information on the cultural environment was collected by conducting a feld sur-
vey to various sites in chosen areas. Depending on the type of site, the informa-
tion recorded might include its signifcance and its cultural history (Magga 2007a,
74–79). In the case of the Sámi sites, there were essentially no written records avail-
able to be used as background material. Thus, the regional and cultural expertise of
those conducting the survey and their cooperation with the local residents became
particularly important; the Sámi archives are the people who possess traditional
knowledge and who know the area (Magga 2007a, 54).
I was coordinator and responsible for the feld surveys in the Sámi area. The
actual feldwork was carried out by members of local communities. The manner
in which the project was executed can be described as dialogical. It was interesting

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to note that the Sámi conducted feldwork largely in the area of their own siida.
This refects the traditional Sámi system of family areas. Even today, many families
have their ‘own areas,’ and entering an area that belongs to others is not consid-
ered appropriate or is avoided. It was the local Sámi feldworkers who ultimately
decided whether to survey a particular site or not. Where they chose not to do so,
this was infuenced by the values of the local community, which manifested them-
selves, among other ways, in the fact that previously unknown sacred places such
as sieidi were ultimately not surveyed. Throughout the work process, we discussed
whether the sites and information collected should be made public. Based on these
discussions, the project steering group decided to lay down a number of principles:
The information collected would be reviewed, and, if necessary, consideration would
be given to what should be done with regard to its publicization. This procedure was
designed to ensure that sacred places in particular would remain undisturbed and
intact (Magga 2007a, 18–21).
With the Sámi perspective as the point of departure for the work, the outcome
was a rich and diverse cultural environment comprising locations connected to
livelihoods, dwelling sites and ruins, as well as places connected to folk tales and
beliefs. The information collected in surveys highlighted the diversity of the Sámi
cultural environment and made it visible (Magga 2007a, 23). For example, the sur-
veys revealed that more buildings from late 1800s and early 1900s still existed than
we had been aware of. Other interesting fndings were movable buildings, structures
which have been moved from one place to another as the need has arisen – possi-
bly repeatedly, covering long distances. A special building type that emerged in the
study was the áiti, a lightly built structure designed for storage. The grounds around
dwellings could have several áiti in different sizes for different storage needs (Magga
2007a, 54).
The feld surveys brought up a number of sites relating to reindeer herding. These
bring out regional variations in herding but also reveal the change that the liveli-
hood has undergone. Here, it was diffcult to determine whether or not the sites were
still being used. For example, a fenced-in enclosure is never actually abandoned but
rather remains as a resource to be used, for example, when the weather makes it
necessary to change plans. In the case of such sites, I decided to classify them ‘not in
use at present’ by their current status at the time of the survey. For many sites, the
present use could be classifed as traditional knowledge, examples being old dwell-
ing sites and reindeer enclosures that may have decayed to the point that they are
diffcult to distinguish in the terrain without local knowledge.
At the end, the collected material was reviewed in specifc working groups to
determine the signifcance of the sites. There was a separate working group for each
main area, and the composition of the groups varied from area to area as there was
an emphasis on the importance of having local knowledge of Sámi culture repre-
sented. Consideration of the sites consisted of a verbal assessment. Sámi cultural
sites were identifed using the criteria applied by the Norwegian Sámi Parliament:
The site has an oral or written Sámi tradition associated with it; local knowledge
connects it with Sámi culture; or research reliably proves that that it is linked to
Sámi history or prehistory (Magga 2007a, 55–57). This phase drove home how dif-
fcult it is to evaluate Sámi sites. For the Sámi representatives in the working groups,
the idea that some sites were more valuable than others seemed alien. Highlighting

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some sites, even for the sake of an example, might inadvertently suggest that they are
particularly rare or that they are typical of a particular area. In reality there might
be any number of similar sites; on the other hand, a very poorly preserved site may
be unique indeed (Magga 2007a, 55–57).

NATIONALLY VALUABLE LANDSCAPES

IN THE SÁMI AREA 6
The Cultural Environment Unit of the Sámi Museum Siida updated the survey that
had been done of nationally valuable landscape areas and scenic landscapes in the
Sámi area as part of a Finnish national project (about the Sámi Museum Siida, see
also Aikio in this volume). This effort was designed to review the current list of
nationally valuable landscape areas and scenic landscapes in Finland7 as well as
the criteria used in identifying them and the classifcation of their value (Arvokkaat
maisema-alueet 1992). It then went on to update the list to comply with the revised
systems for implementing and guiding landscape management.8 Where work on the
Sámi cultural environment was concerned, this provided an opportunity to further
test the content of the concept of a Sámi cultural environment and its application
in the feld, to update the former survey in the light of the Sámi conception of a
cultural environment and to illustrate the special features of a given area, such as
unique or characteristic landscapes used in livelihoods. The Sámi perspective on the
use of the area and on its history was the basis to choose and evaluate sites. Here,
extensive cooperation with local communities proved very helpful. People were
asked for suggestions using a web-based map survey, written requests and sessions
arranged in villages. Information collected in earlier surveys was also reviewed, and
areas with a high concentration of valuable sites were examined with particular care.
Interestingly, a signifcant site/area may have been reported in the map survey, but
the person submitting it did not want it made public. The same phenomenon was
seen in discussions as well. People had an interest in reporting sites and a hope that
the value of the site would be understood but, at the same time, were afraid that this
information might be misused – for example, to attract tourists (about the challenges
of tourism, see Puuronen in this volume). In such cases, we opted not to propose
the sites for inclusion in the updated list (Magga and Ojanlatva forthcoming). In
my view, this refected the Sámi distrust of the (heritage) authorities. The report by
researcher Leena Heinämäki (2021, 48, 108, 198) on the rights of the Sámi in the
protection of ancient relics points out on many occasions that the rights of the Sámi
to their cultural heritage are not currently implemented in Finnish legislation.
According to the Finnish general guidelines for conducting the feld survey
(Maaseutumaisemat – Arvokkaiden maisema-alueiden inventointi), the signifcant
features of landscape areas were understood as outcomes of long-standing human
activity. One criterion for a site to be considered nationally valuable is the land-
scape’s vitality and the continuity of activity in it. In the context of the Sámi home-
land, this kind of thinking is incongruous. For Sámi, the most important criterion
for a signifcant cultural landscape may well be the quality in a landscape of being in
its natural state, and ‘retaining vitality’ may mean that the area continues to remain
in its natural state (Magga and Ojanlatva forthcoming). The signifcance of an area,
by contrast, springs from its content with respect to Sámi culture; needless to say,

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many areas often also have scientifc value (Magga and Ojanlatva forthcoming).
Our assessment focused particular attention on adequately representing Finland’s
three Sámi language groups and the regional variations, as well as how rare, diverse
and original the sites are. We tried to include in the selection criteria various types
of archaeological sites, examples of the built environment, cultural environments,
valuable geological locations and natural environments. The criteria also took into
account sites and areas that have played a particularly signifcant role in the his-
tory of the Sámi homeland (Magga and Ojanlatva forthcoming). As a result of the
updated inventory, 21 sites were proposed for the Sámi area, including 5 former sites
with different boundaries (Lapin maisemat, Ylä-Lappi). The Government of Finland
adapted new nationally valuable landscapes in November 2021. There are now in
total 186 sites of which 30 new sites. More than half of these new sites are located
in the Sámi homeland.9

THE TRADITIONAL SÁMI WORLDVIEW AND

PRACTICES DERIVING FROM IT
The Sámi philosophy and the worldview and human-nature relationship emanating
from it, as well as the traditional siida system, continue to be present in the customs
and customary law of the contemporary Sámi. We Sámi are no longer particularly
aware of these infuences in our everyday lives because the idea that the old Sámi
religion has ceased to exist has been reiterated repeatedly, over a long period of time.
Here, I propose the view that the ‘old Sámi world’ is closer to us than we might
consciously realize. This is evident in the ways in which the Sámi, particularly those
engaged in the traditional livelihoods, continue to relate to nature and landscape –
their own cultural environment.
In the Sámi worldview, humans are just one among many actors in their environ-
ment. Living in harmony with the other actors who share the same environment
has required Sámi to have a moral and ethical code of behaviour (see also Joks
in this volume). This can be seen, for example, in how Sámi have sought to infu-
ence these complex interactive relationships through action and thought. While all
landscapes are inhabited by other-than-human beings, their presence is particularly
salient in areas important for livelihoods and more carefully delimited locations.10
Some of these invisible beings are similar to people and in many ways like us, while
some other beings escape defnition. They can be dangerous, they can warn us, and
they can also help us. In addition to other-than-human actors/beings of the environ-
ment, relatives who have passed away are also important (e.g. Helander-Renvall
2016; Sjöberg 2018; Oskal 1994). All these beings are also present in a Sámi cultural
environment.
In his doctoral thesis, Nils A. Oskal analyzes the concept boazolihkku (‘rein-
deer luck’) among reindeer-herding Sámi and its philosophical underpinnings.
Comparable concepts are guollelihkku (‘fsh luck’) and beanalihkku (‘dog luck’).
All three are based on a conception that a human should negotiate and come to
an agreement with animals, as well as the land and various places. According to
Oskal, reindeer luck is personal and covers a broader spectrum of ways of thinking
and behaving in which behaviour towards reindeer is only one facet. The number
of reindeer one has is not a sign of the owner’s reindeer luck, although the number

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may be a result of such luck. To get reindeer luck, one has to live decently – show-
ing honesty, fairness and moderation in all things. It is a matter of how one treats
reindeer but also how one treats people. In addition, people are expected to show
the same respect for the areas and places they use (Oskal 1994, 89–90, 94–101).
Morally good or correct behavior with respect to the environment also has a positive
effect on a person’s life.
Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg (2018, 117–118), a scholar in religious studies, examines
the Sámi practice sivdnidit (‘blessing’) in her doctoral thesis. As part of daily life,
sivdnidit can be relevant in many contexts, and it is also a means to communicate
with the land and various beings. In Sjöberg’s view, sivdnidit is a way to remain
mindful of humility, gratitude and obligations in order to get along with others.
Beings and spirits are also encountered along routes in locations that are particularly
challenging to access. Negotiation with the entities involved has been considered a
prerequisite for entering and acting in such places. This involves asking for permis-
sion and giving a blessing. For example, spending the night outdoors requires asking
for permission from the place and giving thanks when leaving. Moreover, when leav-
ing, the place used should not be left untidy. Blessing functions as a way of indicat-
ing one’s presence while showing one’s respect for those living there (Sjöberg 2018,
113; Oskal 1994, 102). The suitability of a building site had to be tested by sleeping
there before starting any work; if one slept well, it was a sign from the underground
inhabitants that one had received permission to go ahead and build. According to
Oskal (1994, 103), requesting permission and blessing were ways to negotiate and
live in harmony out of respect for others and to ensure everyone peace and quiet.
Another rule was that one could not build anything on top of a path; this meant
sleepless nights as all that move in the night, any being – human or otherwise – could
pass through the building on their way. All these practices describe human interac-
tion with the land and the other beings inhabiting it.
In my view, the Sámi conception of a cultural environment is grounded in the old
Sámi worldview. However, I would not go so far as to claim that the old Sámi reli-
gion has lived as such to this day. Rather, I argue that, in a general sense, the old Sámi
worldview and the related philosophy about the interrelationship between humans
and other beings of the world – in their tangible and intangible dimensions – continue
to characterize contemporary Sámi understandings. They manifest themselves in the
Sámi relationship to nature and, by extension, in the Sámi understanding of what
constitutes a valuable landscape – that is, a cultural environment.
The sacred drum, which is divided into separate levels or layers, has become a
visual epitome of the Sámi worldview. Similarly, the Sámi cultural environment can
be seen as consisting of layers: The visible and the invisible, the tangible and the
intangible. The built environment is part of the visible world, the realm of people,
fora and fauna. This is also where the Sámi heritage landscapes are formed through
Sámi livelihoods and traditional dwelling practices. Human activity there has given
rise to heritage biotopes in these landscapes. Good examples of these are residential
felds with old dwellings and areas around reindeer enclosures and fshing camps,
as well as the distinctive, site-specifc vegetation that has emerged at such sites over
time.
Archaeological cultural heritage refers to stationary relics that refect the activi-
ties of the earlier inhabitants of the area. These include remains of structures and

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dwelling places but also natural formations that have fgured in the activities of the
people. By virtue of their age, these archaeological sites qualify to be protected under
the Finnish Antiquities Act. These archaeological sites form an interface between the
visible and the invisible world. For the Sámi, the sites are concrete manifestations
of their ancestors; hence, they are not silent relics but tell a variety of stories about
the past. The traditional knowledge continues to pass on accounts of who lived at
these locations. The more recent the sites are, the more detailed local knowledge is.
As dwelling places of previous generations, they are locations that have a spiritual
dimension as well as an associated code of behaviour.
Another reference point between the visible and invisible landscape is the sacred
place. A sieidi as an archaeological site is described as a sacrifcial stone or sacrifcial
site. From the Sámi perspective, a sieidi is more, however; it is a presiding spirit or
actor in its particular landscape. A sieidi can exist in the form of a stone, spring, lake
or fell which has sacred meanings in the minds of individuals or the community.
The sites have been thought of as gateways or links between different worlds (e.g.
Rydving 2010). Even if sacrifces are not made anymore, it is still considered good
manners if one behaves respectfully and even thinks good thoughts when passing
near them (e.g. Sjöberg 2018, 113). Such places embody a fusion of the physical
world and people’s cultural cognitive map.
In my defnition, the Sámi cultural environment is both vertical and horizontal in
scope. It is vertical in the sense of a linear conception of time. For example, the value
ascribed to the built heritage is often based on its age. It is horizontal in that it has a
number of different layers, seen in the simultaneous presence of the visible and invis-
ible. Landscapes, animals and people belong together and interact with one another.
People interact with other beings across dimensions. This interaction is a means of
being part of the landscape, functioning in it and managing relationships to both the
living and the dead (Sjöberg 2018, 78). The Sámi go through their daily routine and,
through their thoughts and behaviour, are connected to and adjust their interaction
with the other beings inhabiting the world.

CONCLUSION
It is not infrequently that one comes across the assumption that life in the contem-
porary world causes Sáminess to disintegrate, or even vanish altogether. Living in a
house instead of a lávvu or using a snowmobile instead of skis or a draught reindeer
prompts people to automatically assume that traditional practices no longer fgure
in daily life. In my view, however, the Sámi practices concerning interaction between
people and nature have to some extent persisted and are sustained by the traditional
Sámi worldview and the philosophy underpinning it, as well as the customs that
uphold the practices.
In my work in cultural heritage management, I have noted that the Sámi home-
land was poorly represented in the list of nationally valuable landscapes and the built
cultural environments. By creating a new concept of what a cultural environment
encompasses, I have made it possible for the Sámi culture to be better acknowledged
in feld surveys. To an outsider a Sámi cultural environment may look like a natural
landscape. For a Sámi the same landscape is augmented by tradition that adds vari-
ous elements that pass from generation to generation. Traditional knowledge is not

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confned to the concrete context of everyday life; it has a horizontal dimension that
extends to other levels, a scope refecting the Sámi way of perceiving the world. In
this chapter, I have described the ways in which the Sámi cultural environment is
intertwined with the Sámi worldview.
The Sámi cultural environment is not an unproblematic construct. First, even
though the defnition of the concept acknowledges that the environment’s invisible
dimension is important, the question remains of how these dimensions can be cap-
tured and documented. Verbalizing these multiple invisible dimensions is challenging.
It requires a great deal of feldwork and many opportunities to talk with the local peo-
ple. This in turn requires trust. Inclusive work is rewarding, but it requires resources.
Second, the status of traditional knowledge as a source of a statement or claim
can easily be challenged. In the inspections of certain landscape areas, I where have
been involved in working with Finnish authorities, I have noticed that if there are
no built structures in the area, authorities on the regional and local level fnd it truly
diffcult to believe that the area has any signifcance for, say, reindeer herding. Yet it
is precisely unbuilt areas that are often the most important for herding. Research on
Indigenous Peoples (e.g. Xanthaki et al. 2017) has already drawn attention to the
impossibility of separating the intangible heritage from the tangible – and there is
every reason for doing so.
The understanding of the cultural environment that has established itself at the state
level highlights the built environment and the impact of human habitation. Defnitions
formulated on the basis of agricultural traditions render Sámi phenomena invisible
in cultural heritage management because they do not recognize the phenomena. The
cultural narrowness of the defnitions leads to a negative cycle: The defnitions pre-
vent Sámi phenomena from being recognized and, thus, contribute to their remaining
invisible. As a result, the Sámi phenomena are not given any consideration where they
should be. Conceptualizing the Sámi cultural environment and formulating defnitions
of it does not mean that there is one homogeneous Sámi cultural environment. Sámi
cultural environments may differ in terms of the natural conditions and livelihoods
practiced in them, which in turn will have infuenced how the land has been used and
how people have lived there. Needless to say, the environments share certain features,
but by the same token, one may see confgurations that are unique to each.
Third, the concept of a Sámi cultural environment is not created to respond to
Sámi needs. It has been formulated as a platform for discussion so that the Sámi
cultural environment might become visible and given due consideration in Finland
in the governance and protection of cultural environments. The use of the term ‘cul-
tural environment’ makes it easier to recognize the salient message here, enabling
non-Sámi as well to examine it in terms of their own relationship to the landscape.
In other words, optimally at least, the term can bring to light for others relationships
to landscapes and sites worthy of protection whose value has been obscured by the
emphasis on heavily built environments.

NOTES
1 Arvokkaat maisema-alueet 1992, 173–193; RKY 1993, 263–272.
2 The Sámi relation to nature has been studied from a number of standpoints: Knowledge
of nature, customary law and use of areas (e.g. Helander-Renvall 2016; Ingold 2000;

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Valkonen and Valkonen 2019); the connection between Sámi and ancestral lands (e.g.
Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2006; Länsman 2004); and the connection between reindeer
herders and the landscape (e.g. Näkkäläjärvi 2013; Oskal 1994).
3 For more discussion about the defnition of meahcci, see Joks et al. (2019) in this volume.
4 The njalla is the smallest kind of storeroom, built on a dry pine trunk, the top of which
has been sawn off. The njalla is high enough so that animals cannot reach it.
5 Exploring Lapland’s Cultural Environments (May 2004–April 2008) was a provincial-
level project of the Lapland Environment Centre funded by the EU. The project manager
was Tiina Elo. The project had two components, one focused on archaeology, the other
on Sámi culture (July 2004–January 2007). The coordinator for the latter was Päivi
Magga.
6 The Ministry of the Environment, the Regional Council of Lapland and the Lapland
Centre for the Economy, Transportation and the Environment (ELY Centre) asked the
Cultural Environment Unit of the Sámi Museum Siida to carry out a feld survey in 2014
that would update the list of nationally valuable landscape areas and scenic landscapes.
The work began at the end of February of the same year and had to be completed by the
end of the year. The ELY Centre was responsible for managing the project, and the work
was carried out in the homeland area by the Cultural Environment Unit, archaeologist
Eija Ojanlatva and researcher Päivi Magga. The project was funded by the Ministry of the
Environment and the Regional Council of Lapland.
7 In the list for 1995, there are 165 valuable landscapes in Finland, of which 6 are found
in the Sámi homeland. These include the nationally valuable villages of Peltovuoma
and Pöyrisjärvi, the latter being the summer village of reindeer-herding Sámi, both in
Enontekiö, and the valleys of the Teno and Utsjoki Rivers in Utsjoki. The nationally val-
uable scenic landscapes were the Pallas Fells and Saana Fell in Enontekiö (Arvokkaat
maisema-alueet 1992).
8 These include the European Landscape Convention (173/2006), the Land Use and Building
Act (132/1999) and the national objectives, the Nature Conservation Act (1096/1996) as
well as the agricultural subsidy systems (Maaseutumaisemat – Arvokkaiden maisema-
alueiden inventointi).
9 Information about Nationally valuable landscapes (VAMA 2021) from Ministry of the
Environment. https://www.ymparisto.f/en-US/Nature/Landscapes/Nationally_valuable_
landscapes.
(Ylä-Lappi. Valtakunnallisesti arvokkaat maisema-alueet. VAMA 2021).
10 A large number of different beings, spirits and gods have fgured in the world of the Sámi.
Some have lived in certain landscape locations, some under the earth. There are differ-
ences among these in different Sámi cultures and languages. It is not my intention here to
describe them, their function or how to behave with them.

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Landscapes]. Työryhmän mietintö 66/1992. Helsinki: Ministry of the Environment.
Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/29087
Cultural Environment Strategy 2014–2020. 2014. Helsinki: Ministry of Education and Culture,
Ministry of the Environment. Available at: https://helda.helsinki.f/handle/10138/43197
Heinämäki, L. 2021. Saamelaisten oikeuksien toteutuminen muinaisjäännösten suojelussa
[The Rights of the Sámi in the Protection of Ancient Relics]. Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön
julkaisuja 2021:38. Helsinki: Ministry of Education. Available at: http://urn.f/URN:
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Helander-Renvall, E. 2016. Sámi Society Matters. Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press.

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Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
London: Routledge.
Joks, S., Law, J. and Østmo, L. 2019. Verbing Meahcci: No beginning, no end. The
Sociological Review, 68(2), pp. 305–321. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/
full/10.1177/0038026120905473
Lapin maisemat. Ylä-Lappi. [Landscapes in Northern Lapland]. Available at: www.ymparisto.
f/f-FI/Lapinmaisemat/YlaLappi
Länsman, A.-S. 2004. Väärtisuhteet Lapin matkailussa. Kulttuurianalyysi suomalaisten ja
saamelaisten kohtaamisesta [Cultural Analysis of the Encounter between Finns and Sámi
in Lapland Tourism]. Inari: Kustannus-Puntsi.
Maaseutumaisemat – Arvokkaiden maisema-alueiden inventointi. [Rural Landscapes –
Inventory of Nationally Valuable Landscapes]. Available at: www.maaseutumaisemat.f/
Magga, P. 2003. Saamelainen kulttuuriympäristöohjelma. Esiselvitys [The Sámi Cultural
Environment Programme. Preliminary Study]. Unpublished.
Magga, P. 2007a. Birrasis – Lapin kulttuuriympäristöt tutuksi -hankkeen saamelaiso-
sion loppuraportti [Birrasis – Sámi Subproject of “Getting to Know Lapland’s Cultural
Environments”]. Publications of Giellagas Institute Nr 7. Oulu: Giellagas Institute.
Magga, P. 2007b. Rakennuksia, kotasijoja, muistoja – saamelaista kulttuuriympäristöä
inventoimassa [Buildings, dwelling sites, memories – Inventory of Sámi cultural environ-
ment]. In: T. Elo and P. Magga, eds., Eletty, koettu maisema – näkökulmia saamelaiseen
kulttuurimaisemaan. Suomen ympäristö 34/2007. Rovaniemi: Lapin ympäristökeskus.
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2007.pdf?sequence=9
Magga, P. 2013. Mikä tekee kulttuuriympäristöstä saamelaisen? [What makes a Sámi cultural
environment Sámi?]. In: P. Magga and E. Ojanlatva, eds., Ealli biras – Elävä ympäristö.
Saamelainen kulttuuriympäristöohjelma. Inari: Sámimuseum – The Sámi Museum
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Magga, P. and Ojanlatva, E. (forthcoming). Saamelaisalueen valtakunnallisesti arvokkaiden
maisemanähtävyyksien ja -alueiden päivitysinventointi 2014 [Inventory of Nationally
Valuable Landscapes in Sámi Area, Finland 2014]. Inari: Sámimuseum – The Sámi Museum
Foundation.
Mulk, I.-M. 1997. Sámi Cultural Heritage in The Laponian World Heritage Area. Småskrifter
från Ájtte 5. Jokkmokk: Ájtte, Swedish Mountain & Sámi Museum.
Mulk, I.-M. and Bayliss-Smith, T. 2006: Rock Art and Sami Sacred Geography in Badjelánnda,
Laponia, Sweden. Archaeology and Environment 22. Umeå: University of Umeå.
Näkkäläjärvi, K. 2013. Jauristunturin poropaimentolaisuus. Kulttuurin kehitys ja tietojärjes-
telmä vuosina 1930–1995 [Reindeer Nomadism of Jávrrešduottar. Cultural Evolvement
and Knowledge System in 1930–1995]. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Oskal, N. A. 1994. Det rette, det gude og reinlykken [What is Right, What is Good, and
Reindeer Luck]. Tromsø: University of Tromsö.
RKY 1993 = Rakennettu kulttuuriympäristö. Valtakunnallisesti merkittävät kulttuurihistorialliset
ympäristöt. 1993. [Built Cultural Heritage Sites of National Signifcance]. Museoviraston
rakennushistorian osaston julkaisuja 16. Helsinki: Finnish Heritage Agency, Ministry of
the Environment. Available at: www.nba.f/rky1993/
Rydving, H. 2010. Tracing Sami Traditions. In Search of the Indigenous Religion among the
Western Sami during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Oslo: Novus Forlag.
Schanche,A. 2002. Meahcci, den samiske utmarka [Meahcci, the Sámi Wilderness]. In: S.Andersen,
ed., Samiske landskap og Agenda 21. Kultur, næring, miljøvern og demokrati. Dieđut nr
1/2002. Kautokeino: Sámi Institution, pp. 156–170.
Sjöberg, L. M. 2018. Att leva i ständig välsignelse. En studie av sivdnidit som religiös praxis
[Live in Constant Blessing. A Study of Sivdnidit as a Religious Practice]. Acta Theologica
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Valkonen, S. and Valkonen, J. 2019: On local knowledge. In: T. H. Eriksen, S. Valkonen and J.
Valkonen, eds., Knowing from the Indigenous North. Sámi Approaches to History, Politics
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Ylä-Lappi. Valtakunnallisesti arvokkaat maisema-alueet. VAMA 2021. [Northern Lapland.
Nationally valuable landscapes. VAMA 2021.] Helsinki: Ministry of the Environment,
Finnish Environment Institute. Available at: https://www.ymparisto.f/en-US/Nature/
Landscapes/Nationally_valuable_landscapes
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Cultural Heritage: Rights, Debates and Challenges. Leiden: Brill.

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 CHAPTER NINE

F R U S T R AT E D C A R E TA K E R S
Sámi egg gatherers and cloudberry pickers


Solveig Joks1

INTRODUCTION

eanan the land

lea earálágan is different
go das leat orron when you have lived there
vánddardan wandered
bivastuvvan sweated
šuvččagan frozen
oaidnán beaivvi seen the sun
luoitime loktaneame set rise
láhppome ihtime disappear return
eanan lea earálágan the land is different
go diehtá when you know
dáppe here are
máttut roots
máddagat ancestors
Source: Valkeapää, N. A. and Gaski, H. 1997. The Sun, My Father. Guovdageaidnu: DAT.
English translation by Ralph Salisbury, Lars Nordstöm and Harald Gaski.

Famous Sámi writer and poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää described how we perceive our
homeland through our senses. The land becomes part of us, as we become part of
the land. But what does it mean to be part of the land? Do we relate differently to
our surroundings when we perceive ourselves as being part of the places we walk in?
Many of us have our own experiences from being involved in activities on the land.
Others have seen or listened to someone else’s experiences of involvement. In this
chapter, I will elaborate on how our relationships to the land are expressed through
specifc activities in Sápmi.

150 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-11

 — Frustrated caretakers —

Sámi people, like other Indigenous Peoples, draw their traditional livelihood from
the land. The Sámi landscape is varied, with high mountains, tundra, sea, fjords and
marshes. Many Sámi traditional practices are connected to the land that belongs to
the people living there. The diversity of landscape has afforded many forms of living
from the land. The abundance of lichen inland has fed reindeer in the long winter
period while the coastal areas with a wide variety of green plants appeal to reindeer
in the spring and summer time. The fjords have offered fsh, and Sámi people have
combined fjord fshing with raising a few sheep and cows on small farms. Flexibility
is the characteristic of traditional sea Sámi ways of life and livelihood (Eyþórsson
2008).
Reindeer herding is an exclusively Sámi form of livelihood in Norway and
Sweden, but not in Finland and Russia (see Labba in this volume). As a result, in
Norway and Sweden, reindeer herding is often treated as a representation of real
and authentic Sámi culture (see also Aikio in this volume). Other forms of liveli-
hood such as fjord fshing, berry picking and hunting and agriculture combined
with fshing are not unique to the Sámi since these are also practised by non-Sámi,
even in the same area. In this chapter, I will focus on the way cloudberry picking
and egg gathering are practised by the Sámi in the Sámi coastal area. Both activities
take place yearly. People living by the Porsáŋgu/Porsanger2 fjord go to the holms in
the spring to gather eggs, and they go to pick cloudberries when the season begins,
usually in the middle of July. These two activities have been given less attention
in research than other Sámi activities such as reindeer herding, fjord fshing and
salmon fshing.

Cloudberry picking is peaceful. I can be tired and have pain in the body, but
when I enter a marsh and see all the red, beautiful berries, then my tiredness and
pain disappear.

This is the answer I got from one of my friends who is an eager cloudberry picker
when I asked her what cloudberry picking means for her. Peacefulness is the most
common description of cloudberry picking. Even though people can be together
with others on the marsh, they still walk alone while picking berries.
My aim in this chapter is to analyze how the Sámi perform these specifc prac-
tices in coastal Sápmi: How cloudberry picking and egg gathering are enacted. I
also ask how these practices are described, how they are connected to the landscape
and how they express relations to humans and non-humans. The intention with
this chapter is therefore to discuss and show how people notice connections in their
surroundings through a concrete practice and how they perceive their own position
in the world.
I frst briefy describe the history of cloudberry picking and egg gathering, which
have been important activities in the coastal Sámi areas for ages. Second, I discuss
the ways people carry out those practices and ask how they relate and move in rela-
tion to both humans and non-humans. But I start by elaborating on cloudberry pick-
ing and egg gathering as practices by means of examples from Norway and continue
by discussing how these practices have been carried on in a certain Sámi coastal area.
To approach these questions, I draw on ethnographic research and interviews of
local cloudberry pickers and egg gatherers from a Sámi coastal area by Porsáŋgu fjord.3

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I start by discussing how cloudberries and eggs became important market products
and how their concept, as understood by Norwegian offcials, differs from Sámi con-
cepts. These differences are also the starting point for the theoretical framework in this
chapter.

CLOUDBERRIES AND EGGS – IMPORTANT

LIVELIHOODS
Wide areas with marshes both inland and on the coast are places where cloudberries
grow and provide a living for the Sámi. Cloudberries have been an additional source
of livelihood for many. Another important activity for people living on the coast has
been eider duck egg gathering. Eggs have not had the same importance in terms of
income as cloudberries and have usually been privately consumed. While cloudberry
picking is common in all parts of Sápmi, the egg gathering is concentrated in the
coastal areas. Compared to reindeer herding, fjord fshing and hunting, in which
the majority of those involved are men and the tasks are often divided between the
sexes, cloudberry picking and egg gathering are activities common to both men and
women. Since both sexes are well represented in those activities, women’s voices are
very much present in this chapter.
The growth of North Norwegian cities, boat landings, fshing villages and indus-
trial sites in the middle 1800s created a new market where cloudberries also became
a commodity (Bratrein 1995). Cloudberries and eggs were products considered to
be farm resources in the same way as pasture, forest, peat, lake fshing and game
(ibid.). According to Einar Richter Hanssen (1986), people in Porsáŋgu municipality
were not very dependent on ocean fshing in the past. Cloudberry picking and the
gathering of down and eggs were also important parts of people’s livelihoods. At the
end of 1850s, duck down prices were high, and cloudberries and eggs were popular
products in the cities. In 1854, the criminal law added a provision that prohibited
cloudberry picking on private property. During the creation of the 1854 law, the
Norwegian Parliament argued that the north of Norway differs from the south of
Norway in terms of cloudberries. One reason was that the cloudberries in the north
are concentrated on the lowland on the coast, where the cloudberries not only grow
in large concentrations but are also easily accessible from the farms. The marshes
are not necessarily big, and the islands and holms can be small, but large numbers of
seabirds have contributed to spreading plants and constantly fertilize marshes and
land with their guano (ibid.).
Eggs and cloudberries are categorized as utmarksressurser (natural resources out-
side agricultural fences)4 in Norwegian law (NOU1994: 21; Teien 2019). A com-
mittee appointed by the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture in 1933 suggested that
the right to pick wild berries was only permitted in utmark, which is an area outside
innmark (Teien 2019). Norwegian agriculture legal practice distinguishes between
innmark and utmark. Liv Østmo and John Law describe the legal difference as
follows:

Innmark (roughly felds or arable lands) lies close to the farm. It is where animals
are kept and crops are grown. Utmark (roughly outlying felds or ‘wilderness’),

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also part of the farm, is the borderless area where cattle or sheep may go in
summer, where there is hunting and fshing, berries are gathered, and frewood
is collected.
(Østmo and Law 2018, 358–359)

The Sámi categorize and share berry picking and egg gathering areas using quite
different concepts. Sámi people go cloudberry picking to luomemeahcci, and in
Porsáŋgu, they go to holms to gather eggs. In this way of thinking, the place and the
activity are closely connected to each other. Luomi means cloudberry. Meahcci is a
Sámi landscape, or maybe it is better to describe it as a taskscape, to use Ingold’s
(2000) term. The task is, like any practical operation, carried out by a skilled agent
in an environment. ‘Just as the landscape is an array of related features, so – by
analogy – the taskscape is an array of related activities’ (Ingold 2000, 195). The
concept of taskscape highlights the way in which activities and surroundings are
entangled in Sámi gathering practices.
Luomemeahcci, like other meahcit (plural), is not a fxed place; rather, where
one goes and what one does always depend on circumstances (Joks et al. 2020). For
instance, guollemeahcci is a fshing lake (for more detailed discussion of meahcci,
see Joks et al. 2020). According to Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg (2018, 180), the same
place can be named in different ways and can also have different qualities. These
vary in relation to the activities that take place there. Sjöberg (ibid.) contests, there-
fore, the use of terms such as ‘wilderness’ because those concepts do not have any
meaning in Sámi, where activities are concrete and specifc (see also Magga, P. in
this volume).

PROTOCOLS IN GATHERING PRACTICES

There is no doubt that cloudberry picking and egg gathering have changed since
the 1850s, when these products from the north frst attracted the attention of the
Norwegian Parliament and started to become market commodities. But these prac-
tices remain important. As one woman said, ‘It runs in the blood,’ which means that
she looks forward to going out and gathering eggs and picking cloudberries. People
evoke memories from their frst cloudberry-picking trip, and they remember very
well the frst time they sold cloudberries. Anna is nearly eighty, living in a coastal
Sámi village; she has also practised fjord fshing, and she had sheep. She is an eager
cloudberry picker, and she also gathers eggs. Anna still remembers the frst pail she
got at the age of seven. She got the pail with the help of the Marshall Plan, the 1948
American-funded economic recovery program for Western Europe after the end of
World War II.
The colour of cloudberries is orange to red and is often called ‘the Gold of the
Tundra.’ They thrive in damp areas, such as marshes, or on wet meadows and
tundra. More than a year ago, I went with Anna to a marsh where she goes every
year if there are cloudberries. It was a sunny day at the beginning of August when
we went to her marsh, which is few kilometres from her home. When I got to her
house, she told me that two of her cousins had already gone to the marsh. While
we were walking, Anna showed me a cloudberry on which the leaf was opened but

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the berry was not ripe. According to Anna, this berry had tried to ripen in the cold.
If she were to pick it then, it would have ripened by the time she arrived home.
I found a spot with ripe berries. While I was picking there, Anna and her cous-
ins, who had taken a break, waved me over to join them. I stopped picking and
went to them. They told me that I was not allowed to take cloudberries from that
spot because it was privately owned. For me, it was impossible to know that this
spot was owned privately. Anna had told me earlier that she never picked berries
from property leased by someone else, even though she knew that the leaseholders
would not come and pick there. Another thing that Anna had told me in advance
was that she always makes a fre and boils coffee on her trips to pick cloudber-
ries. She has a place she uses close to a river where she gets water for coffee. We
sat around the fre, and much of the conversation was about cloudberries, such as
their market price and whether to go to a certain place where their ancestors had
turf huts. This place is much farther from the house, so to go there, it is necessary
to stay overnight.
People in Porsáŋgu have their own protocols related to marshes and bird nests.
For instance, it is important to always leave one egg in the nest and never go close
to other people on marshes when picking cloudberries. Both norms are connected
to a particular activity. When walking on the marshes outside the cloudberry sea-
son, the protocols change. Then there are no longer rules about not talking to oth-
ers one may meet on the marshes. So people’s behaviour in places also changes in
accordance with the activities that take place there. Suchet-Pearson and others use
the concept ‘humans as Country’ instead of humans in Country (Suchet-Pearson
et al. 2013). Indigenous Australians do not sit alongside Bawaka Country but are
an integral part of Bawaka Country. ‘Country shapes and constitutes the human
authors as they shape and constitute Country’ (ibid., 186). From this perspective,
marshes are not static, but instead they are emerging in an entangled togetherness
(ibid.).

TRADITIONAL KNOWING IN PRACTICES

What do we need to know in order to master Sámi traditional gathering prac-
tices? First, those who follow these practices need to know when the berries and
eggs are in the right condition to be picked. Second, berry pickers need to know
where to fnd cloudberries and how to get there. They need to know if there are
cloudberries and where they are in that particular year. Where the cloudberries
grow is dependent on the weather in spring and summer. For many people in
coastal Sápmi, these practices are their Sámi traditional knowledges. They started
to follow these practices in childhood, frst with their parents or with other adults
and afterwards continuing on their own. To build up information, experiences
and knowledge about cloudberry picking and egg gathering, one needs to practise
it most of the time (Sara 2003). One learns the practice and how the surround-
ings are entangled by doing it. These practices can be described as a way of life.
According to McGregor (2004), Indigenous knowledge is part of the people, and
it is therefore problematic to try to separate the knowledge from the people in
documenting traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) before it disappears. The

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Culture A Culture B Culture C

Nature

Figure 9.1 One nature, many cultures.

Practice A Practice B Practice C

Culture A
Culture B Nature
and
culture
Nature B are not
divided
Nature A

Figure 9.2 Social and material practices generate different versions of culture and nature.
They also interact with one another.

energies must rather be devoted to realizing self-determination by protecting peo-

ple’s rights (McGregor 2004). Following McGregor’s argument about the prob-
lem of separating knowledge from people, we can ask what this entanglement
implies about the way we have been taught to think about ‘knowledge,’ or per-
haps rather ‘knowing.’
The ways of knowing trigger an epistemological question, for instance, ‘How do
certain Indigenous People know the world?’ (Blaser 2013, 19). Blaser illustrates (see
Figure 9.1) how the distinction between nature and culture leads to different per-
spectives on one world. In this sense, traditional knowledge reduces to one of many
other cultural perspectives (ibid.).
Blaser instead argues from his anthropological tradition, overlapping with science
and technology studies, that instead of seeing many cultural perspectives in the same
world, we operate within socially and materially patterned practices that have been
handed down to us and adapted. Those practices are partly normative – about goods
and bads. They are partly about how to view the world – about epistemologies. And
they are partly about enacting realities or worlds.5 In our practices, we are therefore
not only seeing the world but are also acting performatively in it (Viveiros de Castro
1998; De La Cadena 2010). There are no passive objects waiting to be seen from a
series of different perspectives, but instead, objects come into being with the prac-
tices in which they are manipulated (Mol 2002, 5). Objects are not given in the order

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of things, but they are brought into being in practices (ibid.). The argument is that
different realities are being enacted in different practices (Law 2008). In this way
of thinking, terms such as ‘worldview’ or ‘culture’ are usually avoided because they
both imply the idea that there is a single natural world.6 However, in practices like
those of egg gathering and cloudberry picking, we not only look at the world but we
are also acting on and constituting that world. So instead of talking about different
worldviews, in this chapter I will draw attention to world-making or knowledge-
making practices (Goldman et al. 2018) and the ‘normativities,’ the goods and bads,
that these also carry and enact. The focus in this chapter is therefore directed to what
is to be known in practices.

DIFFERENT WAYS OF ACTING IN THE WORLD(S)

Bruno Latour (2004) is critical of the way modernist ideology has separated
humans from their living world and placed them outside what is defned as
nature. In this way, scientists have achieved the authority to represent nature,
and by contrast, others have lost their ability to reach truth (ibid.). A Mi’kmaq
scholar, Marie Battiste (Battiste and Henderson 2000), who is Chickasaw, dis-
cusses the understanding of Indigenous knowledge in the orthodox context of
knowledge – which they call Eurocentrism. Many have argued that Indigenous
ways of knowing and relating to the world are superior to so-called ‘Eurocentric’
approaches. So, for instance, Battiste and Henderson write: ‘Indigenous Peoples
do not view humanity as separate from the natural world; thus they do not have
to face the Eurocentric terror of separation from nature, nor do they have to
construct artifcial organizations – or human ‘culture’ – to overcome this separa-
tion’ (ibid., 24).
The Sámi language does not make a distinction between culture and nature,
and it refers to much more diverse areas of reality than simply the relation of
man’s or people’s communities with nature (Valkonen and Valkonen 2019). In the
Sámi language, there was originally no concept of nature. However, in the modern
world, the concept luondu is used in the sense of outside physical surroundings
(Schanche 2002, 162). Luondu was originally used to describe a person’s or an
animal’s personality. Since a person and an animal both have luondu, it is natural
to think that the differences between them are less than it would appear in the
worlds that clearly differentiate nature from humans. In the Sámi way of thinking,
for instance, one can say that this woman has bad or good luondu in the same way
that one would describe the personality of an animal (Joks 2015). The luondu that
is understood to be part of humans and animals is something that one has from
birth. Nature, as a category distinct from culture, makes no sense in Sámi land-
related practices, and therefore if luondu is rendered into English as nature, it is a
mistranslation (Østmo and Law 2018). Sámi land-related practices are expressed
by using other terms, for instance, meahcci. As I noted earlier, Sámi people go to
meahcci (plural, meahcit), which is/are the locations where people undertake dif-
ferent tasks at different times, such as fshing and berry picking (Joks et al. 2020).
In addition, meahcit can also be part of home and a place of safety (Schanche
2002).

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The caretakers of the meahcit and islands

‘I like to be in meahcci regardless of what I am doing there,’ says Anna. She remem-
bers very well her frst trip to luomemeahcci. She was no more than seven or eight
years old when she went to the marshes for the frst time. The cloudberries that
she picked were sold to a merchant, and with the money, she bought boots for her
frst day at school. Since that time, Anna has picked cloudberries every year, and
she refers to her passion as being in her luondu (in her nature). Long before the
cloudberry season starts, Anna pays close attention to weather conditions. In the
spring, when the cloudberry plant is coming into leaf, the wind must usually be calm
because if the wind is too strong, it will destroy the cloudberry plants. Local people’s
knowledge about how cloudberry plants are dependent on many things is built up
through their gathering practices. So when the cloudberries are ripe and it is time to
pick them, the experienced cloudberry pickers know where it is worthwhile to go
and, on the other hand, which marshes will be waste of time to visit. These might, for
instance, be in open places that have not been sheltered from the wind. By contrast,
in the marshes that have been sheltered from the wind, berries can be found even in
bad cloudberry years.
Anna, like other traditional cloudberry pickers, observes the relationships between
the berries and the weather conditions. Those observations are used to anticipate
where the best berry places will be this year. The relationship that local people have
to the marshes and to the rest of the places is captured by Deborah Rose (2005, 303)
who writes: ‘Humans are called into action by the world.’
In the summer of 2020, many marshes had cloudberries with black spots. I was in
a marsh myself and saw those black spots. Later, I went to another marsh far from
the frst one, and the berries there had no spots. I asked berry pickers on Facebook
whether anybody knew the reason for the black spots. According to berry pickers
from the Norwegian side of Sápmi, the black spots are fungal, and they often appear
in wet or foggy weather, whereas those from Finnish side of Sápmi blamed the spots
on an insect. One of the people who responded lives on the Finnish side of Sápmi,
but he grew up on the Norwegian side. He wrote that he had read about an insect
(beaiskodivri) that caused the black spot, but when he grew up, he was told that the
spots were caused by fog. Yle Sápmi, the Sámi-language public service in the Finnish
Broadcasting Company Yle, wrote an article about the black spots and referred to
a scientist7 who says that in good cloudberry years, there are a lot of cloudberry
insects (Paltto 2020). A scientist8 from Norway, on the other hand, responded to a
question from the Sámi newspaper Ávvir that the black spots are caused by a fungal
infection, which prefers wet terrain and humid air (Kemi 2020). The discussions
on Facebook show that people care about cloudberries, and they also search for
answers to the changes that occur.
There are different answers to why there are black spots on the cloudberries.
As mentioned earlier, cloudberries have had much less attention from social and
biological scientists than other Sámi activities, such as reindeer herding, fjord fsh-
ing and salmon fshing. People who walk and pick berries on the marshes, however,
observe changes – such as 2020’s black spots. On the marsh where I went in the
summer of 2020, there used to be big hillocks with a lot of cloudberries, but now
they have fallen, and people explain this by climate change. The permafrost has

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melted, and the hillocks are flled with water, and they are collapsing or sinking to
the ground.
With these examples, I want to argue that people, through their cloudberry pick-
ing activity, are caring for their meahcit and places. They notice the changes that
have infuenced the cloudberries. The caring starts long before the activity begins, so
caring is a process that lasts over a period. Care is part of what engages practitioners
in their worlds (Martin et al. 2015). It starts when cloudberry plants are starting to
grow and lasts until the picking season fnishes. People enter a relationship with the
marshes, the cloudberries and all the surroundings that affect the cloudberries. They
go to the marshes to see whether the berries are growing, and they talk with others,
discussing where the cloudberries will probably be. The holms in the Porsáŋgu fjord
also have marshes where local people can pick cloudberries. However, I will intro-
duce the holms through egg gathering.

THE HOLMS AFFORD US WEALTH

The Porsáŋgu fjord is characteristic of many others, with its approximately 250
islands, holms and rocks. Such a rich fjord environment has long been advantageous
for coastal Sámi people in exploiting resources. The holms have provided fodder for
farm animals, including seaweed and kelp, ling, moss and dead grass in the spring.
Additionally, berries, eggs and down have been gathered. Other practices, such as
bird and seal hunting, fshing, peat and livestock pasturing have also been carried
out (Birkely 2011). Today, the holms are still used for egg gathering, berry picking
and fshing activities.
In the spring, when the birds start to lay eggs, people in Porsáŋgu go to the holms
to gather eggs. Anna does this every year. This is an important part of her life. She
knows the landscape and knows how to fnd eggs. She also looks at the behaviour
of birds. If, for example, one sees the birds mating, one knows that there will be eggs
there the next day. When one approaches a seagull and it fies up early, then one
knows that it has a nest there. If one sees the eider-male in the sea, then one knows
where the eider has a nest. The male bird swims away from where the nest is and
waits for the female bird to come down to the sea, then the male bird can duolm-
mastit (‘trot’) a new egg on the female.
Many birds are protected, and it is therefore forbidden to gather eggs from those
birds. While we were walking, we also found eggs from the eider, but we let them
be in the nest because the bird is protected. When I went with local people to one
of the holms, we found a nest with a gull egg. When there is only one egg left in the
nest, it is usually fresh. The bird has not incubated the egg for long, and therefore
we can take it with us. Inga, a local woman, put the egg in a mitten and said that
we could boil the egg when we arrived at the campfre site. According to Hartvig,
Inga’s father, the seagull lays a maximum of three eggs. If there are three eggs, it is
important to check whether the eggs are fresh. If it is late in the season, also check
when the nest has two eggs. One egg should be left behind so that the bird comes
back and lays more eggs. To see whether the egg is fresh, one puts it into a bucket
of fresh water. If the egg foats, the bird has incubated it, and it is no longer fresh.

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Leaving one egg also shows humility and respect. According to a Sámi legend, all
beings stem from their origin and have their own giant protector that cares for its
own species. If one fails to show respect or hurts someone in bad way, one can be
attacked by the protector of that species. Also, every bird species has its own giant
bird that cares for it, so leaving one egg ensures that the giant bird does not come
and attack the gatherer.
The number of eggs has decreased in recent years on the holms. A drastic
increase in the eagle population and less food for seabirds are reasons that local
people mention as having caused this. In the past, people hunted both eagles and
foxes on the holms so the birds could nest in peace. According to Anna, some birds
get the upper hand if people stop gathering eggs. The presence of too many black-
backed gulls hinders the growth of cloudberry plants because the birds tread down
the plants.
People who gather eggs on the holms see how life on the sea affects the life on the
holms. They also see how their own activity and, maybe more importantly, their lack
of activity affects the birds and the life of the holms. In order to preserve the bal-
ance, the holms need different kinds of birds, and the holms need people who care.
Conversely, too many of one species can push the holms out of balance; therefore,
people keep an eye on how the life on the holms is developing. If local people do not
have the opportunity to manage their holms as they did earlier, then the number of
birds and eggs may drop more in the future. Without eggs, fewer people will be there
to gather them, so the tradition of egg gathering will disappear, and caring for the
holms will also be lost. Martin et al. (2015) ask who has the power to defne what
counts as care and how it should be administered (see also Herranen-Tabibi in this
volume). Local people care for the holms, but they have no power to act in the way
they consider to be the best practice. The authorities have launched restrictions on
hunting birds and animals that then become too numerous and gain the upper hand
over others. In addition, lots of birds are on the red list, which means that people are
not allowed to gather eggs from those birds.

DIALOGUE WITH SURROUNDINGS

The Sámi language has causative verbs ending with -dit and -hit that can some-
times carry the meaning ‘getting someone to do something.’ One example in terms
of cloudberries is láddadit. The common expression heard in the cloudberry season
is ‘[M]un lean dien jeakkis láddadeamen luopmániid’ (‘I am getting cloudberries to
ripen in this marsh’). Láddadit builds a relationship between the person, the marsh
and the cloudberry. A similar relationship is established between a person and the
bird’s nest by the term guottihit (literally, ‘get to lay eggs’), which means waiting for
the bird to come back to the same nest to lay more eggs after leaving one egg in the
nest.
I suggest that gathering practices connect people to the land in a way that is dif-
ferent from a connection in other forms of (for instance) visual or cartographic or
recreational practice. One senses and follows what happens on the land through the
vision of the activity one is going to do, even though the vision can vary from one

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person to another. But the focus in this case will be on the cloudberries or the birds.
We follow the connections, such as how the weather infuences the cloudberries and
how other species can scare away the birds.
So there is a relationship with what is commonly considered to be nature. Sámi
writer Johan Turi describes the beauty of the land in the following way: ‘The land-
scape is so beautiful that it laughs, and when a person has fun and all goes well, he
or she thinks that all the landscape is happy’ (Turi 2012). By personifying the land-
scape, we can see how people sometimes merge into the landscape, or the landscape
becomes part of human beings.
There is also landscape that is not as happy as Turi describes here. Anna says
that some places are not pure, and she can feel the coldness in her back. But she has
not been scared and only felt this coldness in some places. However, there are good
places, too, that are happy to see you. One of those places is Guollejávri, where Anna
has a turf hut. Every time she goes there, she notes right away that she is welcome
there. Anna believes that most people notice good or bad feelings in places, but she is
not sure whether they think about it. She wonders if people nowadays are in such a
hurry that they do not have time to stop and listen to the places. For Anna, meahcci
is more than the physical landscape that natural scientists describe.
Another story tells how people can be affected by spirits in a landscape. The
story was told when a group of elders were gathered in Mearrasiida (the Coastal
Sámi Cultural and Knowledge Center) in Billávuotna to assist our research group
with Sámi place names and Sámi concepts generally. It was said that a local per-
son went to one of the holms in the spring and became ráimmahaddat (was ren-
dered powerless), which means that the spirits of a dead person circled around her.
Ráimmahaddat is a well-known incident that can be cured in many ways. On this
holm, there are old Christian and pre-Christian graves. The ráimmahaddan (noun)
was so strong that she could not sleep that night, and in order to recover, she made
contact with a healer to be cured in a traditional Sámi way, which was intended to
remove the bad spirits from her body.
How people relate to their surroundings, as discussed here, can be found in lan-
guage and stories. Both are closely connected to the way we dádjadit, which means
fnding one’s way, both physically and mentally.

‘PEOPLE’S PANTRY’
I also want to argue that the behaviour of cloudberry pickers constitutes luomemeah-
cci. Berit, a woman who is 70 years old, has a story about herself and her sister on a
marsh not far from a village. They did not usually go there. This happened in the 1990s:

We were picking cloudberries, they were not big, but the berries were quite plen-
tiful. While we were picking, a lady who lived in the nearest village appeared.
She picked around us. She was chasing us away. We had to leave the marsh.

The behaviour of the lady was marking that this marsh belonged to her. She did not
say anything, but her behaviour was an obvious sign to Berit and her sister that they
were not welcome there. It is also considered a bad thing to go and pick cloudberries
close to other people. One must keep a distance from other people on the marsh.

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According to Berit, local people have always, as a rule, harvested in part of the
area around their private property. These areas are considered to belong to certain
people, and nobody else picks berries, fells trees or hunts ptarmigan there. Berit
calls this the ‘people’s pantry.’ But those who have their own ‘pantry’ close to their
private property never say that they have exclusive rights to use the area. Instead,
their neighbours will make sure that others do not pick cloudberries, hunt or go
to muorrameahcci (a place to fell trees) in that area. This exemplifes the strong
relationships people have to each other and how the land is divided between them
without any interference from the state. According to Berit, people always thought
about birgejupmi. Birgejupmi is a noun derived from the verb birget, which is based
on the basic values of good life (Aikio 2010). When people have birgejupmi, then
they survive and get their livelihood from their own surroundings. Survival is based
on practical skills, the knowledge of social management and the way people relate to
the land, water, animals and other non-humans. Everyone in the village knows that
everyone needs birgejupmi, and therefore, they do not go to property that belongs
to their neighbours.
So Sámi meahcci practices are about dialogue with people, the ‘natural’ world
and the ‘spiritual’ world. Those practices are concrete and specifc – and this is a
reality that is also refected in the language (Joks et al. 2020). Luomemeahcci is
primarily constituted in encounters with people who pick cloudberries. As I sug-
gested earlier, luomemeahcci is more of a taskscape than a landscape (Ingold 2000),
an activity space (Massey 1992) or a set of places-times-tasks (Joks et al. 2020).
Sámi people have traditionally not simply walked in meahcci without any duties or
tasks. Walking in meahcci without any duties is described as joavdelas vázzin, which
means walking without any intention and meaning. Berit says that when people
returned home from the fjords, they never arrived guorosgieđaid (empty handed).
It was said that if anyone arrived guorosgieđaid, then it was not worthwhile letting
them go on the fjord. So meahcci practices are about engagement. Indeed, they are
dialogues of engagement.

FRUSTRATED CARING
While practising cloudberry picking and egg gathering, people relate to both humans
and non-humans in the places. They observe the surroundings and the changes that
occur in the places and discuss the observations with other cloudberry pickers and
egg gatherers. Together, they evaluate and try to get answers regarding the changes
that have occurred. Changes that are imposed by other activities that lead to an
imbalance in terms of too many species that destroy cloudberries and eggs are the
most common observations. By discussing the changes with other cloudberry pick-
ers and egg gatherers, they care for the place. In this way, the changes are conveyed
to others, just as people have contributed their own fndings to this chapter. This
relationship also implies that a berry picker and an egg gatherer also care for the
places by doing those activities. Primarily, they go to luomemeahcci and to holms to
pick cloudberries and gather eggs. This caring is part of the activity, and we can ask
whether people had noticed the same connections and changes in meahcit and on the
holms in the absence of the activities. Therefore, the caring is also connected to the
people’s rights to practise their traditional activities.

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Local people have their own protocols for how to behave while engaged in cloud-
berry-picking and egg-gathering practices. The protocols indicate the ways people
relate to other humans and non-humans. To respect others is the main principle of
the protocols. While being active in luomemeahcci or on holms, the people realize
the connections in their surroundings. They want to act, but the authorities impose
restrictions. What looks like and counts as care from one point of view may look like
and be domination from another (Joks and Law 2017).
Places also change in relation to the activity that is occurring there and so do the
description of the place and the behaviour of the person. Meahcit are character-
ized by means of the activity, and the behaviour of the person is dependent on the
activity that they are doing there. Places are also different in terms of good or bad
spirits. If one listens to the surroundings or, maybe more importantly, to one’s own
feelings, it will probably become apparent whether or not the place is welcoming.
But sometimes one can also get into unwanted situations. These are the reminders to
people that there are invisible spirits in the places that affect us. Using language as
a tool to approach people’s practices can lead us to a deeper understanding of how
local people themselves approach their surroundings. The language is the archive of
knowledge that is transmitted from one generation to the next (Kuokkanen 2009). In
contrast, the categories from other parts of the world can be misleading because those
can either be absent from people’s understanding, or they can have other meanings.
Places where traditional activities take place are being cared for, but there is also a
lack of action due to the strict regulations by the authorities. Doing something in order
to cure these places is not as easy as it was in the past. Because they no longer have
ready access to these places, people who practise cloudberry picking and egg gathering
have become frustrated caretakers, unable to take actions that could cure the places.

NOTES
1 I am grateful to Áile Aikio, Harrieth Aira, Svanhild Andersen, John Law, Steinar Nilsen,
Stine Rybråten, Sanna Valkonen and Liv Østmo for discussions, reactions and comments.
2 Porsáŋgu/Porsanger fjord is a fjord in Troms and Finnmark county. It empties out into the
Barents Sea.
3 The materials are collected for the project Making knowledges visible: Relational gathering
practices and their linguistic and narrative expressions in coastal Sápmi. This is a coopera-
tive research project with Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Mearrasiida
(a Sea Sámi centre in Billávuotna that works with traditional knowledges, place names,
Sámi terms and expressions and local history in Sea Sámi areas), Árran Julevsámi Centre
in Ájluokta, and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Lillehammer. The
research project is fnanced by the Research Council of Norway.
4 Utmarksressurser is the Norwegian term and means natural resources that are found in the
area outside agricultural fences. The area inside the fence is called innmark.
5 Those practices typically interact and, indeed, some may dominate others.
6 In this way of thinking, the character of reality arises in relations, and it varies as a function
of the form of those relations. But for human beings, the character of realities necessarily
arises in relations that include human beings and their practices (where ‘practices’ are pat-
terned relations) because if we are not a part of those relations, then we know nothing of
them. But (see Figure 9.2) since different human practices work in more or less different
ways, human-relevant realities also vary.

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7 Rainer Peltola, Natural Resources Institute, Finland.

8 Inger Martinussen, Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO).

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 CHAPTER TEN

S Á M I F O O D C U LT U R E
Traditional practices and contemporary challenges1


Lena Maria Nilsson

PROLOGUE
It’s early June, 2020, and the Västerbotten County Administrative Board has invited
food entrepreneurs, local reindeer herders, representatives of the reindeer herder’s
association and the Sámi Parliament of Sweden to a virtual symposium to discuss
the critical situation (Berggren 2020). In many ways, this has been an extraordinary
spring.
The cold weather and extremely thick snow cover of the mountain region has
disrupted migration, predation and calving patterns, from a reindeer herder’s per-
spective. During a normal year, the reindeer move from their winter grazing areas in
the eastern coastal region to the summer grazing areas of the western mountains and
highlands close to Norway. There, they give birth to their calves atop a dry heather
tussock, far from bears and highways, in a grazing land rich with sweet primary
birch leaves the size of a mouse ear and other spring primroses. This year, 2020,
the shortage of feed is alarming, and reindeer cows are extraordinary lean. Due
to the thick snow cover, summer migration is delayed, and the herds remain in the
over-populated forests. Some cows have already aborted their calves due to starva-
tion, and many calves born alive are delivered on snow cover. Thus, after delivery,
the reindeer cows must lick their calves dry to prevent them from freezing to death
immediately. Born in the forest instead of the mountains, the possibility for the
reindeer herders to protect their cattle is also decreased, and the predator stress is
increased. Thus, in order to decrease the stress factors, the County Administrative
Board has allowed extra culling of bears. But despite all efforts, every second rein-
deer calf will not survive their frst day of this strange spring.
From the perspective of food entrepreneurs as well, the spring of 2020 has been
extraordinary. Due to health recommendations pursuant to the COVID-19 pan-
demic and the closure or cancellation of restaurants, conferences, nonessential
travel and large cultural events, the demand for reindeer meat has decreased by
proportions never experienced before. In Norway and Finland, restaurants have

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-12 165

 — Lena Maria Nilsson —

been completely closed, while in Sweden, they have remained open with capacity
restrictions. According to a report from the Swedish Sámi Parliament, 66% of rein-
deer meat normally goes to grocery stores, and 34% goes to hotels and restaurants.
During the spring of 2020, the largest entrepreneurs reported a 45% decrease in
reindeer meat orders from grocery stores and a 93% decrease in orders from res-
taurants (Doj 2020). Selling reindeer directly to the consumer is diffcult due to the
fact that it is a premium product. Reindeer meat is more expensive than alternatives
such as beef, pork and poultry in the trade-based national and global food system.
According to the report, the price of reindeer meat is likely to decrease due to the
low sell-off during spring and decreased global prices for alternative meat. For the
food entrepreneurs, the situation will likely stabilize in a few years while the situa-
tion for reindeer herders is alarming (Doj 2020).

INTRODUCTION
Sámi food culture originates with the plants and animals available in the boreal,
mountain and coastal areas of northernmost Fennoscandia and the Kola Peninsula
of Russia, hereafter referred to as Sápmi. Different food items predominate in dif-
ferent parts of Sápmi. In the harsh Arctic and sub-Arctic environment, strategies for
year-round food sovereignty have been necessary. These includes strategies for gath-
ering, fshing, hunting, herding, cultivating, sharing and trading, as well as strategies
for preparing food by slaughtering, cleaning, preserving, storing, cooking and serv-
ing. In addition, Sámi mealtime culture varies across different parts of Sápmi. For
example, in the Ume Sámi area, a special expression of gratitude, gudtsan, applies
only to situations in which you have been served food while the more common word
gijttuo is applicable to any expression of gratitude. To the best of my knowledge, no
other Sámi language has any synonym for gudtsan, while there exist many different
ways of showing gratitude for food from all over Sápmi, such as praying thanks to
the Christian God before and after a meal or showing gratitude to the Sámi goddess
Sáráhkká by pouring the last sip coffee over the campfre.
In other words, the Sámi food culture is multi-layered, combining environmen-
tal food sources with contributions from local agriculture and global trade. From
a nutritional perspective, the Sámi food culture may be described as a diet rich in
animal food sources, wild berries and plant foods, with the addition of boiled, unfl-
tered coffee. However, no uniform Sámi food culture exists. The diet of a Norwegian
fshing Sámi is different from the diet of a reindeer-herding Sámi in Finland, a Sámi
tourist entrepreneur in Sweden, or a City Sámi in Russia. The aim of this chapter
is to introduce the Sámi food triangle and to guide the reader through the different
forms taken by Sámi food cultures of the past and present.
This chapter is based on a literature and database review, initiated by a dialogue
with Ellacarin Blind and Anneli Jonsson from Slow Food Sápmi2, a Sámi non-gov-
ernmental organization (NGO) aiming to support the development and utilization
of traditional Sámi food and Sámi food sovereignty. Slow Food Sápmi is a part of
the global Slow Food Movement, in which traditional food is protected from and
contrasted with Westernized fast food, using a system called the ‘Ark of Taste.’ In
this system, knowledge about small-scale, ecologically sustainable and traditional
products is gathered. By describing the products in detail, and thus granting them

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so-called ‘presidia’ status, hostile use of traditional food products by non-local

commercial – or in Sápmi, non-Sámi – interests is avoided. So far, two Sámi food
items, based on reindeer meat and common at least in western Sápmi, have attained
presidia status, according to the ‘Ark of Taste.’ These items are suovas (also called
suovasbiergu), traditionally smoked reindeer meat, and gurpi, traditionally smoked
minced reindeer sausage. Slow Food Sápmi is also supporting Sámi fshing practices
in a recently launched project called Golleguolli (‘gold from fsh’ in English).
I use Sámi names for plants, food and fsh, together with their Latin names at
their frst occurrence, in the following presentation of the results of my review. My
spelling is that of the Luleå Sámi plant and fsh vocabulary lists compiled by the
Swedish Sámi Parliament.3 When referring to the food sovereignty of different food
groups, I will distinguish between fsh sovereignty, meat sovereignty and plant food
sovereignty.

MY EXPERIENCE OF SÁMI FOOD CULTURE

My experience of Sámi food is a mix of multiple worlds, and I consider myself a
City Sámi. My Sámi mother tongue is Ume Sámi, a language that I cannot speak.
My parents were born in the reindeer-herding areas of Malå and Norsjö, in Arctic
Sweden. My mother’s relatives were Forest Sámi. My father’s relatives were settlers
in the winter-grazing areas of Malå.
I grew up in Lund, a city in southern Sweden, close to Denmark, where my par-
ents met and married during their university studies in the 1960s. Though the food
culture of my childhood was affected by food items available in the south, my par-
ents regularly prepared and served traditional food from Sápmi. They made clear
that this was the best and tastiest kind of food.
We spent most of our holidays with relatives in Sápmi, where different kinds of
local foods were served. In 1980, my family moved back north, and I spent a much
of my adolescence reconnecting to the land.
As an adult, I have continued to value and use local and Sámi food. In 2012 I
defended my thesis on Sámi diet as a determinant of health (Nilsson 2012). Since
then, I live the life of a middle-aged, City Sámi scientist in Umeå, Sweden, where
traditional and local food shares the shelves with modern innovations. The climate-
inspired vegetarian preferences of my three grown-up sons continuously challenge
my food-culture worldview. However, the more I refect on what a sustainable food
system in Sápmi could look like, unfolding my thoughts into their smallest parts, the
more I value and appreciate the roots of the Sámi food culture.

THE SÁMI FOOD PYRAMID

Food pyramids are commonly used as models to show ideal proportions of the dif-
ferent food groups included in a healthy meal. I have used the pyramid model here
for a different purpose (Figure 10.1). Based on contemporary quantitative descrip-
tions of Sámi food patterns (e.g. Brustad et al. 2008; Nilsson et al. 2011; Ryd 2015)
in which elements of the historical and present-day Sámi diet are described, I have
modeled these elements in a pyramid to refect the ordinal, rather than proportional,
economic impact of different food groups. The following description of Sámi food

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Figure 10.1 A pyramid showing the ordinal economic impact of different food items in
a Sámi diet in the past and present day. Fish includes local wild-caught fsh. Meat includes
locally produced reindeer, game, cattle, goat, mutton, dairy products, poultry (wild and
tame) and eggs. Plants include locally harvested wild herbs, berries and roots. Trade includes
sugar, salt, coffee and grains (in the past) and any imported non-local food including meat,
fsh and plant food (today).

culture is organized according to these two pyramids, following the disposition of

the frst one, beginning at the base.

FISH: IMPORTANT FOR SURVIVAL AND HEALTH

In the past, wild-caught fsh was the most important food staple in large parts of
Sápmi (Nilsson et al. 2011). For settled and coastal Sámi in northernmost Norway,
this meant a predominance of saltwater fsh and seafood. For forest, hunting and
fshing Sámi in the Fennoscandian inland, this meant freshwater fsh. Before closure
of the Finnish-Norwegian (1852), Swedish-Finnish (1889) and Swedish-Norwegian
(1919) borders hindered summer migration, this meant a combination of salt- and
freshwater fsh for the mountain and highland Sámi. In a study comparing the diets
of Sámi and other reindeer-herding Indigenous Peoples in Russia in the 1920s, Sámi
people were described as consuming the largest amounts of freshwater fsh, although
in this Sámi group, meat was consumed in larger amounts per capita than fsh, an
average of 120 kilograms and 70 kilograms per year, respectively (Kozlov et al.
2008).
One main advantage of fsh is the possibility for nearly year-round access – under
the ice in the winter – and the ease of long-term storage. Drying and fermenting are
two very important methods of fsh preservation, stemming from the times before
salt and sugar were commonly available in Sápmi (Nilsson et al. 2011). In northern-
most Norway, dried fsh – also called ‘stockfsh’ – is still considered a delicacy even
among non-Sámi inhabitants (Montalvan Castilla 2020).

The nutritional quality of fsh

In general, wild-caught fsh are leaner and have a higher vitamin D and mineral con-
tent than farmed fsh (Table 10.1). Access to dietary vitamin D is especially important

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Table 10.1 Nutrients, minerals and energy content per 100 grams of the following fsh
species: luossa (Salmo salar), tjuovttja (Coregonus lavaretus), sjilla (Coregonus albula) and
rávddo (Salvelinus alpinus).

Species Luossa Tjuovttja Sjilla Rávddo

  SW FI SW FI SW SW
(unit)/100 g Wild Farm Wild Farm – Wild Wild Farm
Energy (kcal) 188 210 102 132 90 111 135 152
Protein (g) 22 20 20 20 21 19 19 20
Carbohydrates (g) 1.1 0.7 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Fat (g) 10 14 2.3 5.9 0.6 3.9 6.5 7.9
Fatty acids
SFA (g) 2.4 1.9 0.5 1.0 0.1 0.9 1.8 1.4
MUFA (g) 3.6 6.7 0.7 2.6 0.1 0.6 1.5 3.1
PUFA (g) 3.4 4.1 0.4 1.6 0.2 1.3 2.5 2.5
n-6 fatty acids1 (g) 0.6 1.9 0.1 0.7 0.02 0.3 0.3 0.5
n-3 fatty acids2 (g) 0.7 1.1 0.3 1.0 0.04 1.0 0.8 0.6
Trans fat (g) – – <0.1 <0.1 – <0.1 – –
Cholesterol (mg) 61 64 49 47 47 74 50 58
Vitamins
A, retinol (μg) 0.0 0.0 11 0.0 0.0 95 8.0 18
D, (μg) 25 7.4 15 14 8.0 9.4 4.0 5.8
E, alfatokoferol (mg) 2.1 4.6 2.7 0.4 0.4 1.6 1.5 1.6
B1, thiamine (mg) 0.2 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1
B2, ribofavin (mg) 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1
C, ascorbic acid (mg) 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
B6, pyridoxin (mg) 0.6 0.6 0.4 0.6 0.5 0.2 0.1 0.5
B12, cobalamin (μg) 3.5 3.5 1.0 3.2 3.2 2.0 4.0 1.8
Minerals
Iron (mg) 0.3 0.2 0.5 0.2 0.2 0.8 0.9 0.2
Calcium (mg) 4.0 5.1 60 12 12 192 89 14
Potassium (mg) 368 354 380 485 485 330 330 379
Magnesium (mg) 28 26 30 28 28 25 25 27
Selenium (μg) 25 17 37 25 25 22 26 22
Zink (mg) 0.3 0.3 1.2 0.4 0.4 4.0 4.0 0.6
1
Also known as omega 6, includes essential fatty acid 18:2.
2
Also known as omega 3, includes essential fatty acid 18:3.

Abbreviations: FIN, Finland, data from Fineli; SWE, Sweden, data from Livsmedelsdatabasen;
Wild, wild-caught fsh; Farm, farmed fsh.

Source: Data were received from national public dietary databases in Finland (tjuovttja and
sjilla) and Sweden (all species). Fineli (https://fneli.f/fneli/en) and Livsmedelsdatabasen
(www.livsmedelsverket.se/livsmedel-och-innehall/naringsamne/livsmedelsdatabasen).

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in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, where lack of suffcient amounts of sunlight during
long periods of the year limits the body’s own production of this essential vitamin
(Grant et al. 2011). Fatty fsh are also rich in alpha-linolenic acid (an omega-3 fatty
acid) and linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid), referred to as the ‘essential fatty
acids’ since our bodies cannot produce them. In interviews that I conducted with
elderly Sámi in Västerbotten in 2008–2010, fatty fsh was clearly described as more
attractive than lean fsh (Nilsson et al. 2011). The story that follows demonstrates
how this was expressed.
After a research interview with an elderly Sámi, a relative of mine, I went fshing
with his wife from a boat. It did not take long until I landed an approximately 600-
gram vuoskun (Perca fuviatilis), which made me, a City Sámi, feel quite pleased.
After a little while, my relative, preparing coffee for us by the shore, yelled to his wife
and asked, ‘Have you got anything?’ ‘No – not yet,’ she immediately replied. Then
she looked at me and added, politely, in a much lower voice, ‘Well, Lena Maria got
a vuoskun.’ Our fshing trip did not end until my fshing partner landed an approxi-
mately 1.6-kilogram dábmuk (Salmo trutta), which she – and my relative – consid-
ered good enough for a meal.

Environmental impact on fsh

Eating wild-caught fsh three times a day was not uncommon in the Sámi diet of
the past (Nilsson et al. 2011). Still today, the clean fshing waters of northernmost
Scandinavia attract tourists from all over the world. However, from a City-Sámi per-
spective, wild-caught fsh is no longer a dish to be taken for granted. One reason for
this is the colonialization of land through industry, pollution, draining, damming and
fsh farming, which has caused a general decrease in the quantity as well as quality
of wild-caught fsh. It is generally considered that no lake or river in Fennoscandia is
free from human impact (Lehtonen et al. 2008). For example, damming of the Baltic
rivers caused an estimated 80% decrease in the natural production of luossa (Salmo
salar) compared to prior to World War II (Eriksson and Eriksson 1993). Pollution
may be long distance, affecting the entire Sápmi, or short distance, associated with
local industries such as mining and forestry. Only an exception from European food
safety standards makes it still possible to consume wild-caught fsh from the Gulf of
Bothnia, although women of childbearing age are discouraged from eating it, and
other adults are advised to eat no more than three servings per week (Nilsson and
Evengård 2015).
In general, farmed fsh is promoted as a pollution-safe alternative which it may
be possible to manipulate towards coveted nutritional status by adequate feeding
(Tacon et al. 2020). On the other hand, farmed fsh is also associated with ecological
stress due to overuse of antibiotics, overconsumption of seafood for feed and distur-
bances in wildlife in the surrounding aquatic system. In Norway, fewer than one in
fve fsh farms are eco-certifed (Luthman et al. 2019).
According to traditional knowledge, there may be sensory differences between
fsh harvested from different lakes during different seasons. Certain fsh should
only be harvested during certain periods of the year. Similarly, there may be sen-
sory differences between farmed and wild-caught fsh. A mountain-fshing friend of

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mine, working partly in the sewage business, claims that he can distinguish between
wild and farmed rávddo by the minor taste of sewage that he detects in farmed fsh
(Anders Johansson, oral communication August 2020). To verify these claims scien-
tifcally, a sensory and quality study performed in a Sámi/Sápmi setting is warranted
(c.f. Claret et al. 2016).

Fish sovereignty
In Sweden, fshing rights are attributed to either owning land or being a member
of a reindeer-herding community, according to legislation derived from the so-
called ‘lapp-ska-vara-lapp’ (‘Sámi-shall-remain-Sámi’) policy of the 19th century.
Originally, this principle held that only Sámi were allowed to herd reindeer and
that reindeer-herding Sámi were the only true Sámi. As a consequence, only organ-
ized reindeer-herding Sámi are today confrmed rights holders of traditional lands
and waters, and reindeer-herding communities approve who becomes a member.
Thus, many Sámi outside the reindeer-herding community struggle for fshing
rights on equal terms with their reindeer-herding neighbours. This is an example
of how colonial structures and national authorities affect the fsh sovereignty of
the entire Sámi population, causing lateral conficts among Sámi (see also Drugge
in this volume).
International standards also affect the fsh sovereignty of Sápmi. In Norway
and Finland, the treaty of the border river Deatnu in 2017 – in response to North
Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO) policy – has been used to
strengthen state control over Sápmi by banning vital elements of the local Sámi
fshing culture and livelihood around the river (see Nykänen; and Puuronen in this
volume). Norwegian and Finnish authorities claim that fshing performed by the
tourism industry and non-Sámi stakeholders is more sustainable. Noteworthy was
the exclusion of representatives of local and parliamentarian Sámi from the process
preceding this bi-national agreement (Kuokkanen 2020).
In Sweden, the blacklisting of all wild-caught rávddo (Salvelinus alpinus) accord-
ing to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) guidelines4 meant a decreased avail-
ability of an important food staple to many City Sámi. However, when researches
at Umeå University compared the rávddo stocks in mountain lakes used by Sámi
entrepreneurs with unfshed mountain lakes, they found no differences. This leads
to the conclusion that, at least in fshing areas included in the study (mountain lakes
around the village Ammarnäs, in northernmost Västerbotten), lakes are used in a
sustainable way (Umeå University 2020). Thus, these specifc lakes are now listed as
exceptions to the WWF blacklist of wild caught rávddo.
According to a Sámi entrepreneur from Ammarnäs, many other areas in the
mountains of Sápmi are likely as sustainable as his fshing lakes. But to be added
to the WWF ‘green list,’ scientifc evidence is mandatory. Without approval from
WWF, it is impossible to sell fsh to restaurants and other consumers, who instead
buy farmed rávddo for ethical and economic reasons. But the farmed rávddo served
at restaurants is often described in ways to make consumers believe they are eating
a much more exclusive and expensive wild-caught fsh (Anders Skum, oral commu-
nication July 2020).

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MEAT AND DAIRY, AVAILABLE THROUGH

HERDING AND EXCHANGE
Meat and dairy constituted the second most important food group of the Sámi food
pyramid of the past (Figure 10.1). Even though the majority of the Sámi population
is not immediately involved in reindeer herding, reindeer herding is considered a
cornerstone of Sámi culture, providing food as well as important material for duodji,
or traditional arts and handicrafts. When I grew up in southern Sweden in the 1970s,
my City-Sámi family imported meat and coffee cheese from reindeer-herding rela-
tives in the North on an annual basis. The cheese was a delicacy, but the meat was
treated as a common food staple in our home. Our meatballs and pasta sauce were
made from minced reindeer meat prepared in a similar manner as beef or pork in my
non-Sámi schoolmates’ homes.
A retired, small-scale farming Sámi described to me how his family used to
exchange butter in the springtime for a share of reindeer meat in the autumn with
reindeer-herding relatives passing by during migration (Nilsson et al. 2011). Today,
reindeer meat is too expensive for him to buy, so he has substituted imported beef
and pork from the local grocery store. For him, reindeer meat has been transformed
from a food staple into a premium product.

The nutritional quality of meat

The World Cancer Association’s advice to avoid eating red meat to decrease future
incidences of colorectal cancer (Stewart and Wild 2014) is based on studies of large
populations, where red meat equals agriculturally produced beef, lamb and mutton.
There is no scientifc evidence that this association is also applicable to consumption
of meat from reindeer and moose. So far, no scientifc studies designed for studying
Sámi food have matured enough to answer this question.
Reindeer meat and moose meat are leaner and more protein rich than beef and
pork (Table 10.2). It has been argued that the fat composition of reindeer meat is
advantageous due to a high proportion of essential fatty acids – that is, fatty acids
our bodies cannot produce. However, proportions of essential fatty acids, repre-
sented in Table 10.2 by the total amount of n-6 and n-3 fatty acids, are of less rel-
evance to compare between different species since a smaller proportion of total fat
by default means a smaller proportion of any fatty acid. Thus, the relatively high
content of some vitamins and minerals in reindeer and game meat is a better indica-
tor of food quality. As shown in Table 10.2, meat from reindeer and moose has the
highest content of fat-soluble vitamin E, important for cancer defense, and water-
soluble vitamins B2 and B12.
For vitamin B12, Nordic nutrition recommendations stipulate an intake of 2 μg/
day (Molander et al. 2014). The large differences in B12 content between the dif-
ferent kinds of meat in Table 10.2 mean that, in order to achieve a minimum daily
dose, one must eat 32 grams of reindeer or moose meat, 142 grams of beef or 334
grams of pork per day (according to Finnish data) or 67 grams of reindeer meat, 92
grams of moose meat, 167 grams of beef or 286 grams of pork a day (according to
Swedish data).

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Table 10.2 Nutrients, minerals and energy content per 100 grams of meat from moose,
reindeer, beef and pork.

Species Moose Reindeer Beef Pork

(unit)/100 g FI SW FI SW FI1 SW FI SW
Energy (kcal) 113 113 127 109 132 129 195 155
Protein (g) 21 22 22 23 19 22 19 19
Carbohydrates (g) 0 0.2 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fat (g) 3.0 2.3 4.5 1.7 6.2 4.2 13 8.7
Fatty acids
SFA (g) 0.7 0.9 2.3 0.7 2.7 1.9 4.7 3.7
MUFA (g) 0.6 0.8 1.5 0.5 2.3 1.6 6.0 3.6
PUFA (g) 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.3 1.8 0.9
n-6 fatty acids2 (g) 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.2 1.6 0.8
n-3 fatty acids3 (g) <0.1 0.08 <0.1 0.05 0.1 0.05 0.2 0.05
Trans fat (g) 0 – 0 – 1.5 – 0 –
Cholesterol (mg) 52 55 52 68 53 58 52 57
Vitamins
A, retinol (μg) 7.5 3.4 6.0 3.7 9.2 7.5 10 9.0
D, (μg) 0.2 0 0.2 0 0.2 0.03 0.4 0.6
E, alfatokoferol (mg) 0.8 0.6 0.8 0.8 0.4 0.7 0.4 0.4
B1, thiamine (mg) 0.3 0.2 0.1 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.9 0.8
B2, ribofavin (mg) 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.5 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.3
C, ascorbic acid (mg) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B6, pyridoxin (mg) 0.6 0.4 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.5
B12, cobalamin (μg) 6.3 2.2 6.3 3.0 1.4 1.2 0.6 0.7
Minerals
Iron (mg) 3.5 2.6 6.7 3.5 2.2 2.6 0.8 1.3
Calcium (mg) 6.0 13 13 3.8 7.9 5.0 7.6 8.6
Potassium (mg) 390 370 440 355 284 328 270 338
Magnesium (mg) 27 22 33 27 19 23 19 25
Selenium (μg) 4.0 6.8 30 18 16 7.5 18 10
Zink (mg) 4.6 5.7 4.8 4.1 4.1 4.6 2.0 2.4
1
Beef is presented in two categories in the Fineli database – fatty meat and lean meat –
while pork and reindeer meat are not. Thus, in this table, a mean value of the two categories
is presented for beef in order to increase the comparability between meats.
2
Also known as omega 6, includes essential fatty acid 18:2.
3
Also known as omega 3, includes essential fatty acid 18:3.

Abbreviations: FIN, Finland, data from Fineli; SWE, Sweden, data from Livsmedelsverket.

Source: Data were received from national public dietary databases in Finland and Sweden;
Fineli (https://fneli.f/fneli/en) and Livsmedelsdatabasen (www.livsmedelsverket.se/
livsmedel-och-innehall/naringsamne/livsmedelsdatabasen).

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When looking at minerals, a similar pattern appears, especially in iron, of which

reindeer and moose meat have considerably higher concentrations than beef or pork.
Reindeer meat also has a very high selenium content compared to other kinds of
meat, i.e., more than twice the content of beef, pork or moose (Table 10.2).

Offal and fat

Offal, including brains, tongues, feet, intestines and tallow, has been used in the Sámi
food culture. Today, when traditional slaughtering practices have been replaced by
slaughter according to European Union legislation, this is no longer as common.
The only offal food item represented in public databases is liver. Looking at liver,
for which only data on reindeer, beef and pork are available, the similarities between
different animal sources are greater than in other cuts of meat. For example, all spe-
cies’ livers are extremely rich in vitamin A.
In the Sámi cuisine, reindeer tallow is widely used for cooking and baking as an
alternative to butter or margarine. In the past, belly fat was collected, dried and
stored in emptied reindeer bellies for later use. Today, it is more common to dry the
fat with the meat or to collect it after cooking from the pan or from a bouillon. The
inner fat from the marrow bone (ađa), as well as rumen fat (leavsusbuoidi/leksosat)
are eaten as delicacies consisting of fat only, and dried reindeer tallow may be added
as a favour enhancer to the coffee. I remember an elder relative of mine offering me
a piece of dried meat with a thick tallow side for my coffee, looking straight into my
eyes and saying, ‘You don’t remove the tallow like a city lady, do you?’
No data on moose and reindeer tallow are available in public databases, but some
comparisons are still possible using alternative sources (Hassan et al. 2012; Blind 2013).
The nutrient composition of reindeer back and belly tallow differs, and the vari-
ance is sometimes greater among different reindeer fat sources than among different
species. In comparison with tallow, the trans-fat content of reindeer is advantageous,
but in comparison with lard, it is not. Similarly, the cholesterol level of reindeer tal-
low is lower than that of beef tallow but higher than that of lard. However, as was
the case with meat, the vitamin and mineral content of reindeer tallow is consider-
ably higher than that of any other animal fat listed, with the exception of butter,
which is enriched with vitamins A and D. Reindeer fat’s extremely high content of
iron, zinc and selenium is worth highlighting. It is clearly higher than the corre-
sponding data for beef and pork (Hassan et al. 2012; Blind 2013).

Meat sovereignty
In Norway and Sweden, Sámi people have the exclusive right to herd reindeer while
in Finland, Sámi reindeer herding does not have dedicated legislative protection (see
Labba in this volume). In Swedish Sápmi, reindeer herding is under stress from com-
peting colonial land use, extractive industries and other business. Slow Food Sápmi
describes the situation as alarming (Jonsson et al. 2020). Hunting rights in Sweden
are attributed according to either land ownership or reindeer-herding activity. Meat
forms the second level of the modern food pyramid (Figure 10.1). Nevertheless,
meat sovereignty is diminished today compared to in the past. Today, more calves
are slaughtered, and fewer parts of the animal are used in food production. One

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reason is the one-sided consumer interest in meat, rather than offal. Another is EU
food-production legislation that leads to a situation in which animal blood, brains
and other organs are wasted in the slaughtering process (Jonsson et al. 2020). A
third reason is the predatory and infrastructural pressure on reindeer herding, which
means that early slaughtering decreases the risk of loss over time.

Dairy products
Dairy products, originally derived from reindeer and goats, are also important ele-
ments in Sámi food culture. Wild herbs (describe in the section on plant food) were
once prepared and preserved in fermented milk, and homemade coffee cheese, resem-
bling an unsalted halloumi, was an important delicacy and trade item (Nilsson et al.
2011). Coffee cheese is served cut into cubes and added to a cup of hot coffee. Ideally,
coffee cheese should ‘squeak between your teeth’ when you eat it (Nilsson 2018).
Reindeer milk, like reindeer meat, is considerably richer in fat – 17.1%, com-
pared to cow milk’s 3.7% – and protein – 17.1%, compared to cow milk’s 3.6%
(Fjellström 1985). This makes it very suitable for cheese production. Reindeer cows
used to be milked on limited occasions during three periods of time: Between calving
and midsummer, between midsummer and late August and between late August and
late October. In the early 20th century, the practice of milking reindeer cows was
gradually abandoned, replaced by an increased use of dairy from goats and cows
received through small-scale farming, trade or exchange (Ryd 2015). Today, coffee
cheese is commonly made from cow’s or goat’s milk. At farmer’s markets, it often
happens that any unaged goat cheese may be sold as ‘coffee cheese.’ In many cases,
cubes from these coffee cheeses – prepared without traditional knowledge – will
melt, losing their shape and chewability. (This has been my own experience.) The
only coffee cheese available to me year-round in the city of Umeå is Finnish cof-
fee cheese, available in the gluten-free department of my nearest supermarket. The
most important differences between the coffee cheese that my family brought from
reindeer-herding relatives in the 1970s and this Finnish coffee cheese is that the latter
is not made from goat’s milk, is fnished by grilling and is a bit too salty for my taste.

PLANT FOOD, LOCALLY AVAILABLE

WILD VEGETABLES
Plant food forms the third level of the frst pyramid refecting a Sámi diet before
1945 (Figure 10.1). Today, traditional plant food has been abandoned to a large
extent and replaced by Western vegetables such as carrots, lettuce, broccoli and rhu-
barb. It is well known that we only eat a small proportion of the edible plants sur-
rounding us, and this is also the case in Sápmi.
In the past, some important herbs were båsskå (Angelica Archangelica),
guosasjrásse (Epilobium angustifolium), juobmo (various Rumex species), jierjja
(Mulgedium alpinum), vuolpporásse (Alchemilla vulgaris), häbbro (Oxyria dig-
yna) and pakte grase (Polypodium vulgare). Båssko grows in two-year cycles. Fully
grown, it reaches a height of 50 to 100 centimetres. The root, stem, leaves and fower
buds are edible and are used for medicinal as well as nutritional purposes. During
the frst year, only the leaves, fáddno, are developed. During the second year, the

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fowers, båsskå, appear, and they are harvested before blooming. Because of this, it
is important not to harvest all båsskå available. To avoid the eradication of the herb,
our ancestors used to let some fowers bloom out, dávtakbåsskå, and produce seed.
Even if not cultivated, since time immemorial, this and many other systematic efforts
have been made to improve the growth and spread of båsskå.
Traditional herbs are often prepared with milk as a way of conserving them and
to coagulate the milk proteins, for example in the dish gompa, made from båsskå
and milk (Fjellström 1985).
Wild berries, such as láttak (Rubus chamaemorus), jågŋå (Vaccinium vitis-idaea),
sarre (Vaccinum myrtillus), tjuobmá (Empetrum hermaphroditum) and gahpermu-
orjje (Rubus idaeus), are also very important in Sámi food culture. Of these, láttak
and jågŋå are the most important due to their naturally high content of benzoic acid,
which make them easy to preserve for a long time without added sugar, for example
by water covering (Nilsson 2018). Wild berries and herbs may also be added as fa-
vouring to fsh dishes (Nilsson et al. 2011).
Birch tree sap and pine inner bark are examples of plant food harvested from
trees. Both items are typically harvested before midsummer, sap in the period
between the thaw and when leaves begin budding. Pine inner bark is traditionally
harvested a bit later in the year.
Birch tree sap tastes much like water, only slightly sweetened and favoured. It
changes its characteristics with the weather, time and relative height of the tap-
ping point: The lower, the sweeter; the sunnier, the sweeter (according to my own
practice and oral communication with my former colleague, Jan-Henrik Lidgren).
Traditionally, sap tapping was performed as follows: A twig was cut, and a small
pot was left below the twig wound to collect the sap. The main disadvantage with
this method is that the water is easily contaminated by debris and insects. You need
to harvest in a short period of time to avoid this, making large quantities diffcult
to harvest. One way to avoid contamination is to cut big branches and attach them
to a large plastic can with a water hose for tapping, thus creating a closed system.
The main disadvantage with this method is that the health and survival of the birch
tree after tapping may be compromised. Personally, I prefer a small-scale tapping
method, developed by Jan-Henrik Lidgren (Figure 10.2). Use a bottle, a party straw,
some lace and a drill. Choose a drill bit corresponding to the diameter of the party
straw. Drill a hole no more than 10 millimetres deep into the tree and a hole of

Figure 10.2 Small-scale tapping of birch tree sap in a modern setting.

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similar size in the bottle cap. Cut the top of the party straw for optimal ft into the
birch tree. Then use the party straw to connect the sapping birch tree with the bottle
and stabilize its position with lace. With this method, it is possible to collect 5 to 15
decilitres of sap per day. After tapping, you can close the hole with a wooden plug
to avoid harming the tree.
Pine inner bark has a history both as a Sámi food staple since time immemo-
rial and as an emergency food during famines and societal crises. As a food staple,
pine inner bark is ideally harvested in early summer before a bitter aroma occurs.
Harvested this way, many people consider it a delicacy. When harvested later in the
season, typically as a response to an agricultural failure, a less attractive food prod-
uct will be the result (Rautio et al. 2014). The nutrients and bioactive component of
traditional herbs, wild berries and pine inner bark are described in detail elsewhere.
In brief, traditional herbs and berries are of high nutrient quality, contain vitamin
C and have anti-infammatory properties, and pine inner bark is a nutritious and
starch-rich staple (Nilsson 2018).

Plant food sovereignty

Generally, legislation in different parts of Sápmi allows harvesting plant food on
land defned as being owned by the national states. In Sweden, the ‘right of public
access’ (allemansrätten) also allows for collecting herbs and berries on any land,
regardless of ownership, excepting certain nature reserves. Parallel to these are cus-
tomary Sámi laws regulating how certain families may pick berries in certain areas
(see Joks in this volume). These customary laws are not implemented in the national
legal system. Furthermore, sap and inner bark are not included in the right of public
access, restricting collection of sap and inner bark to one’s own trees, unless one,
through membership in a reindeer-herding cooperative, has access to these rights for
household use in certain areas owned by the state.

Trade: Indication of a low self-suffciency level

Trade forms the top level of the frst pyramid refecting a traditional Sámi diet before
1945 and the base level of the pyramid refecting a City-Sámi diet of today. Trade
has been an important food source in Sámi food culture for a very long time, includ-
ing local trade with settlers (Ryd 2015) and international exchange with Russia
in the east and with Western Europe via Norway. Some culturally important food
items attained this way are coffee and grains. Elderly Sámi describe eating porridge
for dinner as a luxury in the early 20th century (Nilsson et al. 2011). Coffee was
made a quick meal by adding sugar, coffee cheese, dried meat and reindeer fat. Even
today, Sámi drink considerably more stovetop-boiled, unfltered coffee than non-
Sámi (Nilsson et al. 2012, Nilsson 2014). While a low proportion of trade indicates
a high level of food sovereignty, a high proportion indicates the opposite (Figure
10.1). Today, the level of self-suffciency is generally low, and it has been shown that
in the parts of Sápmi administered by Sweden, less than 50% of the population’s
daily caloric intake is locally produced (Nilsson 2020). The strong dependence on
trade and the solid trust in business and the global capitalistic trade system for sus-
tainable food security are signifcant for the thinking of our colonial policy makers.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS
While Sámi food culture may appear nondiversifed, it includes a large proportion of
nutritious and sustainable elements, as shown in this chapter. Depending on which
perspective we choose, Sámi food sources such as reindeer meat, wild-caught fsh
and wild berries can be seen as common food staples since time immemorial (the
reindeer-herding Sámi perspective) or exclusive food staples that have disappeared
or been transformed into premium products of a capitalistic food system (the City-
Sámi perspective).
When using a food-triangle model to describe the ordinal impact of different food
groups in the past and present, the present time is characterized by an increased
impact of trade-based food. From a City-Sámi perspective, beef and pork may seem
like cheap alternatives to Sámi food staples. However, when comparing the nutrient
density of Sámi food with these staples, the cost effciency of cheaper alternatives
may be questioned. Wild-caught fsh is richer in minerals and vitamin D than farmed
fsh, and the same pattern is shown when comparing reindeer and moose meat and
tallow with corresponding food products from farmed beef and pork.
In a recent report, Slow Food Sápmi summarizes threats and opportunities related
to the development of today’s Sámi food culture, applicable to the entire food sys-
tem, including fsh, meat, wild plants and berries (Jonsson et al. 2020). A large part
of the report highlights the lack of sustainable funding for a quality system applica-
ble to traditional Sámi food. Slow Food Sápmi’s report warrants more research into
associations between traditional Sámi food items and health, especially with respect
to meat.
When considering the situation in the spring and summer of 2020, when COVID-
19 and climate change threatened the Sámi food system as described in the chapter
prologue, I think there is a need to refect on which elements we would like to
include in our future food system. The Sámi food culture includes a lot of favour-
able elements, not only from a cultural point of view, but also from a nutritional
one. Thus, a post-climate-crisis food system in Sápmi would beneft from supporting
Sámi food production by supporting the Sámi food culture. And to my vegetarian
son, required to supplement his diet with vitamin B12 pills, I would suggest: Why
don’t you try a piece of dried reindeer meat as a change?

NOTES
1 This book chapter was partly developed within the frames of the research project Dialogues
and Encounters in the Arctic (the DEA project, www.dialoguesencounters.com). In brief,
the DEA project operated with economic support from the Interreg Nord programme
(European Regional Development Fund) by arranging a series of dialogue meetings in
Finland and Sweden in 2020–2022. One of these meetings was the starting point for a
fruitful dialogue with the Sámi NGO Slow Food Sápmi, which contributed to a consid-
erable extent to the knowledge and insights shared in this chapter. I therefore cordially
acknowledge Slow Food Sápmi for this valuable knowledge sharing, as well as the EU
funding facilitating our dialogue.
2 Slow Food Sápmi, www.slowfoodsapmi.com/
3 Luleå Sámi plant and fsh vocabulary lists compiled by the Swedish Sámi Parliament, www.
sametinget.se/1676, www.sametinget.se/3189

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4 The Swedish WWF fsh guide, in which fsh are sorted according to three categories: green
(‘enjoy eating’), yellow (‘be cautious’) and red (‘don’t eat’). The fnal category (red) is also
referred to as the ‘blacklist.’ https://fskguiden.wwf.se/blog/fskar/rodingfjallroding/

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN

U N D E R S TA N D I N G S Á M I R E I N D E E R
H E R D E R S ’ K N OW L E D G E S Y S T E M S
O F S N OW A N D I C E


Inger Marie Gaup Eira

INTRODUCTION
Reindeer and their Sámi herders live in environments with interchangeable climatic
conditions across wide areas of the north and have lived here since time immemorial
(Turi 2009; Oskal et al. 2009). Arctic reindeer husbandry is a livelihood and way
of life based on traditional practices and knowledge developed through long-term
experiences living under harsh, extremely challenging and changing climatic condi-
tions (Eira et al. 2018; Turi 2016; Degteva et al. 2017). Reindeer husbandry has
developed signifcant adaptation strategies to exist in the uncertainties of the Arctic
environment (Mathiesen et al. 2018) and adverse climate conditions, managing to
create sustainable livelihood systems (Magni 2017; Eira et al. 2016).
The basic value for reindeer husbandry is the knowledge of nature (Sara 2003,
94). A key feature of this knowledge is knowing the weather, wind and changing
seasons that affect the availability and use of resources (Sara 2001; 2013). Weather
and snow conditions are almost wholly decisive for the reindeers’ survival and
important for the existence and livelihoods of reindeer-herding communities. The
temperature can vary much throughout the year, and weather and climate condi-
tions can change continuously (Eira et al. 2018). Successful herding depends on
good skills in analyzing everyday conditions, but even more on maintaining an
overview of anticipated development throughout the snow season. Reindeer herd-
ers must have knowledge of and skills concerning the nature of reindeer and the
environment in which reindeer live and the topography, weather and climate of
the area, as well as the mutual relations between all these factors (Strøm Bull et al.
2001, 300).
In this chapter, I examine how reindeer herders use snow concepts in their
practice of reindeer herding. The investigation will, with the help of concept
analysis and concept categorization, provide insight into what comprises a Sámi
snow and ice knowledge system. Daily work with reindeer involves many differ-
ent types of activities, especially for the herder, the siida and the herd. The herder

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has a crucial role in inspecting and observing the situation regularly during the
day, every day during winter. The herders on duty must make decisions and
solve problems that may arise according to the demands of the situation (Sara
1990). Winter herding (Sámi: guođohit) is derived from the noun guohtun (to
graze or the possibility of grazing), i.e. to let or put to graze, which shows that
the reindeer’s need for food and water plays an important role in the herder’s
understanding of the well-being of their animals (Eira et al. 2010). The herder
must examine the area to fnd ealát (food) and to guohtun (access to foraging
beneath the snowpack) for the herd. By observing closely where the herds have
been grazing, whether the snow is hard in the area and whether there is ice under
the snow cover, the herders must look for a new place or niche within the grazing
area where reindeer can dig through the snow. Part of their daily work therefore
involves observing, watching and examining snow conditions and the changes
in those conditions that may affect the survival of the reindeer during the seven-
month-long winter (Eira et al. 2013).
Like other disciplines, reindeer herding has its own specialized vocabulary and
concept and knowledge systems – e.g. about nature and reindeer accumulated
through generations working in the feld (Eira 2012). Reindeer-herding knowledge is
frmly embedded in reindeer-herding language (Eira 2012), which shows the impor-
tance of language as a portal to knowledge. Knowledge is represented by language
(Burgin 2016) and is constituted, organized and transferred by using the language
(Rey 1995). Knowledge is refected in the concepts embedded in reindeer husbandry
practice (Eira et al. 2013; see also Joks in this volume). These concepts represent a
unifed body of knowledge and knowledge systems related to reindeer husbandry.
In order to use concepts to present human knowledge that has been produced and
developed in specifc specialized felds, the concepts must also defne and clarify the
relationship between the concepts (Nuopponen 2010). Battiste (2002) claims that
analyzing knowledge is basically the same as analyzing the concept of knowledge.
Thus, the epistemology of knowledge that is concerned with conceptual clarifcation
can be showed by clarifying the use of concepts (Rey 1995).
This chapter is based on research that is part of the broader Rievdan1 Project.
The chapter presents an interdisciplinary investigation on Sámi snow and ice
knowledge systems in general and, in particular, those related to Sámi reindeer
herding in Guovdageaidnu. The topic will be examined through two questions:
How is the Sámi snow and ice knowledge system constructed, and how do reindeer
herders explain this?
To obtain data on herder knowledge of snow in Guovdageaidnu2 and their
daily use of snow concepts for herding, the project interviewed reindeer herders
over several years, used in situ data to describe the conditions of the forming of
ice layers in the snow and combined these with in situ data from the Norwegian
Meteorological Institute to help us better understand the herders’ observations in
the area of what happens to the snow above if warming occurs in the ground. The
informants were six elderly (aged 60+) herders who have spent their whole lives
working with reindeer and have acquired and retained extensive traditional knowl-
edge about snow and reindeer. To describe and analyze existing knowledge and
practice interactions on how reindeer herders comprehend the character of snow
and ice, I used a conceptual and empirical analysis method, an activity in which

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concepts, their characteristics and their relationship to other concepts are clarifed
(c.f. Nuopponen 2010).

SÁMI REINDEER HERDER SNOW AND ICE

KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
The Sámi snow and ice knowledge system (SSIKS) is, in this case, based on under-
standing reindeer herding in Guovdageaidnu and the vocabulary that has arisen in
and is infuenced by the environment (Eira et al. 2018). This system is described
by its boundaries concerning reindeer herd, ecosystem and snow and ice, structure
and purpose expressed in its function and practice (ibid.). This includes climate and
weather factors (precipitation, temperature, wind), seasonal cycles, snow and ice
physics (snow metamorphism, snow, ice types, snowpack layers) and certain con-
ditions which strongly affect the character of the snow cover with an impact on
animals, humans and reindeer herding. The system consists of factors that herders
observe and monitor as of the frst day that snow covers the ground until the night
before it fnally melts and disappears.

Reindeer herder knowledge system

The snow and ice knowledge system includes a concept system made up of several
small conceptual systems covering large and small sub-areas of the feld. Each snow
concept has its place and can be clearly defned by its relationship to the other snow
concepts. Sámi reindeer herders in this area express a huge technical vocabulary with
at least 318 concepts for snow and ice designating various types of snow and snow
conditions (Eira 2012). The knowledge that reindeer herders possess about snow
includes an understanding of both the physical properties of snow and the physical
processes of snow directly linked to the International Classifcation for Seasonal
Snow on the Ground (Fierz et al. 2009).
In percentages (see Figure 11.1), these are distributed into fve different subsystems:
31% of the vocabulary describes snow factors affected by and affecting reindeer herd-
ing processes and mechanical impacts affected by deer and humans, track on snow cat-
egories and types and guohtun categories and types; 28% describe snow on the ground
(snow types, wet snow, hard/soft, thick/thin, layers in the snowpack, crust forms), pro-
cesses (metamorphism, changes) and impacts; 25% express weather processes; 15%
concern ice features and processes in the snowpack, water and other places and impacts
(types, ice categories on the ground, on the trees and on things; ice features in lakes and
water; melt-freeze layers) and 1% describe the sound from/on snow.
However, the technical vocabulary of snow and ice will probably be greater if we
count Sámi snow concepts throughout the whole of Sápmi (Magga 2014; Ryd 2007;
Jernsletten 1994; Eira 1994; Svonni 1981; Nielsen 1979; Ruong 1964). The high
diversity of snow vocabulary used daily by the herders represents a unique knowl-
edge and indicates the importance of different snow conditions concerning pasture
topography, temperature, wind and precipitation (Eira 2012; Eira et al. 2018). The
use of Sámi snow ‘language’ is an important gateway to the herders’ traditional
knowledge of the herd, the management of the herd on snow-covered ground and
how herders deal with these complex systems.

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Figure 11.1 Reindeer herder vocabulary of snow and ice is divided into fve subsystems.

Content of the knowledge system

The knowledge of snow and ice contains several knowledge systems that are
represented in the knowledge base for reindeer husbandry. This includes net-
works of systems that represent subsystems of the reindeer husbandry knowl-
edge system. This can be compared with a comprehensive knowledge system
which, according to Burgin (2016), has many types of knowledge; knowledge of
each type is organized in relation to the corresponding subsystem of the entire
knowledge system.
Sámi reindeer herder knowledge about snow and ice represents a systematic way
of thinking and knowing. The knowledge system also contains elements that cross
biological, physical, cultural and linguistic systems. The system thus encompasses
theoretical models and practical reindeer herding that are linked to different types of
science and knowledge, such as hydrology, meteorology, biology, topography, rein-
deer herding, animal welfare, land management, adaptation strategies to climatic
conditions etc. (see Table 11.1). It also contains other types of knowledge that aid
in understanding, communicating and transmitting knowledge, such as ontology,
linguistics and pedagogy.
The system contains two main categories. The frst is snow knowledge, containing
elements of the physical nature of snow and ice (snow type, snow conditions, snow
transformation) and on matters affecting the snow or the result of an impact (such
as temperature, wind, precipitation, air). The second is knowledge of snow that has
a wider meaning than snow physics, defned by basic concepts in reindeer herding
in a snow ecosystem related to reindeer survival mobility, tracking conditions and
visibility (see Figure 11.2). Various types of snow and snow conditions provide a
unique knowledge base for adapting to changes in snow and coping with environ-
mental uncertainties.

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Table 11.1 Parts of the reindeer herder snow and ice knowledge system

  Conditions affected by or affecting

Basics of RH Weather Reindeer Reindeer Land
‘Subsystems’ processes herding
Physical properties – snow x x x x
Topography x x
Behaviour of reindeer x x x x
Biology and physiology x x
Meteorology x
Hydrology x
Animal welfare x x
Land management x x x x
Adaptation to climate x x x x
conditions
Language – ontology x x x x
Knowledge transfer x x x x

Traditional knowledge on precipitation and weather processes

The knowledge of weather processes and how these alter the physical condition
of snow and ice can be seen as a subsystem of SSIKS. Just as Western scien-
tists (Halfpenny et al. 1989, 41; Armstrong and Brun 2008, 27), reindeer herders
reveal knowledge of how the physical transformation of snow is affected by tem-
perature, pressure, wind and radiation from the time the snow crystals reach the
ground. Reindeer herders are constantly observing weather conditions and evalu-
ating how the different types of weather are affecting and forming the surface
of the snow and layers (Eira et al. 2013). There are two fundamentally different
types of snow: frst, the snow that falls from the sky (precipitated snow). Second:
snow produced by later changes within deposited snow (metamorphosed snow)
(LaChapelle 1992, 3).
There are different expressions in the knowledge system for weather, like fertu
(if there is clear weather, no clouds, precipitation and wind). The opposite is dálki
(bad weather with wind and snow). If the air is thick and the weather is cloudy, it is
called moskku dálki, and if the air is so thick that it is diffcult to see, supmudálki.
Precipitated snow or precipitation in the form of water or ice falling from the atmos-
phere to the ground, depending on temperature and wind, is expressed using terms
like muohtti, borga, šlahtti, arvi, buolaš borga. Other examples are čuorpmas (fro-
zen raindrops), ráššu (cold rain or sleet), šlahtti (wet snow that is almost rain), čáđgit
(precipitation of very wet snow) and goahpálat (new wet snow that immediately
sticks to things).

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Snow on the ground can remain unchanged for a period, but generally only for
short periods. Some factors have a great infuence on the snowpack, like temperature
and wind (Halfpenny et al. 1989, 41). There are also many concepts expressing how
wind can transport snow, wind in snow, wind shape, wind and snow and wind and
temperature. Wind-drifted snow is guoldu; snowing in windy weather is borga; wind
combined with cold temperature is ruvaš; and when wind is blowing and transport-
ing the snow constantly, this is veađđat.
According to reindeer herders, air temperature has a great infuence on both
falling snow and snow on the ground. The knowledge and the conceptual system
show scales with processes from hot to extremely cold – báhkka (hot), bivval (mild
weather when the air temperature is above 0°C), buolaš (air temperature is colder
than −15°C), ruosti buolaš (extreme cold weather, colder than −25°C). This way of
calculating expresses the use of fuzzy logic, which is a mathematical approach to
dealing with complex systems using linguistic variables rather than numerical vari-
ables (Berkes and Berkes 2009).

Knowing how snow is affected by and affects reindeer herding

Sámi reindeer herders deal with many variable factors simultaneously, like physical
variables for snow that determine whether access through the snowpack is easy or
diffcult, but also pasture topography, herd behaviour and the mobility of the neigh-
bouring herd (Eira 2012). Reindeer herders observe and monitor both the snowpack
and the behaviour and reaction of reindeer to different types of snow and ice on the
ground and snow in the air. Reindeer herders use more than 20 different topographic
areas throughout the winter in a winter grazing area, based on how the snow settles
on different types of terrain/different landscapes and how this affects the reindeer
when there is snow on the ground. The different snow and snow conditions at a winter
grazing area, and its topography, are important components that determine how snow
is distributed over an area and thus affect the availability of grazing plants for rein-
deer (Eira 2012). Having knowledge of the combination of snow and topography –
including time – is thus important since the reindeer will alternate between different
parts of the landscape, like wooded hills (roavvi, maras) in the frst part of winter;
while there is little and loose snow, the reindeer will graze mostly where it fnds the
best low deposits.
Snow on the ground, snow cover, amount of snow, thickness of snow cover, snow
consistency and the differences in snow layers in different areas, at different times
of the year and under different weather conditions decide the possibilities for rein-
deer to dig through the snow to reach their food. The snow and the snowpack in
Guovdageaidnu, to take one example, are important for reindeer herding because
they have a substantial impact on reindeer behaviour and activity.
In addition to assessing the snowpack and examining the physical properties in
it, the herder will also assess the nature of the environment beneath the surface of
the snow and assess the condition of the vegetation. If snow conditions are good –
no hard snow, no trampled snow – and if there are ealát (lichen and other plants),
reindeer will start grazing the area. Eira (2012) exposed reindeer herder practices

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for how to check the condition of the snow and the possibility of reindeer reaching
the lichen.
“We usually check the snow with a stick; if it goes easily through [the snow] it is
usually good” (Isak Mathis O. Eira, in Eira 2012). He also characterizes snow cover,
temperature, moisture, wind, herd behaviour and the animals’ situation using tradi-
tional holistic knowledge and the herders’ knowledge of the physical properties of
snow, which play a key role in herd management.
Thus, snow physics have a great infuence on the reindeer’s grazing ability (Eira
et al. 2018; Jernsletten 1994). The denser the snow, the harder it is for the reindeer
to dig holes or depressions in the snowpack to reach the plants beneath the snow
layer. Snow is also a prerequisite for mobility, tracking and visibility. Five key factors
(Table 11.2) characterize snow cover and type of snow that affect reindeer survival
and well-being, as well as the working conditions of herders (Eira 2012).
Analyses point to a system of the way herders describe and communicate knowl-
edge of snow and ice.
The system contains several different factors expressed with different concepts:

• A physical process like weather/snow transformation causing different types of

snow and ice.
• Product or result of transformations: Snow quality, density, hardness, snowpack
(snow layers).
• How these infuence herding.
• Reindeer behaviour in snow, survival, sustainability and well-being.

The core factor of knowing how to deal with reindeer in snowy climates is guohtun.
Guohtun describes grazing conditions for reindeer and how they access plants and
how easy or diffcult it is for reindeer to access plants by digging through the snow
(Eira 2012; Benjaminsen et al. 2016). Guohtun reveals the nature of the snow-
pack, which comprises different layers, each with unique physic characteristics.

Table 11.2 Snow categorization according to factors affecting

reindeer and herders, respectively.

A   Reindeer needs
I Access to grazing
II Access to shelter
IIIa Snow conditions, mobility
B Herder tasks and requirements
IIIb Snow conditions, mobility
IV Snow conditions, mobility on skis, skis run easily
V Track snow
VI Visibility

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The complexity of the guohtun is a broader concept than understanding the purely
physical concept of snow since it also includes elements of reindeer herding. It
includes concepts that belong to a subsystem of guohtun: Oppas,3 čiegar,4 feski5
and goavvi,6 characterized as the basic concepts for herding in winter. These are the
most important herding concepts in winter that explain the evaluation of the sur-
vival and sustainability of reindeer (Eira et al. 2010). These concepts are dynamic
because the content is about processes and conditions that change according to
weather, time, location etc. and are expressed as a complex system of traditional
knowledge, refecting the holistic understanding of reindeer herding (Eira et al.
2018).

Two ways of knowing snow and ice

Sámi reindeer herders express a complex system of traditional knowledge refect-
ing the holistic understanding of reindeer herding. This is an understanding of the
complexity of the relationship between snow, reindeer and terrain, which they use
to adapt their herding strategy in relation to the well-being of reindeer. They also
articulate a comprehensive knowledge concerning snow physics that includes dif-
ferent characteristics of snow like hardness, density, stratifcation, layer thickness,
snow depth, snow water equivalent and physical processes of snow affecting these
(Table 11.3).

Table 11.3 Overview of topics in snow physics used by reindeer herders to describe snow
properties.

Consistency Hardness Water Layers Processes Thickness

content
ceavvi časttas njáhcu gearni borga bohkolat
hard compact hard snowdrift thaw thin falling of snow deep snow of
snow (smaller than crust of varying depth
skálvi) snow
melt-freeze destructive melting melt- destructive
metamorphism metamorphism freeze metamorphism
seaŋáš čearga soavli skárta guoldu skálvi
depth hoar snowdrift very wet thin snow big (high,
which is so snow/slush layer transported steep and
hard that it of ice by wind usually hard)
bears; crust of frozen (snowdrift) snowdrift
drift snow on to and provided
the poor visibility
ground
constructive destructive melting melt- destructive destructive
metamorphism metamorphism metamorphism freeze metamorphism metamorphism
and sintering

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Table 11.4 Different snow concepts regarding quality of snow

and snow metamorphism.

snow snow cover snow layer

snow depth snow density snow hardness
snow type snowdrift surface features
dry/wet snow snow water equivalent crust types
ice features new snow snow changing processes

The general term for ‘snow, snow-covered ground’ is muohta (Magga 2006, 8).
Ođđa vahca (new snow) is unmetamorphosed snow and newly fallen snow that has
very low density (Landrø 2007, 36).
In Western science, the transformation of the snow on the ground is called snow
metamorphism (Brattlien 2008), with at least four different processes that can occur
simultaneously to transform snow: destructive, constructive, melt/freeze metamorpho-
sis and sintering. During metamorphosis, the snow’s density, structure, texture and
strength change (Armstrong and Brun 2008). Reindeer herders demonstrate these pro-
cesses using verbs designating the various processes, like čeargat (destructive meta-
morphosis) and seakŋut (constructive metamorphosis).
Snow quality can be assessed along several dimensions (Jernsletten 1994; Magga
2006; Eira 2012) such as consistency, hardness, layers, water content, thickness
and transforming processes. Destructive metamorphosis is the process that breaks
down the snow crystals with a temperature gradient within a snowpack of less
than 1°C per 10 centimetres that make a snowpack dense. In the knowledge sys-
tem, some snow concepts are characteristic of a change process like skálvi (big,
usually hard snowdrift) and časttas (hard snowdrift, smaller than skálvi) (Nielsen
1932–62, 1979), and čearga (very dense and hard snow layer). This snow type starts
in destructive metamorphosis and continues with the sintering process. New snow
in combination with wind develops čearga conditions. The wind transports the
snow crystals on the surface of the snowpack and breaks the crystals into smaller
particles.
An older Sámi herder described how čearga occurs and how dense it is.

Na garrá dat muohta, go biegga feraha dan muohttaga čađat, ovttohii ja dat
maŋemus de šaddá dat nu čavga nu ahte dat šaddá dakkár maid ii beasa čađa
boazu ja ii ge olmmoš ge. [The snow became very dense created by strong winds
which have blown the snow and rolled it to become hard. The snow will become
so hard that neither reindeer nor herders can dig through it.]

This type of snow possesses many characteristics belonging both to snow physics
and to the herders’ evaluation of reindeer survival and well-being: Whether it bears
weight, how hard it is, its quality, how it can be checked/tested and the effect of wind
on it.
Constructive metamorphism is a transforming process that describes the decreas-
ing density of the snowpack. In reindeer areas of Eurasia, it is a normal process

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Figure 11.2 Seaŋáš/depth hoar.

Source: Inger Marie Gaup Eira

Figure 11.3 The melt – freeze cycle with the previously mentioned seven concepts. The
different shades of grey denote the different metamorphisms: dark grey: melt – freeze;
grey: destructive metamorphism; light grey: melting metamorphism; white: constructive
metamorphism.

even if the snow sometimes is deep, up to 1.5 to 1.70 meters, with a temperature
of −30°C. Reindeer herders call this type of snow seaŋáš (depth hoar crystals), which
are most easily formed in cold, continental climates with shallow snow cover and a
favourable strong temperature gradient (LaChapelle 1992, 18–19).

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This process makes a granulated seaŋáš, loose snow, close to the ground, which
reindeer can easily dig through to forage and which can be used as a water source
because it melts very rapidly. This snow type contains large-grained, faceted, cup-
shaped crystals that resemble sugar granules (Fierz et al. 2009).
From a reindeer herder’s perspective, when the snowpack contains seaŋáš, this
represents very good grazing conditions because this snow is fragile and porous.
In the Sámi language, seakŋun is a concept for recrystallization, the process that
takes place at the bottom of the snowpack and changes hard snow types to more
porous snow, like seaŋáš. In the winter, when it has been cold for a while, the
process of seaŋáš formation starts. Cold weather is a prerequisite for and pro-
motes this process because it requires cold air, a temperature gradient of more than
one degree per ten centimetres of snow (Armstrong and Brun 2008). According to
Ruong, seaŋáš production starts as early as January. He describes this as ædnam
æl’lá, which means the ground is alive (Ruong 1964, 79). While reindeer herders
use the term suđđit to explain how the ground “eats” away at hard-packed snow,
Western snow scientists describe this as a result of heat from the earth, and snow
is normally warmer closer to the ground than at the surface. In spring, the wind
can change hard snow to seaŋáš. As long as the air temperature is cold and the
snow temperature gradient may be high, this will result in larger crystals than the
original precipitated crystals. Lack of this snow type will reduce the possibility of
adaptation on snow-covered ground; the understanding of seaŋáš is therefore key
to the economy of reindeer herding. So, from a herding perspective, seaŋáš is good
because a snowpack loses mechanical strength (Eira 2012). From another perspec-
tive, seaŋáš is not good because the process of constructive metamorphism leads
directly to an increased risk of avalanche (Marchand 2014).
Crust is a hard layer of snow in which liquid water has refrozen into a grain fabric.
Crusts are usually the result of sun, rain or wind (Fierz et al. 2009). Reindeer herders
explain rain crust (geardni) as a thin layer of ice on the surface of the snowpack. It
occurs when rain hits the snowpack and freezes. Sun crust (skáva) is a thin layer on
the surface just before cuoŋu (strong crust on snow), ruovdecuoŋu (very dense snow,
almost ice) that occurs when the snow has been softened up and frozen during the
night and hardened the snowpack so can bear the weight of people and animals.
Cuoŋu is an ice layer that hinders reindeer from breaking through the layer to access
lichen (Jernsletten 1994). Wind crust is the product of the mechanical deterioration
of snow crystals. The resulting fragments are densely packed and sintered together.
According to Halfpenny and Ozanne (1989, 49), wind crust can be very strong, like
čearga. Wind crust forms as a frm, even hard snow layer (činus). There is also melt-
and-freeze crust, in addition to these. Moarri is a brittle crust formed on the surface
of the snow as a result of alternative thawing and refreezing of the top layers.
Reindeer herders call the worst type of high-density snow/ice bodneskárta. This
is basal ice, class IFbi (Fierz et al. 2009) at the bottom of the snowpack, coating the
vegetation and ground (Eira et al. 2013). Bodneskárta occurs when the frst snow
partially melts, and the water freezes on the ground and in the plants. Meltwater
puddles on the soil substrate and freeze by heat conduction into cold substrate for-
mations (Fierz et al. 2009). Once bodneskárta develops in a snowpack, it can persist
all winter until the spring melt. Such events have dramatic impacts on grazing condi-
tions for reindeer (Eira 2012).

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Increasing precipitation and temperature variations in wintertime, with tempera-

tures rising above freezing with rain followed by refreezing (rain-on-snow condi-
tions) are forming ice layers in the snow, like bodneskárta, that then block access to
foraging and subsequent starvation (Larsen et al. 2014; Maynard et al. 2011). This
is expected to create challenges for herding in the future and cause extremely bad
grazing conditions – goavvi – with starvation and loss of reindeer and a subsequent
negative impact on the economy and organization of herding. In Guovdageaidnu,
goavvi occurred at least 12 times from 1917 through 2012 (Eira et al. 2018; Eira
2012). It is alarming that the frequency of goavvi is increasing at pace with climate
change – higher air temperature and snow quantities and strong winds. The last
goavvi season was in 2020 (see also Nilsson in this volume).
Reindeer herders evaluate crust by its hardness, or rather its capacity to carry
reindeer and humans. If the crust supports the weight of a reindeer, it is cuoŋu; but if
the crust is frm but not frm enough to carry a reindeer, it is činus. Moarri is a crust
not hard enough to support the weight of people or reindeer that will cut their legs
when they break through. This kind of snow or ice crust breaks and cuts the legs of
reindeer (Eira 1994, 62–64).
A part of the snow and ice knowledge system contains the herders’ understanding
of thawing and refreezing processes. It explains processes of changes to snowpack
structure by melting as the high-water content and melting between snow crystals
change the snow into a soft, soggy, wet and granular slush (soavli). This is a part of
melt metamorphism. Njáhcu is also a result of melt metamorphism. Refreezing also
increases snowpack density. At night in spring, refreezing results in cuoŋu of melt
water (called njáhcu), which is common due to the cooling of the snowpack, result-
ing in complex changes to the snowpack. According to the herders, the freeze cycle in
spring has at least fve snow concepts that are the result of refreezing after melting.
Layers of ice occur in three different ways: rolled or compressed by the wind, with
the heat of the sun (melting/freezing) and freezing following rain (Halfpenny and
Ozanne 1989, 49). In a Sámi understanding, layers are like frost or a coating of ice
types on the ground, trees and other things (Ruong 1964, 76–77; Eira 2012). These
types also have an understanding of chronology in terms of time – which type is frst
in the fall and which is last in the spring. The frst is bihci (ground surface frost),
occurring when the ground is snow-free and cold. Then it is ritni (a type of frost on
trees). Skilži is an ice type that sticks to clothes and hair; spulži is ice on trees, things
and footwear; and čođđi is ice on trees or stones. Ritni is very important for reindeer
herding. Ritni (also called rinádat) is good for grazing. Reindeer can also hide in a
ritni forest, which gives the reindeer an opportunity to graze in peace without being
disturbed because they are hidden. For the herders, ritni is not very good. Ritni
impedes work because it is diffcult to see and know where the herd and each rein-
deer are hidden, i.e., when collecting the herd or fnding smaller herds.
The overall formation of guohtun depends on the relationship between snow,
precipitation, temperature and wind direction and velocity, as well as other envi-
ronmental variables such as topography. These impact whether the snow condi-
tions make good or bad grazing conditions for reindeer, which relates to reindeer
survival. The temperature gradients between air and ground through the snowpack
are an important factor that might change the processes resulting in good guohtun
or poor guohtun (Eira 2012). If guohtun is poor, this indicates that the layer on the

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top or within the snowpack is so hard that the reindeer fnd it diffcult to crush the
hard layer while digging through. The strength in the snow layer increases with the
number of melt-freeze cycles (geardni, cuoŋu) and with the ability of the wind to
compress the snowpack (čearga). Sámi herders observe and monitor these conditions
in the snowpack very closely from hour to hour every day.
Sámi people have observed, monitored and recorded freezing and breakup dates
throughout the years in river and lake ice. Ice formation and processes on water or lakes
have a large conceptual system that includes processes and the products of these in terms
of time and space. Gavdot is a verb denoting when the water surface starts freezing in the
autumn; suttis is the condition of the water when the ice is not yet frozen but has open
holes; bođaš are icy tones on riverbanks or in the bottom of the river; jiekŋagávli is ice on
the riverbank, e.g. when the bays freeze over. Boarragis is when ice in spring is lifted up
from the lake or river surface. This is the stage before the ice becomes nállojiekŋa (needle
ice) when fshing is advantageous. This ice taxonomy is often related to the surface of
lakes and is used to assess travel conditions and show the processes from water to ice,
solid ice and melting ice related to both season and topography. Certain types of ice are
better for transport, and other types do not permit travel at all, while others allow pas-
sage, crossing the ice or making a detour. In the autumn, lakes and rivers must be frozen
and have a thick ice layer in order to bear reindeer, humans and vehicles. It can be life
threatening for both humans and animals if these are not frozen. The herder must con-
stantly monitor this and be aware of it during transport and travelling.

CONCLUSION
The Sámi herders’ snow and ice knowledge system is constructed as a holistic
knowledge combining two ways of knowing – traditional knowledge and scientifc
knowledge. On the one hand, herders express a multidimensional understanding of
the physical properties of snow, which can be compared with international snow
classifcation, while on the other hand, we fnd elements of different herding strate-
gies for snow and the ecology of the herd in the winter grazing area.
The system contains comprehensive knowledge concerning a) snow physics, snow
types, snowdrifts, deep snow, hard snow and how snow crystals are affected by dif-
ferent processes in the metamorphism and b) how each process is affected by time,
snowpack properties and external weather conditions.
This knowledge system has fve different subsystems: The largest group is those
with reindeer herding, processes around guohtun and mechanical infuences caused
by reindeer and humans. The second-largest subsystem involves snow on the ground
and the physical processes concerning changing snow, further weather processes
and weather phenomena and ice with melt/freeze processes on land and water. The
smallest group expresses the sound coming in/out of the snow.
Within this knowledge system, we fnd elements of knowledge or subsystems with
different types of knowledge and practices and routines that generate, validate, commu-
nicate, and apply knowledge. The subsystems, including reindeer herding, are linked to
different types of science and knowledge such as hydrology, meteorology, biology, topog-
raphy, animal welfare, land management and strategies to adapt to climatic conditions.
This knowledge system is complete and has specifc concepts of epistemology, and
its own scientifc and logical validity. Many traditional Sámi concepts describe snow

193
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conditions as these are defned by international standards, whereas other traditional con-
cepts describe the physical processes leading up to certain snow conditions. Like many
other Indigenous Peoples, reindeer herders have a broad understanding of the relationship
between humans and nature because of their understanding of snow ecology and the herd.
The study shows that reindeer herder language is an integral part of Indigenous
knowledge systems; thus, language is an important way of communicating knowl-
edge and sharing knowledge effectively. The content of snow and ice systems is
articulated through Sámi language, and the physical condition of different layers is
key to changes in weather and temperature conditions, which are often integrated
into the meanings of the words. To understand Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, one
must understand how the language of these peoples works and the symbolic, verbal,
and unconscious structures of knowledge.
Reindeer husbandry is known to be crucial not only for reindeer herding but also
for the maintenance of the Sámi language and culture. Its ability to maintain the
Sámi language and culture depends on how the practitioners’ knowledge systems
and ways of knowing are maintained, transformed and adapted by their practices,
conversations, signifcant infuence on formation of basic framework conditions and
self-managed adaptation to change.

NOTES
1 The research project Rievdan (Rapid change – challenges or opportunities for sustainable
reindeer husbandry) was commissioned by the Sámi University of Applied Sciences and the
International Center for Reindeer Husbandry and supported by the Research Council of
Norway (grant 238326).
2 Guovdageaidnu is in Northern Norway and represents the biggest region of reindeer hus-
bandry in Norway.
3 Snow condition in an untouched or untrodden area in winter. In this condition, the entire
snowpack from the surface to the bottom includes loose snow, snow types like vahca,
luotkkomuohta and seaŋáš and thus have not been touched by reindeer when grazing.
4 Snow condition with very dense snow in an area in winter. Such conditions occur because
reindeer have been grazing in the area, leaving cold grazing holes (suovdnji) in the snow.
The process that makes čiegar is the reindeer, by grazing, destroying the snow crystal struc-
ture so that the snow change, sintering process goes much faster.
5 Area with tracks and grazing spots; the snow has become dense due to reindeer grazing.
6 Disaster event connected to snow conditions that cause starvation and death of reindeer,
negative calf production (miesehis jagit) and less nutrition – which, in turn, affects the
herders’ livelihood, economy and psychosocial well-being. This appears during extreme
weather events caused by a combination of different ice formations, amount of snow (dense
and hard snow that is too hard for a reindeer to penetrate like ice (jiekŋa) layers on the
surface or in the snowpack), ice frozen into the vegetation (bodneskárta), deep snow (gassa
muohta) and wind-packed snowdrifts (čearga). These conditions can cause impenetrable
pastures – often referred to as ‘locked’ pastures.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

I S S U E S O F S Á M I R E P R E S E N TAT I O N
I N F I N N I S H TO U R I S M
A quest for authenticity


Nuccio Mazzullo

INTRODUCTION
Sámi representations have changed considerably over time and turned almost into
their opposite, from the image of a backward minority to the romanticized children
of the forest (see Nyyssönen in this volume). Nowadays, these exaggerations have
become less common, and there is a move towards a more realistic picture of the
Sámi. In this chapter, I shall follow how the concept of authenticity has been under-
stood through a historical overview of the representations and by juxtaposing it
with the notion of identity for the Sámi. I shall then focus on two aspects that are
crucial in the defnition of Sámi authenticity, and these are the notion of tradition as
the binding cultural factor and the notion of handicraft in its function as a cultural
proxy. These aspects, however, are debated in the Sámi community, which fnds itself
facing phenomena like mass tourism and foreign industrially made souvenirs.
In their desire to liberate their cultural representation from external ascriptions,
the Sámi struggle with persisting stereotypes used by the Finnish tourism industry.
Based on feldwork with Sámi reindeer herders who are also involved in the tourism
business, this chapter scrutinizes Sámi representations in the growing tourist industry.
How do the Sámi wish to represent Sámi culture in the tourism business, and what
kind of challenges exist regarding the tourist request for authenticity? The aim of this
chapter is to explore the different representations of Sáminess inside and outside the
Sámi worldview and to contribute towards a culturally sustainable Sámi tourism.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SÁMI AND THE GROWTH

OF TOURISM
In order to understand current Sámi representations, we have to ask ourselves where
these narratives came from and what made them persist in the tourism sector. As

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-14 197

 — Nuccio Mazzullo —

a starting point, I analyze the historical emergence of representations through the

observation of ancient written accounts.
Lapland has seen a high number of visitors throughout the centuries, and many
of these visits resulted in the production of extensive description of journeys, people
and landscape. Some of these accounts are accessible through secondary sources,
as in Book IV of The Histories by Herodotus (450 BC) as well as in Tacitus’s short
ethnography Germania (98 AD), depicting the Thule region as an unallocated region
of the north, and so the geographic and ethnographic accuracy are at one with
mythology.
Herodotus describes the mythical populations living in the north, calling them
Hyperboreans who had lived ‘happily’ in the far north of the inhabited world for a
thousand years, and Tacitus mentions the Fenni, later Phinnoi, who were living as
hunters. The geographical location of the place inhabited has been uncertain and has
shifted progressively to the north. The historian Procopius, writing in the mid–6th
century, locates the Thule region farther north than previously thought and men-
tions the ‘Skritiphini,’ most likely referring to the Sámi people. While the geographi-
cal location remains uncertain, according to Procopius’s legends, in the Thule region,
the sun would rise and set only once a year. Procopius’s name for the local popula-
tion, Skritiphini, was used seven centuries later by Saxo Grammaticus in his text
‘Gesta Danorum’ (c. 1200) describing the ‘skiing Finns’ with their passion for hunt-
ing and their unusual ways of transportation on the snow. It is Saxo Grammaticus
who mentions Lapland for the frst time, using the name ‘Utraque Lappia’ (Saxo
(Grammaticus) 2015, 334).
From the 16th century onwards, with the increased geographical discoveries and
the technological advances, more precise accounts have been preserved. In these
accounts, priests and other clergy sought to show that the people living in the far
North could be evangelized, as evident in the writings of Olaus Magnus (1555) and
Johannes Schefferus (1673). In other accounts of Lapland, we can observe either an
emphasis on observation of plants and landscape, as in the reports by Carl Linnaeus
(1732), or on the people, as in descriptions by Knud Leem (Leem 1767), as well as
Giuseppe Acerbi’s travel account in the years 1798 and 1799 (Acerbi 1802).
Along with the colonization of the New World, ethnography emerged in the
1800s as a means of capturing Indigenous cultures and introducing them to central
European audiences. In the attempt to educate and entertain, the Sámi culture on the
outskirts of Europe also caught attention. Accordingly, an accurate representation
of the Sámi world was only partly intended in the organization of ‘Lapp caravans.’
Starting in the 1800s but becoming popular especially between 1910 and 1930,
exhibitions showcased Sámi villages in the zoos of central Europe, in particular in
the Hagenbeck Zoo of Hamburg, Germany. The aim of the organizers was to intro-
duce ‘primitive peoples and “lower cultures” of the world in European amusement
parks, circuses and, particularly, zoos’ (Lehtola 2013, 325) to the masses. In zoo
exhibitions, Lehtola recognizes the conscious reproduction of ‘stereotypes of authen-
ticity’ (Lehtola 2013, 327) in the presentation of real objects and live performances,
which, however, underwent a selection process for the purpose of the exhibition.
Contracts between the organizer and the Sámi specifed, among other things, the
clothing and other items to be worn by Sámi but, in the frst place, determined who
could be hired for the exhibition as participants were chosen according to their

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physical appearance (Lehtola 2017). Carefully selected and exposed in the zoo, these
Sámi became popular study objects for hobby as well as scholarly anthropologists
who were spared the stressful journey to remote regions (Lehtola 2013, 329).
A frst written ethnographic description authored by a Sámi dates back to the
beginning of the 20th century, encompassing the writings of Johan Turi (2011) in
collaboration with Danish artist Emilie Demant. Muitalus sámiid birra, frst pub-
lished in 1910, gave a rather different picture based on the perspective of an insider.
To avoid misconceptions, Turi explains: ‘I have been thinking that it would be best if
there were a book in which everything was written about Sámi life and conditions’
(Turi 2011, 9). Introducing an uninformed audience, and especially the Norwegian
and Swedish governments, to the Sámi world, Turi was well aware of his role and
the novelty of his task. In descriptions prior to Turi, the Sámi are depicted accord-
ing to the various authors’ intentions and cultural backgrounds, either as the ideal
people to evangelize and, hence, as remote and backward or as an example of good-
natured and noble people. Also, the frst translation of Turi’s muitalus (account,
Sá) into English (of Demant’s Danish version by Elizabeth Gee Nash in 1931) was
written through the lens of a ‘civilized’ audience learning about a ‘primitive’ people.
Only later translations corrected the exaggerated language that was ‘infantilizing’
Turi’s work (DuBois 2013, 274). Despite the tainted lens through which non-Sámi
speakers accessed Turi’s writing in the Danish and English translations, his book
introduced the Sámi world to a wide audience and motivated travellers to meet Turi
personally.
From the 1930s onwards, people with a research interest increasingly travelled
to Lapland and studied the Sámi, thereby establishing the discipline of Lappology,
which was later dismissed as highly stereotypical with regard to the way the Sámi
are homogeneously depicted as being close to nature. While the representations in
Lappology await proper analysis to this day, Lehtola argues that stereotypes about
backwardness were prevalent on both sides, among Sámi and non-Sámi researchers
(Lehtola 2017, 100). According to travel accounts (reviewed by Lehtola), many visi-
tors were surprised by the Sámi people’s knowledge of major cities, and in popular
images such as travel guides etc., the infuence of ‘higher culture’ was considered to
deteriorate Sámi culture. These external descriptions reinforced the previously estab-
lished image of the Sámi as being close to nature and thus fundamentally denied
their (right to) technological and cultural development (see Aikio in this volume).
This image of the Sámi as essentially depending on the specifc living circumstances
that prevailed in their community at the turn of the century, when they were ‘dis-
covered’ by European audiences, established itself in popular and intellectual think-
ing. Lehtola remarks that even the Finnish composer and ethnomusicologist Armas
Launis, who had a profound understanding of Sámi culture, stated, ‘They cannot
thrive in better and more favourable conditions, they wither like a forest plant in a
garden’ (Lehtola 2017, 93).
With an increase in people’s curiosity and mobility, especially following Finnish
independence and the annexing of the Petsamo region, a territory that gave Finland
direct access to the Arctic Ocean, the polarization of Sámi as either backward
or virtuous became part of everyday conversations in Finnish society. (For more
about the Petsamo region, see Jouste in this volume). Ethnic Finns migrated to the
Petsamo region in substantial numbers to support the national development with

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the construction of roads and dams for the newly established state, hence aiming
to Finnicize the region. Emphasizing this colonial aspect, the journalist Nuuttila
writes, ‘Yleinen vitsi oli, että “briteillä on se Intia, mutta meilläpä on Petsamo”’ (‘A
common joke was that “the British have India, but we have Petsamo”’ (Nuuttila
2021). Many Sámi who were employed in the construction works had a gener-
ally supportive attitude but were not without doubt about the social and cultural
consequences of facilitating mobility to and from villages hitherto diffcult to reach
(interview with Skolt Sámi, who participated in the construction of the dam on the
Paatsjoki River, 2014).
Apart from some foreign travellers, at the beginning of the 20th century, Lapland
tourism grew very much as home tourism and slowly extended to international tour-
ism after WWII. Starting from the 1950s, Lapland tourism was increasingly pro-
moting the Sámi as the exotic inhabitants of the wild North. It was conceptualized
in contrast to the ‘civilized South,’ thus playing an important psychological role.
This growth generated critical responses inside the Sámi community, culminating
in the 1970s and 1980s with pamphlets and books from Sámi writers opposing the
development because of the negative impact it was believed to have on Sámi liveli-
hoods and culture. Kirsti Paltto, for instance, remarked that ‘in Lapland there isn’t
a single corner that has not been already encroached by tourism’ (Paltto 1973, 51).
In her chapter on tourism, Paltto outlines some of the common problems prevailing
through today, concerning the fast development of a tourism in which Sámi are cen-
tral in terms of object but peripheral in terms of agency. Paltto promotes a respon-
sible tourism that is overseen by and benefts local people, but does not exhaust
local resources on which the community relies as staple food, such as game, fsh and
berries (Paltto 1973, 61).
In this context, it has been argued that in the Fennoscandian North, tourists have
often been treated with preference (Juuso 2018); in the extreme case, their presence
is favoured over everyone else’s (Beach 1994), especially in the context of wilderness
protection.

Local people and tourists enjoy the same rights to both fshing and hunting.
The only difference now between a local person and a tourist from the south
is that the tourist thinks that, in the north, he is in an area where everything is
permitted. When a person from the north goes south, he does not camp on the
property of someone else or drive through someone else’s garden. An injustice
is felt to be the fact that, whilst a local person and his life history and traditions
have no value, a tourist from the south is treated like a lord when he comes
north. Furthermore, the tourism business practised by the majority population
blatantly exploits ‘Sáminess.’
(Juuso 2018, 50)

In wilderness areas, the presence of humans is conceptualized along a scouting leave-

no-trace mentality, disregarding the fact that the seemingly wild nature of the North
is the product of long-term human intervention (see Magga, P. in this volume). As
Beach (1994, 183) has pointed out, the landscape of the Scandinavian North is mis-
takenly seen as being ‘purely natural’ while, in fact, it is the ‘stamping grounds for a
highly developed traditional reindeer herding.’ Beach continues to argue that

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[a]s the conceptualization of Nature comes to exclude humankind, the Saami

herders will fnd themselves increasingly hampered in their traditional lifestyles.
Ironically, the Saami herders and their reindeer are advertised as major tourist
attractions.
(Beach 1994, 183–4)

The role of the Sámi in this wilderness context is tightly bound to an image of tradi-
tional livelihood as it was practiced around the beginning of the 20th century. Thus,

the tourist who desires a wilderness challenge is often willing to accept a leather-
clad herder living in an old traditional tent, tending his herd on foot, but should
the herder, garbed in synthetic materials, fy to his modern cabin by helicopter,
the tourist can become indignant and demand restrictions.
(Beach 1994, 184)

Nowadays, the Sámi and other Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic are increasingly
resisting their instrumentalization as part of an exploitative tourism industry that
strips them of their agency. For instance, in Alaska, Alaskan Airlines ‘requests that
people on its tours to the villages refrain from taking photographs of the Native
tour guide as they disembark the aircraft. Taking photographs of the locals is only
one of the many exploitative touristic pursuits’ (Nuttall 2002, 139). During my visit
to Baffn Island in Nunavut in 2017, the residents of the Clyde River community
were proud to tell how they had managed to rebuff the type of tourism described
by Nuttall. There, during the summer, cruise ships brought thousands of tourists at
a time who focked all over the village, taking pictures of anything and anybody for
a few hours, and then boarded the ship and left, leaving very little in return to the
community apart from a sudden disruption of local social life. Following protests
against this kind of encounter, only small cruise liners with limited numbers of guests
are allowed in Nunavut now, as terms have been agreed with the local communities
(Stewart et al. 2011). Nuttall points out that the seasonal arrival of tourists has a
big infuence on the economies of local communities because during high season,
involved members will primarily serve the needs generated by the tourists rather
than those of the local community:

In this way tourism produces dependency relationships and local people may
also become dependent on outsiders for seasonal or long-term employment
when primary industries, such as fshing decline.
(Nuttall 2002, 139)

These relationships of community dependency and disruption of local routines are

also characteristic of tourism development in Lapland, where the local population is
quickly outnumbered by tourists. And the infux of tourists is no longer restricted to
short periods. The time of disruption used to be confned to the summer season, last-
ing from the last week of June until the ruska time of mid-September, during which
increasingly greater numbers of tourists visited the North by car and RV, but they
are now instead visiting the area as organized groups with charter busses and planes.
Nowadays, the seasonal arrival of tourists has turned into a steady, year-round fow,

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with the implication that certain images of the Sámi are used in the competition to
draw the tourists’ attention. As in other parts of the world where Indigenous Peoples
have attracted visitors, traditional costumes are important marketing elements of the
tourist experience.
During my feld work in Lapland in the 1990s, I often encountered tourists who
were wondering where they could fnd the real, authentic Sámi whom these visitors
had heard of as living in tents and wearing traditional clothes. With such expecta-
tions in mind of a romanticized ‘living close to nature,’ it would escape their atten-
tion that representatives of the Sámi could be standing right next to them, albeit
dressed in clothes similar to those worn by the tourists.
Another, more pejorative take on the Sámi, certainly serving the image of the
civilized South can be found in the then-popular TV-parody series Pulttibois [Bolt
boys], interpreted by two Finnish comedians, Petelius and Kalliala, at the end of
the 1980s and the beginning of 1990s. The series was based on sketches centering
around Finnish characters including two Sámi. The Sámi characters, wearing fake
Sámi costumes, were entirely based on stereotypes about the imagined backward-
ness of the Sámi, their faces dirty with ashes, usually intoxicated or longing to be (see
Kyrölä in this volume). The stereotype of an elderly Sámi, dirty with ash and drunk,
in traditional Sámi clothes, was also staged by a Finnish actor, and the picture could
still be purchased as postcard in touristic towns in Lapland until very recently.
It is in this context of imaginary representations of Sámi culture that Sámi tour-
ism entrepreneurs are trapped. What we are currently witnessing in the attempt to
establish a ‘culturally sensitive tourism’ (Olsen et al. 2019; Kugapi et al. 2020; Hurst
et al. 2020; see also Puuronen in this volume) is constituted by the struggle between,
on the one hand, an historically grown and widely popularized repository of ste-
reotypes which the Finnish tourism industry has been nurturing and, on the other
hand, the strengthening rights of Sámi tourism entrepreneurs who wish to tell their
version of Sáminess and so be in command of their representation. This contradic-
tion is part of a wider political struggle for self-determination and sovereignty, and
in the absence of political resolution, the fght for adequate cultural representation
intensifes.
In this pursuit, some Sámi artists and activists have taken on the effort to decon-
struct such stereotypes, thereby reappropriating the very ontologies of the repre-
sentational process. One example is the TV program Märät Säpikkäät (in Sámi,
Njuoska bittut, i.e. ‘Wet reindeer hide legwarmers’) produced and directed by two
Sámi authors, Suvi West and Anne-Kirste Aikio. In this programme, the two Sámi
artists exaggerate what happens when Sámi women move south to a big city such
as Helsinki as they pick up on the various stereotypes that a young Sámi woman is
confronted with to this day, struggling with stereotypical expectations from outside
and inside her own ethnic group. The producer-actors create a counter-parody to the
earlier mentioned show depicting two Sámi men, impersonated by the two Finnish
comedians, Petelius and Kalliala. On the one hand, West and Aikio reproduce the
ordinary stereotypes about the Sámi as the backward, the drunken, the dirty and
the sexually lavish, and on the other hand, they mirror internal stereotypes and con-
straints within Sámi society, such as the importance of owning reindeer and being
a herder as the only viable choice for a proper Sámi marriage. It is by exaggerating
expectations from outside and from within, and by exposing and deconstructing

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them, that the two Sámi comedians are able to generate a powerful critique of both
Sámi and Finnish societies (Dlaske and Jäntti 2016; Sipola 2012; see also Kyrölä in
this volume).
Hence, if stereotypes cannot be easily dismissed, they can be used as a counter-
argument. In other words, although some of these narratives seem to have become
‘autopoietic’ (i.e. with a self-referential existence) and thus prove to be diffcult to
get rid of, they can be utile in highlighting all approaches that are clearly not appro-
priate to Sámi culture.
By actively reproducing and standardizing certain stereotypes for commercial pur-
poses, the Finnish mass tourism industry has to be understood as heavily restricting
Sámi entrepreneurs in their freedom and right to tell their own version of Sáminess.
As some Sámi entrepreneurs were commenting on this issue, when tourists come to
Lapland, they already have a picture of who the authentic Sámi are, and Sámi entre-
preneurs either work under these assumptions and expectations or tourists will look
elsewhere for a matching picture. Altogether, persisting representations of the Sámi
as noble or backward, or their eviction from a ‘wilderness’ area, have been used
strategically by outsiders.
A resolution of prevailing conficts over rights is important in the context of cur-
rent development plans, such as the planning of the much-opposed Arctic railway
(see Sara et al. in this volume), which take place in the context of these ambivalent
experiences and contested narratives of development. In debates surrounding the
Arctic railway (Toivanen 2019) and, in fact, any other decision making concerning
land use, we can observe diametrically opposed depictions of the Sámi. The confron-
tation over land use in the Sámi homeland draws from the established repository
of popular images in which the Sámi can appear as stewards of nature preventing
(industrial) progress (Valkonen and Valkonen 2014) or as careless as their intensive
herding methods provoke an overgrazing of their pastures.

WHAT IS SÁMI IDENTITY? THE VIEW FROM WITHIN

The tourism industry – including a multitude of actors in the national and interna-
tional context – intercepts processes of identity making and traditions in transition.
In the case of the Sámi, the popularization of certain images and roles has had a great
impact on the negotiation of boundaries between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
residents. The formation of local identity through the construction of otherness can
be assumed to have been exaggerated and polarized for the purpose of marketing in
Lapland tourism. On the following pages, I will discuss the concept of ‘indigeneity’
and present perceptions locals have of themselves and their own communities.
In the Sámi homeland, the most common association between Indigenous People
and identity is with a particular livelihood, which is reindeer herding. It is widely
recognized as the main marker of Sámi identity and has legally manifested as an
exclusive livelihood in the Norwegian and Swedish jurisdictions, where only Sámi
can practise reindeer herding (see Labba in this volume). This is not the case in
Finland, which is the only nation across the Sámi homeland that has passed legisla-
tion (in 1932) that allows all residents of the state-designated reindeer-herding area
to practice this livelihood. As a result, in Finnish Lapland, the Finnish reindeer herd-
ers are more numerous than their Sámi counterparts.

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Historically, not all Sámi have practiced reindeer herding. Sea and freshwater
fshing were equally relevant livelihoods wherever geographical features allowed
(Itkonen 1984; Lehtola 1997). The comment by Juuso (2018, 50, see earlier quote)
is to be understood against this backdrop: The previous diversity of livelihood of the
Indigenous People is denied, and fshing rights are granted to tourists and Indigenous
People alike (see Nykänen in this volume).
As a consequence, in the Finnish context where, for historical and juridical rea-
sons, neither reindeer herding nor fshing could be regarded as the main identity
marker, then language, traditional clothing and traditional singing were understood
among Sámi as being more relevant means of distinction instead. In the context of
questions of ethnic belonging, these markers are frequently emphasized in common
discussion.
In the course of several feldworks conducted in the northern part of Finnish
Lapland, the topic of identity was picked up regularly among the Sámi interviewees.
To quote a representative thought on this aspect, I will refer to an interview with a
well-known Sámi politician and head of a Sámi association. Regarding the question
of what constitutes Sáminess, she emphasizes the inclusiveness of various aspects. In
her words:

Sáminess is naturally my life, constituted, of course, by my mother tongue and

by the nature around me. Sápmi [Sámi homeland] is not just a land that has
been drawn around the borders but is the whole Sáminess, the life of Sámi per-
sons. My life, my mother tongue, nature, of course the livelihood, in particular
reindeer herding. And of course, also the clothing, the food, my customs, my
values, all of this. I was brought up as a Sámi within a Sámi community. . . . All
the norms, all the rules, what I have learnt in my own community, in my own
family, they are Sáminess. They make one Sámi. I didn’t realize this until, as a
young person, started to work for the Finns, it was then that I started to ask
myself questions.

In the interviewee’s view, there is a dynamic and fully encompassing relational feld,
as described by Ingold (Ingold 2000, 149), constituted by the land, the environment,
the culture and the people that supports and nurtures individuals and phenomeno-
logically lets them grow into recognized members of their own community. During
my feldwork (1995–1997), I experienced the resilience of Sámi social organization
and upbringing in the context of the siida. Although it had gone through radical
changes, such as the introduction of the Finnish cooperative system that forced sev-
eral siida herding communities to merge into a single reindeer-herding cooperative,
the driving principles, such as bilateral kinship patterns, kinship belonging, exog-
amic patterns and herding autonomy in the management of pastures, continue to be
important. Hence, kinship patterns and reindeer herding are, at different levels, both
changing and yet are still fundamental as they constitute the most important institu-
tion at the base of Sámi society.
In contrast to these aspects of social organization, Sámi identity in tourism is built
around a selective, visual still image of the past, carefully constructed and widely
shared (Tuulentie 2006). This image fulfls the true defnition and function of what
we call stereotypes, and that is to keep the representation frozen at a moment in time

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that is believed functional to either attract or discourage outsiders’ attention. These

images are supposed to attract tourists or, for instance, discourage investments for
economic developments as they manage or fail to acknowledge Sámi social and cul-
tural needs and rights. Kuokkanen emphasizes this by remarking that:

talking about ‘traditional’ ways of life or ‘traditional’ culture can suggest racist
notions of a frozen culture giving rise to false views of authenticity and ‘tradi-
tional practices.’ This, for its part, denies development and change in Indigenous
cultures.
(Kuokkanen 2000, 418)

Reacting to this tendency, Ingold and Kurttila suggest that

[o]ne solution might be to drop the concept of tradition altogether: to regard it

as so tainted by its conventional opposition to modernity that it can give only a
distorted view of people’s real lives, one that is fattened in time and devoid of
any sense of history.
(Ingold and Kurttila 2000, 184)

The persistence of stereotypes can be surprising, considering the number of attempts

already made to demystify them (Ridanpää 2016). During my feldwork, I often
experienced that, in the minds of the tourists visiting the North, there was a strong
wish to fnd the authentic Sámi, meaning those who follow the reindeer in the tundra
and live in the lávvu, i.e. the Sámi tent. It was regularly disappointing for them to see
Sámi wearing western style clothing and fying planes. This absence of visual clues
was then interpreted as an overall loss of tradition. In the aim to deconstruct this
type of persistent understanding that features identity as a ‘complete and unchang-
ing “being,”’ Lehtola proposes to popularize instead the notion of identity as an ‘on-
going process, continually being produced’ (Lehtola 1997, 86). His position matches
the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty (1999) and the interpretation by
Tim Ingold (2011, 2000).
Lehtola further emphasizes that ‘[n]owadays a “real” Sámi may be a city dweller,
may be a professional computer programmer, or an astronomer.’ Overall, he adds
a metaphor by referencing that for Rauna Kuokkanen identities are, like reindeer,
continuously migrating (johtti) (Lehtola 1997, 86), thus dismissing any attempt to
fxate Sámi culture. In the next section, we shall take a closer look at why we need
categories when referring to cultures and how these are shared across time.

ON THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION

When we think about tradition, we think of activities and artefacts from the distant
past as they have been transferred from one generation to the next, and regarding
the way they are practiced or produced, they may be regarded as authentic. Just like
identity, we commonly expect tradition to be recognizable and identical to the one
practiced and enjoyed in the past by previous generations. Accordingly, Sámi handi-
craft also has to bear a set of attributes that remain unchanged over time and hence
become ‘traditional’.

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However, when we look at Sámi traditional handicraft, we can see that many
things have changed, and much has been adjusted to current needs in order to
respond to a very pragmatic principle that is fundamental to Sámi culture (see
Magga, S.-M. in this volume). It is the need to remain fexible and adaptive in
order to be able to respond to suddenly occurring needs and challenges as they
are encountered in life. In fact, it is fundamental, for instance, when travelling
in the forest, that one must carry only the strictly necessary, and the items must
be multifunctional, practical and reliable and always perfectible and upgradea-
ble. This also implies a concept very important in Sámi culture, one of personal
autonomy, fundamental in the process of assessing and taking decisions, which
bears as a result different courses of action, according to the character of the per-
sons involved. During my feldwork, Sámi craftsmen have defended the idea that
autonomy is very important and that things can be done in many different ways
and yet belong to the Sámi tradition. My early attempts, during feldwork in 1991,
to craft items that were traditional clashed with the Sámi understanding that the
focus is more on ideas and processes rather than being strictly the replica of previ-
ous similar items. Hence, it is precisely such autonomy of the makers that keeps
their tradition alive. It can be argued that this is constitutive of the Sámi tradition,
the notion of remaining fexible, in a physical sense (not to overburden oneself
with items) and in a mental sense (to adapt practices, ideas, identity, language etc.
when it is good to do so).
It is all those aspects of fuidity, creativity and fexibility that are fundamental for
any culture to thrive and to be in synchrony with the historical times. To put it in
Valkeapää’s words: ‘The sign of a living culture is precisely fux and constant change’
(Valkeapää 1983, 57). In the same book, he insisted that although he was singing the
traditional Sámi juoiggus, he was not prepared to do it by repeating, like a cassette
player, the exact style others had done in the past. In his words: ‘I would have fn-
ished with anything related to yoik long ago if I had to function like a tape recorder
or a gramophone record’ (Valkeapää 1983, 57).
These concepts remarked on by Valkeapää were supported, during my feld-
work in 1990–1992 and in 1995–1997, in my conversations with Sámi informants
and practitioners. They emphasized that any culture, at any point in time, is in
continuous transformation, an understanding supported by the seminal writings
of Wagner (1981) and Ingold (foreword to Wagner 2016). Hence, Sámi people
who are selling industrially made souvenirs to tourists are not as worried about
the impact that this may have on traditional Sámi handicraft. They see these hand-
made handicrafts and the industrial products as two separate realms fulflling dif-
ferent functions. Reindeer herders would still use and trust handmade knives in
the forest.
In an interview published in 1984, Petteri Laiti emphasized the connection
between traditional knowledge and modern practice, describing it in the following
terms:

The practical knowledge of traditions can be combined with modern everyday

needs. One can produce items for today’s market competition, as long as they
are based on one’s own tradition.
(Laiti 1984, 10)

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He further underlines that when, looking at the phenomena of mass production

and tourism, he acknowledged their existence and that they have to be dealt with.
However, ‘Even though an artisan has to cater for the needs of mass production one
can still base the work on one’s own tradition and under this infuence new designs
and patterns can be developed’ (Laiti 1984, 10).
Moreover, the actual changes in the shape and pattern of handicraft items, as well
as in the ways in which they are sold to tourists, reveal a picture in which, despite
the changes, understood as ‘natural,’ handicrafts are still embedded in the context
of daily practices. ‘When .  .  . they [outsiders] want Samis [sic] to reproduce old
things which no longer have any practical function, it’s not very stimulating to do
anything’ (Valkeapää 1983, 57). This is to say that Sámi traditional handicrafts in
order to be defned as such, must change. In other words, Sámi tradition is indeed
traditionally transitional. I think it is important to notice how focusing on the pro-
cess rather than the products allows practitioners to get away from the rigidity of a
structured approach to change towards a more fexible approach, one that allows
change and innovation. So how do we deal with the issues of authenticity? In the
Sámi world of handicrafts, this issue has been addressed with the foundation of the
Sámi Handicraft Association in 1975, Sámi Duodji, and its counterparts in Norway
and Sweden, whose main goal is to certify the authenticity of the handicraft product
produced in Sámiland while at the same time reasserting the vitality of Sámi culture
(Magga 1995, 7). It was only in 1982 that it became a trademark managed by the
Sámi Council so that it could offcially guarantee the genuineness of the products
(Lehtola 1997, 114).

THE EVERCHANGING AUTHENTIC SÁMI

What most of my Sámi informants were emphasizing was the difference between
telling about Sámi culture and sharing it. The main idea is that the sharing of one’s
own biographies is understood as a more authentic way of talking about one’s own
culture, and in order to be able to do so, one has to be Sámi. So, among the features
emphasized by Sámi informants which are constitutive of the concept of authenticity
are the embeddedness and contextualization of the actors and of the representations.
The same applies to the craft items in focus and not only the descent or the ethnicity
of the makers. Hence, some items that fall within the defnition of authentic Sámi
handicraft, currently sold as souvenirs, may be authentic but obsolete for the Sámi.
During my trips to the forest, I was always reminded that items that should be car-
ried in the forest are items that work, that do the many jobs required by the evolving
travel events encountered during the journey.
This was opposite to what the Norwegian and Swedish governments were impos-
ing on the Sámi at the turn of the last century, with policies that were based on the
understanding that the Sámi, in order to be Sámi, had to live in the Sámi way, breed
reindeer, wear Sámi clothing and live in a Sámi tent. These requirements were sum-
marized by the motto ‘let the Lapp remain a Lapp’ (Lapp skall vara lapp) (Sámi
Instituhtta/Nordic Sámi Institute 1990, 71; see also Drugge; and Hansen in this vol-
ume). These expectations were not so different to what Lehtola describes as happen-
ing with the arrival of the frst tourists in the Petsamo region, after the construction
of the Arctic road to join mainland Finland with the Arctic Ocean. For as long as the

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Skolt Sámi stayed in the forest and conducted a traditional life that could be exhib-
ited, it was fne. It was the appearance of the so-called ‘roadside Skolts’ (Lehtola
2017, 94) that worried those who saw it as a phenomenon that would undermine
the authenticity of the cultural identity of the bearers. These ‘roadside Skolts’ were
Sámi who had seen the opportunity to trade some of their surplus with the frst
Finnish travellers who were so eager to experience the exotic North by travelling all
the way to the Arctic Ocean coasts.
However, the idea that those Sámi who were authentically Sámi could possibly
imagine anything else apart from the natural livelihoods that they thought of as
being specialized was understood as undermining their identity and turning them
into majority normal people.
This view was strongly opposed in the work of Valkeapää, in particular in his
Greetings from Lapland, in which he remarks:

I just maintain that a living culture can never stand still. I am genuine, but I don’t
want to be genuine in the sense of petrifcation. I want to create new things, I
want to live in the culture I was born into, and I shall let myself be infuenced
by the current of the times.
(Valkeapää 1983, 57)

Here, the desire to be authentic is clear but not at the expenses of change and inno-
vation. This is the precisely the point that is crucial to explaining the long life of
these stereotypes while Sámi were kept in a state of hesitation between the possibil-
ity of betraying their own culture by being modern or that of becoming a museum
piece and entering the photographic collections of some of those tourists who were
in search of the authentic and/or exotic inhabitants of Lapland (see Aikio in this
volume).
For instance, Lehtola reports how, in 1930, the police chief of Utsjoki was regard-
ing his Sámi friend as not ‘real “Lapp” because he eats with a knife and fork’ (Lehtola
1997, 86). As if the authenticity was dependent on his friend’s use at the table of
the Sámi knife (niibi), unpolluted by Western civilized manners and tools. But, of
course, the reality is that Sámi, in the course of their history, assessed the approach-
ing changes and would make choices, too (see Lehtola in this volume). And despite
the fact that Sámi could be wearing Western style normal clothing and seen as revo-
lutionizing reindeer herding because they were using snowmobiles (Pelto et al. 1968;
Pelto 1973) or ‘fying dogs’ (helicopters) (Beach 2013, 94), they were still themselves
and their livelihood, too.
Where the touristic experience is understood to lack suffciently entertaining
activity, Sámi tradition can also be entirely invented, as in the ‘ceremony of the
crossing of the Arctic Circle.’ There, queues of tourists in winter overalls with ash
marks on their foreheads participate in a made-up ritual led by a ‘shaman’ who
wears seemingly traditional Sámi clothing and plays the drum in a Sámi tent. Such
depiction of the Sámi as simple children of nature still practicing animism fulfls
tourist expectations nurtured through media sales. Cohen (1988) has suggested that
tourists are aware of this kind of deception but cannot escape their role. Instead,
when embarking on these kinds of tourist entertainment trips, they enjoy the play,
‘which like all play, has profound roots in reality, but for the success of which a great

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deal of make-believe, on part of both performers and audience, is necessary’ (Cohen

1988, 383).
Thus, the common search for the authentic exotic Sámi dressed in traditional
clothing to be photographed has not eased up; on the contrary, it has increased,
particularly with the digital photographic revolution and the increased importance
of social media. From recent feldwork conducted in Finnish Lapland to investigate
whether there are possibilities to shift ‘Toward culturally sensitive tourism’ among
Indigenous People in the Arctic, Kugapi et al. remark:

Tourists’ interest in seeing and photographing the Sámi has led to many uncom-
fortable situations. Tourists enter people’s backyards and photograph local
homes. There are tourist busses that park in front of churches to wait for local
people to exit the church in their traditional Sámi costumes.
I have a personal experience of this from [a] funeral. It felt awful when the tour-
ists came there to photograph us. The tourists must have thought that this was
a real jackpot to get a picture of people in Sámi dress, but you sure do not want
to have tourists present in these kinds of situations or events. Some people just
do not think about these things.
(Kugapi et al. 2020, 18)

Nils Aslak Valkeapää, in his outspoken argument against any form of cultural coer-
cion, had already gone even deeper in his distaste for this paradox in which Sámi
were trapped, saying that ‘When people are so keen to make Samis into museum
pieces – live in tents, herd reindeer – then something is wrong somewhere.  .  .  .
This eagerness to keep an eye on folks and keep them ‘genuine’ seems revolting’
(Valkeapää 1983, 57).
However, in Kugapi et al.’s report, Toward culturally sensitive tourism (from the
research project ‘Culturally Sensitive Tourism in the Arctic – Arctisen’ 2018–2021),
it became clear, in the interviews that we conducted among the Sámi entrepreneurs
who are involved in one way or another with tourist business, that things are chang-
ing much faster than before, which makes it more diffcult to adapt (Kugapi et al.
2020). Most of the Sámi interviewees saw a fundamental role for themselves in
the tourist business, for they know that in the most important tourist locations of
Sámiland, there is a lack of people who can tell tourists about Sámi culture. Namely,
Sámi interviewees see a major difference between those who can talk about Sámi
culture and those, like Sámi entrepreneurs themselves, who can share their own Sámi
culture with the visitors. Some are going even further by sharing their family history
and some of their daily routines and activities (Kugapi et al. 2020, 18, 24, 27). And
their stories and their lives also include modern items, tools, vehicles and musical
instruments.
In the ‘Arctisen’ project, the interviews conducted among the Sámi also show dif-
ferent views of what is seen as fundamental to the core of Sáminess. Although some
interviewees were pointing at the Sámi dresses as an important symbol of personal
and group identity, some others would set the dresses a little aside and put at the
centre the Sámi language and the drumming (not so much the drum), in connection
with, and above all, the yoik. One interviewee emphasized how the yoik lives where
the core identity also lives; the yoik is its deepest expression. According to interviews

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conducted in Utsjoki in 1997, the yoik used to be the frst present a child would get
at birth, and it was the part of the person that would live on, through the memories
and the voices of all those who would sing it, and hence, by singing it, they sum-
moned them (Mazzullo 2005, 260). Thus, in the views of many, it was one of the
most authentic expressions of the Sámi self.
According to these interviewees, any ridiculing of the yoik is most upsetting
as it touches on the most intimate part of the Sámi identity. They also did not
approve of the use of fake Sámi dress in tourism, and stopping this practice
was emphasized with a big demonstration held by several Sámi associations in
Rovaniemi in 2008. Intimidated by the ridiculing, many Sámi have stopped cul-
tural practices such as drumming and yoiking for fear of being associated with
the exaggerated image of a shaman or drunkard. Observing this tendency, Sámi
activists responded by re-embracing these practices and connecting them with a
political message.
This request to avoid ridiculing is nowadays quite established, and Finnish author-
ities are taking steps in this direction, in the quest to rectify and settle centuries-long
injustices and misunderstandings through a truth and reconciliation commission. In
an effort to show the way forward, the Finnish Sámi Parliament (Sámediggi) recently
published a set of guidelines, ‘Principles of Responsible and Ethically Sustainable
Sámi Tourism,’ to make way for a different type of tourism, one that is respect-
ful of people’s dignity and privacy and thus aims to be discreet and to strengthen
Sámi self-determination in issues that touch them both economically and culturally.
Former Sámi president Tiina Sanila-Aikio reminds that ‘[n]othing about us without
us’ (Sanila-Aikio 2018; see also Magnani in this volume).
It can be argued that it is not only a matter of decolonizing these representations,
something necessary as a frst step, but also one of reappropriation of the role of
both narrative maker and teller. It is the narrator’s role, along with their lived expe-
rience, that ought to overlap in any of the tourist services that bear any desire of
offering a Sámi cultural experience that can be authentically shared. Opposing the
so-called genealogical approach, which is based on descent, to explain how inter-
twined knowledge is with the lived world, Ingold uses what he calls the relational
approach (Ingold 2000). In this respect, he remarks that ‘cultural knowledge and
bodily substance are seen to undergo continuous generation in the context of an
ongoing engagement with the land and with the beings that dwell therein’ (Ingold
2000, 12). Hence, returning to the need for authenticity in tourism, it is not a sup-
posedly unchanged mere representation of the Sámi as such that is needed, which
can be then exchanged as the content is continuously being updated in the business
of living in accordance with the times, but the lived experience of the processes of
knowing and engaging with the world.

CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have summarized the historic development of representations of
Sámi people in Finnish northern Lapland, with particular reference to their functions
in contemporary Sámi tourism. I have provided examples from previous literature
and my feldworks in the Northern parts of Finnish Lapland from the beginning of
the 1990s until now.

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With the beginning of the 20th century and the rise of Arctic tourism, the images
drawn only partly referred to Sámi culture as a real counterpart. Instead, they were
constructed to serve certain expectations within the receiving culture. Despite the
taintedness of these external ascriptions, including rather foreign concepts (e.g. as
stewards of nature) associated with these representations, they nevertheless became
part of a common repertoire which has infuenced the representations produced by
the Sámi themselves. Where Sámi tradition was artifcially fxed in time and con-
structed according to the needs of the tourist industry, authenticity of practices and
products has been contested the more successful tourism has grown. In this chapter,
I have also refected on the academic debate surrounding the concept of tradition
and suggested an approach that fnds the essence of Sámi culture in the principles of
change and fexibility, rather than a still image of rituals and artefacts.
With the increasing power of Sámi institutions and general political awareness
among members of Sámi society, superfcial descriptions and stereotypes became
political tools to mirror the encroachment of Western society and the derogatory
impact it had had on Sámi cultural practices. In a sense, the highly stereotypical nar-
ratives can be understood as providing the necessary provocation for the majority
of Sámi society to join the struggle for independence from social and cultural con-
straints. Preventing the ridiculing of yoiks and the misappropriation of drums and
dresses in the tourism industry are, however, only one side of the counter-movement
that has gathered momentum in the Finnish Sámi community. On the other side, the
deconstruction of internal stereotypes is pursued, dissociating contemporary Sámi
culture from reindeer herding and promoting a modern city life as equally meaning-
ful. My argument regarding the social cohesion of the Sámi community supports
this understanding, locating the foundations of Sámi tradition in its social relations,
rather than visual features.

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 PART II

G I E R DAT 1 – L I V I N G
T H RO U G H / I N S O C I E TA L
RUPTURES


1 ‘to endure’; ‘to bear’; ‘to be strong enough’

 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FUTURES OF SAMI

L A N G UAG E S


Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren

INTRODUCTION
All Sami languages are endangered to varying degrees. According to the Unesco
Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley 2010), degrees of
endangerment range from North Sami, categorized as ‘defnitely endangered’; to
Skolt, Inari, Lule and South Sami (‘severely endangered’); and fnally, to Pite, Ume
and Ter Sami (‘critically endangered’).1 However, there are also positive trends to be
seen and possibilities for continuing language use and revitalization2 in various com-
munities and contexts (see also Pasanen in this volume).
We will frst provide a short general description of the main historical factors that
have resulted in the endangerment of the Sami languages, then we will present a num-
ber of prognoses frequently heard in society3 about factors threatening the survival
of Sami in the Nordic countries (about the Sami in Russia, see Allemann; see also
Andersen in this volume). We will consider them one by one, showing that their impact
has not always been as expected. Finally, we will discuss the possibility of maintaining
and revitalizing the Sami languages and securing their survival in the long run.
During the past few generations, the linguistic surroundings of people around the world
have changed. The linguistic domains of rural societies based on natural livelihoods have
shrunk and partly disappeared, while the domains of public discourse have grown, and
new, important linguistic domains have continued to emerge. Industrialization, continuous
urbanization, changes in livelihood structures and in business life, motorization of traffc,
reindeer herding and other Sami primary livelihoods, modern bureaucracy, school educa-
tion and – not least – the many pivotal reforms in communication, such as widely circulat-
ing press, radio, telephone, TV, computers, mobile phones, the internet and social media
have revolutionized linguistic surroundings.
Pre-industrial Sami societies were nearly self-suffcient, and necessary skills were
acquired within the closest surroundings. Along with skills, the language was also
passed on to the next generation. In industrialized societies, school gained a more
important position in the lives of children and youth. Intensive development of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-16 217

 — Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren —

school system entailed compulsory schooling, and a growing number of people

learned their occupation in schools. The linguistic surroundings of the Sami changed
critically, and during the 20th century, Sami languages were used less and, fnally,
even became endangered. How did this happen?
During the 19th century, nationalist philosophies and political ideologies in Europe
created the illusion of monolingualism, though this has never corresponded to reality.
In the Nordic countries, nationalism was especially strong, and during the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, nationalist policies divided peoples and languages within
states into two categories: Those who were regarded as belonging to the country and
others who were not. The earlier acceptance vis-à-vis others was replaced by open
assimilation policies. According to the social-Darwinist ideas of the time, the Sami were
considered primitive, and the disappearance of their languages was seen as a natural
development (Lehtola 1997, 44–46; see also Drugge; and Nyyssönen in this volume).
Modernization in the Nordic countries came later to the Arctic areas than to the
southern parts of the states. What was nearly fatal for the Sami languages was the
fact that modernization reached those areas in the assimilation era. New, important
modern domains were established only in the majority language, and these new
domains – especially education – also came to be used as means of assimilation.4
As a consequence, a shift from Sami to the majority languages became common in
many Sami areas during the 20th century.
Sami language transmission from parents to children was almost totally inter-
rupted5 in areas where modernization came earlier – that is, in the southernmost areas
(Southern Sami areas in Sweden and Norway and Vuotso in Sodankylä municipality
in Finland), as well as the Norwegian coast, where the Sami lived in multilingual,
more densely populated areas and cities. The areas where language transmission
has continued are the most ‘remote’ northern regions in the states, located in the
central Sami area, with Sami as the majority of the local population. Such areas are
inner Finnmark in Norway, Utsjoki municipality in Finland and a number of smaller
areas and villages in the northernmost parts of the three countries. The North Sami
language spoken in those areas clearly survived better through the period of assimi-
lation policy than the other Sami languages. (See e.g. Aikio and Lindgren 1973;
Jernsletten 1982; Bjørklund 1985; Aikio 1988; Hyltenstam and Stroud 1991.)
Many Sami came to regard the language shift as necessary because of societal
change; otherwise, it was thought that people in the Arctic areas would remain
backward. However, modernization in itself was not the reason for a vast lan-
guage shift; rather, it was the combination of assimilation policies and moderni-
zation (see Lindgren 2010). In offcially multilingual countries, the new modern
linguistic domains were introduced in more than one language from the begin-
ning, e.g. in Finland, both in Finnish and in Swedish. How would the multilingual
situation in Sapmi look today if schools and all other modern domains had been
introduced in the Sami languages from the start?

‘EDUCATION THROUGH THE MAINSTREAM SCHOOL

LEADS TO LOSS OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY’
During almost a century of forced assimilation policies lasting until the 1970s,
language assimilation was most effciently carried out in the school systems of

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the Nordic countries. In many places, Sami was a forbidden language in schools
and school dormitories, and parents were also sometimes told that it was prefer-
able to speak the majority language to their children at home (Aikio 1988, 55;
Svonni 2007; Huuva and Blind 2016; Aikio-Puoskari 2018, 356; see also Hansen
in this volume). Norwegian scholar Minde (2005) has discussed the fact that rela-
tively little was previously known about the socio-psychological consequences
of the Norwegianization policy. In spite of the fact that so many people had suf-
fered so much, there were few accounts of the school experiences of the Sami.
To Minde, this indicated the complexity and taboo nature of the subject and a
shared attitude to ‘let bygones be bygones’ and not ‘drag up’ painful memories
(Minde 2005, 30). A similar ‘collective silence’ about past experiences among
Sami was also observed by Johansen in Norway (2009, 195). Later, the need to
break the silence was addressed in collections of personal memories and articles
on the earlier school experiences of the Sami in Sweden (Huuva and Blind 2016)
and in Norway through a large Sami school history project.6 Destructive school
experiences among former Sami pupils are also very central in the work of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions recently initiated in Finland,7 Sweden8 and
Norway.9
Paradoxically, however, the assimilatory school system during 1940s and 1950s,
so detrimental to many, also contributed to more Sami than ever before pursuing
academic education. A common majority view was that civilization would in this
way be given to the primitive Sami. ‘The Lapps should be thankful for the Finnish
civilization offered to them,’ an old professor emeritus in Helsinki said in the early
1970s,10 expressing what was a common view in those days. At the same time, it
was expected that increased mainstream education would mean the end of Sami
languages and cultures.
What happened in reality was something else. A number of young Sami intellectu-
als showed that they had fully understood some of the central Nordic values – the
value of one’s own people and striving for equality in society – and applied them
to the situation of the Sami. This resulted in a political struggle for the Sami and
their culture. In the Sami world, ethnic activists were the equivalents of the radical
student activists of the 1960s and 1970s (see Alakorva in this volume).11 The frst
wave of Sami political activism had already taken place at the beginning of the 20th
century, but it did not lead to any reforms as the majority peoples were locked into
nationalism. It was not until the 1970s that the Nordic majorities began to listen to
Sami viewpoints.
Education also offered access to what was happening in the wider Indigenous
world. The Sami became active members of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples
(WCIP) founded in 1974, and since then, the Sami have increasingly participated in
many kinds of international Indigenous cooperation. An important revelation for
the Sami was that they were not alone in the world with their history of oppression
and their present problems – on the contrary, they had huge numbers of partners
in misfortune all over the world. During the past decades, contacts and friendships
have evolved between peoples with similar predicaments from different parts of the
world. Learning from the experiences of others and gaining access to international
research and discussions on minority and Indigenous rights have widened the per-
spectives of Sami activists and strengthened their endeavors.

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 — Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren —

‘THE SAMI LANGUAGES WILL SOON BE GONE’

Since the mid–20th century and onwards, many people, both majorities and the
Sami themselves, believed that the Sami languages as well as Sami culture, liveli-
hoods and lifestyle were doomed to extinction. Some believed that there was no
future for ‘Saminess’ either. ‘The Sami have never been masters anywhere,’ said an
elderly Sami who had grown up in the old world and was very suspicious of the
Sami movement.12 Others were afraid of the reactions from the majority to the
Sami movement (Lindgren 2000, 119). Though open assimilation policies had been
dropped and linguistic rights were gradually improved in society, linguistic assimila-
tion continued among the Sami.
What radically changed the situation around the 1970s was that the Sami move-
ment adopted new central goals: to make Sami languages offcial and to bring them
into domains important to modern-day Sami. According to Eidheim (1989, 75),
Norwegian Sami activists wanted Sami to be recognized as the mother tongue of the
Sami people, ‘a cultural trait which people speaking other mother tongues should
respect, and in which the culture carriers should have the right to be literate, and
which they should take pride in as a cultural heritage.’ Linguistic human rights were
discussed, and bilingual and multilingual Sami associations, conferences, festivals
and other public arrangements were initiated. Gradually, the Sami languages were
introduced as school subjects or means of school instruction, as well as offcial
regional languages. Radio broadcasting in Sami was initiated; more Sami press and
literature were created than before; the yoik was combined with other music forms
and brought to stages, records, tapes, CDs and the Internet; TV programs and flms
were produced; and so on (Helander 1990; Magga 1990; Hyvärinen 1995; Lehtola
1997; Magga and Skutnabb-Kangas 2001; Svonni 2008; see also Rasmussen et al.
in this volume).
Although the Nordic countries introduced more pluralistic language policies, in
many places, language shift from Sami to majority languages continued and still con-
tinues. From the 1980s onwards, an intentional language revitalization has also been
taking place among the Sami. Since the last decades of the 20th century, the Sami
have lived in circumstances which could be characterized as a race between assimi-
lation and revitalization. When the Sami languages were introduced into important
new domains, the majority languages of each state had already been established in
the domains created by modernization, and the use of Sami languages in the differ-
ent sectors of public life dragged behind. It presupposed a strong spurt on the part
of the Sami to modernize the linguistic surroundings in their own language. This was
not an easy task when added to the language-political struggle going on in society
(Lindgren 2010).

‘THE YOUNG GO TO THE CITIES TO WORK AND

FOR STUDIES AND BECOME ASSIMILATED’
Many revitalization movements seem at a loss when they fnd themselves unable
to attract the younger generations that are supposed to be easily infuenced by the
majority society and its dominant language ideologies. It has also long been a con-
cern for Indigenous communities that young people tend to leave traditional areas
where the language and culture are still part of daily life and move to cities for work
220
 — The futures of Sami languages —

or study. In the Nordic countries, the ongoing migration from rural to urban areas
and from the north to the south has been strong ever since industrialization. Fewer
job opportunities and possibilities to study in the Sami area have amplifed this ten-
dency among the Sami, especially after the 1950s. Today, approximately half of Sami
populations in the Nordic countries live in cities, and the proportion of children
and the young is even larger (Cf. Pedersen 2015; Pedersen and Nyseth 2015b, 318;
Lindgren 2015; Aikio-Puoskari et al. 2009, 8–10).
It has been feared that those Sami who move to cities will settle down for good,
start their families there and lose touch with their language, culture and roots. While
this no doubt happens in many cases, other tendencies are also present, as recent
research has shown (see Dankertsen in this volume). Formerly, only two options
were supposed to be available for young minority language speakers: To move away
and embrace the majority language and identity or to stay in the original area and
maintain the Indigenous language and identity. Today, the alternative of having both
exists for many. Numerous young people are, in reality, developing competence in
several languages while the Indigenous language is often an important part of the
multilingual young person’s linguistic repertoire. In general, multilingual speakers
are in research focus today, and the relevance of the so-called urban-rural divide is
also being questioned (e.g. May 2014; Pedersen and Nyseth 2015a, 15–16).
Similar results were found in a study on urban Sami in Helsinki (Lindgren 2000,
2015). Some of them had left Sami language and identity as moving to a larger city
has sometimes been a way to free oneself from a stigmatized identity. This could be
found among the older, so-called boarding school generation, who went to school
during the era of overt assimilation. On the other hand, there were ethnic activists
belonging to the same generation, those who had participated in the struggle for Sami
linguistic rights at least since the beginning of the 1970s. They founded urban Sami
associations that organized multifaceted, continuously developing cultural activi-
ties and offered contact networks and arenas for Sami language use (cf. Pedersen
and Nyseth 2015b; see also Eriksson in this volume). Urban Sami associations have
worked hard to establish and maintain Sami preschools and Sami school instruction
(Aikio-Puoskari et al. 2009; Pedersen and Nyseth 2015b, 323). Nowadays, virtual
contacts in schools are also used to connect pupils with Sami areas.13 The activities
of urban Sami associations include a fair number of programs targeting children
and the young, which refects the importance of language maintenance in urban
Sami communities. Many younger Sami have experienced Sami media from the
start and have studied Sami or received instruction in Sami at school. In Lindgren’s
study (2015), attitudes towards the Sami languages and Saminess in general were
clearly more favourable and relaxed than among the boarding school generation.
There were also Sami who grew up in dominantly Finnish-speaking families but who
acquired an active competence in Sami through school.
Today, there is a need for educated Sami language professionals in Sami admin-
istrative areas and in cities as well. This is supported by Sami language acts in
Norway and Finland and by the National Minorities and Minority Languages Act
in Sweden (about the Swedish Act, see Eriksson in this volume). University-level
Sami language education is found in cities, and the media also offers job opportuni-
ties that require the presence of educated Sami in cities. They are as crucial to the
modern development of Sami as has been the contribution of majority-language
professionals. They actively participate in using Sami in important modern domains
221
 — Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren —

and in developing and diversifying Sami cultural life. At the same time, urban Sami
culture is in confict with traditional majority views on the Sami (Lindgren 2000,
57–72; Gjerpe 2015, 261). The present situation would not suggest that urban Sami
are unnoticeably becoming assimilated – rather, that they contribute strongly to the
work that is essential for the maintenance of Sami in cities, as well as in traditional
Sami areas.

‘WHEN THE ELDERS ARE GONE, SO WILL

THE LANGUAGES BE’
Even in traditional Sami areas, many Sami language activists have feared that the
young will not maintain their Sami identity. As a result of former assimilation poli-
cies and continuing overt discrimination in society, their contacts with Sami lan-
guage and culture have been weaker, and they are expected to easily assimilate in
the majority society. However, younger Sami generations in the Nordic countries
have a growing interest in their heritage (Todal 2002; Rasmus 2008; Linkola 2014;
Outakoski 2015). They do not carry an equally heavy burden of negative memo-
ries as their parents and grandparents, although many of them are still affected
by intergenerational trauma. According to Johansen (2009), the second and third
generations paid a high price for Norwegianization as they landed in a ‘neither-nor
identity,’ which many of them have tried to process later in life. The generations who
experienced forced assimilation still retained enough of their linguistic and cultural
competence to be able to express Sami identity in private contexts, a possibility their
children lacked (Johansen 2009, 195). For these generations, reclamation of the lost
language is a way back to stronger Sami identity.
An increasing number of young Sami today are trying to reclaim Sami language
and culture. Sami schools and instruction in and of Sami in other schools have
been important in this respect, but a great deal of revitalization and inspiration
work is also done through social media, which offers Sami living far from each
other the possibility to train their language skills online. Sami youth participate in
Indigenous youth festivals and organize their own national and international fes-
tivals. In publicly funded projects, they also contribute to revitalization efforts by
producing their own materials and activities (e.g. Huss 2017; see also Dankertsen
in this volume).
In the lives of younger Sami generations, individual multilingualism is often taken
for granted. In fact, all Sami have a long history of internationalism and multi-
lingualism. During the times of self-suffcient natural livelihoods, many Sami also
knew the majority languages of the surrounding society. In addition, in North Sami
areas in Sweden and Norway, Sami had skills in other minority languages, such as
Meänkieli and Kven. Some speakers of the minor Sami languages living near North
Sami areas have also spoken North Sami, and vice versa. Reindeer herders from
Sweden had their summer pastures in Norway and learned Norwegian in addition
to Sami, Swedish and Meänkieli. Many of the pre-war Skolt Sami generations also
spoke Russian. Today, revitalization of the Sami languages again increases multilin-
gualism, and among middle-aged and especially younger Sami, there are increasing
numbers who are fuent speakers of both Sami, one or several majority languages
and English.

222
 — The futures of Sami languages —

‘INTERETHNIC FAMILIES LEAD TO SAMI

LANGUAGE LOSS’
In many studies of minority language situations, exogamy has been identifed as a fac-
tor promoting language shift to the more prestigious language in the family (e.g. Clyne
1982; Arnberg 1991; Hyltenstam and Stroud 1991). In Sapmi, interethnic families are
a common phenomenon. It has been feared that the increasing number of bilingual
and intercultural families would gradually lead to the loss of the Indigenous language,
with children becoming socialized in the dominant language of the surrounding soci-
ety, and with weak or no language competence in Sami acquired at home.
Earlier, the dominant language indeed became the family language in many cases
because many non-Sami parents did not know Sami, and monolingualism in the domi-
nant language was thought to be benefcial for the child. For many Sami parents dur-
ing the era of open assimilation, the majority language was the symbol of a good life
(Balto 1997, 116; Marainen 2007). Eidheim (1989, 65), writing about Sami identity
in a coastal Sami community in Norway in the 1950s and 1960s, mentions that many
Sami thought it was ‘necessary’ and therefore ‘right’ to speak Norwegian to children.
At that time, the choice of bilingual upbringing was not considered a feasible
alternative. However, modern research on bi- and multilingualism since the 1960s
and 1970s, as well as a growing awareness of the benefts of early multilingualism for
the child,14 have changed the situation during the past decades and infuenced lan-
guage choices in many bilingual families, including Sami families (Huss 1999, 100).
Now, bilingualism is often seen as a goal for children in those families. Moreover, in
some cases, non-Sami parents are acquiring Sami, or the Sami language has become
a ‘family project’ in which both parents are involved. The Sami parent is reclaiming
his or her original language once lost or never acquired while the children are receiv-
ing Sami language support in preschool and school (see Pasanen in this volume).15
Examples of family bilingualism can be found both within and outside tradi-
tional Sami areas. In her study on urban Sami in Helsinki, Lindgren (2015) found
that in cities, interethnic couples and families seemed to dominate – something that,
according to her data, did not lead to less Sami spoken to the children, but rather
the opposite. The younger generation in general seemed to be fairly familiar with the
advantages of bilingualism and ways of bringing up children bilingually and consid-
ered it important to transmit their own language to the next generation (Lindgren
2015, 256–257). Instead of diminishing the number of Sami speakers, interethnic
families may accomplish the opposite, although we do not know how frequent this
kind of development has been, and is, in different Sami contexts.

‘YOUR LANGUAGE IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH!’

Frequent negative prognoses about the future of Sami languages affect all Sami in
various ways, but especially those who are striving to take back their original lan-
guages. It can also take the form of negative attitudes vis-à-vis the language of the
new speakers: It is not considered good enough, not ‘real Sami’ (e.g. Fjellgren and
Huss 2019; Johansen 2019), and therefore language reclamation is sometimes con-
sidered a futile attempt. Many elderly Sami who still remember the era of forced
assimilation are struggling with earlier traumas while experiencing the new waves

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of interested Sami who want to reclaim their lost languages. This can sometimes lead
to ambivalent feelings or bitterness (e.g. Johansen 2009; Huss and Stångberg 2018).
Elders can also feel guilty for not having transmitted their language to their children
(Aikio-Puoskari 2018, 356), who now struggle with language reclamation.
Such negativity surrounding language reclamation may complicate overcoming
a threshold to start speaking. Jane Juuso, working with Sami revitalization at the
Isak Saba Senter in northern Norway, observed early on that many people of Sami
origin seemed to have great diffculties in learning and using Sami, despite having
heard or maybe even having used the language earlier in life, while numerous non-
Sami quickly learned the basics and started using Sami in practice. To overcome
what she identifed as emotional blocks caused by former assimilation policies and
other negative experiences, Juuso developed a method based on cognitive behavio-
ral therapy, using study circles and mentors to support and inspire learners. In her
opinion, it is crucial to overcome such emotional hindrances to learning and, in that
way, contribute to language revitalization (Juuso 2009).
There are, naturally, special diffculties for those who are learning Sami without
having spoken it in their homes. Many learners struggle in fnding language models or
the mentors often needed to help them start speaking Sami outside the classroom. A
further problem, strict and insensitive language policing, is discussed in Fjellgren and
Huss’s (2019) study based on learner interviews in Sweden. The authors suggest that
errors and varieties infuenced by the learners’ frst languages should be respected
by those who wish the learner to continue and eventually become a confdent Sami
speaker. As one Lule Sami speaker living in a larger Swedish city concludes:

I must be allowed to have a Swedish accent. I’m not a worse Sami person because
of that. I shouldn’t be afraid of colouring my Sami with my Swedish thoughts.
It can actually be quite humorous. I’m not a half, and I am not becoming more
Sami as I gradually learn more Sami. I’m trying to take something back that was
lost, but I don’t feel that I am more or less Sami now when I’m taking back my
Sami language.
(Fjellgren and Huss 2019, 28–29, emphasis added)

Language learners, especially those who are reclaiming a language previously lost,
often feel vulnerable. At the same time, many of them also feel the need for help from
others, especially mother-tongue speakers of Sami. It is important to raise awareness
about different methods of correcting someone’s language in a delicate way. Later
on, dictionaries, grammars and Sami language literature will pave the way to higher
competence. What is an advantage to language learners today is that there are many
role models available all over Sapmi, many Sami from different walks of life, such as
reindeer herders, actors, teachers, journalists and others, who have reclaimed their
Sami languages, showing that it is possible.

‘TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE!’

When the ethnic renaissance gained force in the 1970s, reclamation of the Indigenous
language was often seen as an important part of it. This was also the case in the
Sami movement in which a particular aim was to transform Sami from a ‘dying

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language’ to a ‘mother tongue’ (Stordahl 1996, 86). In the Nordic countries, the
Sami languages, especially North Sami, were gradually strengthened, owing to the
end of overt assimilation policies and a rising interest among the Sami communi-
ties themselves to struggle for the survival of their languages. From the 1990s, spe-
cial laws on the Sami languages and the ratifcation of Council of Europe minority
conventions by all three countries have given stronger public support to Sami than
ever before (Pietikäinen et al. 2010). Concurrently, the interest in maintaining and
reclaiming Sami among Sami communities has been growing. The growing demand
for people with knowledge of Sami within Sami administrative areas in the Nordic
countries has probably also spurred this development. Today, Sami language compe-
tence is needed in municipal work, social and health services, preschool and school
education, the media, cultural life, festivals, social media, innumerable projects both
offcial and private and so on. Nevertheless, many positive developments have also
triggered negative backlash among part of majority populations in all three coun-
tries, e.g. in Norway the ‘No to Samiland’ movement, as well as in Finland (see
Pääkkönen 2008) and Sweden (see Poggats 2018).
Negative prognoses repeated from time to time, coming from outsiders as well
as frustrated insiders, are also something that language activists need to challenge.
Critics often point out that existing supportive language policies and legislation are
not enough to remedy the situation. The support from school education to the Sami
languages is considered too weak, especially in Sweden, but also in Finland and
Norway (Svonni 1993; Aikio-Puoskari 2001; Hirvonen 2008; Todal 2013; Hettema
and Outakoski 2020). In fact, even international examples tend to show that educa-
tional language support, so emphasized by many, may not easily solve the problem of
Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization (Hornberger 2008; Huss 2008).
Pasanen (2018, 368–369) underlines that most revitalization work takes place
outside the home, and even if there is legislation in place in all Nordic countries,
it is not always implemented. There is often a lack of permanent structures while
language planning and revitalization are based on projects and voluntary work –
something that is true of many Sami areas. And even then, quoting Pasanen (2018,
369), ‘[R]evitalization cannot be a project, it is a permanent way of life.’ It should
also be a permanent, strong commitment on the part of authorities and governments
who are obliged to implement established policies and laws.
A revitalization process often develops gradually, going through several stages,
and it is diffcult to know what the result will be. While linguistic assimilation will
progress in some places, in others, interest in the language may grow and attitudes
towards it improve. For many individual Sami, reclamation of one’s original lan-
guage is important, irrespective of what kinds of prognoses are given about the
futures of small languages. Language maintenance and long-term survival lie in the
hands of individuals and families, depending on their language choice in different
contexts and their belief in the future. The strength in language maintenance and
revitalization efforts must come from individuals and communities, and the efforts
have to be locally anchored (Dorian 1998, 91; Crawford 2000). Pasanen (2018,
364) quotes Inari Sami activist Matti Morottaja (2006):

When a tiny people like Inari Samis are trying to promote language and culture,
it’s better not to think too much about whether this is possible. You have to look

225
 — Leena Huss and Anna-Riitta Lindgren —

far and see ahead – you have to dare. This work is not for pessimists. You have
to be an optimist.

CLOSING REMARKS
Since the early decades of the 20th century, the Sami have in many ways shown
their will to maintain and revitalize their own languages and identities. The attitudes
of majorities and state policies, varying from assimilatory to pluralistic, have had
a strong impact on the situation. Linguistic rights implemented in practice have
contributed critically to language survival. The Sami are not alone – respect for the
rights of both minorities and Indigenous Peoples has grown noticeably since the
last few decades of the 20th century in many countries, as well as on the interna-
tional level. In the Nordic countries, the Sami have been pioneers in the struggle for
language and culture maintenance and revitalization. Reforms have taken place,
and majority attitudes as well as the self-esteem of the Sami have improved in the
process. In 2015, a young student in Tromsø, northern Norway, stated that the suf-
ferings of the boarding school generation were unfamiliar to her because nowadays,
it is cooler to be Sami or Kven than a common Norwegian.
Today, multilingualism is a reality for many individuals in the Nordic countries,
not least the younger generations who have grown up in societies in which pluralism
and pluralist language policies are recognized values. The Sami languages are for
many an important part of a larger repertoire, not diminished by the fact that there
are several languages used in life. In the same way, the Sami live in a world where
multiple identities are present. This is nothing new. A couple of decades ago, Lehtola
(2000, 192–195), professor of Sami culture and a Sami himself, criticized essential-
ism in the Sami context and stated that the view of the Sami has always been to ‘live
in two furs’ – that is, to accept multiculturalism and interaction between cultures,
avoiding simple categorizations, living on borders and moving creatively between
two or even more lifeviews. In the same vein, Sami multi-artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää
(1971) wrote about his will to create something new, with infuences from new
cultures. He did not want to be seen as a remnant of an ancient culture, but as a
member of a living people.
As the situation is now, there is a strong and growing will among the Sami to revi-
talize their languages – something that has been proved by actual, practical work –
and there is continuous offcial support from the states. If there is no sudden change
in the offcial policies, we can expect that this overall positive development will con-
tinue. However, the political climate has changed in many countries in Europe in a
more minority-hostile direction, and it is diffcult to foresee what will happen in the
Nordic countries if a similar trend strengthens to the degree that work for human,
minority and Indigenous rights is threatened.
As we have seen before, new circumstances and new opportunities keep emerg-
ing from time to time, some of which can further facilitate language learning and
revitalization. Nevertheless, the Sami languages still fnd themselves in a precarious
position, and the way to a safer and more stable position, especially as regards the
smaller Sami languages, still appears long. As Aikio-Puoskari (2018, 356) writes:

Even in the strongest areas, the Sami languages are not safe. There is need
for revitalization in all areas and in all Sami languages, and this may be true
226
 — The futures of Sami languages —

forever. The intergenerational transmission of the language must be secured

by every generation, again and again, because of the strong infuence and
pressure of national languages and English. These factors are not going to
disappear.

While the speakers and potential speakers themselves have a central role in revi-
talization work and while the engagement of the Sami themselves is strong, there is
an acute need for stronger support on the part of the Nordic countries to speed up
language revitalization in order to guarantee the fulflment of the linguistic rights of
the Sami.

NOTES
1 Sweden and Norway are estimations. The most positive estimations count the total Sami
population up to 100,000 people, of whom 50,000–65,000 live in Norway, 20,000 to
40,000 in Sweden, 10,000 in Finland and 2,000 in Russia (Hettema and Outakoski
2020, 5).
2 In this chapter, revitalization is understood as giving new life and vigour to a language
that has been steadily decreasing in use.
3 The authors have heard these prognoses repeated in numerous contexts, such as confer-
ences, debates and local discussions among Sami speakers.
4 Some differences existed between the states as regards state assimilation policies (Lehtola
1997, 44–46). For instance, in Sweden, there was a period of segregationist policies under
the motto ‘Lapps shall be Lapps’ around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th
centuries, but at the same time, instruction in the schools for Sami children was in Swedish
(Svonni 2008, 240–241).
5 For motives for language shift, see sections 2 and 6.
6 See http://skuvla.info/index-e.htm (accessed 6 February 2021).
7 www.samediggi.f/saamelaisten-totuus-ja-sovintokomissio/ (accessed 6 February 2021).
8 www.rcinet.ca/eye-on-the-arctic/2020/06/17/sami-in-sweden-start-work-on-structure-of-
truth-and-reconciliation-commission/ (accessed 6 February 2021).
9 https://uit.no/kommisjonen/mandat_en (accessed 6 February 2021).
10 Private conversation with a person born in the 1890s.
11 Even if the role of the young, educated Sami was important for creating a new dialogue
with the majorities, the movement was not limited to academic Sami; on the contrary,
there were people with varying professions, such as reindeer herders etc. And naturally,
not all Sami with academic education took part in the ethnic movement.
12 Private conversation, 1972.
13 For instance, in Sweden, distance education is more and more applied to solve problems
of recruiting teachers and providing Sami instruction for pupils living scattered over large
areas. See Hettema and Outakoski (2020) about the current state of distance education
in the Sami language in Sweden. In Finland, a distance education project in the Sami
language for the whole country outside Sapmi was awarded an important governmental
prize by the Ministry of Education on 23 November 2020 (www.samediggi.f/2020/11/23/
opetushallituksen-cygnaeus-palkinto-saamen-kielten-etaopetushankkeelle/ (accessed 6
February 2021).
14 Among the frst to invalidate earlier research seeming to show that bilingualism affected
cognitive performance in a negative way were Canadians W. E. Lambert and E. Peal
(1962).
15 Cf. Aikio-Puoskari (2016, 20) about an example of how a Sami-language preschool
affects language use in families.
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languages. Acta Borealia, 27(1), pp. 1–23.
Poggats, T. 2018. Kartläggning av rasism mot samer i Sverige [Charting Racism against the
Sami in Sweden]. Umeå: Centrum för samisk forsning, Umeå universitet.
Rasmus, M. 2008. “Sápmelašvuohta lea dego skeaŋka” “Saamelaisuus on kuin lahja”.
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ueella [Saminess is Like a Gift. The Well-being of the Sami and the Implementation of Their
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funn [Sami in the Modern World: Change and Continuity in a Sami Local Community].
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skning i en språkbyteskontext [The Sami Language of Sami School Children. A Study on
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Humanities 113, Umeå universitet.
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Gorter, eds., Multilingual Europe: Facts and Policies. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
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talet [“. . . If You Heed Your Golden Saami Tongue” The Vitalisation of Sámi Language in
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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLING OF
T H E S Á M I I N T H E S OV I E T U N I O N
Historical development and impacts


Anna Andersen

INTRODUCTION
The Sámi people inhabiting the territory of the Kola Peninsula (henceforth, Kola
Sámi) represent one of the most endangered Sámi groups with their total population
number of 1,599 people (RNC 2010). Historically, the Kola Sámi encompassed sev-
eral groups – Ter, Akkala, Skolt and Kildin – that are severely endangered or extinct
today (UAWLD 2010). First, the Akkala Sámi language became extinct in 2003
(Rantala and Sergina 2009). Second, critically endangered is the Ter Sámi language,
with an estimated 2 remaining speakers. Third, the Skolt Sámi is extinct in Norway
and nearly extinct in Russia but is still spoken by 300 people in Finland and around
20 people in Russia. Finally, there is the severely endangered Kildin Sámi with a total
number of approximately 700 language users (Scheller 2013, 396).
Since the 1930s, the Kola Sámi have undergone a succession of dramatic histori-
cal experiences, such as policies of collectivization, sedentarization, Stalin’s Great
Terror, the Second World War, land dispossession and enforced resettlements (about
the displacement of the Kola Sámi, see Alleman in this volume). Simultaneous to
all these events, the Soviet system of residential schooling was introduced, forming
one piece of a whole puzzle in historical pictures of events that had caused severe
cultural transformations of the Sámi during the Soviet period.
This chapter explores the series of turning points in the school history of the
Sámi people in the former Soviet Union – the development of residential education
from 1935 to 1989. During the Soviet period, there were three residential schools
where the Kola Sámi were educated. The boarding school in the military town of
Gremikha operated for Sámi children from the Sámi District in the Northeastern
part of the Kola Peninsula. The Sámi children from the Lovozero District received
education at the school in the Sámi village of Lovozero, located in the Central part
of the Peninsula. The Sámi from the Kola District studied at the boarding school in
ethnically mixed town of Kola in the Western part of the Peninsula.

232 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-17

 — Residential schooling of the Sámi —

Map 14.1 Map of the Murmansk region, the Kola Peninsula, showing three districts where
boarding schools operated for the Sámi during the Soviet period. The boarding schools
covered by Andersen’s research were in Gremikha and Lovozero.

In the 1960s, all children from the boarding school in Gremikha were central-
ized and transferred to one boarding school in Lovozero, which since then accom-
modated a great number of Sámi pupils from relocated families. The boarding
school in Gremikha was offcially closed as a result of the enforced resettlement
and elimination of the Sámi villages in the Sámi District (Afanasyeva 2021, 2019a,
2014, 2013; Allemann 2020; Konstantinov 2015; Scheller 2013; Overland and
Berg-Nordlie 2012). The boarding schools not only operated for Sámi children but
were also constructed for children of different ethnicities. For instance, the board-
ing school in Gremikha served Sámi and Russian children and children of Crimean
Tatars deported to the Kola North after the Second World War (Afanasyeva 2019b,
131). In Lovozero, the school encompassed mostly Sámi, Komi and Russian chil-
dren. The boarding school policies were designed for children of various Indigenous
and non-Indigenous peoples of the Soviet Union and not specifcally for the Sámi.
Thus, the Sámi were affected by both types of educational reforms: Those that
targeted at boarding school education in general and those educational provisions

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that were specifcally oriented to languages of Northern Indigenous minorities in

schools.
In this chapter, I will frst illustrate how the boarding school education devel-
oped in the local areas of Sámi inhabitance on the Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk
region, Northwest Russia. I concentrate on policy shifts in residential schooling and
the realization of these policies in areas of the Kola Sámi inhabitance. I will then
complement the analysis with results and insights from my research based on oral
histories and narratives of the Sámi who have experienced residential schooling. I
propose that four generations of the Sámi have undergone the system of residential
schooling in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods (Afanasyeva 2019a, 54). The major-
ity of my interviewees attended residential schools from 1935 to 1989.1 This con-
stitutes three different generational experiences, which are not in line with the same
birth decade (cohort). I have identifed intergenerational boundaries of the three
generations as follows. First Generation attended boarding schools in the period of
cultural pluralism in education of Indigenous minorities from 1935 to 1955. Second
Generation had their school years during the active Russifcation policy at boarding
schools from 1956 to 1968. Third Generation resided in a restricted orphanage type
of boarding schools from 1969 to 1989. This chapter therefore addresses the situa-
tion of residential schooling for the Sámi only in the Soviet period, while the situa-
tion of the Fourth Generation in the post-Soviet period still requires urgent in-depth
research (Afanasyeva 2019b, 55).
The boarding schools in the Soviet Union were a common part of the educa-
tional system throughout the whole country (about the Nordic boarding schools, see
Hansen in this volume). Therefore, the impacts of this educational system affected
Indigenous and Russian children, causing numerous traumatic effects. However,
these impacts are heterogeneous among various Indigenous groups, depending on
their local sociocultural and economic situations, along with the way the federal pol-
icies were implemented in their regions (see e.g. Liarskaya 2013, 2003; Allan 2015;
Rockhill 2010; Bloch 2004). In my analysis of residential schooling, I take par-
ticular focus on loss of contact and isolation of children from their Sámi-speaking
families. Through my work, I deliberately state that in addition to various traumatic
individual experiences (particularly within the Second and Third Generations), the
Soviet system of boarding school upbringing had both immediate and long-lasting
infuence on Kola Sámi cultural maintenance and language assimilation.
The views and policies of the Soviet state on residential education and Indigenous
languages did not remain intact throughout the 20th century. Its priorities and aims
shifted radically. Hence, the history of Soviet residential schooling is complex, het-
erogeneous, disparate and full of contradictions. In addition, the federal policies were
variously implemented in different regions and among different Indigenous Peoples
of the country (Liarskaya 2013, 159). Still, in case of the Kola Sámi, it is possible to
identify three core periods in the development of the boarding school policies.

1935 TO 1955: SÁMI BOARDING SCHOOLS AND

THE FIRST GENERATION
The origin of the boarding school system for the Kola Sámi starts in the mid-1920s
and the early 1930s. In the mid-1920s, the number of primary boarding schools with

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residential facilities for the Indigenous children of the North was still insignifcant.
The existing schools were not yet part of the unifed educational system, but rather
regular primary schools with residential facilities. The boarding schools of the 1920s
were simple school dormitories for Sámi pupils, where they received food and warm
beds while they attained primary education. These primarily served the Sámi chil-
dren from remote villages and made it possible for them to obtain education. By the
end of the 1930s, the residential schools that provided secondary education for the
Sámi were established.
The minority policies of the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the creation of the
system of the Sámi national (Indigenous) schools. Such schools were established in
the villages of the Kola Peninsula where the majority of the Sámi people lived and
had primarily Sámi pupils in their classrooms. The frst attempts to educate and pro-
mote literacy among the Sámi people in their mother tongue were undertaken in the
1920s. The frst Sámi pedagogues, educated through the Talent Foundry2 initiative,
started to work in the ethnic schools (Volkov 1996, 102). The frst Sámi orthography
in Latin (1933) and ABC books in Sámi were elaborated for purposes of teaching in
these northern schools (e.g. Cherniakov 1933; Luisk 1934).
The mid-1930s introduced the boarding schools in the Kola North and started the
compulsory seven-year school education for all children. The introduction of primary
education in Indigenous languages carried out in this period refected the ideas of cul-
tural pluralism and harmonious development of personality (Liarskaya 2013, 162),
which were considered to be possible only when a child acquired knowledge, learned
and received education in their mother tongue. The state policy at the very beginning
of the Soviet period guaranteed all nationalities and national minorities the right to
‘free development of national cultures and native languages’ (Tsintsius 1958, 76).
In the Murmansk region, two special committees, the Murmansk Committee of the
New Alphabet and the Murmansk Committee of the North, were established for the
purposes of building schools and introducing elementary education among the Sámi
in their mother tongues. However, from the literature (Siegl and Riessler 2015; Kuraev
2013; Rantala 2006; Stepanenko 2002), we know that the development of mother-
tongue education of the Sámi ended abruptly by the end of the 1930s with Stalin’s
Great Terror. The leader of the Committee of the New Alphabet, ethnographer Vasilii
Alymov, and linguist Aleksandr Endiukovskii were executed in 1938 (Ogryzko 2010,
21). By the end of the 1930s, the school education was delivered solely in Russian;
however, usage of the mother tongue by the Sámi children was still favored in schools.
The period from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s corresponds to the experiences
of First Generation in my study. This generation predominantly spoke Sámi as their
frst language and had some knowledge of Russian at preschool age. This oldest
generation of the interviewed Sámi shows most profciency in the Sámi language.
Informants of this generation highlight that they were allowed to use their mother
tongue at school. That is why they had good Sámi language profciency later in life
as adults, including a strong sense of ethnic identity. The informants also recall that
the Sámi children continued using Sámi language among themselves in school in
spite of the education given in Russian.

When I went to school, I don’t even remember 1st to 3rd grade; I don’t remem-
ber how I studied there. Such a veil, I can’t remember any single detail. I started

235
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to feel that I was in school when it was already the 3rd grade. In such a way,
the Russian language, which was new to me, entered into my mind. . . . The
Sámi spoke entirely in the Sámi language among themselves. Thence, a normal
natural language environment existed before our residence in boarding schools,
before we began to be taught in boarding schools. In the boarding school, of
course, we continued to speak our mother tongue, and when we came back
home, naturally . . . but after, it was already both, somewhere in Sámi, some-
where in Russian. But knowledge of the mother tongue is always with you. I
have this feeling that I have never forgotten it.
(Informant 1)

The informants stress that their teachers were very kind and attentive with them,
even though it was diffcult to study in Russian. They keep warm memories of board-
ing school teachers of this period, who were a generation of teachers educated in the
spirit of cultural pluralism of the 1920s and the early 1930s. Many interviewed Sámi
among the First Generation state that they enjoyed living at the boarding school
and appreciated the opportunity to receive an education. The experience of this gen-
eration differs in this way from that of the next generations, whose schooling was
characterized by a strong aim of Russifcation.

I respected Anna Alekseevna [the teacher]. And, it looked like she liked me
because I could only speak Russian badly – she’d stay with me after class; she
taught me how to speak and how to count. Because I didn’t know how to do
anything! There [in her Sámi village] we lived, we didn’t have pencils – nothing
to draw with. I didn’t even know how to hold a pencil! She stayed with me and
she taught me everything – she holds the pencil with me and shows me how to
draw letters, how to write.
(Informant 2)

In addition, many of the Sámi stated that they enjoyed residential education because
there were so many Sámi children, many more than in their small Sámi villages.

Life changed in the way that we had more interests. It was more interesting.
Studies, large circles of acquaintances, social arrangements. In elementary school
it wasn’t like that, and here it was so interesting. The cultural club was also next
to us, ‘The Cultural House of the Offcers.’ We used to run to dance evenings!
We had more interests, more acquaintances, more teachers because for every
subject there was a new teacher. The teacher for botany was so good! Oh, those
teachers were so kind!
(Informant 3)

The special trait of First Generation is that they had continuous communication
in Sámi both in the boarding schools and at home. The family bonds were not dis-
torted, and children of the First Generation grew up surrounded by their parents’
way of life. Most of the informants state that boarding school superintendents did
not interfere in their communication with parents. The children could visit home
without strict restrictions from the school; some children even had the opportunity

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to be with their parents regularly at their own request. The informants have very
strong memories of their experiences of being engaged in gathering, fshing and rein-
deer herding with their parents. They studied during the semester and during the
vacation period traveled back to their Sámi villages, where they helped their par-
ents work at collective reindeer-herding and fshing farms. The cultural transmission
between children and parents in this generation was especially strong in compari-
son to the next two generations. Most children of this generation continued to be
engaged in traditional Sámi subsistence activities, along with having Sámi as the
main language of communication with parents and relatives. These informants have
a very deep connection to the northern nature, to their language, to the reindeer and
to the traditional Sámi way of life. Having said that, in 1941, the Second World War
started, and boarding school education, established in the way it was in the 1930s,
stopped for the time of War.

1956 TO 1968: RUSSIFICATION AND THE SECOND

GENERATION
When the Second World War ended, the Soviet state started to build from scratch a
totally new system of residential education. The decision on the so-called immedi-
ate establishment of a wide system of boarding schools for the Soviet children was
broached by the Communist Party in 1956 (Kaser 1968, 105) and resulted in the
complete reorganization of the school system, which began in 1958 (Ambler 1961,
237). At the end of the 1950s, the Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev,
considered that it was time to proceed from socialism to communism. Khrushchev
believed that boarding schools would be the ideal instrument to form a political
change and that all children of the USSR should be raised at boarding schools (ibid.,
250). A boarding school system would enable a quick overturning of social and
cultural norms in the Soviet society, leading to the formation of a totally new, highly
industrialized Soviet nation.
The Soviet government proclaimed for the frst time its exclusive role in matters of a
child’s upbringing in boarding schools. In connection to this, the Law on Strengthening
Ties between School and Life (1959) restricted the role of parents and family members
in the education of their children. These provisions gave the state an exclusive role in
decision making on how youth should be brought up and educated in boarding schools
(CDRP 11 (4), 12 and CDRP 11 (21), 10). The state introduced the offcial pedagogi-
cal doctrine of communist upbringing, which claimed children were to be educated in
reformed educational institutions, such as boarding schools of restricted types.
The theoretical ideas behind this pedagogical conception had the fundamental
aim of raising a new, improved type of human, the ‘engineering of human souls’
(Khrushchev 1956, 97; c.f. Liarskaya 2003, 93) that would build up the progres-
sive communist society. As anthropologist Alexia Bloch explains in her work on
residential schooling of the Siberian Evenks, ‘The Soviet state narrative was framed
by an evolutionary perspective featuring “backward” peoples who “progressed” to
become modern’ (Bloch 2004, 103).
The boarding school policy of this period is contradictory to what was consid-
ered an educational ideal for ethnic minorities in the 1930s (Liarskaya 2013, 103).
The ideological principles behind the minority policy of this period was a strategy

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of cultural submergence (Berg-Nordlie 2015, 48). The boarding school policy was
targeted at all-around economic, linguistic and social assimilation of Indigenous
Peoples into the Soviet society. The new boarding school plan implemented in the
end of 1950s was aimed at fulflment of the then-compulsory school education, spe-
cifcally among the children of semi-nomadic reindeer herders and ‘creating among
non-Russian nationality groups ideal conditions for the mastery of the Great Russian
language’ (Ambler 1961, 240). The primary goal of the plan was oriented towards a
linguistic Russifcation of such non-Russian-speaking, semi-nomadic peoples as, for
instance, the Sámi.
Another aim of Russifcation at these Northern schools was to completely restruc-
ture the children’s personalities by changing their domestic and cultural habits. This
would infuence their parents and family members at home, leading to complete
assimilation of Indigenous societies (Krongauz 1948, 72.) Thus, the methods of com-
munist upbringing applied to the Sámi children in boarding schools had the objective
of spreading among new generations the sense of belonging to the state and rooting
in them values of communist ideology, especially as practiced with the introduction
of vocational activities flled with ideological work and labor, or socially useful labor
at boarding schools, such as plumbing, electrical work, obtaining driving licenses
and labor works in agriculture (R.S. 1956, 213). These educational reforms were
targeted at the production of specialized cadres and human resources required in
different spheres of the rapidly developing state economy. By means of vocational
practice, the Sámi pupils were supposed to acquire the skills of the new, modernist
professions, different from occupations of their ‘underdeveloped pastoralist’ parents
primarily engaged in reindeer herding, fshing and gathering. In order to implement
these political ideas, the role of the Russian language in the everyday life of boarding
school students was increased.
Many small Indigenous languages were offcially proclaimed to be on the edge of
extinction and therefore unworthy of investments and unpromising for further devel-
opment. It was offcially recognized that languages with small numbers of speakers,
such as the Sámi, could be easily substituted with Russian in all social domains
(Grenoble 2003, 57; see also Trosterud 2008, 105). Schools that had mother-tongue
instruction in minority languages were transferred to compulsory Russian curricula.
In some schools, this change was immediate, and in other regions, transition was
more gradual. The language policy introduced into educational practice at the end of
1950s ‘cannot be characterized in any other way than Russifcation’ (Vakhtin 1993,
45; c.f. Liarskaya 2003, 97). The introduction of this policy in different regions (e.g.
Chukotka, the Komandorskie Islands, Alazay Tundra in Eastern Yakutia) resulted in
teachers forbidding Indigenous children to speak their mother tongues in boarding
schools. The children who spoke their languages were punished, and parents were
strongly advised not to use their language with children at home (c.f. Vakhtin 1993).
My interview material suggests that the use of the mother tongue was prohibited
in the Sámi boarding schools as well. A male informant, born in 1946, who attended
boarding school in Lovozero in the 1950s and 1960s recalled that pupils were physi-
cally punished for speaking Sámi:

We studied all together – Russians, Komi, Sámi – there was no difference –

anyway in Russian. At those times we were punished! I am afraid to say this,

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of course. But teachers punished so we wouldn’t speak our language at all at

school. It’s only now they started to tell us that we have to learn our language,
but back then, you know? You speak Sámi? Here you go – a kick comes your
way! Almost beaten, almost. You mustn’t speak your language – only Russian.
(Informant 4)

The central aspect of Russifcation was the prohibition of Sámi language use in the
boarding school and its dormitory. Specifcally, the informants recalled that they
were ridiculed or physically punished for speaking Sámi and that they were forced to
learn Russian at school. Moreover, the Russifcation stretched beyond the boarding
school arena and affected home communication with parents. The parents were fre-
quently visited by educators at home and instructed to stop using the Sámi language
with their children (Afanasyeva 2019b, 209).
A more evident example of rearing the new Soviet type of human that the board-
ing school system intended to create from children of Sámi reindeer herders was the
method of civilizing the children from the tundra and accustoming them to hygiene.
In particular, the hygienic procedures were introduced through shaving children’s
heads upon their arrival at the boarding school. Similar policies were introduced
among other Indigenous Peoples worldwide, such as Native Americans and Canadian
First Nations. The short-hair policy implemented in the boarding schools, as Adams
highlights, was rooted in two considerations. In the frst place, it made it easier to
control the problem of head lice. Secondly, the reason for short haircuts went deeper
than cleanness: ‘At the heart of the policy was the belief that the children’s long hair
was symbolic of savagism – removing it was central to new identifcation with civi-
lization’ (Adams 1995, 101).
The policy of short hair for hygienic purposes was widely practiced among the
Second Generation and the youngest informants of the Third Generation in my study.
The extreme traumatic experiences of the informants are principally connected to hair-
cut procedures carried out on the frst day of their arrival at the school. This trauma
was experienced not as specifcally related to having short hair, but as associated with
psychological shock caused by the fact that the children had arrived at an unknown
environment, and their frst acquaintance with this place was a procedure that shaved
them bald. As informants recall, upon arrival, they were immediately sent to strange
rooms where other children were crying and walking out of these rooms bald – after
adults did scary things with them in there. For instance, the female interviewee, born
in 1956, who resided at the boarding school in Lovozero from 1963 to 1971, recalled:

In the beginning of course we didn’t understand where we were being taken to.
Parents put us into a boat and we went on the boat. . . . When we were brought
to the boarding school, they took us inside – girls go here, boys go there. You
enter the room and you see a queue, and here they cut your hair off! I remember
Zoia. She had such long braids! Zoia screams and there [emphasis], several peo-
ple are holding her! After haircuts we were sent to the Russian bath. I remember
that we were given linen sacks to put clothes, etc., and we were organized in a
line of two-and-two, and marched to the bath building. We were washed and
that’s it. We walked like soldiers. We were supposed to go marching in line
everywhere – to the dining room, on walking tours around the village.

239
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We were sheared. We all walked bald. They didn’t ask us if we wanted this,
nothing. We arrived and even those who had long braids – they cut off every-
thing, everybody was bald. We sobbed of course, but what can you do? We must
study, so we all walked like that, bald. . . . It was a shock that we were cut bald.
It was indeed a real shock.
(Informant 5)

The majority of informants of the Second and Third Generations continuously

emphasized their traumatic memories of psychological pressure caused by hair-
cuts and the experiences of being washed in the Russian bath. In their narratives,
informants put special emphasis on military style, strict rules and restrictions of their
behavior that were imposed on them at the boarding school. Students were supposed
to march in formation to the morning exercise class, to vocational practice activities
(Bloch 2004, 155), to the Russian bath, to the dining room and on walking tours
around the village. Simultaneously, they were dressed in the European clothing that
was given to them at the boarding school, having bald haircuts.
The informants frequently brought up escapes from boarding school and the feel-
ing of isolation from their parents, something that was not characteristic at all of the
informants of the First Generation. Informants of the Second and Third Generations
lived in the school in approximately eight to ten years of their adolescence, being almost
completely separated from their families. The boarding school rules restricted the num-
ber of home visits, obliging students to stay almost constantly in the territory of the
boarding school. Students were busy all day with classes and extracurricular activities –
for instance, sports, handicraft groups and other vocational workshops. During the
academic year, opportunities for connecting with their parents were restricted to occa-
sional phone calls, which had to be negotiated with boarding school superintendents
in advance. Simultaneously, the geographical remoteness of their villages and lack of
established transport connections created serious obstacles for frequent family visits.
In order to see their parents and relatives, it was necessary to obtain written consent
from the boarding school superintendents. On walking tours around the village, they
were constantly supervised by the educators and walked in a two-and-two formation.
When it comes to Sámi language and culture, informants of the Second Generation
mentioned that it became unpopular among their peers to be engaged in reindeer
herding and fshing as occupations for subsistence. Most informants felt greatly dis-
tanced from deeds of their parents and preferred to be engaged in modern profes-
sions like drivers, plumbers etc. that corresponded to the skills they obtained through
vocational labor training at school. The transmission of language from parents to
children through traditional Sámi activities stopped in the Second Generation. Most
informants of this generation had Sámi as their frst language, acquired at preschool
age, but already spoke Russian as their second language. Most informants of the
Second Generation already spoke Russian with their children.

1969 TO 1989: ORPHANAGES AND THE THIRD

GENERATION
The residential school system’s drive for conscious Russifcation began to decline at
the end of the 1960s. In the period from 1969 to 1989, the Sámi language prohibition

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at school was gradually abolished. However, two other signifcant changes occurred
within the educational system. First, the introduction of nine-year and then ten-year
obligatory school education. Second, another broader reorganization was launched
in the late 1960s, resulting in the closing down of the number of state orphanages
in poor material condition and their incorporation into the network of residential
schools (CDRP 11 (21), 10; GARF 9563–1–519, 3). Merging boarding schools with
orphanages was part of a wider national structural strategy caused by a lack of
resources and the infrastructure of the orphanages, some of which some dated to
the pre-revolutionary period; it was outmoded and unsuitable for further use. The
second goal of the merger was to make better use of resources and provide edu-
cation specifcally for children in orphanages (GARF 9563–1–519, 13–18; GARF
9563–1–1519, 19–21). The main target groups for these new kinds of institutions
were as follows:

In the boarding schools and orphanages are brought up children, mainly, need-
ing the help of the state in order to receive an education: orphans, children of
single mothers, children of parents disabled in war and labor, children from
large families and low-income families, as well as children whose parents by
their terms of labor and life cannot educate them in regular schools (reindeer
herders, hunters, pastoral shepherds, specialists working abroad, workers of
forest industry, water and railway transport, etc.). Out of the total number of
orphans, approximately 90,000 people live in boarding schools and 35,000 live
in orphanages.
(GARF 9563–1–519: 13)

Combining different contingents from boarding schools and children’s homes cre-
ated strong concerns among the country’s intellectuals and pedagogues. The issue
began to be criticized by the specialists of local Departments for Public Education,
who considered it to be inappropriate and pedagogically incompetent to combine
pupils at boarding schools with children from orphanages. (See e.g. GARF 9563–
1–519, 6–7.)
This structural change turned boarding schools into a closed residential institu-
tion targeted at the upkeep of orphans and, often, pedagogically neglected children
from troubled families. In 1976, a high infux of pedagogically neglected children,
having problems with delinquency and criminal behavior, started to be transferred
from orphanages across the Murmansk region to the boarding school in Lovozero
(Afanasyeva 2019b, 309). The arrival of children whose parents were, as a rule,
deprived of parental custody aggravated the sociocultural situation of the Sámi chil-
dren residing at the boarding school. The changing social environment of the board-
ing school is signifcant because it is connected to questions of the social status of
Sámi children and their parents in the overall picture of boarding school contingents.
In contrast to the child orphans, most of the Sámi pupils of the boarding school
had living parents who participated in their upbringing seasonally when they came
back from the tundra to their village. When allowed by boarding school superin-
tendents, the parents took their children with them to the tundra during summer
or autumn vacation periods. Still, the Sámi pupils were often perceived as children
of parents who were deprived of parental custody. As noticed by anthropologist

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Yulian Konstantinov, ‘In many respects, therefore, the school resembled an orphan-
age’ (Konstantinov 2015, 147).
Education in a reorganized type of boarding school merged with orphanage
contingents is the unifying and characteristic experience for the Third Generation.
Unauthorized deprivation of parental rights and changing the status of the boarding
school in Lovozero to an orphanage type of educational institution were among the
topics most discussed in interviews with the Third Generation.
According to recollections of interviewees among the Third Generation, frequent
confusion arose when they thought that their parents had either abandoned them
or were deprived of parental rights. In fact, their parents were involved in reindeer
herding in the tundra and were not formally deprived of their rights to raise their
children. This created serious misunderstandings and tensions within Indigenous
families, gradually ruining relations between parents and children. This confusion
was evidently caused by joining two categories of children – parentless children
and children of reindeer herders. Informants emphasize that they were overwhelmed
with multilevel stigmatization and discrimination from their classmates, teachers
and the rest of majority society in the village. These were the central issues forming
their experiences, apart from their strong feelings of being abandoned by or isolated
from their parents.
The Third Generation of informants had the most painful memories of their expe-
rience of residential schooling among the three generations under study. The inform-
ants especially stressed questions of separation from parents and the absence of care
and love from adults. Informants stressed instances of violence and psychological
abuse on the part of teachers and educators, followed by psychological traumas
received during their life at this educational institution of restricted type, oriented
on the upbringing of orphans and pedagogically neglected children. Such traumas,
for instance, especially concerned the short-hair policy of the school, experiences of
the Russian bath and the overall military style of everyday behavior imposed on stu-
dents. Some informants had diffculty understanding the reasons for their residence
in this institution – i.e. why children of reindeer herders ought to reside in this type
of school as it emerged in the 1970s.
Despite the fact that the Russifcation policy softened and the prohibition of the
Sámi language was abolished, most of the interviewees of this generation already
had Russian as their frst language with predominantly passive knowledge of the
Sámi. Later, at the end of the 1970s, the Sámi language was introduced into com-
pulsory boarding school curricula, together with various extracurricular classes in
Sámi lore, culture and reindeer herding. Even though the educational programs and
boarding school practices improved (e.g. children were allowed to stay with their
parents during holidays and weekends and visit home occasionally), all these meas-
ures appeared to be insuffcient to maintain their mother tongue.

CONCLUSIONS
This chapter offers a coherent overview of the Soviet boarding school policies and
their infuence on the experiences of the Kola Sámi. The Soviet boarding school
policies can be characterized by a contradicting structural dynamic that becomes
visible through its rapidly changing priorities throughout the entire Soviet epoch. As

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a result, the Soviet state at frst promoted Sámi mother-tongue education and then
repressed it. The same boarding school was seen as a tool for eradication of the Sámi
languages in the 1950s and as an arena for Sámi language revitalization in the 1970s.
The Russifcation and prohibition of the Sámi language at boarding schools ended
with introduction of the Sámi language into obligatory boarding school curricula.
These dynamics denote distinct inconsistency of the educational policies undertaken
in different stages of the Soviet state’s evolvement. The cost of such inconsistency
is serious psychological traumas and three-generation language loss experienced by
the Sámi at the boarding schools.
Khrushchev’s boarding school reforms at the end of the 1950s were the core over-
turning of the policy. They included views of economic and language assimilation,
which constituted comprehensive, multifaceted projects oriented towards social, lin-
guistic and economic assimilation of the Sámi by means of residential education. The
central aspects implied in the holistic concept of residential schooling were targeted
at restructuring Indigenous cultures, languages and economies and the production
of new human resources for manual labor that could be used for the beneft of the
country’s economic growth.
Khrushchev’s boarding school reforms restricted the role of parents in the educa-
tion of their children. This resulted in separation of the boarding school pupils from
the cultural values and economic activities of their parents, who were looked upon
as primitive pastoralists. This boarding school system had a severe impact on trans-
forming the social relations and archetypical family structures within the Kola Sámi
societies. The school strategies stretched beyond the classroom and implied subordi-
nate techniques of intentional prohibition of parental communication in Sámi with
children, introduction of vocational activities flled with ideological work and labor.
Residential education became a political instrument for the ideological formation of
a unifed Soviet nation. In turn, the boarding schools were regarded as a tool for the
political and ideological upbringing of youth.
The Kola Sámi in this period underwent two types of assimilation – linguistic
with the prohibition of their mother tongue and economic with incorporation into
new, emerging economic forms for subsistence that were radically different from
the occupation of their parents. Education in boarding schools greatly distanced
children from the traditional way of life of their parents, gradually impairing the
family relations and the transmission of the Sámi languages from one generation
to another.
My study found that the experiences and memories of informants throughout
three generations transform according to the changes in the federal and regional
policy of the state in relation to the education of Indigenous children in board-
ing schools. Tracing the situation of all studied generations, we observe how the
number of years spent in boarding schools gradually increased in each generation,
from the First Generation’s two years to the Second and Third Generations’ eight
or nine years.
Correspondingly, the number of years of education in boarding schools gradu-
ally increased in each subsequent generation, while separation from the family was
experienced more and more acutely, starting with the Second Generation, and is
especially sharply represented in the Third Generation. The number of years spent
at the boarding school was a determining factor in the informants’ memories and

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experiences. One might observe how more and more diffcult memories appear in
narratives of informants of the Second and the Third Generations; in time, the mem-
ories of the Third Generation are most painful.
If the majority of the First Generation of informants noted that they were satisfed
with the education in boarding schools, in the Second Generation shocking memo-
ries prevail – they had their hair cut bald and were physically punished for speaking
Sámi at the boarding school. In the Third Generation, informants recollected that
they suffered deeply from disconnection with families, absence of love and protec-
tion from adults, instances of violence, social stigmatization and the military style
of discipline imposed on them at the boarding school. Some informants of the Third
Generation noted that they did not know their relatives well and did not clearly
understand how one should interact with them after they graduated from the board-
ing school.
The Sámi family relations and the institution of Indigenous kinship traditions
were undermined. Most of these children did not have access to accurate resources
to be brought up with the Sámi language or learn it from elders and relatives, nor
did they have enough emotional capacity to cope with their heavy traumatic experi-
ences. Most of the Sámi parents among those who had undergone Russifcation at
boarding schools themselves could not speak Sámi with their children. Informants
of the Third Generation received certain knowledge of the Sámi language from
the Sámi teachers of the boarding school in extracurricular and school classes.
However, in the absence of the main resource – namely, family upbringing in the
Sámi language and language transmission through communication with elder gen-
erations – the Sámi language activities introduced at the school at the end of the
1970s proved to be ineffective. This generation was already in the active stage of
the language loss.
In such a way, the language shift from Sámi to Russian occurred in the course
of the three studied generations: From monolingual in Sámi with some knowledge
of Russian in the First Generation to bilingual in Sámi and Russian in the Second
Generation to Russian as their frst language with predominantly passive knowl-
edge of Sámi in the Third Generation. Of course, the specifc peculiarities of the
language situation differ for each generation. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace
characteristic dynamics across generations in relation to both loss of the mother
tongue and disintegration of family unit as the cornerstone of an Indigenous social
organization.

NOTES
1 This chapter is based on my PhD dissertation and in-depth oral data from 25 interview-
ees, collected during feldwork on the Kola Peninsula in 2010 and 2015. In addition, I use
primary sources from the federal archive in Moscow (The State Archive of the Russian
Federation, henceforth GARF) along with Western, Russian and Soviet sources from dif-
ferent historical periods. During my feldwork, I interviewed the Kola Sámi who resided
at two boarding schools in Gremikha and Lovozero. In addition, I interviewed the Sámi
teachers who worked at the boarding school in Lovozero.
2 Talent Foundry policy provided state support in the higher education of Indigenous minori-
ties of the North from the 1920s up to the 1980s.

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CDRP 11 (21), 10 = Party Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers: On
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Interviews
Informant 1. 2010, Murmansk. Female born at the end of the 1930s. Resided at the boarding
school in the mid-1940s.
Informant 2. 2015, Lovozero. Female born in the mid-1930s. Resided at the boarding school
in the mid-1940s.
Informant 3. 2015, Lovozero. Female born in the mid-1930s. Resided at the boarding school
in the mid-1940s.
Informant 4. 2015, Lovozero. Male born in the mid-1940s. Resided at the boarding school
in the mid-1950s.
Informant 5. 2015, Lovozero. Female informant born in the mid-1950s. Resided at the board-
ing school in the mid-1960s.

247
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE SÁMI IN THE SPIRAL

O F N E G AT I V E S O C I A L
D E V E L O P M E N T S O F T H E S OV I E T
NORTH


Lukas Allemann

INTRODUCTION
When the large-scale dislocation of people leads to unforeseen and undesired social
issues, blaming the victims becomes a recurring pattern, permitting those in power
to avoid responsibility. In a recursive loop, the blaming itself tends to exacerbate
these negative social issues. The blame-the-victims fallacy (Downing and Garcia-
Downing 2009) describes the top-down assumption that the displaced people are
unable to appreciate and take advantage of the new opportunities offered to them.
It is thus a way to consistently individualize post-relocation social issues. We may
call this systematic pattern individualization of the negative. In this chapter, I will
explore such patterns of individualizing social problems in relation to the displace-
ment of Sámi communities in the Soviet Union and ask how they shaped the Sámi
lifeworld and society in the Russian part of Sápmi.
Population displacement due the attempts by modern states to sedentarize
nomadic populations and to appropriate the resources of the North occurred within
the entire circumpolar world. Displacement in the Russian and Siberian Arctic pre-
dominantly impacted Indigenous communities, but also non-Indigenous people who
lived there before the advent of a strong state (see, for example, Holzlehner 2011;
Laptander 2014; Stammler et al. 2017). Various forms of population displacement
in the Arctic across North America and the Nordic countries have been documented
by previous research (see, for example, Tester and Kulchyski 1994, Marcus 1995;
Hamilton et al. 1996; Lantto 2014).
This circumpolar context is important to mention in order to avoid a biased per-
spectival exceptionalism when discussing the Soviet Union’s policies in the North.
Population displacement in the Arctic (and elsewhere) should be appropriately seen
within the broader scope of social engineering, a term coined most prominently by
Scott (1998). Social engineering was and is to a greater or lesser extent pursued by

248 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-18

 — The Sámi in the Soviet North —

all modern states. It means the attempt to shape a given population according to a
state’s ideas of a rulable society and administrable landscape. The more dispersed a
population is, the less legible it is for the state and the more it requires reshuffing in
order to become administrable. On the Kola Peninsula, that least legible, transpar-
ent and reachable population were predominantly the Sámi communities scattered
around the peninsula without road access and with a semi-nomadic lifestyle. The
events that happened during the Soviet epoch in order to administer this population
may appropriately be called ‘social bulldozing’ (Scott 1998, 218), rather than just
social engineering.

THE DISPLACEMENT OF SÁMI COMMUNITIES

Displacement in all its facets is both a tool and an outcome of social engineering.
The Kola Peninsula has been a place where social engineering among Indigenous
communities took place to an extreme degree – something proudly stated by the
Soviet authorities themselves. And yet this is also an exemplary case. In the times-
pan from the 1930s to the 1970s, multiple reasons for moving the population
were confated on the comparatively compact territory of the Kola Peninsula –
reasons that also led to population displacement elsewhere in the Soviet Arctic,
but mostly in a less overlapping and concentrated manner. These reasons included
sedentarizing Indigenous Peoples, economically rationalizing the livelihoods of
rural populations, the mass colonization of the Kola Peninsula and the build-up
of large-scale industry and infrastructure, the goal of making populations and
resources administrable and controllable and the unseen militarization in light of
the Cold War and the Kola Peninsula’s geographical closeness to the West. Likely,
this geographical closeness and the Indigenous Peoples’ transnational status were
among the motives for showcasing the Kola Peninsula as an exemplary case of
Soviet reforms. Therefore, we can say that the Kola Peninsula is an extreme and
yet exemplary case in point as all the social engineering that happened here also
happened in other places of the Soviet Arctic, and even beyond – partially to the
same extent, partially less systematically (Gutsol et al. 2007:, Afanasyeva 2013,
2019a; Allemann 2013, 2020a, 2020b).
The most comprehensive mass displacement of Sámi communities and the fnal
destruction of their previous settlements took place in the 1960s and 1970s. As a
result, Indigenous communities, which were scattered around the Kola Peninsula, dis-
appeared from the map, and their inhabitants had to move elsewhere. Most of them
followed the state’s push to move to one village, Lovozero, which before the relo-
cations was predominantly inhabited by Komi people (Ushakov and Dashchinskii
1988). This village was slated by Soviet planners to become the so-called ‘compact
place of dwelling’ (mesto kompaktnogo prozhivaniia) of the Sámi people (Allemann
2013, 80). Such villages were established for Indigenous minorities across the entire
Soviet Arctic, and the accompanying process has been aptly called ‘indigenous vil-
lagization’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 5).
Resettlement was not offcially coercive, and no organized physical violence was
used, although in fact for many families, it turned out to be forcible and psychologi-
cally violent. The term of ‘benevolent cruelty’ (Ramsay 2017) matches this situation
very precisely. We should nevertheless refrain from using ‘forced’ as a constant label

249
 — Lukas Allemann —

of Soviet resettlement policies in the Arctic. It does not do justice to the multiple
ways in which relocating to a more urbanized setting was received, made sense of
and coped with. Being aware of this can disclose the patchwork of impositions
and incentives that Soviet societal transformation brought about (Konstantinov
2015). Neither was there an explicit ethnic discriminatory component in any of the
countrywide, centrally decided policies. However, frstly, the underlying Soviet evo-
lutionary model of the development of nations clearly bears racist traits according
to today’s standards, and secondly, distinct effects of discrimination along ethnic
boundaries did emerge on a local scale, both as unintended outcomes of state meas-
ures and as creative adaptations to them (see later in this chapter; see also Allemann
2018).
The negative consequences of displacement included a chronic housing shortage,
lack of meaningful occupation, a lasting shift in gender relations and erosion of fam-
ily structures, violent death and substance abuse, educational obstacles, loss of lan-
guage and establishing a social hierarchy along ethnic lines (Allemann 2017, 2018,
2019). Thus, the events on the Kola Peninsula confrm Scott’s (1998) theory, which
claims that modern states’ social engineering is inherently prone to multiple failures.
From the state’s point of view, these faws were compensated with a strategy of
individualizing these negative outcomes. ‘Blaming the victims’ is listed by Downing
and Garcia-Downing (2009) as one of the fve fallacies of state-initiated, develop-
ment-induced population displacement around the globe. In the case of the Kola
Peninsula, the responsibility for the spiral of negative social developments – such
as a shortage of housing, alcohol abuse and poor school performance – was shifted
from the state to the individual, from the public to the private sphere. By attributing
material and mental hardship to defciencies of individuals rather than of policies,
it became possible to maintain a façade of a society of equals with a few deviants.
Measures such as the denunciation of so-called ‘drunkards’ in the local newspaper
aimed at generating public opinions surrounding an individual rather than a social
issue. This can be seen as a means to channel collective social distress into public
anger against selected scapegoats. Scapegoats are easiest to recruit among low-status
members of society, and, as I will show in this chapter, in Soviet Sápmi, the displaced
people living in poor conditions became the most likely targets of individualizing
measures.
First and foremost, the people relocated from Sámi communities scattered around
the Kola Peninsula to the village of Lovozero met chronic housing and employ-
ment issues. From the outset, the relocated people were put into a situation of
being petitioners, both for housing and for employment. These primary diffcul-
ties, especially the catastrophic housing situation, led to widespread psychosocial
distress among the relocated people. Due to the disastrous housing conditions and/
or family distress, many children found themselves in boarding schools (Afanasyeva
2019b; see also Andersen in this volume). Enrolling children of relocated families
in the boarding schools – in spite of the fact that the parents were now living in
the same settlement – is a clear post-relocation blame-the-victims pattern: Mothers
and fathers were stigmatized in the community as ‘bad parents,’ children often as
‘mentally defcient.’ For the youngest generation, this meant at best a good school
career and socialization in the dominant society and at worst the destruction of good
prospects for the future (Allemann 2018).

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INDIVIDUALIZING POST-RELOCATION SOCIAL

DISTRESS
This chapter takes a closer look at yet another strategy of individualizing the nega-
tive: The attempt to crack down on the adults among the ‘problematic’ post-reloca-
tion families and individuals – those whose behaviour deviated from the expectations
transmitted in top-down discourse about being a socially useful member of society.
Due to intensifed anti-alcoholism policies since the end of the 1960s, in the period
after the relocations, drinking was increasingly stigmatized by the authorities as a
marker of unacceptable individual deviance from Soviet morals. These morals were
inculcated in education, at the workplace and in organized leisure-time activities as
the dominant social norm. Stories about drinking, and about blaming the drinkers,
still have a strong presence in the narratives I heard during recurring feldwork in the
Russian part of Sápmi between 2008 and now.1 In offcial discourse, drinking could
serve as a departure point for ‘explaining’ disturbing social facts, such as appalling
housing conditions, the negligence of child rearing and non-observance of Soviet
work ethics. The public exposure of drinking people is certainly not something pecu-
liar to Lovozero or to Indigenous Peoples alone. It was part of widespread practices
of public shaming throughout the Soviet Union, which were heavily intensifed in
mature Soviet times (Kharkhordin 1999). I will show, however, how these general
dynamics acquired in Lovozero an ethnic dimension through their local application
to the people relocated from the closed-down villages. The oral accounts, media and
archival documents that I collected are full of ‘blame-the-drunkards’ stories.
For this, we need to know that in post-relocation Lovozero, the presence of the
Komi as the social middle layer between the Indigenous Peoples and the incoming
population from more southern Soviet republics (Russians, Ukrainians and others)
meant that both district leadership and the sovkhoz have up to this day been in either
Komi or incomers’ hands. Not a single time since the relocations has a person with
Sámi background been in the director’s or chairman’s position, as many informants
remember. This is due to the fact the Komi were seen by Soviet power as closer to
the Russians in terms of cultural evolution (Slezkine 1994, 144–147, 343–348). In a
way, they were turned into ‘natural’ allies of the Soviet power, which had taken their
expansive reindeer-herding style as a template for Soviet collective reindeer breeding
(Habeck 2005, 75–77, 207, Konstantinov 2015, 119 f., 161, 242).
The 1985 article ‘Shame on the drunkards’ in the local newspaper Lovozerskaia
Pravda exemplifes this hierarchy. The names in the article refect the local post-
relocation ethnic hierarchy of that time: Two of three culprits have Sámi surnames
(the third is likely to be an incomer, judging from the surname) while the comrades’
court2 chairman and author of the article is a local Komi. I will quote this newspaper
excerpt here extensively in order to transmit the atmosphere of public blaming that
such announcements bore. The surnames have been removed:

The comrades’ court of the sovkhoz Tundra3 asks to place in the newspaper
Lovozerskaia Pravda the note ‘Shame on the drunkards.’
In the end of April, the cases of [X], [Y] and [Z] have been heard – crop-
growers, who systematically abuse spirits and maliciously goof off. . . . It looks
like [X’s] friendship with booze is stronger than her promises. The colleagues

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are indignant and no longer ready to put up with the whims of this lazy-boots
drunkard.
Also [Y] should feel ashamed: She’s well over forty, it’s high time to think of a
future as an esteemed and well-respected pensioner,4 to leave behind good memo-
ries of herself. But no. The woman did not learn anything from her previous experi-
ences. She keeps skipping work as she has done since 1973. . . . She used to have
children but her parental rights were removed, and she drowned both her motherly
feelings and her holy obligations in the plonk. . . . The comrades’ court ruled that
a public reprimand . . . is to be issued in the local press. Additionally, the materials
have been handed over to the Commission for the fght against drunkenness.
A saying has it that only the fool gets angry about justice, while the wise will
draw conclusions. We hope, after all, that these people will be able to be critical
towards their own behaviour and to rectify themselves.
(Rochev 1985)

This article shows well what the offcial line was. Personal blame should bring people
to reason. Alcohol addiction and employment or family problems were strictly framed
as individual issues, detached from the social environment. Holding the individual
morally and legally responsible for his or her precarious situation complied with the
state’s ideological and legal position throughout the entire country. Firstly, there was
offcially no unemployment. As nobody could be unemployed, the designation in all
offcial documents for people not working or not properly working – independently of
their actual situation – is by default ‘non-working’ (nerabotaiushchii) or ‘social parasite’
(tuneiadets) (for example f.146 op.5 d.226 l.63–66 1976, Kheveshi 2002, 130; see also
Konstantinov 2015, 324). Secondly, there was no alcohol addiction as a refection of
social problems. Offcial discourse spoke exclusively of drunkenness (p’ianstvo) as a
personal weakness of the poor and uneducated (see also Rouse and Unnithan 1993;
Struchkova and Ventsel 2015). Furthermore, the punitive approach and the non-eligi-
bility of alcoholism for free healthcare deterred people with a drinking problem from
seeking professional help (author’s feld materials; see also Field and Powell 1981).
Thirdly, child removal from ‘problem families’ was a frequent practice. Interview mate-
rials and archived protocols show that this approach was meant mainly to protect
children and to punish parents (Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010; Allemann 2018).
Child removal, public blaming and forcible, punitive treatment of alcohol abuse
was enforced from the top down through periodical decrees and campaigns, such as
the 1970 Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR ‘On the fght against people,
who sheer away from socially useful work and pursue an anti-social, parasitic life-
style’ (f.146 op.5 d.210 l.202 1974) and the 1972 joint decision by the Communist
Party’s Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers ‘On measures to step
up the drive against drunkenness and alcoholism’ (Raikhel 2016, 190). These are
only two examples of a rich bouquet of top-level decisions fostering individual-
izing, de-contextualizing, medicalizing approaches characteristic of modern, com-
plex industrial societies (Rouse and Unnithan 1993; Skultans 2007, 156–174,
Davies 2017). This intensifed discourse from above about individualizing social
issues meant, quite simply, that at the bottom level of state power, results had to be
delivered quickly. The early 1970s thus saw a surge of punitive action in Lovozero,
which – while stemming from nationwide decrees – was used locally as a welcome

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instrument for doing away with the highly disturbing social issues among the people
who had been recently relocated from the small, closed-down Sámi settlements.

PUNISHING AND CURING ‘THE DRUNKARDS’

An eye witness to those times, whom I interviewed, is Lena (name changed), a former
local police offcer supervising juvenile affairs and child protection (detskaia kom-
nata militsii). Lena held hearings in Lovozero against ‘bad’ parents throughout the
1970s. For instance, in one of them, a teacher is invited to testify against a mother.
The unequal confrontation culminates in this statement: ‘Pinchuk [name changed] is
a very diffcult child. To ninety-nine per cent this is your, his mother’s, fault’ (f.146
op.5 d.224 l.1–2 1975). In another example, a mother accused of ‘drinking system-
atically’ is put in a hearing into the role of a supplicant: ‘I will control myself and
will stop drinking. I will clean up at home. Just don’t send me to the LTP [an institu-
tion of forcible alcohol abuse treatment, see later in this chapter, L.A.], don’t take
away my son.’ A reindeer herder is accused of introducing his son to drinking: ‘We
must write in the newspaper Lovozerskaia Pravda . . . about the father’s behaviour’
(f.146 op.5 d.224 l.4–8, 1975). In many similar hearings, individuals – according to
the surnames, most of them from the recently relocated communities – were threat-
ened with various punitive measures, such as fnes, public blaming or child removal.
Overall, a few years after the country-wide decrees ordering the intensifed battle
against anti-social individuals, the local authorities could be proud of themselves
about having ‘actively engaged into the fght against drunkenness and alcoholism’
(f.146 op.5 d.192 l.98 1974). In Lovozero, the individuals to whom this battle could
be directed had been readily found thanks to the recent relocation disaster. Pressure
was kept high throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, with periodic reminders, such
as ‘the people’s judge and the Lovozerskaia Pravda chief editor to be more watchful
in these matters’ (f.146 op.5 d.226 l.63–66 1976).
Intensifed anti-alcoholism policies led to the introduction of so-called prophylac-
tic labour-therapy camps (lechebno-trudovoi proflaktoii, LTP) all over the country
from the end of the 1960s. Sentences to the LTPs were usually for six months to
two years. They comprised work therapy and medical treatment at the same time.
Room, board, work on the spot or in a factory and payment according to normal
standards were provided. In reality, however, the patients paid for their treatment, as
30 to 60% of their salary was withheld. The patients could pick up the accumulated
money at the end of their term. Most of the LTPs worked as an enterprise, and some
even made a proft (Field and Powell 1981; AE 2013; AP 2014). LTPs were heav-
ily criticized in the fnal years of the communist era for their harsh conditions and
infringements of human rights (Alekseev 1989; Ivanets et al. 1991) as, together with
psychiatric clinics, this was the only way to imprison a person without a criminal
sentence. By 1994, the year of their abolishment, there were 244 LTPs in Russia,
with an estimated capacity of 70,000 to 100,000 inmates (Plotkin 2015; Shved and
Chiknaeva 2019). The treatment was and still is widely regarded as useless or even
harmful, and people usually quickly resumed alcohol consumption after release.
Such opinions were reiterated by every interlocutor with whom I broached the topic.
Administratively, the way of an individual to the LTP was usually paved with
several stays at the so-called sobering-up station (vytrezvitel’), a cell in the police

253
 — Lukas Allemann —

station where drunken people were kept in custody and under medical observation
until sobering up. Allegations that ‘the sobering-up centers, like medical facilities,
were sometimes subject to pressures to fll quotas, which were dubious indexes of
success’ have been mentioned before (Raikhel 2016, 69). It lies in the nature of such
allegations that written evidence about them is unlikely to be available, and we must
rely on oral evidence. Interview materials from the Kola Peninsula provide simi-
lar evidence. Sergei (name changed), another former police offcer from Lovozero,
explains here how and why quantity mattered in their work:

A1 (SERGEI): So then – there was this separate decree from ’72, they used to write
‘drunken, according to this-and-that decree from this-and-that date.’ There was
a fght, the government had decided about it [chuckling]. . . .
Q: And so this resulted somehow in some pressure? . . .
A1: Yes, yes. First of all, our sobering-up station in Lovozero operated at a loss.
It did not pay its way. Because of that we would get additional funding from
Murmansk.
Q: I see. . . . Interesting that state-run places, not only the LTP, also the sobering-up
station, had to pay off.
A2 (HIS WIFE, ALSO A FORMER POLICE OFFICER): Yes, the sobering-up stations had to.
Q: So does that mean that there were some quotas, you had to bring in so-or-so
many people in order to make the place proftable, and you had to fll the quota?
A2: The more the better. . . .
A1: Well . . . once a month, when we would get our pay, they would for instance tell
us: ‘This year you’re not working well enough, we had to ask for subsidies from
Murmansk, so do a better job.’ Only like this, this way.
Q: I see.
A1: They did not give [numerical] quotas because – how? We cannot make a person
drunk only to—
Q: Yes, of course.
(SI 2014)

The main requirement thus was that the hybrid punitive-curative institutions serv-
ing ‘drunkards’ had to be fnancially self-supporting. According to the principle that
alcoholism was not an illness but a vice, the individuals had to bear the full costs of
their behaviour and treatment, both fnancially and symbolically. As Sergei explains,
pressure was put forward in words, not in numbers. If numeric quotas were involved
at a higher level, they were transmitted to the local level only orally. With the num-
bers at hand about the yearly costs of running the sobering-up station and the set
price for a ‘stay,’ it was an easy job for each police chief to calculate how many
people they needed to deliver.
This brings us to the second quotation, which is from an interview with Liubov’
Vatonena, the former head of the district’s statistics bureau and later a Sámi activist.
She recalls how her relative had been sent to the LTP:

I’m telling you just from lived experience, having in mind my cousin [a bach-
elor]. . . . He [sighing], a winner of the socialist workplace competition [sotssor-
evnovanie], who had been solemnly given a lapel pin [znachok], he worked at

254
 — The Sámi in the Soviet North —

the pig-breeding farm [part of the sovkhoz] looking after the pigs, he did drink,
I won’t deny that, but it never was unrestrained drinking [nezapoinyi]. Work,
at least, came always before drinking. And so, a week before the ceremony [of
the socialist workplace competition] he comes, almost crying. He asks us [the
interviewee’s family] that in one month we should write an appeal to get him
released from the LTP, that we had to vouch for his sobriety and so forth. He
says—And I say: ‘How could it be that they are sending you [to the LTP],
you’re just about to get this prize.’ He says: ‘They coaxed me into it, because
they absolutely have to send somebody, but everyone else has children, wives,
only I’m alone. And so they’re asking me.’ I say: ‘So was it the same also ear-
lier?’ Because that was already the third time [for him to serve an LTP sentence].
They used to lock them up there for a long time, at least a year. . . . They asked
precisely him to agree to go there, because they had to send at least someone.
And as he was alone, well, how should I say, no one else would suffer from that,
only he would.
(LA 2013)

This account relates to the pressure exerted from above about delivering people
to the LTP. That such pressure was not only exerted on police and courts but
also on employers is not far-fetched, considering the comrades’ courts’ – working
directly at workplaces and places of residence – decisive role in issuing LTP can-
didate ‘recommendations.’ This pattern is confrmed by archival materials. Thus,
in 1972, the district’s executive committee directly ordered several enterprises to
fulfl the recently issued Communist Party’s decree against drunkenness and alco-
holism. The order issued towards the sovkhoz Tundra as the main employer in
Lovozero puts direct personal pressure on its director, demanding, among other
things, to ‘improve the work of the comrades’ court,’ ‘to list the families of employ-
ees, in which there are alcohol abusers who initiate conficts,’ ‘to develop by 1st
of January 1973 an action plan about stepping up the drive against drunkenness
and alcoholism’ and ‘to send by 1st of February 1973 to the district’s department
of internal affairs [i.e., the police, L.A.] requests to start proceedings about send-
ing ferce drunkards to the LTP’ (f.146 op.5 d.141 l.179,181 1972). Combining
Raikhel’s and my fndings on the topic of quotas, from distinct sets of data and
distinct cases, gives the story about quotas in the ‘fght against drunkards’ a fair
level of credibility. We can conclude that pressure was held up to deliver a ‘reason-
able’ – from the state’s point of view – number of people to the corrective-curative
institutions.
In the local context of Lovozero, Vatonena’s interview also informs us about what
kind of people would most likely become the targets of those who were urged to ful-
fl the plan – unmarried men. She mentions the main reason. An unmarried man was
seen as comparatively free of social obligations and thus more suitable to be sent off
for a year or two, the usual duration of an LTP sentence (Field and Powell 1981, 42).
Men from relocated Sámi groups were especially threatened by bachelorhood and
alcohol abuse due to their much lower social status in the new, urbanized settlement,
compared to the pre-relocation settlements (Allemann 2020a, pp.  158–172). This
nexus between low professional status and lack of family must be seen in a wider
context of Soviet gender roles: ‘Men who are unable to perform as breadwinners

255
 — Lukas Allemann —

have their labor market problems compounded by a damaging domestic marginali-

zation’ (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004, 189; see also Povoroznyuk et al. 2010; Vitebsky
2010; Konstantinov 2015). Other interviewees – inmates, relatives, police staff (NE
2013; AP 2014; LI 2014; SI 2014) – provided similar insights into this local bias in
providing people to the punitive-curative machinery.
Two more aspects of the alcohol-scapegoating system are still in need of a men-
tion. The frst one is about the sales quotas for alcohol by the state-owned shops
(Sokolova 2017), which were never reduced until Gorbachev’s campaign of 1985
(Schrad 2014). These sales quotas, which the shops had to fulfl, may have stood
in a moral confict of interest with a fght against alcoholism, but they did not
with the fght against alcoholics as needed ‘outcasts on the inside’ (Bourdieu and
Champagne 1999). The state had an interest in keeping alcohol sales steadily high –
and even increase them – as they very signifcantly contributed to the state’s
budget. It has been convincingly proven by Schrad (2014) that this has been one
of the most consistent historical continuities between the Russian Empire and the
Soviet Union. Document and interview analysis of materials from Russian Sápmi
clearly showed that the state’s campaigns against drinking aimed at socially isolat-
ing alcoholics rather than eliminating alcoholism. Creating a category of drunk-
ards as outcasts – locally epitomized by the relocated people – also served the
goal of keeping alcohol sales steady: By clearly demarcating the few, the majority
were motivated to keep buying and consuming alcoholic drinks in their habitual
amounts.
The other aspect I still need to broach is the recurring nature of the LTP terms.
Once in the system, one was likely to become a returning ‘client’ – a frequent way
among former personnel to refer to the hybrid patient-inmates. ‘Clients’ thus frmly
entered the role of outcast and scapegoat offered to society. Vatonena mentions this
practice in the interview mentioned earlier. She had already denounced this vicious
circle during the late perestroika times: It is diffcult to get a job after the LTP, and
many are either sent again to the LTP, even after being sentenced to prison terms
for social parasitism (tuneiadstvo) (Vatonena 1990). Aleksandr (name changed),
one of the very few unmarried, relocated Sámi and former LTP inmates who is still
alive,5 recalls:

A: How should I say, I drank at work, yes. They asked me to leave, they gave me one
and a half years [in the LTP] [chuckling]. And so, when I came back from my
work [at the LTP], came here [back to Lovozero], they wouldn’t take me back
to work. . . . They wouldn’t take me and said: “We don’t have enough places.”
That’s how it was.
O: . . . So one more reason to take up drinking again.
A: Sure, yes. After half a year they sent me there again.
O: Meaning you were fred by the sovkhoz, or where did you work?
A: Yes, I worked at the sovkhoz. ‘Dismissed,’ yes. ‘Dismissed.’ Wait, now [I’ll remem-
ber]. ‘Dismissed in connection with dispatchment to the LTP,’ yes. That’s how it
was written, it was written [in the employment record booklet]. ‘Dismissed in
connection with dispatchment to the LTP,’ and that’s it.
(AP 2014)

256
 — The Sámi in the Soviet North —

Comparing the LTP with Foucault’s deliberations on prisons reveals that the LTP
looks like a quintessential form of Foucault’s defnition of prison. Even more than
in a conventional prison, the body is constantly ‘trained and retrained’; its forces are
applied to labour. ‘Medicine, as a science of the normality of bodies, found a place
at the centre of penal practice (the penalty must have healing as its purpose).’ Hence,
imprisonment becomes ‘ambiguously therapeutic and punitive.’ Moreover, delin-
quency should be understood as a ‘coupled penalty-delinquent system’: The modern
penal system ‘manufactures a category of individuals who form a circuit with it:
Prison does not correct – it endlessly calls the same ones back.’ This system gradually
leads ‘irregularity or illegality toward the infraction, with the help of a whole process
of exclusions and parapenal sanctions’ (all quotes Foucault 1997, 35 f.).
Seen in this light, the LTP was an entire parapenal institution as it did not require
any criminal lawsuit for a sentence. Ultimately, this institution’s ambiguous cura-
tive-punitive status did not truly aim at healing its targets. While the body was not
marked physically, symbolic marking kept being the system’s crucial function. By
creating its outlaws, the corrective institution must not really correct but create a
permanent category of outlaws-as-scapegoats. The LTP is a prime example of this
as the scapegoats keep fulflling their function through their periodical returns to
society. Instead of being locked up and thus rendered invisible, the person stays
noticeable and visible in the society where they are supposed to fulfl their role as a
scapegoat, thanks to the on-and-off rhythm.

CONCLUSIONS
To reiterate, the state had developed in mature Soviet times a set of individualizing
answers to socio-economic and psychological distress in Soviet society. Under pres-
sure to provide culprits to the system in a large quantity, the easiest targets were
those with a low social status and a thin net of social relations – something concisely
captured by Foucault’s reasoning that ‘a poor person is always easier to rob than
a rich one’ (Foucault 1997, 36). In many settlements of the Soviet North, from the
1960s onwards, this lowest social rank had been occupied by the groups of relocated
Indigenous communities, due to the preceding village closures and mass relocations.
Within these groups, boarding school children, ‘bad mothers’ and single men became
the most likely targets of the individualizing approach.
This was also the dominant social order in the post-relocation Lovozero of the
1970s and 1980s, which became the place of ‘compact’ Indigenous dwelling on the
Kola Peninsula. Here, too, society’s scapegoats were recruited predominantly among
the relocated people and ideologically constructed as outcasts. Hence, individual-
izing measures hit mostly the relocated Sámi. On this local scale, the crackdown
on deviants ordered from above had timely focked in to provide a convenient tool
for obscuring the state’s responsibility in the disastrous situation following the
development-induced displacement of Indigenous communities scattered around the
Kola Peninsula. The individualization of the negative amounted to fnding scape-
goats and avoiding discussions of larger social grievances and their true origins. As a
result, displacement and the subsequent individualization of its negative social con-
sequences considerably shaped the post-relocation Sámi world. The consequences

257
 — Lukas Allemann —

of the patterns of individualizing social problems affected and still affect the Sámi
people and society.
I suggest that widespread social despondency among the relocated Sámi groups in
Lovozero of the 1970s and 1980s may be seen as an example illustrating the ambi-
guity of resistance. While it is the most straightforward choice to see alcohol abuse
and other forms of self-harming as acts of resignation, one can also see them in this
case – and not in a mutually exclusive way – as resistance to attempts to streamline
social organization according to a high-modernist ideology. Resistance here should
be seen in an expanded perspective. Excessive drinking and, as a consequence, indo-
lence and absenteeism, for which so many people were blamed in Lovozero, turn out
to be forms of resistance to the smooth functioning of the planned socio-economic
machine. In the end, it is a matter of how one defnes the term whether a relatively
conscious intention to resist must be present or not in order to call a phenomenon
resistance. As a result, however, we can see that what have elsewhere been called
self-destructive strategies (Povoroznyuk et al. 2010, 16) had negative effects not only
on individual well-being but also on the functioning of the socio-economic model
masterminded by other people.
Another repercussion of the social upheaval caused by Soviet social engineering
and displacement in Russian Sápmi are the manifold fault lines running through
the Russian Sámi society, which I examined more closely elsewhere (Allemann
2017). These fault lines concern mainly those generations who experienced reloca-
tion or grew up in post-relocation Lovozero. While there is no space here to go
into detail about them, we can state that the Sámi society in Russia still includes a
large array of generational, gender-related and origin-related ruptures. Evaluations
of the Soviet past are highly ambivalent among the older and middle generations.
‘The’ Sámi of Russia are by far not as homogeneous a community as is frequently
assumed by visitors from outside. As Ortner has rightfully noted, ‘groups’ are not
unitary but always ‘internally divided by age, gender, status and other forms of
difference’ (1995, 175). Such distinctions also ‘divide’ individuals and make them
deploy different varieties of narrative agency, depending on the situation.
On the other hand, it is the social reshuffing of the 20th century that stands at the
root of a slowly growing, more unifed Sámi identity among the younger generation,
which is now less caught in the highly fragmented kaleidoscope of the different fault
lines that were created in the frst place by mass displacement and the destruction
of the previous Indigenous socioeconomic order. The collective memory of displace-
ment and of living together in a new place is an important driving force behind
modern Sámi activism and ethnic identity in Russia.

NOTES
1 Most of the feldwork was completed within my doctoral research, which was funded by
the University of Lapland and the Academy of Finland (research project Oral History of
Empires by Elders in the Arctic (ORHELIA), funding decision no. 251111).
2 Comrades’ courts (tovarishcheskii sud) were extrajudicial Soviet social institutions consist-
ing of elected employees or residents at a given place of work or residence. They could
reach limited corrective sentences, such as public admonishment, or turn the accused over
to the law-enforcement authorities (Prokhorov 1978).

258
 — The Sámi in the Soviet North —

3 Sovkhoz (abbreviation for sovetskoe khoziaistvo) was the predominant form of collec-
tive farming in the late Soviet Union. Sovkhoz Tundra was the reindeer-herding collective
farm of Lovozero that formally absorbed most of the reindeer herding from the relocated
communities.
4 The pension age in Arctic regions of the USSR was 50 for women and 55 for men.
5 The popular opinion held by most relatives of former inmates, and by the few former
inmates who are still alive, is that the treatment at the LTP actually shortened the lives of
many inmates. The long-term effects are commonly seen as heightening the organism’s sen-
sitivity towards alcohol without increasing aversion. Besides that, the medicines are com-
monly seen as damaging the organism, which is the reason many inmates only pretended
to swallow the pills they were given. What can be said with certainty is that being released
from the LTP was often ‘compensated’ with excessive drinking. The accumulated wage
handed out at release exacerbated the relapse into drinking. The survivor Aleksandr is one
of the few who became a teetotaler – however, not thanks to the LTP but only in the 1990s
through a turn towards religion.

REFERENCES
Archival materials
All cited documents are archived at the Murmansk Regional State Archive, Kirovsk branch.
The location in the archive is indicated as shown in this example: f.242 op.1 d.1 l.7–8
means collection (fond) 242, list (opis’) 1, fle (delo) 1, sheets (listy) 7 and 8.
f.146 op.5 d.141 l.179,181, 1972. Protokol No. 30 zasedaniia ispolnitel’nogo komiteta
Lovozerskogo raionnogo Soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia [Protocol no. 30 of the
meeting of the Executive Committee of the Lovozero District Council of the toilers’
representatives].
f.146 op.5 d.192 l.98, 1974. Spravka o sostoianii i merakh po ukrepleniiu sotsialisticheskoi
zakonnosti, usileniia bor’by s prestupnost’iu i khishchenii na predpriiatiiakh i v organi-
zatsiiakh Lovozerskogo raiona [Information about the condition and consolidation of
socialist lawfulness, the stepping up of the fght against criminality and embezzlement in
enterprises and organisations of the Lovozero District].
f.146 op.5 d.210 l.202, 1974. Reshenie iz protokola No. 6 zasedaniia ispolnitel’nogo komiteta
Lovozerskogo raionnogo Soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia [Decision from protocol no. 6
of the meeting of the Executive Committee of the Lovozero District Council of the toilers’
representatives].
f.146 op.5 d.224 l.1–2, 1975. Protokol No. 1 zasedaniia komissii po delam nesovershennolet-
nikh pri Lovozerskom raiispolkome [Protocol no. 1 of the meeting of the commission for
under-age affairs of the Lovozero District Executive Committee].
f.146 op.5 d.224 l.4–8, 1975. Protokol No. 2 zasedaniia komissii po delam nesovershennolet-
nikh pri Lovozerskom raiispolkome [Protocol no. 2 of the meeting of the commission for
under-age affairs of the Lovozero District Executive Committee].
f.146 op.5 d.226 l.63–66, 1976. O rabote raionnogo otdeleniia vnutrennykh del raiispolkoma
[About the work of the department for internal affairs of the District Executive Committee].

Interviews
All interviews were conducted by the author of this chapter. The toponyms refer to
the place where the interview was conducted. The initials are changed for the sake
of anonymization.

259
 — Lukas Allemann —

AE, 2013. Female, born in the mid-1930s, Lovozero.

AP, 2014. Male, born in the early 1950s, Lovozero.
LA, 2013. Female, born in the mid-1950s, Lovozero.
LI, 2014. Female, born in the mid-1940s, Lovozero.
NE, 2013. Female, born in the late 1930s, Murmansk.
SI, 2014. Male, born in the late 1940s, Lovozero.

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 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

C H A N G I N G S TAT E S , C H A N G I N G
SÁMI?
Framing the state and the Sámi in studies of history
in Finland and Norway 1923–1954


Jukka Nyyssönen

INTRODUCTION
The Second World War is usually perceived as a turn towards ‘democratic’ values
in European and Nordic historiography. This was achieved by abandoning the most
aggressive forms of social evolutionism that had demarcated and hierarchized cul-
tures in neat series, favouring the historian’s own nation. Somewhat paradoxically,
recent studies have indicated that in the years following the Second World War, the
role of the nation-state in historical inquiry in the Nordic countries was, in fact,
strengthened (Fuchs 2002; Heiret et al. 2013; Haapala and Markkola 2017; Norring
2018). What about studies of Sámi history; did any change take place there?
History as a scholarly discipline has political roots, aims, uses and consequences
and therefore serves a political identity function in national discourses. This aware-
ness of social and ideological ties has not been abandoned in the post-narrativist
era, either: Sámi history, like any other form of scientifc research, does not escape
the discursive dimension or the intertwined political contexts. These contemporary
aspects are imbued with the political and offer discursive tools with implications for
the interpretations and narratives produced by historians (Dahl 1992; Erkkilä 2015;
Kuukkanen 2015).
In addition to the impact of the social on scholarly activity, research in turn
impacts the social. Historical inquiry may be perceived as the production of societal
knowledge and the production of political and societal texts. Texts achieve their
potency by being grounded in historical reality and through the (forward-looking)
construction of the society they are studying (Norring 2018). The same goes for the
production of the subject positions: Research is, to a great extent, an exercise in the
power of defnition, or enacting Sáminess, constructing both the ‘researching self’
and the object of scholarly activity, the Sámi (Gunaratnam 2003).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-19 263

 — Jukka Nyyssönen —

This chapter analyzes transformations of knowledge systems and shifts in the

ideals of knowledge that lead to new epistemic values and new knowledge (poli-
tics) (Mulsow 2018). Concerning Lappology – research on the Sámi undertaken by
majority researchers – the case examined here is interesting because the expected
rupture is simultaneous with slower, ongoing genre-internal paradigmatic change.
Before the Second World War, the place of the Sámi in the hierarchies constructed
in research was almost without exception the lowest (Lehtola 2012). The expected
change, which the rupture caused to hierarchy building and to subject positions in
research, has been less studied. There was a change in research politics: A more plu-
ralistic normative tone could be expected than the old one, which had perceived state
sovereignty as a source of legitimate historical knowledge, delimiting and attributing
subject positions to the historical actors. In what follows, the depth of this change
will be assessed according to whether there were any changes in pre-critical frames
of historical inquiry: Did the frame of historical inquiry shift from political (nation)-
state to a more open and pluralistic society? (See Norring 2020.) How did political
change refect the way the states involved were positioned in relation to the Sámi
in historical studies? (cf. Heiret et al. 2013). Did the subject positions of the Sámi
change?
I have chosen to study the following works in this chapter: Antropogeografska
studier inom Petsamo området. 1, Skoltlapparna [Human Geographical studies in
the Petsamo region. 1, the Skolt Lapps, 1929] by Väinö Tanner; Finmarkens politiske
historie aktmæssig fremstillet [The Political History of Finnmark presented in doc-
uments, 1923] by O. A. Johnsen; The Changing Lapps (1954) by Gutorm Gjessing;
and En utdöd lappkultur i Kemi Lappmark,1 Studier i Nordfnlands kolonisation-
shistoria [An Extinct Lapp Culture in Kemi Lappmark, studies in the colonization
history of Northern Finland, 1952] by Helmer Tegengren. They all cover a long
historical period and focus on relations between the Sámi and the Crown/state,
enabling a comparison of change over time in the national historiographies. This
choice of works is not limited to historical studies, but also includes geographi-
cal and ethnographic/anthropological studies. This is because not many historical
studies are available, and human sciences demonstrated a strong historical focus
during the study period before the shift towards a synchronic approach among, for
example, social anthropologists during the 1970s (Minde 1994). Cross-national
comparison is possible to a certain extent since all the scholars operated in the
intersection of the Lappological feld and academia proper, with a more stringent
national frame. The scholarly network was not strong since academic and political
venues were not yet fully established (the Saami Council was established in 1956),
but the emergent networks are evident in mutual referencing. Methodological
nationalism might have been a constitutive source for historical inquiry, more so
than the transnational networks, and the comparison is used mostly to emphasize
the specifc in Finnish and Norwegian studies of the Sámi (Norring 2018; Turchetti
et al. 2012).
Methodologically, I seek to make a comparative analysis of the occurrences of
hierarchizing framings and transformations of the implications of this framing (sub-
jectifying/hierarchizing/rights-generating). The implications of the subject positions
(subject-citizen) and space for the Sámi voice are studied as well.

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THE PRE-WAR STUDIES – VÄINÖ TANNER AND

O. A. JOHNSEN
Finnish historiography had a deep engagement with nation and state building, locat-
ing long historical roots of national sentiment and Finnishness (Norring 2020; see
also Alakorva et al. in this volume). Historical studies of the 1920s are defned by
the partial bankruptcy of social Darwinism. Darwinism was a progressivist move-
ment within national sciences, displacing God as the prime mover in history and
situating the struggle, selection and viability of nations in historical terminology.
Evolutionism was easy to couple with the developmental and dominant political
philosophy in Finland, the Hegelian-Snellmannian philosophy of history, which
located the state as the highest level of polity in history. In the 1920s, faith in linear
development suffered a blow in the turmoil of the Finnish Civil War of 1918.2 What
remained was a (Darwinian) struggle between rationalities and will, favourable and
wrong choices made in the course of history, with no pre-determined ending in sight.
The building of the nation was still what historians studied, as well as the gathering
thematic and conceptual frame of historiography. Darwinism had an immense cohe-
sive force in Finnish sciences: It infuenced numerous disciplines and became a way
of demonstrating competence and progressivity in academia (Ahtiainen et al. 1996).
It had a deep infuence on Tanner, whose historical vision was framed by Darwinian
terminology, evident in his ponderings on the potency of the Sámi peoples and his
doubts expressed about Finnish competence – for example, in the administration of
the Petsamo region.
A geologist and Finnish Swede, Tanner wrote Antropogeografska before he was
nominated as a professor in geography at the University of Helsinki in 1931. The
book is a multidisciplinary study with a human geographical theoretical frame.
Tanner’s aim was to chart the people, their semi-nomadic adaptation, history, poli-
tics, viability and administration, as well as the socio-economic crisis of the three
Skolt Sámi sijdds in Petsamo, which at that time formed part of Finland (see also
Jouste in this volume). The political agency of the Skolt Sámi was constructed in a
groundbreaking way through the analysis of the norrõs/(siid)sååbbar, an organiza-
tion responsible for Skolt Sámi sijdd administration, which divided the usage rights
of the fshing waters and lands between families. The functionalist perceptions of the
sijdd as a unity of people bound by kin ties to the terrain they were utilizing, as well
as allocating and using the resource zones in an orderly, organized manner, are some
of the most culturally sensitive contributions for which Tanner is credited (Susiluoto
2003; Tanner 1929). Tanner wrote against Lappologist research that reproduced
imagery of the Sámi ‘wandering aimlessly in the mountains’ (e.g. Tanner’s patron
and professor predecessor, J. E. Rosberg) or airing diffusionist hierarchies of culture3
(e.g. his critic Karl Bernhard Wiklund; see Nyyssönen 2015).
Tanner’s book has a programmatic aim of presenting the Skolt Sámi in a positive
light. The Skolt Sámi were, however, ravaged by external conditions and cast into
poverty. Among these forces was modernity, which resulted in immediate position-
ings of the Skolt Sámi in the hierarchies in the book. The book contains an unre-
solved tension between the idea of the inevitability of modernization, with the loss of
the traditional subsistence form, and Tanner’s purist advice regarding the blessings

265
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of semi-nomadic reindeer herding as the original, most suitable and ‘correct’ form of
herding. The book suffers from poor editing and numerous contradictions: History,
for Tanner, is at certain periods both an enabling and a hindering factor in creating
a ‘happy’ society for the Skolt Sámi. It affords either isolation and slow evolution or
stagnation and no tools with which to survive in the modern world (Tanner 1929).
Tanner writes in numerous aggressive ways about the Skolt Sámi: Their racial
foundation was lacking in many ways, but Tanner credited them with the status
of a viable people, capable of entering the modern world. In prehistory, the siidas
demonstrated a varying capacity to resist the colonization of stronger neighbours,
but it was the good will of the latter, and natural barriers, which had sustained the
Skolt Sámi sijdds; Tanner studied their political system through the discourse of lack
(Thomas 1994, 72), as institutions of lesser sophistication. The book is framed by the
modern world and state parameters, within which the Skolt Sámi compared unfa-
vourably and towards which they seemed to need to be guided. The states (Russia,
Finland, the Scandinavian countries) provide rights- and capacity-generating frame-
works, but Tanner was incapable of placing them in stable hierarchies, due to his
oppositional stance against his own mother country. Tanner abandons his aggressive
tone towards Russia, for example, as he begins to compare its policies favourably
with Finnish ones. The book is imbued with identity politics, in which the only stable
position is the lowest, the Skolt Sámi (Tanner 1929).
Norwegian historians produced histories of ‘progressive evolution,’ leading in a
deterministic manner to the genesis of the democratic nation-state. A tendency to
represent the twists and turns of development as being justifed and necessary is
detectable. Historians cultivated the concept of a medieval free peasantry as guaran-
teeing the success of the project of independence. During the 19th century, the Sámi
were portrayed as insignifcant, small, stray folk who could not resist the expansion
of Norse folks or stand in the way of peasant agricultural expansion. Although the
most national romantic fervour of attributing Norwegian sentiment to the medieval
peasant gave way to a more stringent scholarly approach in the early 20th century,
the state continued to dominate the framing of historical inquiry: Marxist-oriented
social and economic history was used to illustrate the consolidation of a strong
independent state (Dahl 1992; Nordby 1995). The corpus of Johnsen, mostly con-
centrating on political history in the period of Danish rule (1380–1814), belongs to
this historiographical tradition.
O. A. Johnsen was commissioned to write the political history of Finnmark by the
Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which wished to obtain historical knowl-
edge of the borders of Finnmark. In doing this, Johnsen aimed to delegitimize the
historical claims of Sweden and Russia regarding the disputed territories. The Sámi
are portrayed as suffering under foreign rule: during the 16th century, as the Swedish
Crown began to reach out to the Arctic Sea coast, the Sámi appear in the text pro-
testing unlawful taxation by Swedish offcials and demanding the substitution of
Swedish bailiffs with Norwegian offcials. The narrative in the book is the border
demarcation, the genesis of Finnmark as Norwegian territory and its administra-
tive organization during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. As a result
of this development, the Sea Sámi became ‘Norwegian subjects.’ The Sámi received
their share of historical agency, as it unfolds in the sources, as a valued target for
taxation (not necessarily due to the monetary value of the taxation, but because

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of power politics as an indicator of territorial claims); as trading partners; and as

somewhat unreliable partners in times of war. Johnsen distances himself from the
aggressive and belittling ways of writing about the Sámi by means of short, direct
citations from the sources, using quotation marks. Johnsen uses racial terminology
(half-Sámi, halvfnner, non-mixed Finnish folk, ublanded fnsk folk) every now and
then (Johnsen 1923).
The Sámi are given the role of an active subject from whom loyalty is demanded,
yet making complaints to the offcials of the numerous kingdoms that are engaged
in negotiating the borders which will cross the Sámi lands. The Norwegian offcials
appear to be on the side of the Sámi as they resist sometimes violent (Swedish, and
later Russian) taxation in Finnmark. The Sámi appear to affrm their devotion to
Norway and testify to the ‘correct’ demarcation of the border, usually to Norway’s
beneft. As the Danish-Norwegian exclusive dominion over the Sea Sámi became
established, the Sámi appear as Crown offcials and sheriffs (lendsmann) in local
Sámi villages. The text is formalist, true to sources and factual; it lacks characteriza-
tions of the Sámi and, therefore, any aggressive tone (Johnsen 1923).
As border negotiations commenced between Sweden and Denmark, the Sámi
emerged in the role of ‘witnesses,’ informing Crown offcials about the border. The
Sámi do not appear as holders of rights; of the two codicils attached to the Treaty of
Strömstad (1751), the one dictating the borders of the kingdoms is examined more
thoroughly than the Lapp codicil regulating the Sámi right to cross-border nomad-
ism. This brief mention is followed by a lengthy chapter on the Sámi’s subject-like
position and belongingness to the Norwegian realm through taxation. Johnsen’s
interpretation regarding Sámi ‘possession of [their] own taxed lands’ followed the
18th-century interpretation of the Crown offcials: It indicated subject-like relations
with the Kingdom of Norway (Johnsen 1923).
In the case of the border demarcation between Russia and Norway in 1826, the
Sámi occupied similar subject positions – as a potentially disloyal threat (shifting
sides to Finland?), as a vanguard movement proving Norwegian claim to the ter-
ritory and as a Norwegian subject enjoying rights granted by the State of Norway.
The borders between Sámi territories, indicating usage rights, had restrictive power
only regarding the usage rights of other Sámi groups (Johnsen 1923). There is no
major difference here between Johnsen and Tanner, for whom the formalistic view of
borders allowed the Skolt Sámi to have no excessive historical agency and for whom,
as well, state borders were the highest in the hierarchies. Neither Tanner nor Johnsen
returned to Sámi issues in their later production in extenso (Sommerfeldt 1954).

RESEARCH ON THE SÁMI AFTER THE SECOND WORLD

WAR – GJESSING AND TEGENGREN
In recent times, Astri Andresen has dealt with the Norwegian Sámi research right
after the Second World War in the greatest depth. In a country otherwise in a state
of bliss following its liberation, sections of researchers found a source to question
the nature of the state of Norway in the need to deal with the consequences of
Norwegianization policies (lasting from c. 1850s to 1950s). Research on the Sámi
and the historical narratives cultivated took part at a critical turn, in which the Sámi
were a weaker nature folk instead of weaker race, the frst settlers and bearers of

267
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a valuable yet still-threatened culture. All these new representations and positions
were rights generating, no longer threatened by evolutionary downfall but by the
Norwegian state and society. What had to be changed and administered was the
policy of the state of Norway and no longer the cultural condition or level of civili-
zation of the Sámi. A paternalistic sense of ‘duty’ to protect the Sámi, even those of
‘guilt’ and ‘debt,’ appears in the texts and in parts of the political discourse as well
(Andresen 2016). There are examples of studies intended as a denial of social evolu-
tionism (Gjessing 1948), but in what follows, I shall examine whether there are any
residual traces of the old paradigm and whether the framing showed signs of change.
Archaeologist and ethnologist, professor and chairman of the Ethnographical
Museum at the University of Oslo, Gutorm Gjessing is the only example in this
selection of a scholar who engaged politically in Sámi issues later in his career. In
Changing Lapps (1954), Gjessing followed the historizing methods of Malinowski
in trying to elicit the functions of the Sámi cultures in Finnmark. For Johnsen (1923),
the Sámi were not the original population in the north but had wandered from the
east at some point in time. Gjessing, however, credits the Sámi with frst-occupant
status: The ‘frst Norwegians’ (he uses this term in a willingly anachronistic fashion)
did not enter an ‘un-owned country,’ but ‘Sameland.’4 He interprets the Stone Age
slate culture as a Sámi culture, attributing to it cultural potency due to material
fndings far south of Finnmark. Race studies are present in the book in a modifed
form: ‘Somatically,’ the Sámi constitute a group of their own, not that of ‘Mongols.’
Gjessing uses the fndings and interpretations of the ill-famed osteological studies by
Kristian Schreiner (in one of which Gjessing participated), as well as the blood-type
studies by the Oxford University Lapland Expedition of 1950, proving a mixing of
races and traces of ‘Nordic’ and ‘East-Baltic’ races in the Sámi. Contacts had inten-
sifed during the Viking Age (c. 800–1050), but cultural loans were to the beneft
of the Norwegians, learning ways to tend their cattle from the Sámi, who were, in
addition, more effcient hunters and boat builders than their neighbours. Gjessing
proves wrong the scornful depictions of the Sámi and lists of negative characteristics
ascribed by Amund Helland and briefy describes the establishment of the ‘heavy-
handed’ Norwegianization policy in schools and its revision taking place in the
1950s (Gjessing 1954).
The hierarchies return later in the book, and the direction of cultural loans changes
as they become detectable in everyday life. Gjessing’s main motif is the disappear-
ance of the social and moral cohesion provided by the siida in encounters with the
modern world and the Norwegians. As Norwegian settlement began, the Sámi were
driven farther up into the heads of the fjords; they gave up their semi-nomadic life
and took up farming. This approach is relational: The Sámi and the Norwegians
are depicted in bilateral networks of trade and exchange. Another repeated theme
is the (lack of) ‘European-American techniques,’ without which the Sea Sámi none-
theless miraculously prosper, even without enjoying ‘any particular consideration’
from the Norwegian authorities. The crisis of hunting wild reindeer and the genesis
of nomadism are represented, on the other hand, as intentional adaptation, or ‘indi-
rect acculturation.’ A recent deep reorganization of herding is, in turn, the result
of ‘enormous European economic development’ in communications and transport.
A self-suffcient economic system is giving way to the monetary economy; many
branches of Sámi culture, such as handicrafts, are ‘gradually decreasing,’ and herding

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has grown more extensive. Families no longer follow the herds, milking has stopped,
cars and ‘radiotelephony’ are used in seasonal moves etc. All this will result in a deep
social change within the kinship ties in the siida system and in moral dissolution in
the form of an increase in reindeer theft. The change is implied to be unwished for,
but stagnation, or a return to simpler ways, is not an option according to Gjessing:
He writes enthusiastically about state-led modernization efforts in education, rein-
deer-herding and handicrafts (Gjessing 1954). The space to (enact) Sáminess appears
nonexistent, and all the choices available to the Sámi appear harmful.
Evolutionist thinking is evident in the search for ‘superior’ positions in the rela-
tions between clearly demarcated ethnic groups. In Gjessing’s study of the Sea
Sámi and other groups residing in Laksefjord, the early disintegration of the siida
administration – in favour of Danish administrative structures – is followed by an
analysis of the Russian Pomor trade, which was more benefcial than trade with
merchants in Bergen. The latter was preferred by the Norwegian fshermen (in grow-
ing debt) while Pomor trade created a niche of fexibility, lucrativeness and partial
Sámi superiority. This was quite a typical way of dealing with the hierarchies and
methodologies of evolutionist thinking at that time: They had not yet been gotten
rid of, but the Indigenous folks were placed higher within them. Efforts to study
in earnest Indigenous rationales as contextual and value-free are of a later date.
Gjessing ends his analysis of the Sea Sámi by representing them as people left behind
and not equipped to follow technological and economic developments, encounter-
ing a foreign bureaucratic system as well as attacks on every aspect of their cul-
ture. They were striving to become acknowledged as Norwegians, something which
the near-racist Norwegian population thought had been achieved by only a very
few. Technical-mechanical developments form a strong hierarchizing parameter for
Gjessing, something that he perceived as stunting the Sea Sámi’s horizons of expecta-
tion and which added to the aspects of symbolic violence in the discourse launched
in his text (Gjessing 1954).
In his discussion of the reindeer Sámi of Karasjok and Kautokeino, Gjessing credits
traditional means of living with creating a cultural safe zone against Norwegianization
policies and in relation to the local Norwegians. Gjessing is surprised by how the
Sámi have managed to sustain their socio-economic system, despite the commer-
cialization of the reindeer meat markets, which to him signifes disintegration. The
siida, for Gjessing, is weak: It had not been necessary for Scandinavians entering the
Sámi domicile to break down the political structure (siida). This same weakness has
resulted in a weak economic and political consciousness, ‘foreign’ to the Sámi, which
has led to diffculties in integrating into the new economic system and to the una-
voidable ‘further disintegration’ of the traditional society. One possible solution, if
wisely conducted, might be the introduction by the government of cooperative forms
of herding, which had long presented a feasible solution in Finland (Gjessing 1954).
In addition to the pre-modern ways of life and connected ideologies and ideas, the
Sámi, according to Gjessing, are locked in a pre-political trap that stops them from
acting on the threat and/or adapting to it. Modernization equals disintegration, but
non-change is impossible, and it is the government which has to present a solution.
The Sámi are no longer disappearing, but there are structural weaknesses in their
psychological set-up, one that secures the superiority of the state and which the Sámi
are failing to engage.

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 — Jukka Nyyssönen —

Finnish historiography was actively re-envisioned after the war, due to the need to ban-
ish demonizing animosity towards ‘our new friend’ the Soviet Union, as well as visionary,
expansionist nationalism. Scientifc, non-visionary, non-zealous, neutral empiricism became
the rule (Ahtiainen et al. 1996; Haapala and Markkola 2017). Professor of ethnology/cul-
tural history at the Åbo Akademi Helmer Tegengren’s study of the ‘Forest Lapps’ and of the
settlement of the Kemi Lappmark is a historical study of colonization and cultural contact,
with numerous ethnological comparisons (Storå 1993). The Sámi are the ones ‘escaping’
as the Finnish settle and conquer the Lappmarks. Nature structures the Kemi Lappmark:
Tegengren agrees with diffusionist Wiklund that wild reindeer wanderings were the origin
of the hunting society, but the form of the society is also credited to the Sámi themselves, not
to outside folks (Tegengren 1952).
The approach is ‘source-positivistic,’ building on empirical material from sources;
the discussion as to whether the Sámi were ‘poor’ follows information from tax
sources. The reason for Sámi poverty is no longer racial, but due to the great demand
for fur in Novgorod/Russia and in Sweden and consequent over-hunting (Tegengren
1952). Even though Tegengren echoes the old discourses and reproduces the old
hierarchies and discourses of the lower, even primitive, Sámi, he also has the capac-
ity to describe the historical and discursive landscape in a way that reveals Sámi
socio-economic and cultural potency – more so than Johnsen, but in a way in which
Tanner had already proved himself capable.
Of the themes introduced to Finnish research in the greatest depth by Tanner, the
societal organization of the Sámi is discussed and discovered in the early organiza-
tion of small hunting groups. Swedish sources produced by Crown offcials guide
Tegengren’s pen, to the same extent but with a different bias to that of Johnsen.
The Swedish Crown ‘protected’ the Sámi from overt taxation and misdeeds on the
part of Crown offcials, in order to keep the Sámi loyal and the Swedish Lappmarks
populated. But even if the Lappmarks were not yet threatened by settlement of ‘for-
eign folk elements,’ the grim destiny of the Lappmarks had already been sown in the
16th century: Contact with (stronger) neighbouring powers entailed the overuse of
resources and the beginning of a two-century-long slide towards the fulflment of
the narrative set out in the title of this book. The incapacity of the Sámi to turn to
other means of living, which were ‘unknown’ to them, also contributed to this des-
tiny. Another effect of Tegengren’s use of Crown sources is a representation of the
Sámi as targets of taxation and the use of Crown imagery and Crown parameters.
This involved perceiving and representing the Sámi as sociocultural anomalies – e.g.
viewing the mobility of the Lapp villages as undesirable, as it threatened the borders
of the Swedish Kingdom and the superiority of the Crown (Tegengren 1952).
As settlement began in the 17th century, the Sámi were forcibly displaced by more
numerous and more powerful Finnish settlers. The crucial element in the narrative is
now formed: The ‘uneven struggle’ between ‘higher’ Finnish settlers and the Sámi led
to the disappearance of the original hunting and fshing culture. The slash-and-burn
economy and consequent evolution towards sedentary forms of agriculture were deci-
sive blows. Tegengren writes decidedly against the parallel theory5 as being an unfortu-
nate choice that left the Sámi with two choices – to retire to the north or to change their
means of livelihood and assimilate with the Finns. An emerging vicious circle accelerated
the process: Since the wilderness was now unused, it led to new waves of settlement.
Complaints sent by the Sámi to Crown offcials about the Finnish intrusion resulted in a
rather weak agency, constructed by means of protection on the part of the offcials; the
270
 — Changing states, changing Sámi? —

Sámi were ‘not totally defenceless.’ This protection was rendered futile by a simultane-
ous policy of advocating settlement, by its straightforward character (no recompense
was ever intended to be payable to the Sámi for the fshing waters or land) and by the
beginnings of the clerical integration of the Lappmarks. The blame for this is appor-
tioned to the Crown’s actions and settler choices of forms of subsistence (Tegengren
1952), and no longer solely to the ‘weakness’ or poor (racial) disposition of the Sámi.
The change of livelihood to Finnish sedentary cattle farming resulted in ‘misery,’
‘rupture’ and a ‘dissolution’ of the old winter village and the wandering way of
life. There are weak echoes of the old paradigm in Tegengren’s dramatic rhetoric,
also in the chapter discussing cultural encounter and cultural change, in which the
Sámi showed a lesser ‘ability to adapt.’ At times, Tegengren manages not to use dif-
fusionist terminology in describing the multidirectional process of folks adopting
numerous subsistence sources. The exchange resulted in multiple-source forms of
subsistence, with tame reindeer as an element of Finnish and Sámi households alike.
Evolutionist terminology returns to the book as Tegengren cites old literature about
the Sámi reindeer herders ‘sinking into’ the status of reindeer hands and poverty.
The same happens in a discussion about how the hunters who fnd themselves in the
‘lower cultural stratum’ have no pressing need to take on the herding of tame ani-
mals if resources are abundant and in a passage dealing with the possible evolution
of herding towards semi- and full nomadism (Tegengren 1952).
The historical evidence presented is ruthless and does not justify any other narra-
tive. The age-old hierarchy reproduced in the narrative – that of the weaker, lower and
primitive Sámi – is left intact in the book. In one sense, the approach has changed: The
book is void of the colourful lists and metaphors of folk characteristics used to hier-
archize folks. This was also the case concerning the Sámi, the Russians, the Karelians,
the Swedes and the Finns, none of whom Tegengren harnessed to such identity-politi-
cal usage as Tanner did. Tegengren’s work is thus a good example of Finnish postwar
non-nationalist historical inquiry, written under a new political constellation after the
lost war. Diffusionist reasoning occupies the major portion of the book, however:
Tegengren credits the rationalization of herding explicitly – with source evidence (a
1767 discussion in the court in Sodankylä on the organization of a roundup and tame
reindeer herding) – to the Finnish settlers, and he credits the milking of reindeer to the
Scandinavians. (Early on, Tegengren’s writing was infuenced by Austrian diffusionist
cultural history, which focused on global cultural dissemination and operated with
cultural spheres and cultural contact as their methodological starting points; see Storå
1993.) Tegengren places the milking economy higher than nomadic forms of herding
and ends up stating that the adaptation of the milking economy was key to the survival
of the Forest Sámi in Torne Lappmark and that not doing so was a fatal faw for the
Kemi Sámi, continually stranded in primitive conservatism and hunting (Tegengren
1952). In spite of this, his approach to the Crown/state is critical as Tegengren shows
an emerging tendency to write compassionately about the ‘vanishing’ or ‘death’ of
Sámi culture. This was well suited to the postwar Finnish political climate, construct-
ing a ‘good’ state by criticizing the old policies.

CONCLUSIONS
The evolution of tendencies in Sámi historical studies between the 1920s and the
early 1950s proceeded in contrary directions in different countries: In Finland,
271
 — Jukka Nyyssönen —

from critical to naturalized, with a critical undertone; in Norway, from natural-

ized to critical. Both the postwar researchers imagined a more democratic state:
Gjessing by criticizing Norwegianization, Tegengen in an effort to present a less
aggressive, compassionate approach to vanishing Sámi culture. The state could no
longer take the place of the ‘claimant,’ as Norway did for Johnsen. The rupture in
Finnish national sciences meant that the expanding, arrogant state vanished, includ-
ing from Tegengren’s book; this solved the problem of personal dissonance with
which Tanner had had to struggle. The dissonance emerges in the text by Gjessing,
in which Norway is demonized as a state, but presented simultaneously as a source
of the technical-modern, thus communicating the handicapped lower position of
the Sámi. The problem of modernity has troubled Sámi research since then. Modern
traits can be an initial source of uncertainty and confusion for researchers; they lure,
at worst, a normative tone into research reports. The modern can be a source of
romanticizing constructions of Sámi identities along the pre-modern-modern binary
or result in the Sámi being blamed for fraud when the researcher’s expectations of
encountering a ‘nature folk’ are not fulflled. The modern pluralization of Sámi soci-
ety through education (a simultaneous source of assimilation) and ethnopolitics, or
the lack of a unifed political front, have been other matters demanding explanation.
The pre-critical frame, affecting the way in which the Sámi past and future were
represented, is still ‘the state’ in all of the texts: in Tanner’s, state intrusion prevailed
yet was handicapping and ‘wrong’; in Johnsen’s, it was predetermined; in Gjessing’s,
state intrusion revealed the lesser political status of the Sámi; and in Tegengren’s, it
assimilated them. This frame left the naturalized potency of the state unquestioned.
The subject positions of the Sámi changed only slightly. Their subject position as the
weakest non-state actor remained, but what changed more dramatically was the source
of the ‘weakness’: The evolutionary frame had weakened, and any perceived innate
characteristics of the Sámi did not suffce as the sole explanation. The state-pronounced
formalist frame strengthened, revealing the unfortunate state policies and restricting
Sámi political potency. This new, more rightful frame was rights generating, but it also
restricted the kinds of rights the Sámi could legitimately claim; the claims could not go
beyond those granted by citizenship of the current state in which they lived.
The way of explaining the condition of the Sámi changed as well: In the last phase
of Finnish Lappology, or at the beginning of Finnish historiography on the Sámi, the
Sámi are still ‘dying.’ For Tegengren, blaming the majority and Crown action for
the poor conditions was a way of showing his leaning towards the postwar political
climate. ‘Lapp blood’ in the ‘blending of blood-types’ was no longer a hierarchizing
factor but a matter of ‘ethnic individuality’ in a process of change, due to, for exam-
ple, intermarriage (Tegengren 1952). These are the frst signs of a paradigm change
in the researcher’s discursive and methodological toolkit, as well as in research poli-
tics, which materialized fully in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Gjessing’s case, the passages most tainted by the old paradigm are those build-
ing on old Lappological studies. The Lappological studies were not yet targeted for
commentary (let alone deconstruction), and the authors were in most cases still alive,
in the midst of a paradigm change of their own, the ‘sins’ still fresh in the memory,
too close in history to be opened to true critical scrutiny. This may be the way that
transnational scholarly networks were performative at the time – they were bringing
forth old knowledge for contemporary use and source-critical scrutiny while their

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research political problematizing was not yet topical. The Lappological school of
scholars, which was beginning its paradigmatic turn into Sámi studies, was not yet
ready for this, but a distance was clearly manifested by using direct quotations and
crediting the knowledge directly to the pre-war scholars. This comes close to being a
case in which the economy of scholarly credibility fows along channels of familiarity,
i.e. the practitioners of independent core groups are likely to know one another well,
and the pragmatic and moral consequences of distrust and scepticism are likely to be
high (Shapin 2010).
The traditional Lappological method of citing the old texts doubled the majority
voice in the books, further amplifed by the choice of an empirical or ‘source posi-
tivist’ approach, in which the voice of the central authorities would dictate in part
the progress of history. In Finland, Tegengren’s book is more coherent than that of
Tanner in its guiding vision of the Sámi as weaker, but this in itself is a residue of the
old paradigm. Most of the time, Tegengren presents ‘factual’ knowledge about the
socio-economic organization of the Sámi, fltered through historical source criticism
and a racializing grid, and does not comment on how correct or suitable/appropriate
they are regarding the Sámi, much as Tanner did. However, this still results in a near-
total absence of Sámi voices. The function of the Sámi claims of Crown protection
in Johnsen and Tegengren show a slight change, from a proof of the benevolence
of the Norwegian system of governance (Johnsen) to a proof of Sámi weakness
(Tegengren). This kind of straightforward methodology concerning the Sámi voices
in the sources remained dominant well into the 1980s (Nyyssönen 2019); since then,
the research feld has become methodologically more attentive to the Sámi voices in
the sources and their involvement as actors in their own history (Lakomäki et al.
2020; see also Alakorva et al.; and Lehtola in this volume).
This comparison shows that the rupture-like change in the ideological context
had different consequences in different research traditions. In Finland, the rupture
had a muting effect, and the scholars avoided openly apologetic research. In Norway,
the tone was more openly revisionist and political, intended to turn the state from
celebrating the liberation of the nation to considering the remaining faws in its
democracy. The Norwegian scholarly discourse resulted in an earlier and broader
front in trying to change the Sámi policies (Andresen 2016). Both of these shifts were
intended in the frst instance to construct a ‘better,’ more benign state, which may be
taken as further proof of the dominant frame. The change concerning the Sámi was
undone; their emancipation into having a full voice in research was still hindered by
many residual pre-war discourses.

NOTES
1 Lappmark was an administrative unit for taxation, defned by the Swedish Crown.
Lappmark was divided into villages, or siidas. Rasmussen (2016, 17–19).
2 The war began as a war of independence, a campaign to drive the remaining Russian forces
from Finland, waged by patriotic right-wing “White” troops. Following a “Red” coup in
southern Finland, the confict escalated into a war between White troops and left-wing
Reds. Following the Red defeat, terror campaigns on both sides and a post-war campaign
of punishments and incarceration, the patriotic right-wing intelligentsia, to which the his-
torians belonged, had to abandon their conviction that the working classes would have

273
 — Jukka Nyyssönen —

shared their patriotic vision of the state and nation as unifying entities (Ahtiainen et al.
1996).
3 Diffusionist thinking, in its hierarchical form, credits the capability of creating culture
only to higher cultures while the lower cultures are deemed capable only of development
through a top-down diffusion of cultural loans (https://tieteentermipankki.f).
4 The land of the Sámi in Norwegian.
5 The theory presented by Governor Graan was intended to promote the settlement of the
Swedes and Finns in the Lappmarks. According to theory, Sámi reindeer herding and sed-
entary land use could exist side by side. Since this theory was based on examples from Ume
Lappmark, with different agricultural forms of subsistence, the policy failed, due to the
juxtaposition with a slash-and-burn economy (Tegengren 1952, 75–87).

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 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T H E SÁ M I F L AG ( S )
From a revolutionary sign to an institutional
symbol


Saara Alakorva

INTRODUCTION 1
The Sámi, like many other Indigenous nations, have their own fag. The Sámi fag is
vertically divided into two dominant colour segments: blue (on the right) and red (on
the left), and between them, there is a narrow green-and-yellow vertical stripe. The
colours are bound by a circle, one half of which is blue and the other red.2 The colours
echo the colours of gákti, Sámi traditional dress (about the gákti, see Magga, S.-M.
in this volume). According to Astrid Båhl, the designer of the fag, the forms bind the
fag to Sámi mythology; the circle represents the sun and the moon as depicted on
the Sámi drum (The Saami Conference 1986). However, several other interpretations
exist as to what the fag represents and what its colours epitomize, and the various
Sámi organizations have not sought to control or unify the meanings assigned to it.
By virtue of its colour scheme, it has been easy to associate the fag with Sáminess
ever since its adoption in 1986, and the fag has become a widely recognized symbol
of Sáminess, both in offcial and unoffcial contexts. The Sámi fag is widely dis-
played on the 12 offcial fag-fying days,3 as well as during efforts calling for Sámi
rights. Miniature fag accessories are used as a decoration on clothing and cars, and
the fag points to services in Sámi language. It represents one Indigenous People liv-
ing across the borders of four nation states, and its use has subsequently become an
established practice recognized by the Sámi institutions as well as national actors. In
Norway, the Sámi fag has even been acknowledged by national legislation, which
stipulates when the state institutions have to fy the Sámi fag (see Sametinget 2021).
The Sámi fag has also gained signifcance among the Sámi in Russia, although,
for political power reasons, their opportunity to take part in Nordic Sámi coop-
eration was still limited at the time the decision to adopt the fag was made in the
Nordic Saami Council (Berg-Nordlie 2017, 444–445). The Sámi fag was adopted
by the 13th Sámi Conference held in Åre in 1986. The Nordic Saami Council and

276 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-20

 — The Sámi flag(s) —

the Sámi Conference4 offered the frst regular forum for Sámi and their supporters to
engage in transborder cooperation in order to develop shared political strategies to
improve the position of the Sámi and to strengthen their collective political agency.
The word ‘Nordic’ was dropped from the offcial name of the Saami Council only
when the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula were able to join in the work of the Council in
1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, the authority to decide on the fag, as well the offcial fag-fying days, shifted
from the joint Sámi civic organization and was entrusted to the Sámi Parliamentary
Council (Sámi parlamentáralaš ráđđi) at the beginning of this millennium. The Sámi
Parliamentary Council is a joint body of the three parliamentarily elected Nordic
Sámi Parliaments (see Mörkenstam et al. in this volume), in which the Kola Sámi have
observer status since they don’t have a parliamentarily elected body of their own.
Before the offcial Sámi fag was adopted, the frst, unoffcial fag – referred to
as the early fag – had been fown since the late 1970s, notably during the Alta
controversy and other efforts in the spirit of the ČSV movement – a movement that
emerged in the 1970s and was particularly associated with the political activism of
the Sámi youth. The early fag designed by the artist – and then an active member of
the ČSV movement – Synnøve Persen lacks the green vertical stripe and the red-and-
blue circle found on the offcial fag.
In this chapter, I set out to guorastit – to trace – the history of the Sámi fag or, rather,
fags. Guorastit means tracing in the North Sámi language. When, for example, a rein-
deer herder follows the traces of an animal, the traces may disappear from time to time,
depending on the terrain or weather. Searching within a larger spectrum, traces can be
found again, if the weather is suitable and the herder knows where to look according
to their knowledge about nature. This has been the case when researching the archive
materials of the Nordic Saami Council, which are not systematically organized. This
material has guided me to new sources – other archives, written materials and records
of a public debate, the earliest of which date back to the 1970s.
I examine the reasons for adopting the offcial Sámi fag and track down the
events leading to it. Research to date has not looked into the process by which the
offcial fag was chosen nor has it examined the role of the early fag in this devel-
opment. Although the early fag and the offcial fag have separate histories, we can
fnd parallels between the process by which the Sámi fag evolved from a revolu-
tionary sign in the spirit of ČSV to an offcial symbol of the people and the process
by which the Sámi movement became institutionalized and its young radicals the
power-wielding establishment. The histories of the fags refect the institutionaliza-
tion of the Sámi movement.

ANTICOLONIAL ETHOS AND DREAMS OF A SÁMI FLAG

Brother, sister! The Sámi are lacking a fag.
We can write our name, and we can write the letters ČSV.
But we still have to learn to draw our fag.
Let us not hide behind foreign fags
Let us give glory to the colours of the Sámi homeland.
And the world will fnally look upon us.5
(Nils Viktor Aslaksen 1976)

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 — Saara Alakorva —

This verse is from the poem ‘Leavga’ (‘The Flag’) by Nils Viktor Aslaksen (later
Holmberg, 1943–2020) published in 1976 (Aslaksen 1976). The poem draws atten-
tion to the fact that the Sámi have no fag of their own and encourages the Sámi
people to come out of hiding behind foreign fags and honour the colours of the
Sámi homeland. Attached to the poem is a drawing by Aslaksen. The picture depicts
a Sámi boy in front of the Norwegian fag, raising his hands to meet a cannon and a
soldier. The boy is wearing a Sámi hat with the letters ČSV. As the verse of the poem
tells us, the Sámi can already write their name – they know who they are – but they
should still learn to draw the Sámi fag so that the rest of the world will know about
the Sámi people.
The combination of the drawing and the poem can be interpreted as a criticism
of the situation into which the Sámi had been forced – into the middle of the bat-
tlefeld of the great powers in World War II. Because of the Cold War, the presence of
the great powers and tension between them remained in the Sámi region. Aslaksen’s
poem was published among other texts in Sámi language in the Čállagat series, the
purpose of which was to encourage the Sámi to write in the Sámi language (see Turi
et al.). In the Čállagat publication, many meanings were also proposed to the ČSV
as a slogan of Sámi youth. The most common interpretation is Čájet Sámi Vuoiŋŋa
(‘Show the Sámi spirit!’).6 At that time, the Sámi languages were used very little as
written languages and not even North Sámi – the Sámi language with the largest
number of speakers – had a uniform orthography (on the Sámi languages, see Huss
and Lindgren in this volume).
Aslaksen’s original poem conveys the idea of ‘fag’ by using two different con-
cepts: fágga, which derives directly from the Norwegian word fagg, and leavga,
which later became the established term for ‘fag’ in the North Sámi language. At
the time the decision to adopt an offcial Sámi fag was made in 1986, the concept
of ‘leavga’ was still largely alien to the native speakers of the Sámi language, as the
following quotation from the words of the schoolteacher and Sámi politician Pekka
Lukkari shows:

When I heard you say ‘leavga,’ what came to my mind was that in our language
[eastern dialect of Northern Sámi] it means ‘scent,’ not smell but scent. . . . Why
not use the word ‘fagga’ or ‘lágga’? . . . It is not that I have something against it
[the word ‘leavga’]. But if someone wants to laugh at us, they will of course say
‘You are walking along, carrying the scent of Sámi with you’ (‘don jođát ja dus
lea fárus sámi leavga’).
(The Saami Conference 1986)

Pekka Lukkari (1918–2006) belonged to the older generation of Sámi and, in the
context of the Sámi society of that time, had grounds for concern that the Sámi
might be laughed at, both within and outside their own society (about the ‘dirty
Sámi’ stereotype, see Herranen-Tabibi in this volume). Sámi youth of the 1960s and
1970s started to fght against these stereotypes and refused to be ashamed of their
Sáminess. The Sámi began demanding that they be seen and treated as equals (see
e.g. Sara 1983). Ole Henrik Magga (born in 1947) (2006), a notable Sámi politician,

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has described his engagement in ČSV as follows: ‘I was one of the ones who tried to
change the centuries of oppression the Sámi had endured.’
Parallels can be drawn between the efforts made by the younger Sámi gen-
eration and the political movement in the spirit of decolonization that unfolded
across the world in the 1960s and 1970s. The ways in which the Sámi describe
their motivation for political engagement echo the ideas of the psychology of the
colonized put forward by Franz Fanon in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks.
In his text, Fanon (1952) lays bare the structures and power relations by which the
colonized were constituted as ‘inferior’ and thus led to believe that they should feel
shame for their existence. This, in turn, resulted in the colonized making efforts
to hide their true identity and to imitate those in power, e.g. the way they behave,
dress or speak.
Members of the ČSV movement refused to be ashamed about the Sámi culture
and hide their identity; on the contrary, they encouraged to strengthen the Sáminess
and bring it visible. At the same time, ČSV challenged the traditional notion of
Sáminess (on the lappologist image of the Sámi, see Aikio in this volume) and
offered a new way of expressing and strengthening the Sámi identity. This was one
that no longer rested only on the traditional characteristics and symbols of the peo-
ple or the way of life associated with the traditional livelihoods (Karlstad 2013).
Sámi society was undergoing a transformation, and the key question had become
how Sámi could maintain Sámi identity in the modern world. According to some
interpretations, one of the objectives of the activities undertaken in the spirit of
ČSV has been to establish and understand the Sámi as a modern people (Karlstad
2013). The fact that the idea of adopting a Sámi fag was frst introduced in the
spirit of ČSV supports this view.
ČSV got involved in and gained strength from the movement that arose
to protest the damming of the Alta River (see Nykänen in this volume). This
action projected an image of a well-organized crowd that was there to defend
Sámi rights and attracted young people to join ( Karlstad 2013 ). Hansen (2014 )
has analyzed the purpose of the Máze Group – an artist collective which also
figures as one of the key actors within ČSV. The Máze Group also took an
active role in the protests against the damming of the Alta River. In 1978 the
artist collective decided to settle in the Sámi village Máze, which – according
to the original, more extensive plan – was doomed to be inundated by the
water reserve of the Alta Dam.
According to Hansen (2014), the ongoing revitalization of Sámi culture of that
time needed visual representations, and the Máze Group responded to this need by
producing several LP and book cover designs as well as posters. In the exhibition
catalogue for the artist collective’s 1979 circulating exhibition, Ailo Gaup describes
the principles underlying the group’s work as follows:

Every people has the right to its own visual art just as it has the right to
its own language and culture. This is the right to self-determination in the
broadest sense. In this effort, visual art contributes to a process where

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we gradually regain our dignity and the pride we feel in belonging to an

indigenous people.
(Gaup 1979; see also Hansen 2014)

One of the nine artists7 of the Máze artist collective was Synnøve Persen (born in
1950) from the village of Beavgohpi, by the Porsanger fjord. Back in 1977, during
her studies at the Oslo Art Academy, Persen created an artistic rendition of a Sámi
fag. She brought the fag with her to Sápmi, and it gained prominence, particularly
during the demonstrations against the damming of the Alta River.
However, Persen’s proposal may not have been the frst artistic rendition of a
Sámi fag. In addition to Persen and Aslaksen, the idea of a Sámi fag had been
embraced by one of the best-known and most infuential Sámi artists, Nils-Aslak
Valkeapää (1943–2001), also known by the name Áillohaš. The source of this
information is Sámi artist and member of the Máze artist collective Hans-Ragnar
Mathisen (born in 1945), known also by his artist name Keviselie. According to
Mathisen (2017a), in 1967 Nils-Aslak Valkeapää had sent a picture of his design
for a Sámi fag to Odd Mathis Hætta, the editor in chief of the Sámi-language
magazine Ságat. The design borrowed elements from the red fag of the Soviet
Union with its hammer and sickle, but in place of the hammer and sickle, it had
reindeer antlers and a Sámi knife. Although, at least in Mathisen’s (ibid) under-
standing, Hætta and Valkeapää thought alike in many areas, Hætta nevertheless
considered the fag design far too radical to be published in the magazine. It is
hard to determine what motivated Valkeapää to produce such a design. He did
not actively take part in party politics, but he probably supported more left-
leaning ideas (see Valtonen and Valkeapää 2017, 45). The generally leftist atmos-
phere at the time undoubtedly infuenced his thinking.
Mathisen’s (2017b) also notes that he himself sketched designs for a Sámi fag
and sent them to Ságat in 1970. His designs were inspired by the existing fags of the
Nordic countries. One fag had a dark green background with a red cross on top of
an orange cross. Mathisen proposed to Ságat that it could organize a design com-
petition for a Sámi fag and invite entries from not only Norway but also Sweden,
Finland and Russia. At the same time, he wanted to send in his own proposals in
advance to ensure that he would not end up being last. However, Mathisen did not
get his designs published in the magazine, and the magazine did not proceed with the
idea of organizing a fag design competition either (ibid).
According to Mathisen (2017a, 2017b), his interest in the fag issue arose in the
1960s, in particular in response to the festivities for Norway’s National Day, celebrated
on 17 May, when the Norwegian fag is fown in festive parades. Mathisen (2017a)
states: ‘[W]hen I saw in the parade on this day Sámi children waving Norwegian fags,
my heart started beating not of pride but of anger.’ Mathisen (ibid) also refers to other
responses sparked in the context of the Norwegian National Day – for example, an
occasion when he had seen TV footage showing a Sámi child in the Sámi dress point-
ing the Norwegian fag towards the ground and the case of a Sámi man of the village
of Buolmát who had hoisted used long underpants up on a fagpole on the Norwegian
National Day. Mathisen (2017b) also practiced silent resistance himself when he was
designing a Sámi calendar for the year 1974: He added an image of a blank fag next to
the Norwegian fag in the space for 17 May – the Norwegian National Day.

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THE PROVOCATIVE EARLY SÁMI FLAG

Although the Sámi fag designed by Synnøve Persen may not be the only or even the
frst proposal for a fag drafted in the spirit of ČSV, her design is nevertheless the
only one that can be referred to as a Sámi fag or an early Sámi fag. This is due to
the symbolic position to which the early fag had been elevated prior to the adop-
tion of the offcial Sámi fag. Also, it is worth noting that a photograph taken at
the XI Saami Conference in 1980 shows that the early fag has been used by Sámi
political institutions, too. In the photograph, the fag can be found in the conference
room, behind the lectern, on the wall next to a fag portraying the logo of the Saami
Council (Saami Council’s Archive).
In his text entitled Leavgga fápmu/The Power of the Flag, Ánde Somby (2017) has
illuminated the context in which Synnøve Persen’s fag design emerged and listed fac-
tors that contributed to the design process. Somby’s text is featured in the exhibition
catalogue of Persen’s art exhibition Who’s Afraid? Gii ballá? which had its opening
in 2017. The text can be interpreted as a response to Hans Ragnar Mathisen, who
has problematized giving the authorship of the fag design to Persen because a simi-
lar design had appeared on several book covers and posters before Persen’s artwork
was published (see Mathisen 2017b). Somby notes that before Persen’s fag design,
there was only Nils Viktor Aslaksen’s poem and goes on to state:

The pattern itself wasn’t original. How could it be? Flags do not usually start as
artworks. In the case of the Sámi fag, the inspirations were there for all to see.
It could be a magnifed end of the sleeve of the gáktis of Buolbmát and Várjjat.
It could be the design used in different pulpits at the time. The design was even
used in some banners to make political statements. But it was Synnøve’s artistic
act that fag became a fag.
(Somby 2017)

Thus, it is fairly safe to say that the design and colour scheme of the fag have gen-
erally been infuenced by the decorations on the gákti – elements that were also
widely used and recognized as the cultural visual idiom of the Sámi movement.
The ‘design used in different pulpits’ that Somby mentions presumably refers to the
decorative cloth on the lectern of the Norwegian Sámi Association (Norske Samers
Riksforbund, NSR), which is still used occasionally by the organization at its meet-
ings. However, according to Somby, ‘it was through Synnøve’s artistic act that the
fag became a fag’ (ibid).
Persen herself has said she got the idea for the fag on a study trip to the Faroe
Islands, which also have a colonial history. The Islands had their own fag back in
the early half of the 1900s. On her way back, Persen looked out the plane’s window
at the lands of Scandinavia and thought that her native country had no colours
(Kuhn 2020, 50–51). As Persen (2017) says, ‘[W]hen you put forward a proposal for
a Sámi fag, you have to have a strong inner conviction that you are doing something
that is right and that absolutely has to be done.’
Persen (2017) goes back to the colour world of the Sámi fag in the works dis-
played in her exhibition Who’s Afraid? Gii ballá? and provides some insights into
the atmosphere in which she frst created the Sámi fag as a piece of art. As a result of

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Norway’s policy to assimilate the Sámi, the older generation of Sámi had lived with
shame. Persen was a member of the new generation that had received an ‘equal right’
to a Norwegian education in the Norwegian language and, as a consequence, had
been alienated from Sámi culture in school dormitories and classrooms (about the
dormitory schools, see Hansen in this volume). Yet that generation’s native language
was still Sámi, and they were accustomed to using Sámi in a variety of contexts of
daily life. To Persen, meeting with other Sámi and Sámi-speaking students in the
Oslo Sámi association was a signifcant empowering factor.
According to Somby (2017), Persen was not alone in her experiences. Rather, she
was part of the movement of Sámi youth aiming to ‘bring together what was left, to
try to heal and revitalise it, and to try to create a future for the Sámi presence.’ Persen
has stated to Ávvir magazine (Helander 2017) that when she put forward her fag
design in 1977, she was happily unaware of the personal price she would have to
pay. This is how Persen describes the suspicions targeted at her regarding her alleged
involvement as a leader in an extremist movement in the North Calotte:

But then Sápmi got a [fag] and I was no longer seen as an artist but as a ter-
rorist. This was the reason that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST)
followed me. The fag. Who knows what they were thinking? Their records say I
was involved in leading an extremist movement in the North Calotte.
(Helander 2017)

The early fag designed by Persen was on display for the frst time in 1978 in Stockholm
in an artist collective’s exhibition Sámi Ál´bmut (Grini 2017). Given the provocative
content of the works displayed, the exhibition sparked public debate. In a report for
Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s major newspaper, Brita Svenlund (1977) wrote that the
Sámi were demanding a territory of their own. According to Svenlund, at the opening
of the exhibition at the House of Culture in Stockholm, Per Mikael Utsi, a depart-
ment head in the Sámi Institute, wanted to establish a territory where nothing could
be done that would undermine Sámi interests: ‘The area has to be clearly defned
as the Sámi area. It must be governed with Sámi interests in mind but in collabora-
tion with other nationalities and ethnic groups.’ Anyone mentioning the idea of an
autonomous Sámi area or otherwise displaying interest in strengthening Sámi rights
was labeled extremist. This is clearly visible in an interview with Alf Isak Keskitalo,
the departmental head at the Sámi Institute, that appeared in Ságat magazine:

I am trying to understand why we are being called extremists. It must mean that
our status is that of a colony. Extremists is how ethnic groups in such a posi-
tion and fghting for freedom are referred to by those in power. They have no
real interest in putting forward the historically accurate point that others have
a right to be free. This is often almost subconscious – which might explain why
the white population of South Africa and Rhodesia, for example, can say what
they say without any pangs of conscience.
(Ságat 6/1977)

The arrival of the Sámi fag in Sápmi was met with a great deal of criticism, in
particular in Finnmark, northern Norway, and discourse in newspapers hinted at

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Persen’s alleged plans to found a separate state (see Karlstad 2013). Against this
backdrop, it is easy to understand what Who’s Afraid? – the title of Synnøve Persen’s
2017 art exhibition organized around the fag theme – refers to. The Sámi fag and
the ideas of an autonomous Sámi area that became associated with it, raised concern
among government leaders8 and also among Sámi.
At this point, when the idea of a Sámi fag had become concretized in a work of art
and received considerable attention, particularly in the media in northern Norway,
the Sámi association of South Varanger, Mádda Várjag Sámiid Searvi (1978), sent
a brief opinion to NSR: ‘NO to a Sámi fag’ (‘NEI til Samefagg’). The Sámi youth
association of Karasjok, Karášjåga Sámi Nuoraid Searvi (1978) reported that, in
principle, it supported the idea of a Sámi fag but considered other Sámi issues to
be of greater urgency. The association was also worried that the fag might do more
harm than good.
Synnøve Persen (2017) says she designed the fag so that ‘heads bent could be held
high again,’ but there were those who resisted, and some of the animosity against her
came from within Sámi ranks. In her opinion, there are still some Sámi who have not
gotten over the fag issue and thus still oppose her (Helander 2017). In an interview
with Kuhn (2020, 51), Persen notes:

I think I was seen as provoking confict. As if I was advocating a separate Sámi

state, with a possible civil war as a consequence. Even the relatives thought I
have gone too far. World War II had had a terrible impact on Finnmark, and
people were very afraid of that. For me, these fears were far-fetched, and I was
caught completely by surprise.

Eidheim (1997, 49) notes that, in the course of the Alta controversy, the Sámi move-
ment broke into two wings: a radical and a moderate one. ČSV can be seen as
representing the more radical wing, which Synnøve Persen (in Bjørklund 2000, 29)
describes as follows:

Our minds were freed from captivity. We wanted our lands back, our language,
our self-esteem, our culture and our property. We wanted them to return every-
thing that they have taken away from us for hundreds of years. A loosely organ-
ized movement, whose main message was ‘Show the Sámi spirit!’

The Sámi fag was a new, modern way to show the Sámi spirit, but connecting it to
the idea of an autonomous Sápmi was a highly sensitive issue politically. Sápmi was
an area split by the Iron Curtain; the Sámi area in Norway was NATO territory that
shared a border with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact it commanded. Sweden
and Finland were non-aligned countries, of which especially the latter found itself in
a very tense position politically between West and East.

THE ANTICOLONIAL ETHOS OF SÁMI INSTITUTIONS

The Sámi fag introduced through Sámi art cannot be severed from the processes
whereby the Sámi institutions have made political decisions about it. Efforts to
extend action across national borders could be clearly seen in how issues relating

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to national symbols appeared on the agendas of the Sámi institutions. However, the
frst national symbol to be put forward was not the Sámi fag, but a national day.
It had been proposed in 1976 by the Bergen Sámi Association (1976) to other Sámi
associations whose work spanned the four countries in which Sámi live. It is clear
from the proposal that broad support was sought for a national day so that it would
be a celebration embraced by all.9
The proposal was translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian. It
being translated into Russian is interesting given that the Sámi of the Kola Peninsula
have been described as not having participated in Nordic Sámi cooperation, includ-
ing the choosing of symbols (Eriksson 1997; Berg-Nordlie 2017). The fact that the
proposal was translated into Russian and most likely delivered to Sámi living behind
the Iron Curtain does not, of course, tell us whether Sámi in Russia were able to con-
tribute to the discussion on national symbols. It does indicate, however, that efforts
were made to maintain contact with them.
The issue of a Sámi fag appeared for the frst time on the agendas of Sámi insti-
tutions when Synnøve Persen sent a letter to the central organization of Sámi in
Norway stating that she had created a Sámi fag as part of her artistic work. Persen
(1977) expressed that it would be important that the proposal be accepted as the
fag of the Sámi but left this determination to the NSR (ibid). Hans-Ragnar Mathisen
(2017b) also reports that he wrote to the Saami Council and expressed the hope
that a fag would be chosen for the Sámi people through a design competition. In his
view, given the nature of the fag as a symbol of the people, such a perspective could
not be adequately represented by a single artist’s rendition, but rather, the choice
would require broader inclusion of the community.10
Archival records indicate, however, that it was Lars-Anders Baer (born in 1952),
a young Sámi politician from Sweden, who frst introduced the fag issue into the
agenda of the Saami Council in the Sámi conference held in 1978. The conference at
which Baer put forward his idea of choosing a Sámi fag was among the frst Sámi
conferences where the great majority of the participants were Sámi. Initially, the
majority of attendees were members of the mainstream society, known as sameven-
ner (supporters of the Sámi), who were interested in furthering the position of the
Sámi. In the course of the 1970s, the younger ČSV generation also started to become
involved in decision making.
The anticolonial ethos of the ČSV movement is clearly refected in Baer’s proposal
for a fag, in which he states that, as a Sámi nationalist, he considers the adoption of a
fag necessary. Baer explains that, to him, ‘Sámi nationalism’ means political thought
that positions the Sámi as free from the Western ways of thinking and power struc-
tures which have constituted the Sámi as inferior. In other words, Baer sees a need to
raise awareness and promote Sámi culture and politics, which have been suppressed
by the mainstream societies. Through their institutions, the dominant societies have
made efforts to get the Sámi to forget their identity and to act in accordance with the
models those societies have adopted (Baer 1979).
Baer saw the need to choose a fag and the need for Sámi nationalism as insepa-
rably linked to the goal of autonomy. The form self-determination might take can
be seen clearly in the proposal for the creation of an autonomous Sápmi. The Sámi

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and Sápmi were compared to other northern peoples, in particular the Indigenous
People of Greenland. Baer in fact states that the Sámi are the only people in the High
North who have not been recognized as a full-fedged people. One sign of this is that
the Sámi have been seeking membership in the Nordic Council for a long time, but,
so far, they have not been granted membership. In commenting on his fag proposal,
Baer (1979) notes that ‘a [Sámi] fag has it greatest importance as a national symbol
where external identity is concerned: it makes it easier for other groups and nation-
alities to recognize the Sámi as a people.’
Among the members of the Nordic Council, Denmark governed Kalaallit Nunaat
(Greenland) and the Faroe Islands and Finland the self-governing region of the Åland
Islands. For the Greenland Inuit, the issue of a fag became topical when Home Rule
was approved in 1979 (Home Rule Act of 1979). Interestingly, it was only in the mid-
1980s that the fags of Kalaallit Nunaat and Sápmi were chosen, and in both cases,
the selection was made through a design competition. The fag of Kalaallit Nunaat
was adopted a year before that of Sápmi, in 1985. At this stage, the idea of a Sámi fag
was no longer so closely linked to the demand for an autonomous Sámi region. Thus,
the adoption of the Sámi fag was not directly connected to the formal confrmation
of the people’s territorial status, unlike the fag of Kalaallit Nunaat (see Healy 1997).
The historian Harald Gustafsson (1997, 149) has noted that, by way of protest, the
Greenland Inuit and the Sámi left the cross out of their fags that appeared as a shared
symbol on the fags of the Nordic countries.

ADOPTION OF THE OFFICIAL SÁMI FLAG

After adoption of a Sámi fag was proposed, it took a full eight years before the
issue was on the table again at the Nordic Saami Council’s meeting. Not even the
Nordic Sámi Institute, a research-oriented institution given the responsibility to pre-
pare the matter in 1978, had begun working on the task (Nordic Saami Council
1985a, 1985b). It seems that the fag had not been made a high-priority issue in
Sámi politics.
When the fag issue was reintroduced, it was the Sámi youth who took it up, but
this time a new generation. The association of Sámi youth, Sámi Álbmoga Nuoraid
Searvi (1985), sent a letter to the Nordic Saami Council, demanding that the Council
resume the fag issue at the Sámi Conference in 1986. The wording of the letter
showed that the young people understood that society had not been ready for a Sámi
fag before, but now times were more favourable for advancing the issue. The youth
association stated, ‘[T]he time is now ripe for us Sámi to adopt a shared symbol for
ourselves, a fag, around which we can gather.’

We need a fag for ourselves to show the rest of the world that we are a people
in our own right, with a right to our own culture and language and right to
our lands and waters. We often travel abroad as representatives of our own
people, the Sámi – most recently felding our own national soccer team and at
the conference of indigenous youth in Canada. At such events an offcial fag
would be a good way to show who we are and we come from (cf. the Greenland

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fag); at the same time, it would put pressure on states to recognize our rights
as a people.
(Sámi Álbmoga Nuoraid Searvi 1985)

Although the next Sámi Conference was held a mere year after the youth associa-
tion sent their letter, no particular effort was made to advance the fag issue. Finally,
Alf Isak Keskitalo from the Nordic Sámi Institute reported that he had looked into
the forms and traditions of fags. He quoted The Book of Flags as well as The Flags
Through the Ages and Across the World, the latter of which describes the fags used
by ethnic and cultural minorities. It points out specifcally that the Sámi have no fag
of their own. In light of his investigations, Keskitalo saw no obstacle to the Sámi
adopting a fag of their own, and, in his view, the easiest way to proceed was to
organize a design competition in keeping with heraldic rules. Then again, he had his
doubts as to whether there was a need to adhere to existing heraldic rules. (Nordisk
Samisk Institut 1986).
The Nordic Saami Council established ‘the fag working group’ to deal with the
fag issue. Its appointed members were Máret Sara and Kaaren Kitti, both teachers
by profession, as well as artist Rose Marie Huuva (Nordic Saami Council 1986a).
This all-female group was authorized to hire a Sámi artist (dáiddačeahppi) if neces-
sary to design a Sámi fag (Nordic Saami Council 1986a). The working group did
not embrace this opportunity but rather decided to organize a design competition.
All Sámi were invited to participate, with the winner to receive 2000 Finnish marks
(approximately 633 EUR). The call for entries was publicized in newspapers and
magazines across the Nordic countries and on radio broadcasts as well (The Saami
Conference 1986). At that point, the fag working group did not fnd it particularly
important to adhere to heraldic rules, and this consideration was not mentioned in
the call for entries (Sámi fag working group 1986a).
The fag competition attracted 24 entrants, who together submitted 74 designs
for a Sámi fag (The Saami Conference 1986). The competition seems to have gener-
ated quite a bit of interest, given that it was organized in a relatively short time, and
the participants had just a couple of months during the summer to draft their pro-
posals. There were 5 entrants whose designs were not considered, as they were not
Sámi (The Saami Conference 1986, 100). The competition was intended for Sámi,
and it was considered essential that a Sámi fag be designed by a Sámi.
The 69 designs accepted were the work of a total of 19 designers. The artist
Hans Ragnar Mathisen, who had already shown interest in the fag issue back in
the 1970s, submitted 29 different designs. Rose-Marie Huuva, herself a member of
the fag working group, submitted 6 designs; the competition rules did not prevent
this – because there were no rules. The other entrants submitted one or two designs
each (Sámi fag working group 1986b).
As the conference was about to start in Åre, the fag working group did not have
a fnal proposal for a suitable Sámi fag. The group continued preparing a proposal
at the conference venue (Nordic Saami Council 1986b, 1986c). The working group
chose nine fags from the proposals, and these were placed on display at the confer-
ence venue without the names of the designers. The proposals are mentioned briefy,

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and almost all the designs are described as having the Sámi colours – red, yellow,
blue and green – or only three of these. It was not until this point that the work-
ing group proposed inclusion of a tenth submission, the fag designed by Synnøve
Persen, their justifcation being that her fag had already served as the unoffcial Sámi
fag for a long time (The Saami Conference 1986, 100). Persen had not taken part
in the competition, citing the conficts her fag had caused in the late 1970s (Somby
2017; Kuhn 2020).
Ultimately, the Sámi Conference made a choice between two proposals, Synnøve
Persen’s fag and one closely resembling it. The latter, an offcial entry, differed from
Persen’s design in having an additional narrow green vertical stripe and a red-and-
blue circle. The majority of the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish sections supported
the fag with the circle, which was then chosen as the offcial Sámi fag at the 1986
conference in Åre.
The designer of the winning entry turned out to be artist Astrid Båhl (born in
1959), whose fag design refected the Sámi’s relation to nature as the Sámi are a
people of nature (see Aslaksen 2009). Båhl has pointed out that the fag refects the
idea that ‘the Sun gives life to the Earth [land],’ and that is the inspiration for the
circle, which symbolizes the sun and the moon. The symbols of the sun and the moon
are also found on the Sámi drum, which Båhl says inspired her in designing the fag
(ibid.).
What makes the choice between the two entries interesting is that Synnøve
Persen’s fag would have met the heraldic criteria, which Alf Isak Keskitalo referred
to in his report for the Sámi Institute. According to heraldic rules, colours such as
red, blue and green may not touch one another on a fag; they have to be separated
by a metal colour using a yellow or white stripe, for example. By contrast, the win-
ning submission of Astrid Båhl did not adhere to these heraldic rules, as a green
stripe was added next to a yellow, or metal, stripe with the green then touching the
heraldic red. In addition, adding the red-and-blue ring to the fag resulted in all the
heraldic colours on the fag touching one another.
In fact, it seems that nonadherence to heraldic rules was actually appreciated in
the fag selection process, perhaps because it made the fag design appear slightly
rebellious. When the choice was being made, there was obviously discussion to
the effect that the fag was somehow exceptional. This is suggested in a comment
made by Ragnhild Nystad that it is precisely the green that makes the Sámi fag
perfect because it is hardly ever seen on fags (The Saami Conference 1986, 100).
According to one participant at the conference, the Scandinavian [Nordic] col-
ours red and blue come together in the fag; the green between these represents the
Sámi and the ring symbolizes cooperation among all the peoples (see Jilek-Aall
1989).
The colour green has also been given an interpretation that augments the sig-
nifcance of the early fag designed by Persen. Veikko Holmberg (2020), a longtime
employee of the Saami Council, thinks back the conversations in the Sámi conference
and states it was good to include green to the fag design, because various designs of
the traditional Sámi dress generally use the colour. In this view, the fag was designed
to be more representative of all Sámi and thus could not end up resembling the Sámi

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 — Saara Alakorva —

Figure 17.1 The offcial Sámi fag.

Source: Sámi Museum and Nature Centre Siida/Pasi Nivasalo

dress of a certain area or certain families. The offcial Sámi fag was raised during
the same Sámi conference in Åre. This frst prototype of the offcial Sámi fag was
sewn by the members of the working group in their hotel room, led by Rose-Marie
Huuva.

CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I have traced the steps leading to the offcial adoption of a Sámi fag.
The process of adopting the new fag also meant retiring the early fag that had been
displayed in the demonstrations in the 1970s. One could say that the adoption of the
new fag gave a new meaning to the Sámi fag, one less associated with the specifc
context of the Alta controversy and the related radicalism and political demands.
Perhaps in this way, it became possible for the Sámi fag to reach Sámi with a more
moderate political stance.
A look at the histories of the Sámi fags shows that, at some point, the idea of a
Sámi fag became closely linked to demands for an autonomous Sámi region. This
idea might sound even more radical today, but at the time, efforts were being made
to strengthen the position of the Sámi in the Nordic Council, to which the Saami
Council was seeking membership. The self-government arrangements that had been
worked out for other minorities and peripheries in the Nordic countries featured
as examples of what the Sámi could hope to achieve. The process of selecting the
offcial Sámi fag was underpinned by an anticolonial ethos, although by the time

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the decision to adopt the offcial fag was made, more insistent demands for a Sámi
autonomous territory had begun to fade.
This can be seen clearly in the minutes of meetings, which show that matters
progressed very slowly, and the member organizations did not participate actively in
the related discussions. At this stage, the focus of Sámi politics had shifted towards
the question of how Sámi self-determination could be implemented separately in
each individual Nordic country. In addition, many younger-generation Sámi who
had been active in the ČSV movement were now increasingly involved in the work
of the Sámi institutions.
Minutes from a 1986 meeting of the fag working group reveal criticism of a
special Sámi politics. The group had been asked to come up with a new symbol to
replace the rings of the logo of the Saami Council.11 The explanation for the request
was that the rings properly represented the nation-states – Norway, Sweden and
Finland – and the smaller ring the Sámi, binding the nations together (Sámi fag
working group 1986a). The fag working group took the view that changing the
symbol would require changing Sámi politics, which was not part of the working
group’s brief. As the group pointed out:

[A]s long as Sámi politics have not changed, as long as continue to divide our
people according to national borders, as long as the Saami Council is divided
into separate sections, as long as conference delegates are chosen according to
the country they represent, as long as every state is to have a separate Sámi
Parliament, the working group feels that the present [Saami Council’s] symbol
is perfectly acceptable.
(Sámi fag working group 1986a)

Another criticism can be seen in Ande Somby’s (2017) position on organizing a

design competition for a fag. He wonders whether some might consider the colours
of an early fag designed by Persen too radical. He goes on to point out that the deci-
sion to adopt an offcial fag left the Sámi with two fags – the one that few high in
the Sámi revolution and the offcial one. Who, then, might have considered the col-
ours on the early fag to be too radical? Somby may well be referring to Sámi whose
political demands were more moderate, a group who opposed the Sámi fag and the
ideas of an autonomous Sámi region associated with it or who considered such ideas
a threat to societal peace.
All the processes by which the Sámi fag was adopted took place during the Cold
War, and the revolutionary colours were most likely too radical for the nation-states
as well. The Sámi were living in an area spanning the Iron Curtain, and that’s why
the Sámi’s political demands for autonomy were particularly challenging, even
represented in artistic work. Thus, the process of selecting the Sámi fag must be
examined through the relationality between the Sámi and the mainstream societies
surrounding them, instead of viewing the process as an aspiration simply arising
from the Sámi society itself, as an effort to strengthen cultural unity among the Sámi,
or working towards a uniform Sámi culture.
The idea of autonomy can still be seen in the late 1980s in The Flag Bulletin, an
international specialist publication on fags, in which Loise Jilek-Aall (1989, 180)

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 — Saara Alakorva —

notes that the adoption of a Sámi fag ‘suggests that Sápmi may achieve autonomy
and that the Sámi, gentle but hardy people of the north, will not disappear as a
distinct entity but will continue to lend colour and beauty to the harsh region of
northernmost Europe.’ Yet, at the same time, the institutionalization of Sámi politics
continued within each state, which saw collective demands for an autonomous Sámi
region fade. However, the fag’s green element – which openly defes heraldic rules –
continues to hint at rebelliousness, and the circle reminds us of the Sámi nature rela-
tion and nature-based beliefs. Although adoption of the Sámi fag was not directly
connected with strengthening the territorial status of the Sámi, the offcial position
of the Sámi fag has become frmly established in the Sámi political organizations. It
thus maintains and sustains the image of a Sámi region spanning borders while at
the same time challenging the seemingly unshakable position of the national fags
in the area.

NOTES
1 I want to thank the Academy of Finland for funding this study. Thank you, Sámi
Allaskuvla (Sámi University of Applied Sciences) for granting me publishing support from
the Nordic Sámi Institute research program. Thank you also the University of Lapland for
granting me travel stipendium from Paavo Rahko fund. Saami Council’s offce (Karasjok,
Norway), Sámi Archive in Finland (Sajos, Inari) and Sámi Archive in Norway (Diehtosiida,
Koutokeino) I want to thank for good cooperation. Richard Foley and Sari Kokkola have
helped me with the English translation. Thank you, I appreciate your expertise!
2 Pantone color codes: Red Pantone 485 C; Green Pantone 356 C; Yellow Pantone 116 C;
Blue Pantone 286 C (The Saami Conference 1986).
3 See Sámi fag fying days Samediggi (2021).
4 The frst Sámi conference had been held in 1953, and 1956 saw the founding of the
Nordic Saami Council, whose highest decision-making body is the Sámi Conference, held
at three- or four-year intervals.
5 Sari Kokkola has translated the poem into English from the Finnish version, which has
been translated by Ailu Valle. Thank you, Sari, and Ailu! The poem is originally written
and published by the old ortography of North Sámi.
6 Other meanings given to the ČSV are, for example, Čállut Sámegiela Vuokkasit (“Write
easily in Sámi”) or Čallut Sámiid Varas (“write for the Sámi”) (5. Čállagat. Sámi
girjálav'digåd'di).
7 Artists of the Máze group: Åge Gaup, Trygve Lund Guttormsen, Josef Halse, Berit Marit
Hetta, Britta Marakatt, Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Rannveig Persen and Synnøve Persen.
8 However, the idea found support, too. One of the supporters was offcial Kalervo Siikala
(1977), who worked in the Finnish government.
9 A Sámi national day (6th of february) was not elected offcially until in 1992.
10 This letter I haven’t found in the archives of the Saami Council.
11 See the logo from the page of the Saami Council: www.saamicouncil.net/

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 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WHO ARE ‘WE, THE PEOPLE’?

A comparative analysis of the right to register
in the Sámi electoral roll in Finland, Norway
and Sweden


Ulf Mörkenstam, Per Selle and Sanna Valkonen

INTRODUCTION
The right to self-constitute and to demarcate the demos, i.e. the right to regulate
membership, is an important part of Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination (see
e.g. Imai and Gunn 2018; Nilsson 2019). In the 2007 UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), this right is expressed as a right for an
Indigenous people ‘to determine their own identity or membership in accordance
with their customs and traditions’ and ‘the right to determine the structures and
to select the membership of their institutions in accordance with their own pro-
cedures’ (Art. 33). This collective right is also confrmed on an individual level:
‘[I]ndividuals have the right to belong to an Indigenous community or nation,
in accordance with the traditions and customs of the community or nation con-
cerned,’ and ‘[n]o discrimination of any kind may arise from the exercise of such
a right’ (Art. 9).
The right to self-constitute may create different kinds of conficts with the states
in which Indigenous Peoples live since state defnitions in a historical perspective
have been one of the most powerful means to dominate and control Indigenous
Peoples (see e.g. Doerfer 2015; Simpson 2016). Membership issues, however, may
also affect the balance of power within Indigenous communities, often described
in terms of a confict between ‘the interests of a self-constituting indigenous group
and the interests of a self-identifying indigenous individual’ (Gover 2016, 35). This
potential and often very real confict of interests could also be described as a confict
between an individual human right (to not be discriminated against) and a collective
human right to be self-constituting as a people.
The transnational Indigenous Sámi people have no common constitution defn-
ing who belong to the people.1 In the Nordic countries of Finland, Norway and

294 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-21

 — W h o a r e ‘ We , t h e Pe o p l e ’ ? —

Sweden, Sámi membership has been handled in relation to specifc legislation on

Sámi issues. The most important defnition of a Sámi concerns the right to vote
(and to be eligible for offce) in the elections to the popularly elected Sámediggis
(often translated into Sámi Parliament in English) since it defnes the political
demos.2 The electoral rolls are core to what the new Sámi public space is, its legit-
imacy and its boundaries. The Sámediggis were established in Norway in 1989, in
Sweden in 1993 and in Finland in 1995 as a common response to demands from
the Sámi to be recognized as an Indigenous People with specifc rights (Josefsen
et al. 2015). The voters in the Sámediggis are defned ethnically, not based on ter-
ritorial status, since the parliaments are supposed to represent all Sámi living in
respective state.
In this chapter, our aim is twofold: First, to describe the criteria for registering in
the Sámi electoral roll in the Nordic states, with a specifc focus on Finland, where
the current objective criteria differ from those in the other two countries. Second,
we analyze both why these criteria have been perceived in such a different fash-
ion within the Sámi communities in their respective countries and why they have
been implemented differently by the three Sámediggis. In Norway and Sweden, the
Sámediggis have historically tried to increase the number of registered voters while
the Sámediggi in Finland has been more restrictive.3 From an international perspec-
tive, the comparison of the same membership issue in three different nation-states
but within the same Indigenous People is unique. Since Indigenous self-determina-
tion within the borders of already-existing nation-states always means some external
control and not total autonomy, it is of great interest to compare how this question
of membership is playing itself out in different national contexts that otherwise have
so much in common.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: THE BOUNDARY

PROBLEM REVISITED
Who was to be included in the demos with a right to vote and run for offce was a
crucial decision when establishing Sámediggis. In democratic theory, this question of
membership is usually referred to as the boundary problem, originating in the fact
that no people can initially constitute themselves in a democratic fashion (see e.g.
Abizadeh 2012; Näsström 2007). The matter of membership is therefore inherently
political: ‘[B]oundary-drawing, and the determination of political membership, are
perhaps the most fundamental political decisions’ (Whelan 1983, 16). All criteria
that are used to defne membership – the answer to the question ‘Who are We, the
People?’ – is always in some way or another in confict with principles of non-dis-
crimination, since the main justifcation of membership regulation is to include some
persons and exclude others.
The boundary problem, however, includes two other aspects of importance.
First of all, and closely related to membership, is the drawing of the actual physi-
cal boundaries of the demos, i.e. the geographical area (the domain) within which
an elected representative body may make legitimate decisions, and second, and
of equal importance, which political issues ought the representative body to have
decision-making power over (the scope) (Miller 2020). These additional aspects
to the boundary problem – the domain and the scope – are particularly important

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in an Indigenous context. Most often Indigenous self-determination is interpreted

as a qualifed right and delimited to internal self-governance, either within the
borders of already existing nation-states or with respect to existing borders in the
case of transnational Indigenous Peoples (like the Sámi). The content of the right
to internal self-determination has often been understood as a right to preserve
the autonomous functions that an Indigenous society needs to survive (Scheinin
and Åhrén 2018). This includes the right to establish their own social, economic,
cultural and political institutions, which, within already existing states, require,
for instance, language and cultural rights, social rights, rights to their own legal
system and self-government rights. Property rights to and control over land and
natural resources are in this context of specifc importance since the cultural, social
and economic life of Indigenous communities are dependent on and conditioned
by the natural resources available (see e.g. Anaya 2015; Hohmann and Weller
2018; Åhrén 2016).
Both the domain and the scope are closely intertwined with the question of
who to include in (or exclude from) the demos. The scope aspect relates to the
question of what Indigenous rights a state recognizes to implement Indigenous
self-determination in practice. Usually, internal self-determination on cultural and
language issues is not as diffcult for a state to recognize as, for instance, land
rights or legislative power since the latter tend to challenge the prevailing bal-
ance of power between the state and its Indigenous People(s) (see e.g. Spitzer and
Selle 2020). The rights attached to Indigenous membership affect the value and
importance of membership, in particular rights to land and natural resources and
rights to use the land. This potentially creates conficts both with members of the
majority society and within the Indigenous community itself (see e.g. Mitchell and
Yuzdepski 2019).
The scope of Indigenous self-determination is also related to the domain aspect
in a fundamental way: Over which geographical area – which territory (if any) –
may an Indigenous People make legitimate decisions? Where Indigenous Peoples
like the Sámi constitute a minority on their traditional lands and live interspersed
among other people, different kinds of systems for non-territorial autonomy have
been developed, for instance, the establishment of separate institutions to ensure
political representation of Indigenous Peoples. The foundational idea of non-
territorial autonomy is, as the name suggests, to decouple ‘the politics of “people”
and “place”’ (Spitzer and Selle 2020, 2). This solution will thus grant some form
of self-determination or autonomy without challenging already-existing borders
or the territorial interests of the majority population. The representative body of,
for instance, an Indigenous People exercises its authority (limited by the scope
aspect) over their members no matter where they live within a state, not over all
persons living within a specifc territory. Non-territorial autonomy is thus based
on a ‘personality principle,’ in which membership is dependent on subjective iden-
tifcation with the community (and other membership criteria) and is most often
understood as ‘functional,’ with its focus on cultural matters, including language,
education, health and welfare, instead of material matters and authority over land
and natural resources (see e.g. Breen 2020; Coakley 2016a, 2016b; Spitzer and
Selle 2020).

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INCLUSION IN THE SÁMI POLITICAL DEMOS:

THE CRITERIA TO REGISTER IN THE
ELECTORAL ROLL
The Nordic Sámi cooperation that offcially started in 1950s with the joint Nordic
Sámi conferences and the establishment of the Nordic Saami Council (1956) has since
the late 1950s emphasized the importance of a common Sámi defnition in order to
secure the rights of the Sámi (e.g. Myntti 1997, 30–34). However, in each state, the
criteria to have the right to vote (and to be eligible for offce) are not the result of
the Sámi exercising their right to self-constitution in the three countries. They are
rather the outcome of public commissions appointed by the states including Sámi
actors: The Sámi Rights Commissions in Norway and Sweden during the 1980s and
several Sámi committees related to Sámi affairs in Finland during a long period of
time (Josefsen et al. 2015; Valkonen 2017).
The basic principles of the criteria are similar. First, there is a subjective criterion;
the voter must declare that they regard themselves as Sámi. Second, there is an objec-
tive criterion; the voter or one of their parents or grandparents (or great-grandparents
in Norway) must have used Sámi as a home language (or, in Finland, as frst lan-
guage); alternatively, one of the parents must be (or have been, in Finland, also could
have been) registered on the electoral roll to the Sámediggi. There is, however, one
important difference. In Finland, another objective criterion is added, stating that a
descendent of a person who historically has been entered in a land, taxation or popu-
lation register as a mountain, forest or fshing Lapp may register in the roll.4 Since
Finland thus deviates from the other two countries, we use the development of the
Finnish defnition as our base for the following descriptive and comparative parts.
The defnition of a Sámi in the Act on the Sámi Parliament in Finland (974/1995)
has twofold grounds. It is frstly based on the shared Nordic understanding about
Sámi-speaking descent as a main determiner of a Sámi. This view was adopted in
the state policy in the 1950s, when Sámi issues came on the agenda of the Finnish
state due to a need to gather information on the living conditions of the Sámi and
to create policies to address Sámi issues and also responding to political demands
from the newly established Sámi associations (Lehtola 2005; Valkonen 2017, 2019).
A defnition based on language was presented by a state-appointed Committee for
Sámi Affairs (three of its six members were Sámi) in a report in 1952. The committee
proposed several measures to improve the position of the Sámi and compiled popu-
lation statistics on the Sámi population in Finland. In the work of the committee, a
Sámi was defned as a person who had at least one of their parents used Sámi as their
home language and who speaks Sámi satisfactorily themself (see Valkonen 2017, 179,
2019, 146).5 A defnition based on Sámi-speaking descent was also included in the
Decree on the Sámi Delegation, an elected advisory body of the Sámi established in
1973 to advance Sámi rights, thus a predecessor of the Sámediggi (Valkonen 2017,
185, 2019, 146). A subjective criterion of self-identifcation was added to the defni-
tion in 1991 – a person had to consider themself a Sámi (like in Norway and Sweden
in their establishment of Sámediggis) – in accordance with the newly adopted ILO
Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (No. 169).
Nobody could be included in ethnic registers against their will (Lehtola 2005, 106).

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When introducing the subjective criterion, however, the objective language-based

conception of a Sámi had already been broadened in 1990, when the government
issued a Bill on an Act on the Sámi. The Bill was prepared by a special division of the
Advisory Board on Sámi Affairs with considerable Sámi representation. The objec-
tive of the Bill was to restore the rights of the Sámi to the land and water areas they
had lived in and used historically, and to safeguard the Sámi language, culture and
practice of traditional livelihoods. The Bill proposed to transfer the state-owned
lands in the Sámi home region (frst defned in 1952 and later in the Decree on the
Sámi Delegation in 1973) to the ownership of Lapp villages to be (re)established cor-
responding to the reindeer-herding districts.6 The Lapp villages were units of the his-
torical Sámi society (Sámi siidas) that were acknowledged and taxed by the Swedish
crown from mid-1500 until mid-1700, after which the system started to weaken as
an administrative structure, but did however not totally disappeared. In this judicial
context, ‘Lapp’ is thus a historical property law concept referring to a person who,
as a resident of a Lapp village, has paid taxes to the Swedish crown (about the siida
system, see Valkonen 2017, 186, 2019, 145; see also Labba; and Puuronen in this
volume). The historical Lapp village system would thus have been resurrected in the
Sámi home region in a new form. The members of the Lapp villages would have been
the Sámi who had permanent residence in a Lapp village as well as other local peo-
ple practicing traditional livelihoods as a permanent occupation at least since their
parents’ generation (Lehtola 2005, 130–131; Valkonen 2019, 147).
With the objective of the Bill to restore the rights of the Sámi to the land and water
areas they had lived in and used historically, a second objective criterion including a
person who is ‘a descendant of a fsher, forest or mountain Lapp who was recorded
in the land or population register as having paid the Lapp tax’ was added to the
common Nordic language criterion defning a Sámi. Importantly, the Lapp criterion
was at this stage limited: The tax records to be considered would have been those
from 1875 onwards, which existed solely from the Sámi home region (Korpijaakko-
Labba 2000, 94; Valkonen 2017, 188, 2019, 147). It was perceived as self-evident
in the Bill that most people defnable as Lapps were also Sámi based on the lan-
guage criterion. The Bill was never brought forward due to general resistance in
Finnish Lapland; instead, the tax-Lapp criterion was included in the Sámi defnition
of the Act on the Sámi Parliament (975/1995) establishing Sámi cultural autonomy
separate from land issues. Importantly, the time limit of 1875 was removed from
the defnition after a decision of the Constitutional Committee of the Finnish
Parliament – a time criterion would have required a separate decree – in contrast to
the initial proposal (Lehtola 2005, 142; Valkonen 2017, 193).
The tax-Lapp criterion was in the Government Bill on the Act on the Sámi
Parliament (1994) justifed by the arguments that the contemporary language-based
Sámi are descendants of historical Lapps and that the current Sámi defnition based
on language may exclude persons who had lost the Sámi language too long ago and
therefore would not fulfl the language criterion (see Valkonen 2017, 192–193). A
similar argument justifed the Norwegian extension of the language criterion by
one further generation, to great-grandparents, in the mid-1990s. In Sweden, a cri-
terion based on Sámi descent was put forward for similar reasons before the Sámi
Parliament Act was enacted: Many Sámi may have lost their language long ago
due to the depreciative Swedish policy towards the Sámi and the harsh assimilation

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policy of the state. The fact that the language criterion might exclude many persons
of Sámi descent was noted in Sweden in the travaux preparatoire, but it did not
change the criteria. The way to handle persons who had lost their language genera-
tions ago was, instead, that the language criterion should not be strictly controlled;
the applicant should only have to make it plausible that they fulflled the criterion,
not prove it with hard evidence (Allard 2017).
Having criteria for membership is one thing, the control of the criteria yet another.
And here we fnd further differences between the three countries. In Finland, the
Election Committee of the Sámediggi compiles the electoral roll based on the electoral
roll of the previous elections, counting in the children of persons registered on the
roll who have reached voting age, based on their written declaration of identifying as
Sámi. The Election Committee also includes those persons who apply to register on
the electoral roll who fulfl the criteria. The decision of the Election Committee may be
appealed to the Board of the Sámediggi and its decision to the Supreme Administrative
Court of Finland (The Act of the Sámi Parliament 1995/974). In Sweden, it is the
Electoral Board of the Sámediggi that decides on new applications. Six months before
an upcoming election, they make the preliminary electoral roll public for one month,
during which appeals can be made by applicants who have been turned down, as
well as by persons already registered who want to appeal someone else’s registration.
Appeals are handled by the County Administrative Board in Norrbotten; thus, as in
Finland, the fnal decision is made by an agency representing the state.
Historically, control of the criteria for registering on the electoral roll seems to
have been lenient in Sweden following the travaux preparatoire, and the electoral
committee has rarely demanded substantial proof of an applicant’s information
(Allard 2017). Even more reluctant to control the criteria, however, is the Norwegian
Sámediggi; no board is really checking the applications with the objective of con-
trolling the electoral roll, and there exist no such external state agencies or bodies
to control Sámi membership issues in a system largely based on trust (Pettersen and
Saglie 2021). Few if any applicants have so far been denied registration, even if the
electoral law opens for it, and the roster, as in Sweden (and Finland), is open to the
public for a short period before the elections.7

THE CONTEMPORARY DEBATE ON THE CRITERIA

The defnition of a Sámi in the Sámi Parliament Act in Finland widened the scope
of the Sámi electorate, and the criterion has been controversial and debated ever
since its introduction. The Sámediggi and many Sámi civil society actors have con-
sidered the Lapp criterion without the time limit to be illegitimate and against Sámi
self-understanding as a people, whereas the language criterion is seen to be most
clearly in harmony with the Sámi kinship-based communality and group recognition
(Valkonen 2017, 177, 2019, 148).
Simultaneously, since introducing the tax-Lapp criterion in the 1990s, new artic-
ulations of indigeneity different from the offcial Sámediggi view have been con-
structed by local associations established in Northern Finland. Local people who
have distant tax-Lapp ancestors but who do not fulfl the language criterion have
started to use the term ‘Lapp’ as a public self-identifcation claiming rights as an
Indigenous People. Likewise, the term ‘Forest Sámi/Lapp’ has been adopted in local

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activism as a current identity and form of indigeneity (Valkonen 2019). Moreover,

the concept of a non-status Sámi has been introduced, referring to a person who
descends from Sámi kin but is not enrolled on the Sámediggi electoral roll (Sarivaara
2012). The political formation of the Lapp/non-status Sámi associations in some
research is referred to as the (neo) Lapp movement (Pääkkönen 2008; Lehtola 2015;
Nyyssönen 2015; see also Länsman and Kortelainen 2021 about the societal imple-
mentation of the concept of non-status Sámi). A central demand from these partly
overlapping associations has been to widen the understanding of Sáminess or indige-
neity in Finland and implement the tax-Lapp criterion for registering on the electoral
roll without a time limit, in clear opposition to the policy of the Sámediggi.8
The Sámediggi as well as many Sámi associations have thus been critical towards
the construction of a Lapp and Forest/non-status Sámi identity. It is seen as a threat
to the self-government, language and culture of the contemporary Sámi, potentially
leading to the assimilation of the Sámi and a Fennicizing of the Sámediggi as these
movements are seen to represent Northern Finnishness, and they originally resisted
Sámi rights.9 In line with this view, the Election Committee and the Board of the
Sámediggi have not regarded the Lapp criterion – excluding the 1875 time limit – to
be valid, something also shared by the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) until
2011. Since then, however, the SAC has gradually changed its interpretation and has
accepted applicants, against the decision of the Sámediggi, to the electoral roll. In
2015, SAC accepted 93 applicants who had appealed the decision of the Sámediggi,
53 of whom were accepted based on an ‘overall assessment’: The appellants did not
have to fulfl the language criterion, but the tax record proofs clearly older than 1875
were taken into consideration, together with an evaluation by SAC on appellants’
Sáminess based on their written identity descriptions (Heinämäki 2017, 93–148,
about the judicial development of the interpretations concerning the Act on the Sámi
Parliament, see also Kiikeri 2021). The Sámediggi has found SAC’s repeated deci-
sions to violate the Sámi people’s right to self-determination, therefore violating their
human rights. In two different claims, in 2015 and 2017, the matter was put forward
to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC). In February 2019, the HRC handed
down two decisions on the electoral roll eligibility criteria: Sanila-Aikio v Finland and
Näkkäläjärvi v Finland (CCPR/C/124/D/2668/ 2015; CCPR/C/124/D/2950/2017).
The committee found that the decision from SAC to include persons on the Sámediggi
electoral roll against the will of the Sámediggi violated the claimants’ rights under
articles 1, 25, 26 and 27 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR).
The HRC’s decisions indicate that the state – and this is important for Sweden as
well, where the County Administrative Board of Norrbotten handles appeals – has no
right to interfere when the Sámi are exercising their right to self-constitute. Following
the HRC decisions, a renewal of the Act on the Sámi Parliament was also proposed
in Finland by a government-appointed committee in May 2021. It clearly aims at
strengthening the Sámi right to self-constitute: The role of the SAC is to be dimin-
ished, and a separate appeal board appointed by the Sámediggi should be established.
In the proposal, it is also made clear that the Act would only defne who has the right
to vote and to be eligible in the Sámediggi elections, not who is a Sámi. In this con-
text, it could be interpreted as a way to detach the political demos from other Sámi
rights (as in Norway and Sweden, and in the 2016 Draft Nordic Sámi Convention).
It is recommended that the Lapp criterion is removed altogether from the defnition,

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and that the language criterion be extended to great-grandparents in accordance with

the Norwegian criterion (Saamelaiskäräjälakitoimikunta 2021). It remains to be seen
whether this proposal will be realized; it was supposed to be given to the Parliament
of Finland in November 2021, but so far the Bill has not left the government’s offce.
In contrast to Finland, the criteria for registering have not been topical in Norway
and Sweden. However, in Sweden, the application of the criteria by the Sámediggi’s
Electoral Committee has been criticized and debated within the parliament and else-
where (Nilsson 2021). The debate has intensifed since 2016, after one of the parties
in the Sámediggi claimed in a motion that there were persons who had wrongly been
registered on the electoral roll and that the party thus wanted the Electoral Board
to reappraise the entire electoral roll. The party argued that the lenient – and some-
times faulty – handling of the applications ran the risk of undermining the legitimacy
of the Sámediggi as a popularly elected Sámi body and that the outcome of the
elections might be affected. The debate continued when the preliminary electoral
roll was made public before the election in 2017 (Mörkenstam 2017). Before the
election in 2021, the electoral roll became topical again. Once again, the handling
of applications by the Electoral Board was in focus but also the right of persons
already registered to appeal someone else’s registration. On the one hand, there are
parties who argue for a much stricter application of the criteria and argue that there
are persons registered on the electoral roll that do not fulfl the requirements; hence,
their registration must be appealed. On the other, there are parties who see no need
to apply the criteria more strictly and who fnd the right to appeal someone already
registered on the electoral roll offensive on an individual level (Sameradion and SVT
Sápmi 2021).
To set up a similar electoral board in Norway is politically and culturally impos-
sible as long as the criteria are conceived of as primarily individualistic rather than
collective, i.e., emphasizing self-identifcation and descent/language use (Bjørklund
2016). Such a board would not have any legitimacy among the Sámi or others inter-
vening in these important matters. It is a trust-based system, even though voices
criticizing both the criteria itself and their implementation are heard now and then.
However, even if the debate has no intensity, as many as quarter of those registered
want more inclusive criteria while less than 10% want to make the criteria more
exclusive (Pettersen and Saglie 2021). However, the criteria debate may come to the
surface in the near future because of the strong urbanization of the Sámi electorate.
The declining dominance of the core Sámi areas within the electoral roll – which also
implies losing mandates – is putting pressure on a Sámi political system in which the
land and resource dimension has been topical within the historical core Sámi areas
since the rise of the Sámi Parliament (Bjørklund 2016; Falch and Selle 2018; Selle
et al. 2020).
To sum up, it is obvious that the introduction of a second objective criterion in
Finland may explain much of the differences in how the demarcation of the politi-
cal demos has played out in the three countries. This is manifested both in the con-
ficts between the Sámediggi and the Finnish state and in the conficts between the
Sámediggi and other groups claiming indigeneity. We can also see that this debate
has become more intense in Sweden while it is still close to a non-issue in Norway,
even if there are people on the electoral roster who want the criteria to be controlled
in a stricter way (Pettersen and Saglie 2021).

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THE DOMAIN AND SCOPE ASPECTS OF THE BOUNDARY

PROBLEM
Looking into the criteria for the political demarcation of the demos alone is, however,
not suffcient to understand these differences: The rights and values attached to mem-
bership – i.e. the domain and the scope aspects of the boundary problem – are deci-
sive. The Sámediggis of Norway and Sweden are mainly institutions for exercising
non-territorial autonomy, and their main duties revolve around the Sámi languages
and cultural issues and the development of Sámi livelihoods. In Finland, however,
the domain is clearly defned since the Sámi have a right to self-government in the
spheres of language and culture within the Sámi home region, something recognized
both in the Finnish Constitution (121§, 4) and in the Act on the Sámi Parliament
(974/1995, 4§). There is, however, no geographical area (domain) within which any
of the Sámediggis have exclusive legislative power, although most of their duties and
political decisions concern the Sámi living within the traditional Sámi settlement area
(Falch and Selle 2018; Mörkenstam and Dahlberg 2021; Guttorm 2018).
In terms of scope, previous studies have shown that the Sámediggi in Finland seems
to have the strongest legal foundation and the widest mandate but that, in practice, it
is the weakest, followed by the Swedish (see e.g. Josefsen et al. 2015; Robbins 2015).
The Norwegian Sámediggi is without doubt the most powerful, and since its inaugu-
ration, it has continuously increased its autonomy and infuence, not least a result of
the early Norwegian ratifcation of C169 (the frst country to ratify the convention
in 1990). Two legislative reforms are of specifc importance in this context. The frst
is the Finnmark Act of 2006, in which the ownership of land and resources (96% of
the land) was transferred from the Norwegian state to the population in Finnmark
through an executive body, the Finnmark Estate (FeFo), co-managed by members
appointed by the Sámediggi and the Finnmark County Council. The second major
reform is the formal consultative arrangement with the Norwegian state from 2005,
making it possible for the Sámi Parliament to consult on any issues they feel are impor-
tant for Sámi culture and living (see e.g. Hernes and Selle 2021; Hernes 2008; Josefsen
2014). The differences in political capacity based on the status and legal bases of the
Sámediggis are further exacerbated by great disparities in fnancial resources granted
by the states, with the Norwegian Sámediggi having the largest budget by far.10
The scope aspect would lead us to believe that the value of the right to vote
would be greater in Norway than in the other two countries – with the Norwegian
Sámediggi being the most infuential and powerful – and thus that conficts over
the right to register on the electoral roll would be most severe. But as we have seen,
it is the opposite. This could partly be explained by the delimited decision-making
power of the Sámediggis, for instance, on the political issues most topical in the
Sámi societies, like land rights and the use of natural resources. Such an under-
standing could fnd support in studies in Norway and Sweden that have shown that
a vast majority of the Sámi (registered on the electoral roll) want to increase Sámi
self-determination through the Sámediggi (Mörkenstam et al. 2021a; Selle et al.
2015; Bergh and Saglie 2021).
Thus, the actual decision-making power (the scope) of the Sámediggis does not
really explain why the demarcation of the political demos has played out so differ-
ently in the three countries. Instead, it may be differences in conceptions of what

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the right to vote might come to mean in the (near) future. In contrast to the debate
on the electoral rolls in Norway and Sweden, the establishment of the Sámediggi
and the debate on the demarcation of the demos in Finland was related early on
to land rights and an understanding of the historical rights of the Sámi to their
lands as residents of historical Lapp villages. In the work of the Advisory Board on
Sámi Affairs (1990) this was, for instance, supported by references to newly pub-
lished research on Sámi land rights (most importantly Korpijaakko 1989), which
proved that Sámi siidas were treated as land owners from the 16th century to
1740 by the Swedish Crown (see also Alakorva et al. in this volume) as well as to
C169. Although the land-rights dimension was not included in the Act on the Sámi
Parliament, land rights have always been at the center of the Sámi debate. This is
also apparent in the Finnish approach to ratifcation of C169, which stresses solv-
ing the Sámi land rights before ratifcation, something repeated also in the Swedish
debate, whereas Norway has developed Sámi rights after ratifcation in 1990.11
Of course, land rights are just as topical within the Sámi and majority societies in
Norway and Sweden, but the issue is not (at least so far) explicitly related to the
electoral roll and the criteria for membership in the political demos.
The main controversy in Finland stems from the common interpretation of Sámi
land rights that only persons registered on the electoral roll would have land rights
in the future, especially if C169 was to be ratifed. Local people were initially afraid
that the Sámi – i.e. persons registered on the electoral roll – would have exclu-
sive land rights but then realized that they might also have individual land rights
through the tax-Lapp criterion or collective land rights as a Lapp Indigenous People
(Pääkkönen 2008; see also Junka-Aikio in this volume12). This potential confict has
also been the main argument from the Finnish state for postponing ratifcation of
C169 since it has seemed unclear who is entitled to land rights. Membership in the
political demos in Finland is thus conceived of as something much more than the
right to vote, which renders membership a greater value and makes it highly contro-
versial. This, to a great extent, also explains the new mobilization and establishing
new associations claiming indigeneity and/or Sáminess.
In contrast to Finland, the right to register in Norway and Sweden has – as men-
tioned above – so far been understood only as a right to vote in the Sámediggi elections
and has not been included in debates on other Sámi rights. In Sweden, Sámi land rights
in the late 19th century (including the right to hunt and fsh on ‘crown land’) were
exclusively attached to reindeer herding in the national legislation, creating a cleavage
in the Sámi society – ‘a category-split’ – between members of reindeer-herding com-
munities (čearru/sameby) and Sámi outside reindeer herding (see e.g. Mörkenstam et
al. 2021b; Saglie et al. 2020). Sámi outside reindeer herding were thus marginalized
in the state’s policy, and after their demands for inclusion during the 1960s and 70s,
one of the main arguments justifying the establishment of the Sámediggi was to create
a body that was representative of the entire minority. In the Sámediggi, this cleavage
was institutionalized in the party system, and the most controversial political issues
all revolve around land rights, although the Sámediggi does not have decision-making
power on these issues. Parties representing voters outside reindeer herding have, for
instance, proposed that all Sámi ought to have the same rights to hunt and fsh and to
be members of reindeer-herding communities, and that Sweden ought to ratify C169
only after all Sámi are granted the same rights (Mörkenstam et al. 2021b).

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From this perspective, the more intensifed debate on the electoral roll in Sweden
may in part be a consequence of the legal process in the Girjas case (initiated in
2009), in which the Swedish Supreme Court in 2020 ruled in favour of the Girjas
reindeer-herding community, who had sued the Swedish state, claiming exclusive
rights to hunt and fsh within their areas of reindeer husbandry. In support of
their decision, the court argued that C169 and the UNDRIP was applicable in a
Swedish context, although Sweden still has not ratifed the former, and the latter is
a nonbinding declaration (Allard and Brännström 2020; Ravna 2020). The deci-
sion by the Supreme Court may, on the one hand, be interpreted as a success for
Sámi land rights in general; on the other, it may be interpreted as consolidating the
position of reindeer herding at the expense of Sámi outside the reindeer industry
(Mörkenstam et al. 2021b). With this confict playing out in the Sámediggi, control
(or not) of the electoral roll may become even more topical ahead.
Also in Norway, land rights are topical. Although there exists no category split as in
Sweden, reindeer herders have strong user rights protected by law, and there are cleav-
ages and confict between those who believe and those who do not believe that rein-
deer herders are guaranteed stronger land rights than other Sámi users of uncultivated
land.13 However, land rights have been handled completely differently in Norway, reduc-
ing these conficts. When the Finnmark Act was passed in 2005, it was established in
principle that all Sámi use of land and resources could constitute rights. This has its
background in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Svartskogen case, in which a Sámi-
dominated community engaged in cattle farming, harvesting, hunting, and fshing was
granted collective property rights in the community’s area (Rt-2001–1229). Property
rights in the Norwegian context therefore mainly apply as a collective right for everyone
who lives and use land in a specifc area – regardless of business activity or the ethnicity
of the individual – even if the special Sámi use is given importance, or even priority.
In contrast to Sweden, then, it can be argued that Sámi use of uncultivated land
other than reindeer husbandry has had land rights recognized both through the
Supreme Court ruling in the Svartskogen case (2001) and in the adaption of the
Finnmark Act (2005). According to the Finnmark Act, the right of land ownership
and use is organized in a joint land-owner body (Sámediggi and Finnmark County)
for the whole of Finnmark, the Finnmark Estate, in a common law that further
regulates various user groups. In addition, a separate system has been established for
identifying and deciding land claims, the Finnmark Commission. The new manage-
ment system that has developed has raised conficts and increasingly so, especially
with the non-Sámi population in Finnmark (Broderstad et al. 2020; Falch and Selle
2021) – but they concern the fact that the question of recognition and clarifcation of
land rights does not follow ethnicity at the individual level (except for reindeer herd-
ing, which is only for the Sámi). This way of handling land rights in the traditional
Sámi settlement area thus also differs from contemporary policy in Finland and may
have infuenced the fact that the question on land rights has been almost absent in
the Norwegian debate on the electoral roll.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter has shown important differences in the way the three Nordic countries
relate to how the Sámi political demos ought to be demarcated.Adding a second objective

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criterion in Finland besides the language criterion is obviously one of the main factors
explaining these differences. However, we have also tried to show that land rights, even
if less so in Norway, in many ways are the focus of the implementation and comprehen-
sion of the debate on the electoral roll, as land rights most often are in Indigenous poli-
tics (see e.g. Anaya 2015; Mitchell and Yuzdepski 2019; Åhrén 2016). This may come
as no surprise, since land rights may not be granted to a specifc group of people on a
collective level without reducing the value of the land for other members of society at the
same time, in stark contrast to, for instance, cultural and language rights.
So far, however, we have only discussed the debate on membership in terms of the
three aspects of the boundary problem – membership, domain and scope. Here, we’ll
also mention another factor we believe is important in this context and where more
comparative research is needed – namely, that the difference in the implementation
and comprehension of the electoral roll may partly be the result of differences in how
cultural competence and community belonging are evaluated among the Sámi in each
country. It seems to be at the core of the debate on membership in Finland but is impos-
sible to invoke in Norway and, so far, only weakly in place in Sweden, in spite of the
political cleavage/category split in the Sámi society. Of course, invoking cultural com-
petence and community belonging may be explained by traditional interest politics in
which those with most power want to control the feld. However, it appears to be more
than interest politics involved in this, related to the importance of specifc Sámi values.
There may, on the one side, be strong convictions on the need for Indigenous self-
determination through the Sámediggis ‘to maintain, protect and develop the past, pre-
sent and future manifestations of their cultures,’ as expressed in the UNDRIP (Art.11),
i.e. to safeguard specifc collective values. Persons who do not share these values – by
their own choice, by the choice of their ancestors or by forced assimilation and state
policy – may from this perspective not be seen as part of ‘the people’. On the other,
membership may be interpreted as an individual right for all persons of Sámi descent
in their capacity of being Sámi, no matter their relation to Sámi values (Nilsson 2021;
Pettersen and Saglie 2021). Could it be that specifc and traditionally based Sámi val-
ues are more important in Finland than in the other two countries and that collective
thinking and collective rights therefore, to a larger extent, trump liberal individual
rights compared to especially Norway but also Sweden? If so, a core research question
would be to dig deeper into the role of the different colonial processes in the three
countries, trying to explain these important and deep-seated differences.

NOTES
1 The Sámi people and their lands have historically been divided between four nation-
states: Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. In this chapter, we will only compare the
Nordic countries since there is no Sámediggi established in Russia.
2 In parallel to this development on a national level, there have the last decades been pro-
posals for a common defnition of a Sámi as part of the ongoing work on an international
treaty between Sweden, Finland and Norway, the Nordic Sámi Convention. However, in
this chapter, we will not discuss that work further (see Draft Nordic Sámi Convention
2005, 2016; see also e.g. Bankes and Koivurova 2013; Heinämäki and Cambou 2018).
3 The number of persons registered on the electoral roll has also increased considerably
over the years in both Norway and Sweden (in Norway from 5,505 in 1989 to 18,103
in 2019 and from 5,390 in 1993 to 9,226 in 2021, in Finland, the number was 5,873 in

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2019, information from earlier elections is not currently available). In Finland the elec-
toral roll is based on a census carried out in the 1960s, and it was completed during the
1970s and 80s (see Valkonen 2017, 180–183).
4 ‘Lapp’ has been the ethnic term the Sámi have been referred to by the majority societies
until recently (on the various meanings of the concept, see Pääkkönen 2008, 188–194),
while the Sámi have called themselves by a word of their own language, which in contem-
porary North Sámi is sápmelaš.
5 The references to the original Finnish documents cited in this chapter can be found in
Valkonen 2017 and 2019.
6 The Sámi home region is legally defned in the Finnish Constitution (121§, 4) and in the
Act on the Sámi Parliament (974/1995, 4§) and covers the municipalities of Enontekiö,
Inari and Utsjoki, as well as the Lappi reindeer-herding district in the municipality of
Sodankylä. In addition, there is a separate Skolt Sámi area inside Sámi home region
defned in the Act on the Skolt Sámi (253/1995, 2§).
7 All details around procedures and possible appeals can be found in https://lovdata.no/
dokument/SF/forskrift/2008-12-19-1480?q=Sametinget
8 Detailed descriptions and analyses of the debate can be found e.g. in Lehtola (2015),
Pääkkönen (2008), Valkonen (2017); see also Junka-Aikio in this volume.
9 In Norway, a similar discussion exists within the Sámediggi, in which the political move-
ment/party Nordkalottfolket emphasizes what the peoples of the North have in common
and, to a lesser extent, relate to the Sámi dimension only. However, because of the more
‘relaxed’ registration practice in Norway, few if any really question whether the organiza-
tion and its members are Sámi enough.
10 In 2021, the budget for the Norwegian Sámediggi was 55 million Euro, for the Swedish
24 million and for the Finnish 8.1 million. In addition, in Norway, the state fnancial
resources are granted the Sámediggi as a block grant, leaving the decision on how to
allocate funds within the set budget to the parliament itself while in Sweden, the funding
is clearly tied to the parliament’s tasks as a government agency, manifested in the fact that
most of the grants are earmarked for specifc purposes, limiting the independence of the
Sámediggi. This is principally the case in Finland also.
11 In Sweden, non-ratifcation of C169 is justifed mainly by arguments referring to the wide-
ranging legal implications of ratifcation and to fears of conficts between the Sami and a
non-Sami population (Mörkenstam 2021).
12 In this context, it is also worth noting that movements like the neo-Lapp movement in
Finland also exist in Norway and Sweden, claiming status as Indigenous Peoples (Kveeni).
However, their claims are not made in relation to membership in the Sámi political demos.
13 The confict between reindeer herding and other Sámi interests in core Sámi areas is, for
instance, clearly expressed through electoral lists for the Sámi elections (Falch and Selle 2018).

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 CHAPTER NINETEEN

TOX I C S P E E C H , P O L I T I CA L
S E L F - I N D I G E N I Z AT I O N A N D
THE ETHICS AND POLITICS OF
CRITIQUE
Notes from Finland


Laura Junka-Aikio

The internet and social media provide new opportunities for active citizenship, but
they have also facilitated various forms of hate speech, especially towards ethnic and
racial minorities and women. In addition to negatively affecting the targeted people’s
sense of security and well-being, hate speech is associated with efforts to infuence
political decision making by silencing certain voices from public debate, and with
the overall harshening of contemporary political culture and rhetoric, and therefore,
it is considered a growing threat for democratic and multicultural societies, freedom
of expression and human rights at large (Knuutila et al. 2019). Accordingly, fnding
ways to adress its causes and consequences is a central concern for various national
and transnational agencies, including the UN and the European Commission (ECRI
2016; Gagliardone et al. 2015).
Hate speech against the Indigenous Sámi people has also proliferated, and in each
Nordic country, it is now considered a problem requiring counter-measures and fur-
ther study (Helleland et al. 2021; Korhonen et al. 2016; Saami Council 2020; Sámiid
Riikkasearvi/SSR 2020). In the narrow sense, used mainly in legal contexts, hate speech
refers to speech which directly incites harm towards certain social or demographic
groups. However, in general parlance, it is considered more broadly as speech which fos-
ters a climate of prejudice and intolerance or fuels discrimination, hostility or violence
(Gagliardone et al. 2015, 11). For example, European Commission against Racism and
Intolerance (ECRI) defnes hate speech as ‘the advocacy, promotion or incitement, in
any form, of the denigration, hatred or vilifcation of a person or group of persons, as
well as any harassment, insult, negative stereotyping, stigmatization or threat’ (2016).
The broader understanding has prompted scholars to develop alternative notions
which bring attention to the fact that speech does not need to be ‘hateful’ to incite

310 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-22

 — The ethics and politics of critique —

harm, hostility or discrimination or highlight the social dimensions of hate speech.

A good example is Lynne Tirrell’s (2017) toxic speech, which builds an analogy
between hate speech and the medical terms of toxicity and epidemiology, mainly to
move beyond the conception of hate speech as an isolatable act which can be traced
down to individual ‘hate’ and to facilitate its analysis as an epidemic, which dam-
ages the whole social body. Drawing on examples from Rwanda, Nazi Germany
and Donald Trump’s rhetoric, Tirrell also argues that speech acts that are devoid
of deeply derogatory terms can be damaging and, over the long term, infict serious
harm on the targeted groups and individuals. Instead of delivering an ‘instant blow,’
the constant repetition of such ‘milder’ messages hurts the society and the targets
gradually, by transforming the boundaries of what is considered normal and accept-
able speech (Tirrell 2017, 147).
As with chemical toxins which do most harm on bodies that are particularly
vulnerable, toxic speech is particularly damaging for minority peoples and groups
whose positioning within the society is less stable and secure, such as Indigenous
Peoples, refugees, women and ethnic and racial minorities (149). To understand the
social impact of toxic speech, one therefore has to pay attention not only to the
content, narrative patterns and strategies of particular speech acts but also to ‘epis-
temic position, access and authority,’ i.e. who speaks, from which position, at what
volume, with what authority and to whom. As a critical approach, an epidemiology
of toxic speech moves attention beyond individual speech acts that may or may not
cross the threshold of hate speech or criminality and reframes hate speech as a com-
munity problem that has to do with structural power relations and requires social
solutions (Tirrell 2017, 140).
In this study, I build on the theory and notion of toxic speech to examine anti-
Sámi hate speech that is specifc to the political terrain in Finland. There, such speech
is particularly common in debates which relate to the Sámi Parliament, especially
to the ongoing political confict over the Sámi Parliament’s electoral register (see
Mörkenstam et al. in this volume; Kortelainen and Länsman 2015). The roots of
the confict date back to the 1990s when local groups that were opposed to Sámi
cultural autonomy came together to oppose its establishment (Pääkkönen 2008;
Lehtola 2015; Valkonen 2017). Later, the opposition centred on criticism of the
Sámi Parliament, voiced mainly by popular movements which promote political self-
Indigenization to gain access to the Sámi Parliament’s electoral register (Junka-Aikio
2021). Although these movements today are involved in, and make explicit use of,
academic knowledge production and discourses which highlight the ideas of Sámi
cultural revitalization and recovery (Valkonen 2017, 209–2012; Junka-Aikio 2016;
2021), the study shows how, at the level of popular rhetoric and in social media, the
same discourses are operationalized to purposefully undermine Sámi peoplehood
and rights, to denigrate those who are seen to defend such rights and to disseminate
pejorative representations of the Sámi and the institutions which represent them.
I begin with an overview of anti-Sámi hate speech in the Nordic context. The
overview is followed by a short look at the main discursive and narrative strategies
that were used to delegitimize Sámi peoplehood and self-government in Finland
in the 1990s, when the legislation leading to Sámi cultural autonomy was being
drafted. The second part explores how these discourses and narratives are repro-
duced and reshaped in contemporary social media discussions that I retrieved from

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the Facebook group Inari Citizen Channel (Inarin kansalaiskanava) between 2012
and 2020.
Despite their prevalence, the toxic narratives and discourses that I examine have
not received much critical attention within the Finnish majority society, which gen-
erally remains both unaware and unsympathetic. Likewise, Sámi scholars and public
fgures have also been rather reluctant to confront such speech publicly. The chapter
ends with a short list of possible reasons which might explain why this kind of toxic
speech has been particularly impervious to criticism and public exposure.

HATE SPEECH IN THE NORDIC SÁMI CONTEXT

Hate speech builds on, and amplifes, conficts that already exist in the society
(Gagliardone et al. 2015, 11–12). In the Nordic Sámi context, its roots go back to
the colonial and hierarchic discourses and attitudes that have defned the major-
ity societies’ relationship with the Sámi during the modern period. In the colonial
discourse of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sámi were considered primitive
and even racially inferior people who, according to the standards set by the major-
ity society, were unable to develop themselves. As in other colonial contexts, such
discourses were used to justify colonial government and tutelage of Sámi lives, lands
and societies.
Since the 1970s, the rise of the Sámi ethnopolitical movement and various meas-
ures to develop Sámi and Indigenous rights have challenged the earlier asymmetries
and improved the social standing of the Sámi. However, the change has also given
rise to new political opposition and counter-movements, especially on the local level
and among those segments of the majority society that have felt that Sámi rights
might undermine their own rights and access to land and resources. Hence, in each
Nordic country, the process of developing Sámi Indigenous rights has been paralleled
by the proliferation of a qualitatively new discourse which perceives the Sámi as a
threat to the existing order and majority rights. As expressed by a Sámi participant
in Juuso (2018, 231), ‘Before, the majority population’s anti-Sámi attitudes were
expressed through mockery of the Sámi’s inferiority. Today, it comes across as pure
hate.’ Paying attention to the particular socio-political context of Indigenous rights
is therefore central to efforts to understand the nature and sources of contemporary
hate speech against the Sámi and the ways in which such speech interconnects with
the history of Nordic colonialism.
In Norway, a number of surveys in the 2000s have shown that the Sámi are
signifcantly more likely to experience discrimination and hate speech than non-
Sámi Norwegians (see Hansen in this volume). While much of it takes place in
everyday situations, online hate speech is a growing problem (Eira 2018; Hansen
and Skaar 2017). Often, such speech is propagated systematically by members of
political parties or by local organizations and groups which oppose the recognition
of ‘special’ Sámi rights, such as the Etnisk Demokratisk Likeverd (EDL, Ethnic
Democratic Equality), which was originally established to oppose Sámi land rights
as enshrined in the Finnmark Act (Balto 2020; Björklund 2020, 24). The various
materials collected and shared by the Sámi Jurddabeassi collective through the
Twitter account Samehets (‘Sámi hate’) and the fact that North Norway’s lead-
ing newspaper Nordlys has actually had to temporally close the online comments

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section for Nordnorsk Debatt due to hate speech targeting the Sámi attest to the
pertinence of the problem.
In Sweden, hate speech against the Sámi gained broad public attention in 2020,
in the aftermath of the Swedish Supreme Court’s decision regarding the Girjas court
case. The decision saw the Girjas sameby, a Sámi reindeer-herding community in the
Gällivare region, win the legal dispute concerning who has the right to control hunt-
ing and fshing rights in its land management area, the sameby or the state. The case
presented a signifcant milestone for Sámi land rights in Sweden and beyond (Ravna
2020), but it was followed by a severe backlash of online and offine hate against the
Sámi reindeer-herding community, leading to actual violence in the form of unlawful
reindeer killings (Raitio and Löf 2020). This was not new as such, as anti-Sámi hate
speech and actions which target especially Sámi reindeer herders have been constant
in Sweden. After the rise of social media, such speech has, however, become increas-
ingly pervasive (Sámiid Riikkasearvi/SSR 2020).
These examples indicate that hate speech towards the Sámi is prevalent, especially
around conficts which relate to land rights and natural resource management. The
same can be said of Finland, where such speech has intensifed since the early 1990s,
originally triggered by the legislative process to establish Sámi cultural autonomy.
As in Norway and Sweden, the process met strong resistance among local non-Sámi
communities that feared that their own rights and access to land would be infringed
(Lehtola 2015; Pääkkönen 2008; Valkonen 2017).
At this early stage, the opposition was articulated especially through efforts
to delegitimize the Sámi as a people, to vilify the persons who represented them
and to raise fear of the prospect of Sámi cultural autonomy. A good example of
toxic speech from this period is Kiisa, a 25-page leafet that was issued in 1995 by
Lappalaiskultuuuri- ja perinneyhdistys (‘Association for Lapp culture and heritage’),
a popular organization that was established in Enontekiö earlier in the same year to
oppose the legislative process (see also Valkonen 2017, 194–199). The leafet mim-
icked the yellow press, starting with a catchy front-page headline: ‘A Law Scandal
of All Times – This is what others are quiet about!’ Following this, the various texts
that were gathered in Kiisa warned against the threat of Sámi cultural autonomy,
building on a number of narrative strategies. For instance, the new ‘Sámi law’ that
was under preparation at the time was described as a ‘treacherous snake’ being
advanced by Sámi and Finnish politicians based on dubious motivations and per-
sonal greed (p. 7). If passed, the Sámi Parliament Act would be ‘Finland’s frst racist
law’ (p. 3) or a ‘trash law’ (p. 12), which, in the end, would reproduce an ‘Indian
caste system’ (p.  13), discriminating against the rest of the local population who
would fnd themselves at the bottom of the social ladder. Once the law was passed,
the locals, according to Kiisa, would ‘wake up as tourists in their own home region,
stripped off those rights that one had learned to take for granted’ (p. 3).
The Sámi, in turn, were depicted not as an Indigenous People, but as an ideologi-
cal association invented by a handful of greedy individuals simply to displace and
take over the rights of other, Finnish-speaking locals. Conversely, these other locals,
now named and organized as ‘Lapps,’1 were presented as the descendants of the
region’s most ‘original’ inhabitants and, hence, as more Indigenous than the Sámi.
(This claim is made on nearly all pages.) On the other hand, several texts in Kiisa
also suggested that there was no real difference between the Lapps and the Sámi.

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One contributor argued that the word ‘Sámi’ was based on a linguistic confusion
and actually refers to Finns (p. 12). Another explains that in Enontekiö, 90% of the
population descends from the Lapps and that the Sámi are just a ‘linguistic minority’
within this larger Finnish-speaking group (p. 10).
Accordingly, Kiisa constructed the Sámi primarily as a threat to other local peo-
ple, whose rights would be violated if the Sámi were to ‘have their way.’ The indi-
viduals who represent the Sámi ethnopolitical movement, in turn, are portrayed as
greedy and power-hungry crooks who act out of personal interest. Such portrayals
are complemented by mutually contradicting discourses which seek to undermine
Sámi peoplehood and Indigeneity. On the one hand, the Sámi were portrayed as
the same as the rest of the local population. According to this narrative, there is no
signifcant difference between them and the Finnish-speaking ‘Lapps’; hence, they
should not be given any ‘special rights.’ On the other hand, Sámi Indigeneity is called
into question through their difference from the ‘Lapps,’ the latter of which are por-
trayed as the region’s oldest, original inhabitants and thus more Indigenous than the
Sámi.
The same narratives still play a central role in popular discussions over Sámi
rights in Finland. However, over time, the rhetoric has become more complex as,
in addition to opposing Sámi claims to Indigenous peoplehood, a new discourse of
‘we, too, are Sámi’ has developed alongside the older ones. Whereas Kiisa was pro-
duced in a strategic context in which the main objective was to oppose the establish-
ment of Sámi cultural autonomy, once the law was passed and the Sámi Parliament
founded, the focus turned to a demand that the Finnish-speaking locals, who had
deep roots in the region, should also be granted access to the electoral register, either
under a competing ‘Indigenous Lapp’ identity or because, upon careful examination,
they, too, could produce records of Sámi ancestry. In addition to granting a chance
to infuence the Sámi Parliament from within, membership in its electoral register
became seen as a ticket to ‘special rights’ that the Sámi might receive, especially in
case the state also recognized Sámi land rights. Hence, outright opposition to Sámi
cultural autonomy was joined by demands to access the electoral register and by the
emergence of new popular organizations which seek to promote the agenda under
various overlapping identities and group names (Junka-Aikio 2021; Lehtola 2015,
2021; Pääkkönen 2008; Valkonen 2017).

POLITICAL SELF-INDIGENIZATION
These developments correspond closely with the self-defned ‘Indigenous’ organiza-
tions that have recently emerged in various other settler colonial locations, espe-
cially North America. Of particular relevance are examples from Canada, where the
recognition of Métis rights in the early 2000s was followed by the establishment
of various new organizations which now demand formal recognition as Métis and
Indigenous. Their political genealogies have been studied in detail by the Canadian
sociologist Darryl Leroux, who shows how some of Canada’s largest self-defned
‘Métis’ organizations were originally established by groups which came together
to oppose Indigenous land, hunting and fshing rights locally (Leroux 2019a). As in
Finland, in Canada, the discourses on Indigeneity and Indigenous cultural revitaliza-
tion were thus ‘weaponized’ in the service of inherently anti-Indigenous forces and

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to distract from the development of Indigenous rights – unless those rights were
extended to more people (ibid.).
Such political organizations represent just one aspect of the broader phenomenon,
whereby people who previously have identifed as white develop a new identity as
Indigenous, often based on highly distant or even entirely fabricated ancestry claims
or narratives of family lore. Given the sharp increase of such identity claims, the
phenomenon has provoked growing attention among Indigenous and non-Indige-
nous critical scholars who discuss it using various terms, such as ‘race shifting,’ ‘self-
Indigenization’ and ‘Indigenous identity appropriation’ (e.g. Leroux 2019a; Sturm
2011; Gaudry 2018). Although not all individuals who self-Indigenize act out of
material interest or to consciously oppose Indigenous rights (see Sturm 2011), such
considerations seem more prevalent when the new identity claims are promoted by
popular organizations and accompanied by demands for formal recognition, as is
the case in both Canada and Finland (Junka-Aikio 2021). In this study, I use the term
political self-Indigenization to highlight specifcally this aspect of the phenomenon.
In Canada, political self-Indigenization has been facilitated by academic knowl-
edge production and scholars who actively promote the identity and history claims
of the self-identifed ‘Indigenous’ organizations (Leroux 2019b). The same can be
said of Finland, where research has had a central role in shaping and sharpening
the popular movement’s discourse and rhetoric. In the past, research associated
with or used by the movement focused especially on legal history, and it was drawn
upon mainly to counter Sámi arguments for cultural and ethnic difference and land
ownership (Lehtola 2021; Alakorva et al. in this volume). However, in more recent
times, the research has been complemented by new humanities-based studies on
Sáminess and Sámi identity. Also, the new research centers on the demand that the
Sámi Parliament’s electoral register needs to be expanded so that more people can
join, but now the argument is articulated in tune with what I have called elsewhere
as ‘deconstructive research ethos’, the discourses of individual self-identifcation and
cultural and linguistic revitalization and employing the theoretical and conceptual
resources of postcolonial and Indigenous studies (Junka-Aikio 2016).
Such research might not come across as politically anti-Sámi – quite the oppo-
site. However, on the level of popular politics and rhetoric, it has been taken up
and operationalized largely by the same groups and actors that have been the most
vociferous opponents of Sámi cultural autonomy and rights since the 1990s. In prac-
tice, this has resulted in a perplexing convergence, around a shared political agenda,
of two seemingly disparate discourses and narrative strategies, one of which high-
lights care and appreciation for Sámi language and identity while the other contin-
ues to oppose Sámi self-determination and to construct the Sámi and Sámi rights
in derogatory terms. Irrespective of their differences and mutual contradictions,
both are now pieced together and employed actively by various actors (including a
number of Sámi parliament members whom Hirvasvuopio (2020) identifes as the
‘opposition bloc’ within the Sámi cultural autonomy) to explicitly undermine Sámi
peoplehood and rights and to denigrate individuals and institutions who are seen
to defend such rights.
Whereas in the early 1990s the dissemination of such speech demanded print
press, today it is done effectively through social media. Especially Facebook has
been identifed as an online space where hate speech targeting the Sámi is actively

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produced and circulated (Korhonen et al. 2016; Näkkäläjärvi 2017). In addition to

the individual Facebook pages of certain politically active actors, such speech is com-
mon at larger, locally based Facebook groups. One of them is Inari Citizen Channel
(Inarin kansalaiskanava), which centers on community issues and exchanges relat-
ing to the Inari municipality. Next, I move on to explore how the Sámi, the Sámi
Parliament and the issue of Sámi identity are discussed in contemporary discussions
found in this Facebook group.

INARI CITIZEN CHANNEL

Inari is one of the four municipalities which comprise the Sámi homeland region
in Finland and home to three recognized Sámi groups: Inari Sámi, Skolt Sámi and
North Sámi (see also Alakorva et al. in this volume). With a total population of
6,900, a little less than one third (c. 1,240 persons)2 of Inari’s inhabitants are Sámi,
the rest being mostly Finns.
The Facebook group Inari Citizen Channel was created in October 2010, and it
currently has around 6,000 members and fve moderators. According to the public
description, its aim is to be a platform where one can express one’s opinion ‘on issues
relating to land use planning, investments, taxation and many other issues relating
to the municipality of Inari that you might be concerned with.’ The group is set up
as a private group, which requires approved membership for access, but its large size
(almost the same as the number of Inari’s inhabitants) and public description indi-
cate that in practice, the purpose is to facilitate public discussion on issues concern-
ing the municipality. All this indicates a reasonable expectation of publicity among
members who participate in the conversations.
Inari Citizen Channel has in the past been singled out as one of the platforms on
which online hate speech against the Sámi regularly fares up (Näkkäläjärvi 2017,
23). Although various different topics are discussed, postings which relate to the
Sámi Parliament, to land or natural resource use issues involving the Sámi or to
Sámi identity are frequent and usually attract a signifcant number of comments.
When people with various different views participate in such discussions, they can
be enlightening and informative. However, one-sided discussions and derogatory
speech are highly common, and the moderators are frequently called on to remove
messages that are considered inappropriate or which might pass the threshold of
hate speech. At times, entire discussions have been removed afterwards or all the
comments hidden. Accordingly, the archived content that is accessible today does
not fully refect the range of the original discussions.
To identify the research material, I searched the group’s archives between 2012
and 2020 using two main keywords – ‘saamelaiset’ (the Sámi), and ‘saamelaiskäräjät’
(the Sámi Parliament). The search resulted in 68 relevant discussions, most of them
between 100 and 300 comments long. Of this vast amount of material, I brought
together for closer analysis those comments and exchanges that might, in accord-
ance with Tirrel’s defnition, be regarded as ‘toxic’ in relation to the Sámi people.
Next, I parsed the main narrative patterns and strategies that are used in these dis-
cussions to undermine, attack or denigrate the Sámi. Given the local counter-move-
ment’s uneven shift from direct opposition to the practice of self-Indigenization, I
was particularly interested in the complex ways in which both explicitly anti-Sámi

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discourses and the discourses of self-Indigenization and revitalization are woven

together and employed side by side, often by the same actors.
To protect the integrity and privacy of the research subjects, all the material has
been anonymized, and it is presented here without information on the date or year
of publication, the immediate context that prompted the discussion, or personal
background and positioning. I also do not provide direct quotes in the original
language (Finnish), as those could be used for reverse identifcation of individual
group members (see Ayers et al. 2018). For these reasons, the discussion proceeds
on a more general level than what the rich material would otherwise warrant.

Crooks and con men

In the material I examined, toxic speech relating to the Sámi takes place especially
through discourses which critique the Sámi Parliament yet also seek to undermine or
denigrate individuals who represent it or to attack the very legitimacy and purpose
of Sámi cultural autonomy. In Kiisa, the leaders of the Sámi movement and the new
‘Sámi law’ that would pave way for Sámi cultural autonomy were still constructed
as the primary threat. Now, the focus is on the Sámi Parliament’s leadership and on
the people around it, as well as on the nature and purpose of the institution itself,
which is cast as inherently dubious and oppressive.
A highly prominent narrative constructs the Sámi Parliament in terms of its alleged
abuse of tax-payer’s money. According to the narrative, one of the Sámi Parliament’s
main functions is to extract and spend enormous amounts of tax money on point-
less legal complaints and bureaucracy. Mostly, this is to harass and exclude from the
Sámi Parliament people who are not in favor of the ‘small Sámi elite,’ to discrimi-
nate against livelihoods other than reindeer herding or to generate personal proft.
Alternatively, the Sámi Parliament is accused of inventing new work positions and
projects simply to extract state funding for the beneft of the ‘small group of insiders’
who are then employed.
For instance, in a discussion which revolves around the Sámi Parliament’s objec-
tion to mechanical gold panning in the Sámi homeland region, the focus is almost
entirely on funding. One asks: ‘Whose money does the Sámi Parliament use to fab-
ricate these complaints [against gold panning]?’ Others follow up: ‘Tax-payers’
money. Our money.’ The conversation carries on:

The Sámi Parliament can keep complaining and tying up judges and the whole
legal roulette endlessly because they don’t need to participate in the costs.

This has cost hundreds of thousands of euros to the Finnish society. . . . [I]t’s a
matter of bullying.

Eventually, the real motivation behind the Sámi Parliament’s objection is revealed to
be economic self-interest:

Don’t you fools understand what a scam this is. Millions [of euros] are directed
to lawyers’ and jurists’ pockets. Opposition to gold mining is just a tool to fll
the belly of [X, a lawyer working for the Sámi Parliament] with easy money!

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After this, the commentator describes the Sámi Parliament as a ‘legalized thief’ and
urges also others to go and check out the names of the individual lawyers who work
for the Sámi Parliament and their yearly salaries.
In conversations such as this one, the Sámi Parliament and the individu-
als associated with it are represented primarily as crooks and con men who are
driven by personal greed. Often, the narrative on the abuse of taxpayers’ money is
joined by a broader one which focuses on Sámi greed for land and power. Echoing
Kiisa, this narrative suggests that the ultimate objective of the Sámi Parliament or
its ‘group of insiders’ or ‘Sámi elites’ is to take over lands and natural resources
in Northern Finland. Although it is acknowledged that currently, the Sámi
Parliament’s mandate is limited to cultural autonomy, the threat of Sámi land rights
looms large:

That [land rights] is what they have been all the time driving for. That would
give them a much stronger chance to have their say on everything – on land use,
water and everything else, too. . . .
[T]he biggest reason for all this cruelty [the actions of the Sámi Parliament] is to
keep the share of state money to as small group as possible, and to secure rule
over land use.

The speech about ‘insiders’ coincides with a claim that the Sámi Parliament is domi-
nated by North Sámi reindeer herders who have come to Finland from Sweden or
Norway, taking over the lands which belong to communities that were there before
them. The narrative of immigrants and colonists builds on the fact that following
the 19th-century border demarcations between Sweden, Norway and Russia, the
Sámi reindeer nomads whose pastures extended across the region were forced to set-
tle in just one side of the new borders, which cut Sápmi in four pieces. Their forced
relocation did cause new pressure on land and natural resource use in the regions to
which they were subsequently confned. However, the consequences were particu-
larly devastating for the reindeer-herding Sámi themselves, as in practice, the border
closures and subsequent loss of land spelled an end to the reindeer nomadism that
had sustained their society and culture until then (Aikio 2011).
This notwithstanding, in popular discourse, the history, which is intimately entan-
gled with the colonization of Sápmi, is operationalized as fodder for toxic or hate
speech. In the conversations that I examined, the North Sámi were portrayed not
only as power-hungry ‘Sámi elites’ who control the Sámi Parliament, but also as
‘illegal immigrants,’ ‘sledge refugees,’ ‘tax refugees’ or ‘colonists’ who use Indigenous
rights and reindeer to ‘continue the robbery.’ ‘Soon no-one else is allowed to live here
except for reindeer herders and their families.’
The narrative of immigrants and colonists relies heavily on the construction a
confict between the North Sámi and other groups which, unlike the North Sámi,
are represented as the region’s real Indigenous People. In Inari Citizen Channel,
the claim is often made in the name of the Inari Sámi, which is an existing, for-
mally recognized Sámi group but which – much like the Métis in Canada – has
been subjected to active appropriation and instrumentalization by groups which
promote political self-Indigenization or which simply seek to critique the Sámi
Parliament.
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They [the North Sámi] are abusing tax money to smoke out the local Indigenous
people, Inari Sámi.
It looks like the reindeer, an alien species in Lapland, has been turned [by the
North Sámi] into a holy cow which is used to take over the real indigenous peo-
ple’s rights to their lands and their ways of life, to suppress all their traditions,
and to drive the inhabitants away from their lands.

Other terms are also used. For instance, in one comment, the North Sámi are portrayed
as perpetrators of genocide. Another one likens them to an authoritarian dictatorship:

One can fnd out what precisely happened to the original inhabitants of Kemi
Lapland after the arrival of North Sámi, by reading from [legal scholar] Juha
Joona’s book.3 What happens today, could be called a genocide.
The North Sámi have learned from the democracy in North Korea. ‘If you don’t
agree with us, a bullet in the neck will teach you the lesson.’

‘They don’t accept us’

In these comments, it is the North Sámi who are portrayed as the true colonists
and oppressors in Lapland. Conversely, Finns and the Finnish state are relieved of
guilt. Often, this is done explicitly: ‘Colonial pressure [in Inari] didn’t come from the
south, it came from the north’; ‘The relationship between the Finns and the Sámi is
ok. The Sámi are oppressed by other Sámi.’
Such statements bring us to the fourth major narrative, which centers on internal
oppression, specifcally on the confict over the Sámi Parliament’s electoral register.
According to this narrative, the Sámi Parliament has purposefully and based on
dubious motivations excluded a large number of Sámi or ‘Indigenous Lapp’ people
from its electoral register. In so doing, it discriminates and violates their basic human
right – the right to personal identity and collective recognition.
The narrative of internal oppression relies heavily on the discourse of self-Indigeni-
zation, which presents individual self-identifcation, distant ancestry and/or DNA as
the basis of Indigenous identity. From the perspective of Indigenous self-determi-
nation, such claims can appear highly problematic, however, insofar as they bypass
Indigenous Peoples’ own understandings of Indigeneity and peoplehood, which tend
to build on kinship knowledge and links to the existing, living Indigenous commu-
nity and on the demand that self-identifcation is balanced by group acceptance (see
Gaudry 2018; Alakorva 2021). In Finland, the dispute over Sámi identity has cen-
tred especially on the legal Sámi defnition. The Sámi Parliament has insisted that the
current defnition, which considers Sámi lineage up to three generations back, can-
not be extended to include persons whose claims to Sámi descent go much further,
back to the 1700’s and early 1800s. This view has been opposed by the self-defned
‘Lapp’ or ‘Sámi’ movements, which argue that practically all ancestry claims, as well
as subjective testimonies of personal self-identifcation, should be considered (see
Junka-Aikio 2021; Tervaniemi 2019; Mörkenstam et al. in this volume).
In Inari Citizen Channel, the discourse of self-Indigenization and the narrative of inter-
nal oppression that accompanies it are advanced through various overlapping identity

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claims. On the one hand, it is argued that those who have been unfairly excluded from
the electoral register are also Sámi, but belong to groups and families that are not in
favor of, or known by, the narrow group of ‘elite Sámi’ who ‘run the Sámi Parliament.’
On the other hand, the excluded are portrayed as members of Sámi minority groups
or of other groups that are ‘more Indigenous’ to the region than the North Sámi, yet
are overlooked by the ‘Sámi elites,’ or the North Sámi. The group names that are used
and operationalized in these contexts include, for instance, ‘Forest Lapps’ (metsälap-
palaiset), ‘Forest Sámi’ (metsäsaamelaiset), ‘non-status Sámi’ (statuksettomat saame-
laiset), ‘Kemi Lapps’ (Kemin lappalaiset) and ‘Inari Sámi’ (inarinsaamelaiset), that last
of which differs from the others in that it is also one of the three formally recognized
Sámi groups in Finland that are represented by the Sámi Parliament.
In practice, all the group names are linked to rather recent organizations which
promote political self-Indigenization and lobby for a broader legal Sámi defnition
(see Junka-Aikio 2021; see also Mörkenstam et al. in this volume). The importance
of formal organization is also highlighted at Inari Citizen Channel:

We have to start promoting our own cause, the cause of the indigenous Forest
Lapps, and turn it into a group that is recognized in law. . . . [O]therwise we are
ran over by lantalaiset [Finns] and the Sámi. As a Lapinkylä [siida], we would
get stronger rights to land and water. Let’s take up our right to be an Indigenous
Forest Lapp people!

The suggestion is followed up:

We would, by the way, be a large group if we put up an organization of our own

for those Sámi who have been excluded. Also in that group, we could use our
Sámi roots to constitute ourselves. We could apply funding for our group, too.

Also, the narrative of internal oppressions explains Sámi Parliament’s actions and
policy in reference to greed and material self-interest. Commonly, it is argued that
the Sámi Parliament wants to ‘keep the number of people with voting rights as small
as possible’ simply to make sure that the possible benefts that come with Indigenous
rights will not need to be shared with more people. Personal self-interest intersects
with, and leads to, collective discrimination and even elimination of those ‘fellow
Sámi’ whose identities are not formally recognized: ‘The Sámi Parliament is under-
mining the Lake Lapps’ [Inari Sámi] right to exist and if we allow the situation to
continue, Inari Sámi might disappear from the map.’
Although the narrative of internal oppression represents the people or groups
that have been excluded as also being Sámi or Indigenous, it is frequently extended
to deny Sámi peoplehood and Indigeneity:

There exists no such people as the Sámi. Those who founded the Sámi Parliament
in the 1980s were lantalaisia [Finns], each of them, from Uusimaa [a region in
Southern Finland]. They have put themselves in the Sámi register and they keep
adding their own relatives in it!
Before there were no Sámi, those snobs just invented it at some point, I still don’t
know any other people than Lapps, and that’s it!

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This kind of speech, which denies Sámi peoplehood altogether, is identical to the
ideas and rhetoric that were disseminated in Kiisa more than two decades earlier.
What is different, however, is that today, such speech is joined seamlessly by a very
different kind of discourse which emphasizes care and commitment for Sámi culture
and identity. In the new discourse, the right to access Sámi Parliament’s electoral
register is framed, above all, as a question of cultural revitalization.

[W]e want to conserve Sáminess and awareness of it in our families. This has to do
with our lineage, which is precious for us and which we are not ready to give away.

Compared to Kiisa, this kind of comment, which conveys ‘love for Sámi roots’ and
commitment to Sámi culture and society, refects a clear shift from direct opposition
to the strategy of self-Indigenization. Consequently, the Sámi Parliament’s refusal to
accept people who ‘self-identify’ as Sámi is portrayed as harmful, not only because
it violates the individual right to identity but also because it hampers efforts to
empower and revitalize Sámi culture and society at large: ‘Now that the construction
of new Sáminess has begun, the Sámi themselves are destroying it by denying those
who are partially Sámi their status.’ Often, such comments are followed by passion-
ate pleas to end fghting ‘one another’ and to promote ‘peace’ instead of confict:
‘Give up all that in-fghting and let Sáminess become stronger’; ‘The most important
task of the Sámi Parliament is to unite, not to separate.’
Such rhetoric can seem highly compelling, especially from the perspective of
Indigenous revitalization. However, in the Facebook discussions I examined, it
peacefully coexists with, and often leads to, comments that are very different in
tone. For instance, in a thread which begins with testimonies of love for one’s Sámi
roots and laments the Sámi Parliament’s rejection letters to those who applied for
the electoral register, the focus soon shifts to demands to end the Sámi Parliament.

The Sámi Parliament is violating human rights. State funding for that kind of
institutions should be totally cancelled.
We have seen enough of this farce. Cut off funding, organize new elections and
include also those people who have been excluded from the Sámi Parliament.

The demands to cut funding are followed by broader calls to place Sámi politics
back under Finnish tutelage:

What do we even need the Sámi Parliament for? . . . The state rather than the
Sámi Parliament should take care of Sámi issues, now there are unnecessary
middlemen.
The Sámi law [the Sámi Parliament Act] has to be revised so that from now on
the one who funds it all, in other words the state, has a fnal say on all of the
functions of the Sámi Parliament. This way we will get an end to this wild dis-
crimination and empty quarrels.

By this point, the conversation has traveled a full circle: The main source of human
rights violations, colonialism and discrimination which hampers Sámi and Indigenous

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well-being in Northern Finland is the Sámi Parliament. To correct the wrong, Sámi
cultural autonomy needs to be ended, and the handling of Sámi matters transferred
back to Finns, who do it better.

A TOXIC EPIDEMIC: CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER

REMARKS
The conversations I have examined bring attention to how elusive the line between
the discourse of Indigenous revitalization and discourses that are hostile to
Indigenous self-determination and autonomy can be in a social environment that
is permeated by political self-Indigenization. In so doing, they also attest to why, in
order to understand hate speech, one cannot focus attention only on expressions
that are openly hateful, harmful or derogatory. Even though most of the comments
that I have analyzed here are not necessarily ‘hateful’ or directly harmful in content,
their constant repetition, as well as the ways in which they are assembled with other
comments, contribute to their meaning and impact.
Also, the volume of toxic speech, the sites that are used for its dissemination
and the lack of consistent counter-speech matter. The number of people who con-
tribute to these narratives, whether on Facebook or through other platforms such
as blogs, online discussion forums, traditional media, public speeches and state-
ments, events or popular and academic publications, is not necessarily that large.
However, the fact that such speech can be advanced year after year, on multiple
sites, largely uncontested and with the blessing of the silent majority, implies that
the space that a limited group of people is able to occupy within the public sphere
simply by juggling the message between one another becomes much broader. In
their study on the social media dissemination of the concept of non-status Sámi,
Länsman and Kortelainen (2021, 197) poignantly call this effect the ‘echo cham-
ber.’ As argued by Tirrel, toxicity ultimately has to do with authority, access and
epistemic position.
Tirrel’s third point is that toxic speech harms the groups that are targeted not
by ‘one blow’ but by slowly expanding the boundaries of acceptable speech. In the
case of an epidemic of toxic speech, derogatory and dehumanizing comments which
otherwise would appear obnoxious gradually become a naturalized and internalized
part of public discourse. The following comment, also from Inari Citizen Channel,
goes some way towards illustrate this:

Equality will be restored in Lapland once the Sámi Parliament is ended. Cut off
the cancer cell that has gone rogue, and everyone will feel better!

Although the comment might be the most openly ‘hateful’ that I found, its internal
logic is no different from the rest of the propositions that I have examined. When
this kind of speech targets a group that is in a minority position and does not have
comparable access or the volume needed to effciently participate in the public dis-
cussion, a leap from ‘critique’ to political silencing, and from online incitement to
actual offine harm, is not far.
And yet, as I read the research material, I got quite convinced that most peo-
ple whose comments I have quoted here did not think they were contributing

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in particularly negative terms. While this might prove the extent to which toxic
speech targeting the Sámi has been normalized, it further highlights the fact that
toxicity is a matter not so much of individual speech acts and the exact words
that are used, but rather, of the ways in which the speech is assembled with other
speech acts as part of the broader narrative or discourse. This is also why criti-
cism of this kind of speech is certainly more demanding than when the speech
is more clearly hateful, racist or degrading. To understand and explain the hurt-
ful nature and impact of ‘milder’ forms of hate speech, one has to engage the
entire narrative apparatus, its political genealogy, and its points of connection
with other texts and forms of speech. In other words, toxic speech is intertextual
in a very profound sense.
What other reasons might explain why such speech has so far evaded critical
attention and exposure? I want to end this study by listing three observations that
are based on my own experiences and discussions with colleagues, hoping that they
can be studied and discussed more thoroughly in future.
The frst observation relates to the quality and nature of the discourse of self-
Indigenization, which is central to the toxic narratives that I have examined. Usually,
such discourses rely on elaborate yet ‘wildly exaggerated’ or even fabricated stories
of family lineage and ethnic affliation (TallBear 2021; Leroux 2019a) or on affec-
tive, subjective testimonies of individual self-recovery. Even when such stories are
brought out in public by the persons themselves, with an explicit aim to infuence
public policy, critiquing them, or exposing the possible inconsistencies or outright
falsehoods they might entail, is not something most people feel comfortable doing.
While this is primarily a matter of personal and research ethics, the increasingly
tight rules and laws which today regulate the handling of personal data, such as the
European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), do not encourage
one to do so, either.
As an example, while the Sámi community in Finland is relatively small (about
10,000 people), many Sámi still hold elaborate knowledge of Sámi kinship rela-
tions and of the ways in which the ethnic boundary between the Finns and the
Sámi has been negotiated locally up until today. For the holders of such Indigenous
knowledge, the identity claims that are made today in pursuit of political self-
Indigenization might seem absurd. Yet to deconstruct such claims, one would
have to engage critically the narratives of family history and the individual testi-
monies on which they rest, i.e. personal matters which are normally placed within
the private sphere and thus beyond the reach of public critique. Even when iden-
tity is made explicitly political, on the eve of public criticism, it suddenly appears
‘too personal.’ What rules or guidelines should frame the ethics and politics of
such critical public engagement is therefore an issue that urgently needs address-
ing. A recent Cherokee Scholars’ statement which seeks to combat misappropria-
tion of Cherokee identity takes the issue up in direct terms, by asserting that ‘[a]
ny person who publicly identifes as Cherokee has initiated a public discussion
about their identity’ (Thinktsalagi 2020).
The second observation is that any person who critiques narratives which, at
frst sight, simply seem to advocate the cause of ‘excluded minorities’ and a broader,
more inclusive understanding of Indigeneity risks being positioned, no matter how
involuntarily, in the box of a ‘gatekeeper’ or an ‘essentialist,’ who refuses to recognize

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Sámi ‘diversity.’ At worse, one may even be accused of reverse racism and discrimi-
nation. For aren’t the critics of the ‘Forest Sámi’ and other new movements equally
involved in denying their Indigeneity and representing them as a ‘threat’? To this,
my own answer is that no one can escape the politics of positioning – insofar as our
understanding of the social world today is ultimately post-foundational, everyone
has to work through the politics and ethics of their own engagement. In the context
of a confict that involves struggles over Sámi identity, I have chosen to stand with,
and respect the experiences and knowledge of, those people who were involved in
the Sámi community before Sámi identity became the focal point of political self-
Indigenization (Junka-Aikio 2016).
The third observation is that the narratives that I have examined can be hard to
engage critically because of their self-conscious framing as ‘critique of power.’ On
the surface, the criticism is a usually directed at the Sámi Parliament, at the ‘elite
Sámi,’ at ‘the insiders,’ the reindeer herders or the North Sámi – almost never at
the entire people. As one commentator puts it, ‘I hate the Sámi Parliament, not the
Sámi as such. There’s a damn big difference.’ However, it is questionable whether
speech which formally addresses only one part of the Sámi society or which is
limited to the critique of an institution which represents them, should be, by that
virtue, considered ethically unproblematic. The threshold for hate speech is natu-
rally much higher in the context of criticism which is directed at institutions, groups
and persons who exercise public power; the right to such critique is a cornerstone
of democracy and freedom of speech. But, when such speech is used constantly
to target an institution which represents an ethnic minority (the Sámi currently
comprise about 0.18% of Finland’s overall population) and when those who are
seen to publicly defend the rights of the minority group are systematically cast as
morally compromised or as part of a self-interested ‘elite,’ the boundaries between
healthy critique of power and efforts to silence a minority people seem much less
secure. This issue has been studied by Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, the former head of the
Sámi branch in Finland’s National Broadcasting Company Yle, who argues that
in Finland, anti-Sámi hate speech, which also involves public and private intimi-
dation, personal attacks and various other methods of harassment and silencing
has been highly effcient at excluding Sámi voices from the public sphere. On a
fundamental level, this has resulted in a severe violation of Sámi freedom of speech
(Näkkäläjärvi 2017).
In a recent essay ‘What the Hell’s Wrong with You?’ Kim TallBear (2021) talks
about the various patterns of delegitimization and outright intimidation that she has
had to overcome to become the public Indigenous voice she is today. Subsequently,
she brings this history to bear upon the current ‘onslaught’ that people who con-
test Indigenous identity appropriation or ‘race shifting’ face in North America. ‘Like
with adolescent bullies on a white-dominated playground,’ Tallbear writes, ‘it has
seemed too risky to publicly confront race shifters and their accompanying resource
appropriation.’ However, the main message she seeks to convey is that ultimately,
much of the internalized fear might be unnecessary: ‘I keep hearing my mother’s
voice in my head: “What the hell’s wrong with you? You can take them.”’ The same
words of encouragement may be needed to tackle the epidemic of toxic speech that
targets the Sámi in Finland.

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This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant
agreement No. 845232.

NOTES
1 ‘Lapp’ is the term that non-Sámis used for the Sámi people, as well as for the nature-based
livelihoods the Sámi practiced, until the term was challenged by the Sámi, who demanded that
their own word – Sámi – be used. As a result, the term ‘Lapp’ – which is the one that is used
in old church and taxation records – was emptied of contemporary meaning until the locally
based counter-movement in Enontekiö appropriated it for its own use. For more on the history
and political uses of the concept, see Lehtola (2015), Pääkkönen (2008), Valkonen (2017).
2 See Saamelaiskäräjät and Väestörekisterikeskus (2019).
3 The reference is to legal scholar Juha Joona’s PhD thesis on land and water rights in Lapland
(Joona 2019; see also Alakorva et al. in this volume).

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 CHAPTER TWENTY

T H E H I S T O RY A N D C U R R E N T
S I T U AT I O N O F D I S C R I M I N AT I O N
AG A I N S T T H E SÁ M I


Ketil Lenert Hansen

INTRODUCTION
Cultural colonization, marginalization, rapid modernization and subsequent ethnic
discrimination are shared experiences among all Indigenous Peoples in the world
(Minde 2005). Also, the national states in Sápmi, Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Russia have directed colonial practices towards the Sámi, but their force, intensity,
scope and impact on Sámi societies have varied at different times and in different
places. These colonial practices have violated – and still violate – Sámi ways of life
and the possibility of maintaining their traditions, government and languages.
There are many examples of practices oppressing the Sámi people, depriving
them of their self-determination. During the 20th century, boarding schools sepa-
rated Sámi children from their families, culture, identity and language. The different
forms of residential and boarding schools for Indigenous children are the shared
colonial trauma of the Indigenous Peoples. Often, Sámi children were taught that
they were of lesser worth than the dominant societies, and the only way to salvation
was to forfeit their culture, identity and language. The Sámi culture, language and
ultimately race being inferior to the majority was not always taught to the children
directly (and sometimes not even intentionally), but it was part of the hidden cur-
riculum of the school that refected the values and interests of the dominant society.
The impression of Sámi being of lesser value can be – even today – taught in school
unintentionally by giving less value, time and resources to the Sámi content and
education.
Though the situation and the right of the Sámi to self-government have improved
to a signifcant degree, various studies in Sápmi show that Indigenous Sámi ado-
lescents and adults experience prejudice and discrimination more frequently than
their majority populations (Bals et al. 2010; Hansen et al. 2008; Hansen et al. 2017;
Heikkilä and Miettunen 2019; Mannila 2021; Omma and Petersen 2015). In this
chapter, I will examine the current situation of prejudice towards and discrimination
against the Sámi in Sápmi. I base my study on recent research on the topic (Hansen

328 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-23

 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —

et al. 2008, 2017; Hansen and Skaar 2021; Lange 2001; Omma 2011; Omma and
Petersen 2015; Omma et al. 2012; Omma et al. 2013). I am interested in both the
individual, institutional and structural, as well as past and present forms of discrimi-
nation that Sámi have experienced. Although there has been recent research done in
this area, there are still large gaps in knowledge. In this chapter, I focus particularly
on the situation in Norway and Sweden, where most research on Sámi discrimina-
tion is done. The central questions I seek to answer are frstly, to what forms of insti-
tutional discrimination were Sámi children exposed in boarding schools in Sápmi,
and secondly, what forms do racism, prejudice and ethnic discrimination take in
contemporary Sápmi and how does it affect the health and well-being of the Sámi?
I will investigate the discrimination which the Sámi in Norway experience today
(Hansen et al. 2008; Hansen et al. 2017) through the results of the Mihá survey
(Hansen and Skaar 2021) conducted on Sámi adolescents and self-reported discrimi-
nation experienced by the Sámi adult (the SAMINOR study I and II). I will also shed
light on the situation in Sweden by presenting two surveys done among Sámi youth
about their experience of negative societal treatment due to Sámi ethnicity and a
survey about discrimination against adult Sámi (Lange 2001; Omma 2013; Omma
and Petersen 2015; Omma et al. 2012). I approach the topic through an historic
overview of the Sámi boarding school history and illustrate what similarities and dif-
ferences can be observed in the harassment experienced by the Sámi. In my chapter,
I illustrate how discrimination is negatively related to health for Sámi people and
examine protective resilience factors (Bals et al. 2010; Friborg et al. 2017; Hansen
et al. 2010; Hansen and Sørlie 2012; Omma et al. 2012; Omma and Petersen 2015)

THE HISTORY OF BOARDING SCHOOLS IN SÁPMI

In Sweden, Finland, Russia and Norway, majority of Sámi children were separated
from their families and placed in boarding schools during the 20th century. In the
boarding schools, the Sámi children were restricted from their native culture and
identity and were only allowed to use Sámi language to a very limited extent. The
boarding schools aimed to adapt the Sámi children to the dominant language and
culture and to the majority culture’s way of thinking at the same time as they were
encouraged to forfeit their culture, identity and language. Thereby, the Sámi children
were taught that they were of lesser worth. An exception to the rather similar board-
ing school policies and practices, Sweden had an additional Sámi schooling policy
built on segregation based on the concept Lapp skal vara lapp (‘Let a Lapp be a
Lapp’). The starting point of this policy was understanding that the Sámi were not
able, and hence should not practice, anything besides reindeer herding.
Norway became an independent nation-state in 1905, after a 500-year history
of union with Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, from 1851 to 1963, the offcial
Norwegian minority policy of Norwegianization was forced assimilation of the Sámi
and also the Kven minority, their language, identity and culture into Norwegian lan-
guage, identity, culture and society. In the period from 1870 to 1905, measures of the
assimilation policy gradually sharpened (Minde 2005). This changed the situation
and position of Sámi and Kven languages in schools. Before, the use of the mother
tongue in teaching and the adaptation of some learning material into the Sámi lan-
guage was accepted (Jensen 2015). As time passed, the offcial policy of using Sámi

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 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

and Kven languages to support teaching became gradually less accepted (Jensen 2015)
until it was banned late in the 19th century when the policy of assimilation of the
Sámi and the Kven became offcial. Gradually, Norwegian language and Norwegian
traditions, food culture and customs became the only acceptable options in schools
and in dormitories. Simultaneously, Norwegianization and Norwegian language and
culture were extended to cover most aspects of social life (Minde 2005). During the
20th century, Indigenous Sámi and Kven minority children were placed at boarding
schools to hasten their adoption of the Norwegian majority language and culture.
The boarding schools were established in order to speed up their cultural transforma-
tion but also to secure national educational policy ambitions as well as contemporary
nation-building concerns related to border security in the high north.
Although the Norwegian education policy of cultural colonization was formally
abolished by law in 1963, practices that alienated Sámi children from their homes,
families, language and Sáminess in general remained, though they were less obvious.
The consequences of the Norwegianization policy in school practices were notice-
able for several decades afterwards. While some Sámi students as adults in Norway
have voiced stories highlighting positive aspects of being offered regular schooling
and a healthy diet (Tjelle 2000), most stories concern painful separations from their
parents, family and home village that alienated them both linguistically and cultur-
ally. Many stories include accounts of discrimination, as well as emotional, physical
or sexual violence and harassment at the boarding schools. At home, the parents
felt deep guilt towards their children, whereas the children felt abandoned by their
parents, which shaped an experience of boarding schools as internment camps. As
studies have documented that adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of
poorer mental health as adults (Merrick et al. 2017), one may expect that these Sámi
children did not go through these experiences mentally unscathed. According to a
retrospective study among Sámi and non-Sámi children attending boarding schools
in Norway, boarding school participants reported more discrimination and violence
at boarding schools and unhealthier lifestyle behaviour (e.g. smoking) and less edu-
cation and household income in adulthood than non-boarding participants (Friborg
et al. 2020).
Meanwhile, in Sweden, the Swedish Sámi policy was built on segregation and the
concept Lapp skal vara lapp (Let a Lapp be a Lapp), meaning that the Sámi people
were not able to do and should not do anything besides reindeer herding (Omma et al.
2012). Part of this policy was an education system with Sámi schools exclusively
for the Sámi, so-called nomad schools (also known as lappskola (Lapp schools)).
The Nomad School Reform in 1913 obligated the nomadic schools to have a lower
educational level and more limited teaching hours and expressly forbade the Sámi
children to enter the folkeskolan (‘folk high school’) and public primary schools
(Lundmark 2002). The aim of this separate educational path and school system for
the Sámi was to ensure that this nomadic group would neither die out nor mingle
too much with the majority Swedish population. The nomad schools were only for
the reindeer-herding Sámi population; the other Sámi attended the regular Swedish
school system. One of the results of this educational segregation policy was that all
Sámi who were not able to make a living herding reindeer were assimilated into the
Swedish society in a harsh way, and many Sámi lost their culture and native Sámi
language (Lundborg 1932).

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In Finland, the education system and boarding schools in rural areas played a key
role in Finnish national identity building between 1866 and 1977. In this period,
there were progressively racially inspired discussions surrounding the ideal of an
ethnically homogenous people in Finland who shared the same culture and language
(Nyyssönen 2007). The education of Sámi children in independent Finland has been
organized in different ways at different times. Though the act on compulsory educa-
tion in 1921 ordered all children to complete a primary school curriculum of at least
six years, the children who lived more than fve kilometres from the school were
excluded. In Sápmi, these children were educated by catechetical schools run by
appointed catechists. The main aim of these schools was to teach the Sámi to read
and write and the basic teachings of Christianity. A new act in the 1940s obliged
municipalities to provide schools for all children and dormitories for those who
lived too far from the schools. These boarding schools were common in rural areas
with poor infrastructure as in the northernmost parts of Finland and in the archi-
pelago. The boarding schools were attended by both Sámi and Finnish children, but
their impact on Sámi children and Sámi society was more dramatic and traumatic
(Keskitalo et al. 2018).
Finland’s strict language policy reached its peak in the postwar period, when edu-
cation was only given in Finnish, and the use of Sámi language in schools and dor-
mitories could even be forbidden. According to Sámi scholar Minna Rasmus (2008),
the banishment of the use of the Sámi language was not absolute in Finnish schools,
but the use of the Sámi language still decreased due to these schools. The reason was
negative attitudes towards the Sámi, especially towards the use of the Sámi language
as a language of instruction. However, assimilation tactics were not manifestly writ-
ten into the education policy in Finland. Nevertheless, the result was that many Sámi
lost their Indigenous language and culture, and this process occurred within a single
generation (Aikio-Puoskari and Pentikäinen 2001).
The frst boarding schools for the Kola Sámi in Russia, which started in the mid-
1920s and 1930s, promoted the idea of cultural pluralism, and primary education
was taught in Sámi language. The Second World War had severe impacts on the
economy of the USSR. During the hard post-war period, many Sámi parents sent
their children to boarding schools to ensure they had the necessary food, housing
and education. After Khrushchev’s boarding school reforms in 1956–1959, the pol-
icy of Russifcation, prohibiting Sámi children from using their Sámi mother tongue,
was the offcial boarding school policy in Russia. In the 1960s, Sámi all over Kola
Peninsula were forcibly displaced from their traditional villages to Lovozero. Sámi
children were separated from the parents and culture when they went to the board-
ing schools. Thus, by the end of 1970s, the Sámi language was reintroduced into
boarding schools as a compulsory subject. However, the boarding schools for the
children of Sámi reindeer herders became closed residential schools for neglected
and orphaned children until the end of the 1980s, taking Sámi language from obliga-
tory to an optional subject for Sámi pupils (Afanasyeva 2019; see also Andersen in
this volume).
The boarding schools as a colonial practice are an experience shared by many
Indigenous Peoples. The history of boarding schools has been identifed as having
long-lasting and intergenerational effects on the physical and mental well-being of
Indigenous populations worldwide (Wilk et al. 2017). The boarding school policy

331
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has stolen many Sámis’ language, culture and self-esteem and has also been the
cause of personal trauma (Nergård 2011). In addition, it has contributed to a mental
affiction known and experienced by many as intergenerational trauma. Centuries of
colonial contact have irrevocably damaged the cultural practices of Indigenous Sámi
populations and have also had a lasting negative impact on generations of Sámi
children and youth (Hansen and Skaar 2021).
Today, the institutional discrimination in the form of boarding schools has off-
cially ended in Sápmi, and the Nordic countries have enacted relatively comprehen-
sive legislation to combat ethnic discrimination (Hervik 2019). Despite this, there
still may be structural and systemic barriers in Sápmi that preclude Sámi people
from attaining ethnic equality across multiple domains (e.g. education, health, work,
law, lack of Indigenous statistics etc.). Forms of institutional discrimination that
emerged with colonization and the forced assimilation of the Sámi people may also
continue to manifest today in new forms of individual-level discrimination. In the
last two decades, numerous studies have documented widespread ethnic discrimina-
tion and prejudice, experiences and attitudes of Sámi in Norway and Sweden. The
next section will present research fndings of self-perceived discrimination among
Sámi youth and adults in contemporary Norway and Sweden society.

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST THE SÁMI IN NORWAY

AND SWEDEN
Discrimination is the unfair treatment of a person or group due to particular char-
acteristics such as ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation or disability.
Discrimination can be defned as a range of behaviours and practices that result
in unfair and avoidable inequalities in power, resources or opportunities between
groups in a society and serve to support systems of privilege and oppression.
Discrimination may be manifested across a continuum of actions, from subtle forms
of social exclusion, microaggression and verbal aggression through to illegal actions,
such as physical acts of violence (Ferdinand et al. 2015).
In Norway today, Sámi adolescents and adults experience discrimination much
more frequently than majority Norwegians. In a new study, called the Mihá study
(Hansen and Skaar 2021). Sámi adolescents and adults from 16 to 31 years old in
Norway reported about experience of prejudice and discrimination. According to the
study, 95% of the Indigenous Sámi youth reported prejudice from the dominant society
towards their Sámi group (Hansen and Skaar 2021). These fgures indicate that almost
all the Sámi adolescents and young Sámi in this survey have experienced dominant
society prejudices against their Sámi ethnicity. Negative stereotypes of Sámi people are
still widespread in Nordic society. We can, for example, see the prejudiced picture of
Sámi people communicated in the media, and it is quite legitimate to joke about the
Sámi on the basis of racist and prejudiced conceptions all over Sápmi (Hansen 2012).
Though intentional Norwegianization is not part of the Norwegian curriculum
anymore, still very little is taught about the Sámi culture and their real history in
school. Lile (2011) argues that Norway has still not managed to comply with ILO
Convention No. 169 as pupils and teachers in the primary and lower secondary
schools in Norway lack basic knowledge of Sámi culture and history. This is changing,
however. For example, the new curriculum in Norway (Saabye 2019) has mandated

332
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the incorporation of Sámi knowledge and history for all pupils in Norway. The goal
of the new curriculum is to ensure that future generations of pupils in Norway will
get to know Sámi people and learn about their real history, hopefully helping break
down negative prejudices and stereotypes in the society.
Around 75% of the Sámi youth reported they had experienced discrimination at
least once in their lifetime. Four out of every ten reported experiencing discrimina-
tion at least once in a year and 8% reported experiencing discrimination monthly
(Hansen and Skaar 2021). The Sámi youth respondents reported their ethnic back-
ground as the main reason for being discriminated against. Ethnic discrimination
was reported by 31.7% of Sámi youth respondents. Other reasons for being dis-
criminated against were gender (14.3%) and living areas (13%). These causes of
discrimination are identical to previous fndings among Sámi adults (Hansen et al.
2017). Other Sámi youths reported age, learning diffculties, sexual orientation and
religions or beliefs as reason for experiencing discrimination (Figure 20.1).
The most common form of discrimination that Sámi experience is ethnic discrimi-
nation. For example, Sámi youth can be name called ‘Sámi bastard’ in public, be
made fun of when they wear traditional Sámi clothes or speak the Sámi languages in
public and sometimes they also experience various forms of violence; for example,
Sámi girls experience unwanted sexual harassment and Sámi boys physical violence,
among other things (Hansen and Skaar 2021).
Discrimination happens in multiple settings, including schools, the workplace, the
local community, on the street or in public settings, in the media or on the Internet
and in accessing public agencies and social services (Krieger 2001). Types and set-
tings of discrimination can be both overlapping and mutually reinforcing; therefore,
individuals may simultaneously face multiple forms of discrimination (Viruell-
Fuentes et al. 2012). Discrimination may originate at different levels: personal or

Type of discrimination
35
31.7
Ethnic background
30
Gender
25 Geograhical affliation
Age
20 Learning difficulties
Sexual orientation
14.3
15 13 Nationality
Religions or beliefs
10 Illness
5 Disabilities
5 3.1 3.1 3.1 3.1
1.9 Other causes
1.2 1.2
0

Figure 20.1 Type of self-reported discrimination by ethnic groups.

Source: Hansen and Skaar 2021. Unge samers psykiske helse – en kvalitativ og kvantitativ
studie. [The mental health of young Sámi – a qualitative and quantitative study]. Oslo:
Norwegian Association of Youth Mental Health.

333
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

Settings where Sámi youths experienced discrimination

25
23

At school
20 Online/Internet
Other place
Government
15 Family
Local community
At work
10 8.7 8.7 Applying for work
Shops/restaurants
6.8
5.5 Voluntary work
5 5
5 Housing
3.1
2.5 Health care
1.9
1.2 1.2

Figure 20.2 Settings where Sámi youths experienced discrimination.

Source: Hansen and Skaar 2021. Unge samers psykiske helse – en kvalitativ og kvantitativ
studie. [The mental health of young Sámi – a qualitative and quantitative study]. Oslo:
Norwegian Association of Youth Mental Health.

internalized (e.g. the incorporation of racist attitudes, beliefs or ideologies), interper-

sonal (interactions between individuals) or structural (e.g. institutional policies that
restrict access to opportunities or resources) (Hansen 2015).
As Figure 20.2 shows, many Sámi youth experience discrimination in several are-
nas. The most common arenas are at school, online/internet, in meetings with the
government, in family, in the local community and at work. Furthermore, a few
Sámi youth participants reported having experienced discrimination when applying
for work, in shops/at restaurants, in volunteering, when renting a house and getting
healthcare (Hansen and Skaar 2021).
Several Sámi adolescents say that they rarely or never participate in the online
debates or comment felds on the internet about Sámi issues. The debate about Sámi
society is often very polarized and seems exclusive to many young Sámi. Hate speech
against the Sámi people can help keep alive prejudices and stereotypes about how
Sámi are as a people. (About hate speech against the Sámi, see Junka-Aikio in this
volume.) These statements can negatively affect health and hit the individual hard.
The fact that young Sámi choose to withdraw from the public debate due to hate
speech contributes to weakening democracy for young Sámi people (Hansen and
Skaar 2021).
Data on perpetrators showed that fellow students, strangers, people of ethnic
groups other Sámi, teachers/other employees at school and other Sámi people were
all common perpetrators of discriminatory acts against Sámi youths (Figure 20.3)
(Hansen and Skaar 2021).

334
 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —

Perpetrator of discrimination
25

19.9
20 Student peer group
18
Stranger
Another ethnic group
15
Teachers/other employees
9.9 Same ethnic group
10
7.5 Other people
6.8
5.6 Work colleagues
4.4
5 3.7 Public sector employees

Figure 20.3 Perpetrators of discrimination.

Source: Hansen and Skaar 2021. Unge samers psykiske helse – en kvalitativ og kvantitativ
studie. [The mental health of young Sámi – a qualitative and quantitative study]. Oslo:
Norwegian Association of Youth Mental Health.

The SAMINOR study is a large population-based study and one of the most
important sources of knowledge of the health and life of the Sámi and Norwegian
populations of rural Northern Norway. The study is conducted by the Centre for
Sámi Health Research (Brustad et al. 2014). In the SAMINOR 1 study (2003–2004)
and the SAMINOR 2 study (2012), we found that Sámi adults experienced ethnic
discrimination signifcantly more often than the ethnic non-Indigenous population
in Norway. Ethnic discrimination occurred most frequently among respondents with
a strong Sámi affliation living in Sámi minority areas (Hansen et al. 2008, Hansen
et al. 2017).
The fndings from SAMINOR 1 (2003–2004) show that a large proportion of
adult Sámi individuals (36–79 years old) experience discrimination based on their
Sámi background (Hansen et al. 2008). The fnding shows the trend that the stronger
the Sámi affliation, the higher the prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination.
After adjusting for age, gender and socioeconomic indicators, the respondents with
the strongest Sámi affliation (Sámi category I) were ten times more like to have
experienced ethnic discrimination than the ethnic majority Norwegians, measured
in relative risk (Hansen et al. 2008).
Sámi individuals with strong Sámi affliation living outside the defned Sámi areas
in Norway report the highest levels of discrimination, which can be related to the
national assimilation process, which had the greatest impact in those areas, typi-
cally coastal communities (Bjørklund 1985; Høgmo 1986). After adjusting for age,
gender and socioeconomic indicators, Sámi respondents with strong Sámi affliation
living in those areas reported 15 times more discrimination than ethnic majority
Norwegians, measured in relative risk (data not shown) (Hansen et al. 2008). Despite
the Sámi revitalization, which gradually replaced the history of forced assimilation,
boarding schools and colonization of the Sámi population in Norway towards cul-
tural safeguarding and a decolonization of Sámi society (Minde 2005), Sámi people

335
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

Prevalence of self-report ethnic discrimination

40.0 %
36.0 %
35.0 %
Sámi category I (n=490)
30.0 %
Sámi category II (n=349)
25.0 %
Sámi category III (n=105)
20.0 % 18.8 %
Kvens (n=71)
15.0 % 12.3 %
Majority Norwegians (n=254)
10.0 % 7.4 %

5.0 % 3.5 %

0.0 %

Figure 20.4 Prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination by ethnic groups, in

SAMINOR 1 (2003–2004).1
Source: Hansen, K. L., Melhus, M., Høgmo, A. and Lund, E. 2008. Ethnic discrimination
and bullying in the Sámi and non-Sámi populations in Norway: The SAMINOR study.
International Journal of Circumpolar Health , 67, pp. 97–113.

living outside the defned Sámi areas must still actively struggle for a visible Sámi
presence to be accepted. The buffering effect of a growing Sámi civil society today
is more obvious in the Sámi majority areas than in the Sámi minority areas (Hansen
2015). Within the Sámi majority areas, there are several well-established Sámi insti-
tutions, including professional Indigenous health and social service networks. The
forced assimilation has had the greatest impact on coastal communities in Norway,
in which the Sámi were in a minority position and may have partially or completely
lost their Indigenous identity, culture, language and traditional knowledge. In coastal
areas, many Sámi were subject to hostile attitudes (discrimination) that practically
permeated society. Still today, in these areas, there is less structural and practical
support for Sámi culture, language and identity (Hansen 2011). In coastal areas
where Sámi usually live in the minority position, the stigmatization of and prejudice
towards Sámi people, and ethnicity-based conficts, are still present (Hansen 2015).
Another question in this survey concerned bullying in general. Bullying was
defned as the ‘repeated exposure over time, to negative actions on the part of one
or more other persons.’ For bullying in general, Sámi respondents reported bullying
twice as often than the majority Norwegians. For those who reported bullying in
the past year, the most common locations were at work and in the local community.
Furthermore, the Sámi respondents reported more often than majority Norwegians
that discriminatory remarks were the most common forms of bullying and that the
bullying that happened previously had taken place in boarding schools (Hansen
et al. 2008).
The SAMINOR 2 questionnaire study (2012) was designed as a follow-up study
on issues addressed in the frst SAMINOR study, conducted in 25 municipalities
in the three northernmost counties in Norway. The questionnaire was expanded

336
 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —

to include the introduction of a broader examination of discrimination (Brustad

et al. 2014, Hansen et al. 2017). In total, more than half of Sámi respondents with
a strong Sámi affliation, compared to one in seven non-Indigenous respondents,
reported having experienced discrimination. Sámi respondents with strong Sámi
affliation also experienced discrimination signifcantly more frequently during the
last two years than non-Sámi participants (Hansen et al. 2017).
The data show that many Indigenous adult Sámi living in Norway experience
discrimination. Comparably, more Sámi than non-Sámi respondents reported more
frequent discrimination during the last two years (Hansen et al. 2017). The results
show that Sámi individuals who are highly ‘visible’ by expressing their ethnicity, for
example by using Sámi language, are subject to higher levels of discrimination than
Sámi individuals reporting lower levels of Sámi affliation.
When comparing the prevalence of self-reported discrimination from the frst
SAMINOR study (2003–2004) (Hansen et al. 2008; Lund et al. 2007) with the
SAMINOR 2 questionnaire study (Hansen et al. 2017; Brustad et al. 2014), we found
that Sámi people in the different age cohorts between 36 and 69 years old experienced
the same high levels of discrimination in 2012 as they did almost a decade before in
2003–2004. This indicates that the level of self-reported discrimination among Sámi
adults in Norwegian society has remained constant, thus not changing for the better
(Hansen et al. 2017). Ethnicity, living areas, age, education and household income were

Prevalence of self-reported discrimination

Previously Last two years

60.0 %

50.0 %

16.5 %
40.0 %

30.0 %
8.4 %

20.0 %
34.3 % 4.8 %
24.5 % 4.4 %
10.0 %
14.9 %
9.9 %
0.0 %
Strong Sámi Self-reported Sámi Sámi family Non-Sámi (n=1085)
affiliation (n=697) (n=479) background (=217)

Figure 20.5 Prevalence of self-reported discrimination by ethnic groups (SAMINOR 2 in:

Brustad et al. 2014).2
Source: Hansen, K. L., Minton, S. T., Friborg, O. and Sørlie, T. 2017. Discrimination
amongst Arctic indigenous Sámi and non-indigenous populations in Norway – The
SAMINOR 2 questionnaire study. Journal of Northern Studies. Volum 10 (2).

337
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

all signifcantly associated with differences in the frequency of experiencing discrimina-

tion. Sámi people reported discrimination more frequently than non-Sámi respondents.
Sámi people living in Sámi minority areas were more likely to experience discrimination
than were Sámi people living in Sámi majority areas (Hansen et al. 2017).
The most frequent types of discrimination reported by Sámi respondents were
ethnic discrimination, followed by discrimination based on gender and geographi-
cal affliation. The same was true in the Mihá study among Sámi youths (Figure
20.6). In addition, Sámi adult females with strong Sámi affliation reported higher
levels of gender-based discrimination than did their non-Sámi counterparts. Gender
discrimination is unequal or disadvantageous treatment of an individual or group of
individuals based on gender. In another study, Sámi women respondents were more
likely to report interpersonal violence than were non-Sámi respondents (Eriksen
et al. 2015). We have little scientifc knowledge about whether the gender role pat-
tern among the Sámi population was more equal in the past (Eriksen 2020). What we
do know is that patriarchal structures are considered drivers of violence and abuse
against children and women (Mikton et al. 2016). It is pointed out that the religious
revival from the middle of the 19th century, namely Laestadianism, which had a
great infuence on many Sámi communities in Sápmi, had/has a patriarchal structure
(Eriksen 2020; about laestadianism, see also Olsen in this volume). Due to prevailing
sexism and internalized colonialism within their communities, Sámi women often
experience dismissiveness, victim blaming or normalization of violence (Kuokkanen
2015). Intersecting forms of ethnic discrimination, stereotypes and sexism render
Indigenous women particularly vulnerable to various forms of gendered emotional,
physical or sexual discrimination and violence in mainstream society. Such factors
could well underpin the fnding that Sámi women reported signifcantly higher levels
of gender-based discrimination than did non-Sámi women in the SAMINOR 2 survey.
In Sweden in 2008, Lotta Omma did two surveys among Sámi youth (12–18
years old) (n = 121) and young Sámi adults (18–28 years old) (n = 516) about their
experiences of ethnic discrimination.
A majority of the young Sámi adult are proud to be Sámi and wish to preserve
their culture, and 71% have a close connection to a Sámi community. Most of the
young Sámi have had to explain and defend their culture and way of life in the
Swedish society. Almost half of the young adults and 70% of young reindeer herd-
ers had perceived bad treatment because of Sámi ethnicity: 25% had heard teach-
ers saying something bad about the Sámi or had been unfairly treated by a teacher
due to their Sámi background, and 17% had teachers who treated them unfairly
because of their Sámi background. For young Sámi reindeer herders, the numbers
were 25% and 43% (Figure 20.7). These experiences were equally common among
genders for young Sámi adults (data not shown). For Sámi youth (12–18 years old),
55% reported bad treatment because of Sámi ethnicity, and 25% had teachers who
treated them unfairly because of their Sámi background (Figure 20.7) (Omma 2011;
Omma 2013; Omma and Petersen 2015; Omma et al. 2012; Stoor 2016).
In a survey about discrimination against adult Sámi in Sweden, in which 372
Sámi men and women aged 18 to 87 participated, every third (32%) of the sur-
vey respondents answered that during the last year (1997–1998), they had being
subjected to derogatory treatment due to their Sámi affliation (subjected to abu-
sive comments such as ‘Lapp bastard’ (‘lappjävel’) or similar) at least once or twice

338
 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —
339

Figure 20.6 Type of discrimination experienced by Sámi and non-Sami population (SAMINOR 2 in: Brustad et al. 2014).
Source: Hansen et al. 2017. Discrimination amongst Arctic indigenous Sámi and non-indigenous populations in Norway – The SAMINOR
2 questionnaire study. Journal of Northern Studies [Online], Volum 10 (2).
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

Experience of negative societal treatment due to Sámi ethnicity

80
70
70

60 55

50 45 43
40 38

30 25 25

20 17
15

10

0
Sami youth (12-18 years) Young adults (18-28 years) Young reindeer herders (18-28 years)
Have other people treated you bad because of your Sami background
Has it happend that teachers treated your unfair because of your Sami background
Have you heard teachers saying something bad about the Sami

Figure 20.7 Experience of negative societal treatment due to Sámi ethnicity. Sámi youth
(12–18 years old) (n = 121) and young adults (18–28 years old) (n = 516).
Source: Omma, L. M. 2011. Being a young Sámi in Sweden: living conditions, identity
and life satisfaction. Journal of Northern Studies, 5, pp. 9–28; Omma L., Jacobsson, L. H.
and Petersen, S. 2012. The health of young Swedish Sámi with special reference to mental
health. Int J Circumpolar Health, 71, 18381; Omma, L. 2013. Ung same i Sverige: livsvillkor,
självvärdering och helsa [Young Sámi in Sweden: living conditions, self-esteem and health]
Doctoral dissertation, Umeå, The University, Faculty of Medicine; Omma, L. and Petersen,
S. 2015. Health-related quality of life in indigenous Sámi school children in Sweden.
Acta Paediatr, 104, pp. 75–83; Stoor, J. P. 2016. Kunskapssammanställning om samers
psykosociala ohälsa [Compilation of knowledge about Sami’s psychosocial ill health] Report.
sametinget.se.

(Figure 20.8). One in ten Sámi persons reported that they had been subjected to
such insults fve times or more during the last year. The sample consisted of 372 per-
sons with Sámi origins out of 500 invited (74.4% response rate), selected from the
5,908 Sámi people on the Swedish Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll in 1997. Half the
respondents (52%) lived in Norrbotten County and 21.5% in Västerbotten County.3
Moreover, every ffth respondent reported being subjected to insults or other forms
of harassment at work at least twice during last year for reasons related to their Sámi
background.
Nearly every ffth woman and every sixth man had been exposed to threats, insults
or other forms of harassment in a public place, e.g. the street, at least once or twice
during in the last year. One in ten Sámi respondents reported being subject to insults
or harassment by neighbours at least once or twice during last year. Among 18-to-
30-year-old Sámi’s, one in fve reported been treated badly at schools/educational insti-
tutions at least once or twice during the last year. One in ten Sámi men reported been
badly treated or receiving poor service from the police (Figure 20.8) (Lange 2001).

340
 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —

Prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination (last year)

(1997-98)
50 46
45
40
34
35 32
30 26
24 25 24
25 21
20 17 18 18
16 15 15
13 14
15 11 10 10 10 9 10 11 10
9 8
10 7 7 7
5
5
0
Norrbotten Other counties Norrbotten Other counties
Men Women All
Called lapp bastard Harassment at work Threat, insults etc., in street
Harassment neighbour At school/education By police

Figure 20.8 Prevalence of self-reported ethnic discrimination (1997–1998) by gender and

living area in Sweden.
Source: Lange, A. 1998. Samer om diskriminering : en enkät- och intervjuundersökning
om etnisk diskriminering på uppdrag av Diskrimineringsombudsmannen (DO) [Sámi on
Discrimination: A Survey and Interview Survey on Ethnic Discrimination Commissioned
by the Discrimination Ombudsman]. Stockholm: CEIFO. Lange, A. 2001. Sámi on
Discrimination. Stockholm: CEIFO. Stoor, J. P. 2016. Kunskapssammanställning om samers
psykosociala ohälsa [Compilation of knowledge about Sami’s psychosocial ill health]
Report. sametinget.se

In this survey, the youngest respondents, members of Sámi villages (a Sámi village
is a legal entity within Sámi reindeer husbandry in Sweden), men, workers, those
with low levels of education and those who lived in Norrbotten County reported the
highest levels of discrimination (Lange 2001). Lange measured the total discrimina-
tion experienced by the Sámi respondents and compared it with 15 ethnic/national/
immigrant groups in Sweden. Sámi reported less discrimination as a whole, but the
level of total discrimination they reported was not far below that of several ‘immi-
grant groups,’ e.g. Yugoslavs, Poles and Vietnamese. Lange also investigated whether
Sweden was a Sámiphobic and racist society in their eyes. More than three out of
four Sámi respondents considered Sweden to be a racist society to some extent. And
around three out of four Sámi reported the same opinion with regard to whether
Sweden was a xenophobic or Sámiphobic society. Almost one in fve Sámi (19.2%)
thought that Sweden was a Sámiphobic society to a high degree (Lange 2001).
In both Norway and Sweden, Sámi reported discrimination in all aspects of soci-
ety. However, few Sámi reported such discrimination to the Ombudsman on Ethnic
Discrimination in Norway (Hansen 2016) and Sweden (Pikkarainen 2008). The rea-
son for such lack of reports in Norway and Sweden was a lack of trust in commu-
nity, county and national establishments, most likely connected to the persistence,
both historically and in the present day, of discrimination against the Sámi people
by government agencies (ibid.).

341
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

DISCRIMINATION, RESILIENCE AND HEALTH

It is diffcult to obtain a coherent overview of the health situation of the Sámi people
living in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, as there is a lack of offcial statistics
which would include ethnicity (Storm Mienna and Axelsson 2019). However, sev-
eral studies in Norway and Sweden show that ethnic discrimination is negatively
related to health in Sámi adolescents and in adults, especially mental health (Bals
et al. 2010; Hansen 2011; Hansen 2015; Hansen and Sørlie 2012; Hansen et al.
2008; Hansen et al. 2010; Omma 2013).
Hansen and Sørlie (2012) found that for Sámi adults in Norway (36–79 years
old), ethnic discrimination was strongly associated with elevated levels of psycho-
logical distress. In the case of Sámi females, factors such as having high education,
strong Sámi belonging (speaking Sámi language) and living in Sámi majority areas
were protective factors (resilience factors) against distress (Hansen and Sørlie 2012).
The Norwegian Arctic Adolescent Health Study was done among tenth graders in
junior high schools in North Norway from 2003 to 2005. They also found that
Sámi youth reported more discrimination than the non-Sámi and that the ethnic
discrimination was associated with elevated levels of psychological distress for Sámi
adolescents in Norway (Bals et al. 2010).
Experiencing ethnic discrimination is also associated with adverse self-reported
overall health status for Sámi adults in Norway. Sámi adults who have experienced
discrimination, those who have a lower socio-economic status and those who live
in the areas that were most affected by Norwegian assimilation policies reported
the poorest health status (Hansen et al. 2010). Sámi males in minority areas report-
ing self-perceived discrimination show higher rates of CVD and diabetes (Hansen
2015). In the minority areas, there is less structural and practical support for Sámi
culture, language and identity. These factors may explain why we fnd such a robust
association between experiencing ethnic discrimination and several chronic condi-
tions in adult Sámi populations living in minority areas and a weaker association
between discrimination and health outcomes in the Sámi respondents of majority
areas: The stronger Sámi civil society in the majority area may have a resilience effect
with regard to stress exposure (Hansen 2015).
Omma and Petersen (2015) found that when surveyed about their health and
well-being, Sámi children (12–18 years old) who have experienced ethnicity-related
negative treatment in Sweden report signifcantly lower functioning and well-being –
e.g. physical well-being, psychological well-being, moods, emotions and self-percep-
tion – than those without this negative experience (Omma and Petersen 2015). In
addition, the young Sámi (18–28 years old) in Sweden who experienced bad treat-
ment were more irritated and worried and less likely to feel calm and relaxed and to
have enough time for doing necessary things than young Sámi without experiences
of bad treatment. Among those who had been treated badly by teachers, it was more
common to feel sad and depressed and to be worried and less common to be calm
and relaxed and have enough time for necessary things (Omma et al. 2012). Young
Sámi (18–28 years old) with experiences of ethnicity-related bad treatment also had
a higher probability of suicidal plans (Omma et al. 2013).
Discrimination is generally negative for health and well-being. However, one
study examined the protective effects of resilience factors among Norwegian

342
 — Discrimination Against the Sámi —

Indigenous Sámi and non-Sámi populations. Sámi with a strong Sámi identity were
least negatively infuenced by discrimination, while majority Norwegians were most
negatively affected. The strong Sámi subgroup had outstanding resilience, despite
extensive exposure to discrimination.
They were protected by individual (personal strength) and family (cohesion) resil-
ience factors (Friborg et al. 2017).

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Racism has persisted to this modern age, and ethnic discrimination has not become
obsolete. The Nordic countries have enacted relatively comprehensive legislation
to combat ethnic discrimination (Hervik 2019). Nevertheless, numerous studies –
as I have shown in this chapter – have documented widespread ethnic discrimina-
tion, prejudices and negative stereotypes towards Sámi in contemporary Norway
and Sweden. In addition, there is evidence indicating that discrimination is an
important determinant of health inequities. Many of the disparities between Sámi
and peer majority populations in Sápmi are an outgrowth of a long history of
colonization, institutional discrimination and policies that have created and exac-
erbated inequality in society. Thus, there still may be structural and systemic bar-
riers in Sápmi that preclude Sámi people from attaining ethnic equality across
multiple domains, for example Sámi culture, language, traditions and social
needs, including culturally sensitive healthcare services, education and employ-
ment and other determinations of health and well-being. Forms of institutional
discrimination that emerged with colonization, boarding schools and forced
assimilation of the Sámi people may also continue to manifest today in new forms
of cultural racism and discrimination. Ideologies of inferiority in the values, lan-
guage, imagery and symbols associated with the Sámi minority group are pre-
sented to society and are consciously or subconsciously adopted and normalized
(Williams et al. 2019). Often manifested as prejudices, stereotyping, values and
norms within media, institutions and society, these new forms of institutional and
individual-level discrimination can work together and reinforce each other, which
makes the concept of institutional and structural forms of discrimination relevant
today.
The fndings of several studies highlight the need to acknowledge and address the
discrimination and racism experienced by the Indigenous Sámi in Sápmi. The cur-
rent research shows that for many Sámi, structural and individual-level discrimina-
tion are regular occurrences. Understanding how discrimination may be built into
various social structures and quantifying its long-term effects are fundamental to the
anti-discrimination work of dismantling these barriers that Sámi people experience.
Discrimination towards the Sámi people is a serious social problem, it is an impor-
tant determinant of health inequities, and this must be placed frmly on the politi-
cal agenda in the Arctic world. The fndings suggest that interventions specifcally
designed to prevent discrimination towards the Indigenous Sámi people of Sápmi
should be implemented, which again would promote the health and well-being of
the Sámi people.

343
 — Ketil Lenert Hansen —

NOTES
1 Sámi category I: Maternal and paternal grandparents, both parents and the participant
speak the Sámi language at home. Sámi category II: At least two Sámi-speaking grand-
parents in the family. Sámi category III: Sámi language or ethnicity for at least one of
the grandparents or parents or for the participant. (iv). Kven: Minority of immigrants
from Finland. Majority Norwegian. Question about ethnic discrimination was asked
like: ‘Have you ever experienced bullying or discrimination on account of your ethnic
background?’
2 ‘Strong Sámi affliation’ were those answering ‘yes’ to the following three questions: ‘I
consider myself Sámi’; ‘My ethnic background is Sámi’; and ‘My home language is Sámi.’
Another sub-population termed ‘Self-reported Sámi’ represented those answering ‘yes’ to
either one or two (but not three) of the questions. Respondents who reported use of the
Sámi language by, or the Sámi ethnicity of, their grandparents or parents but did not con-
sider themselves to be Sámi or reported that they did not have a personal Sámi background/
home language were categorized as people with a ‘Sámi family background.’ Non-Sámi:
Participants reporting no Sámi or Kven affliation.
3 This research was conducted by the Center for Research in International Migration
and Ethnic Relations (CEIFO), which is an interdisciplinary research unit at Stockholm
University. Anders Lange was PI for the investigation (Lange, A. 1998}. Samer om
diskriminering: en enkät- och intervjuundersökning om etnisk diskriminering på
uppdrag av Diskrimineringsombudsmannen (DO) [Sami on discrimination: a survey
and interview survey on ethnic discrimination commissioned by the Discrimination
Ombudsman], Stockholm, CEIFO, Lange, A. 2001. Sami on Discrimination, Stockholm,
CEIFO.

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347
 CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

M U N I C I PA L P O L I T I C S I N T H E
SÁMI HOMELAND IN FINLAND


Vesa Puuronen

INTRODUCTION
Municipalities are regarded as important local administrative bodies due to rela-
tively strong self-government. In principle, municipalities can decide most local
political issues regarding, for instance, compulsory educational systems, social ser-
vices, youth and cultural policies and land use. The Sámi have the same rights to
vote in municipal elections and to run for elected offce in municipal councils as the
majority population in Finland. This chapter describes and analyzes the construc-
tion and constraints of the political agency of the Sámi in municipal politics in the
three northernmost municipalities: Enontekiö, Inari and Utsjoki in the Sámi home-
land area in Finland. The main theoretical framework is derived from postcolonial
critique. The current municipal politics and policies are considered in the context of
past and present colonial policies pursued by the state, church, settlers and corpo-
rates. The colonial experience constitutes a central part of both the past and present
of the Sámi homeland.
From the point of view of settler colonial theory, municipalities are supposed to
be administrative bodies, institutions of the dominant settler state imposed on the
Sámi people. One goal of this chapter is to study how local Sámi politicians utilize
the municipalities and their resources to advance the interests of the Sámi people.
Finnish and Sámi politicians often have conficting political interests and goals in
the Sámi homeland. I will study the response of the local Finnish politicians to the
Sámi politicians’ initiatives and efforts to protect and possibly enlarge Sámi rights. I
will also explore how structural conditions (legislation, institutions, practices) con-
structed by the state affect municipal policy making (politics) and how they are
experienced by both the Finnish and Sámi politicians. The chapter describes the
main locally disputed issues and their connections to the national political structures
and legislation. The main focus will be on the local politics in the municipality of
Utsjoki, the only municipality in Finland with a Sámi majority. Municipal politics
and policies of Utsjoki provide examples of controversies over land use and fshing
rights between different interest groups (see Nykänen in this volume).

348 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-24

 — Municipal politics in the Sámi homeland —

The main empirical data of this study consists of 23 interviews with local politi-
cians in the three municipalities in the Sámi homeland. The interviewees were both
male (12) and female (11). They represented different political parties and one ethnic
association (see Table 21.1 on p. 355), which had representatives on the municipal
councils. The ages of the respondents were 26 to 74 years, and the length of their
careers in municipal politics were from 4 to 50 years. Eleven of the interviewees
identifed themselves Sámi and twelve as Finns.1
In addition to the interviews, the primary data comprises offcial documents pub-
lished on the internet pages of the municipalities, including minutes of municipal
council meetings, municipal strategies and other policy programmes and documents,
which are analyzed by thematic analysis. The experiences and memories of these
politicians are assumed to refect the realities in which they live, even though inter-
views are stories that comprise subjective interpretations. The opinions and attitudes
expressed by politicians are treated as trustworthy representations of their ideolo-
gies, beliefs and worldviews.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT – COLONIAL PAST

The integration and partial assimilation of the Sámi people into the Finnish society
has historical roots dating back to the periods of Swedish colonization of Finland
(1595–1809) and to Finland being an autonomous Grand Dutchy of the Russian
Empire (1809–1917). The frst steps of integration of the Sámi into the Kingdom of
Sweden had already been taken in the 14th and 15th centuries. The driving forces of
the Swedish expansion were economic, political, cultural and ideological. The Sámi
people and their lands and waters were economically interesting because they pro-
duced goods that were in demand. Especially during the 17th century, the growing
mining industry in Sweden encouraged dispossession of Sámi areas. The emerging
central administration in Sweden lacked resources needed for the construction and
enlargement of state institutions and for wars in Europe. The Sámi were taxed frst
in the 15th century by merchants, who were authorized by the Swedish Crown, and
later from the 16th century onwards by priests and state tax collectors (Kulonen
et al. 2005; Karonen 2014).
One of the major steps in the assimilation of the Sámi into the Swedish Kingdom
was their forced conversion to Christianity between the 16th and 18th centuries.
After the idea of one Swedish people (folk) was adopted by the state authorities,
it brought about the notion that some parts of the population seemed not yet to
belong to the folk. The Church Law (Kirkkolaki) of 1686 states that all people in
the Swedish Kingdom must confess the Lutheran religion (Kirkkolaki 1686, 1 §). It
was not legal to serve other gods than the God defned in the Bible, other Christian
religious texts and the Church Law. The law ordered gypsies, Jews, Turks, Morians
and pagans to be baptized (Kirkkolaki 1686, 10§).
The Church Law also ordered that the Sámi had to participate regularly in
Christian rituals, which facilitated their ideological and political control (Hansen
and Olsen 2003, 150–151). The Church Law of 1686 and the Law of the Swedish
Kingdom 1734 (Ruotsin valtakunnan laki) enforced conversion by punishment (for
instance by imprisonment, deportation, disinheritance or death) (Pyykkönen 2020,
3; Ruotsin valtakunnan laki 1734 1959/1984, 87). The Sámi were reluctant to give

349
 — Ve s a P u u r o n e n —

up worshipping their traditional gods and following their rituals. At least three Sámi
shamans were sentenced to death during the 17th century for having used the ritual
sacred drums (Kylli 2012, 70–71). One death penalty was conducted by burning the
shaman with his drum in public. Some priests who tried to convert the Sámi used
violent means (Andersson 1957, 111). Priests who carried out the missionary work
were at the same time tax collectors and merchants. They imported, for instance,
alcohol to Sámi villages and took furs as a payment for their services. The tax rate
was 10%; priests were entitled to one tenth of the fsh, reindeer and other goods
procured by the Sámi (Andersson 1957; Kylli 2012). Ideological colonization by the
Church can be regarded as a colonization of minds: The colonization of the relation
to the spirit world, to the concept of reality and to the cosmological organization of
the Sámi. Christianity, its institutions and its rituals replaced Sámi beliefs, gods and
sacred places and practices (see also Harlin in this volume).
The Church, ecclesiastical authorities (ministers and priests) and church admin-
istration were responsible for secular affairs under both Swedish and Russian rule.
During the 18th and the beginning of 19th century, economic, cultural and social
institutions began to modernize in Finland. Civil society associations, the press,
literature, the educational system and rudimentary social and healthcare services
were gradually established, resulting in the foundation of municipalities. The law
of municipal administration came into force in 1865. The Municipality of Inari
(Aanaar) was founded in 1876 and those of Utsjoki (Ohcejohka) and Enontekiö
(Eanodat) in 1877 (Lehtola 1996, 206).
Before the colonization of the Sámi homeland, the Sámi had a native administra-
tive and legal system within which questions concerning, for instance, land use and
ownership; fshing, hunting and reindeer herding; and civil affairs (disputes, con-
ficts, crimes, marriages, inheritance) were discussed and settled. The Sámi society
consisted of local Sámi villages (siida). These native administrative structures lost
their status and were replaced, frst by church administration and later, at the end of
19th century, by secular municipal administration, local legal bodies, courts, judicial
practices and legislation.
The siida system, however, has not disappeared totally, but it continues to exist
informally and also formally in some contexts (see also Magga, P. in this volume).
In 1990, the Advisory Board on Sámi Affairs proposed a Sámi Act that would have
restored the siida system in the state-owned areas in the Sámi homeland (Lehtola
2005, 130–131; Hansen and Olsen 2004, 191–195; see also Mörkenstam et al. in
this volume). The proposition of the Sámi Act 1990 was based on the introduction
of siida as a land owning unit lead by Sámi people (Heinämäki et al. 2017, 187).
Siidas still exist as Sámi reindeer-herding units, for instance, in Enontekiö (IN18;
Näkkäläjärvi 2013; see also Labba in this volume). In the North Sámi language, the
word ‘siida’ refers to a group of Sámi people who are responsible for reindeer herd-
ing in a certain area.
The Skolt Sámi, who live in the eastern part of the Inari municipality, have been
able to maintain their village administration, which was legalized by the Skolt Act.
The Skolt Sámi have village meetings (siidsååbbar) and the Skolt Sámi Council
(Sääʹmsuåvtõs), which have the right to decide on land use, reindeer herding, fshing
and hunting licenses and other matters that are considered important to the Skolts.
In addition, the Skolt Sámi have an offcial representative who is elected by general

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elections and who looks after and promotes common interests of the Skolt Sámi
(Saamelaiskäräjät 2020b; Kolttalaki 1995, 42§, 45§, 46§).
Sámi participate in politics at several organizational levels and inside different
local, national and international political organizations. At the international level, the
Finnish Sámi people have been active in the Sámi Council, which represents all Sámi
people living in Sweden, Norway, Russia and Finland. The Sámi have participated in
the work of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII),
which is a high-level advisory body to the UN’s Economic and Social Council. The
Forum was established on 28 July 2000, with the mandate to deal with Indigenous
issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, educa-
tion, health and human rights (UN 2020; Saamelaiskäräjät 2020c). Finland has rati-
fed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples but has not
ratifed the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989, ILO convention 169,
which covers, for example, land ownership rights of Indigenous Peoples. The effects
of this decision can be seen in the local politics in the aforementioned municipalities.
At the national level, there have been some members of parliament2 from a
Sami background, but they have not specifcally promoted the interests of the Sámi
people. They have been representatives of political parties and followed political
guidelines defned by national political organizations. Today, the Sámi Parliament
is the main political organization of the Sámi in Finland. Its predecessor, the Sámi
Delegation (Sámi parlameanta), was elected in the Sámi general elections for the
frst time in 1972, congregated in March 1973 and functioned until 1995 (Lehtola
2005, 36–37). The Sámi Delegation underlined the necessity to overcome and forget
the regional differences of the Sámi people and to concentrate on the articulation
of common goals. The Sámi Parliament (Sámediggi) was established in 1996. The
main goal of the Sámi Parliament in Finland is to plan and implement the cultural
self-government of the Sámi.
Cultural self-government is guaranteed to the Sámi as an Indigenous People in
the Finnish constitution. The Sámi parliament has its headquarters in the village of
Inari. The Sámi Parliament ‘represents the Sámi in national and international con-
nections, and it attends to the issues concerning Sámi language, culture, and their
position as an Indigenous People. The Sámi Parliament can make initiatives, propos-
als and statements to the authorities’ (Saamelaiskäräjät 2020a). It further defnes its
status as follows: It is an independent legal entity which, due to its self-governmental
nature, is not a state authority or part of the public administration. The Sami self-
government is restricted to cultural and linguistic issues. It has no authority, for
instance, over land use rights.

MUNICIPALITIES – COLONIAL PRESENT

Municipal politics in the Sámi homeland in Finland have not been the focus of
empirical or theoretical studies. Yet there are some theoretical approaches in other
felds of Sámi research which are valuable sources of theoretical inspiration for this
study. Miikka Pyykkönen has studied the development of governance of the Sámi
people in Finland. Pyykkönen has applied Foucauldian governmentality theory to
the role of priests in the forced conversion of the Sámi to Christianity from the 16th
to 18th century and to the ethnoculturalization of the Sámi in Finland between the

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1850s and 1930s (Pyykkönen 2015, 2020). Pyykkönen focuses on the change of
rationalities, techniques and practices of governance of the Sámi in the late 19th
century. In the spirit of Foucauldian ‘history of the present,’ he also discusses how
historical rationalities, interventions and subjectifcations have infuenced the later
20th-century practices of governance of the Sámi and other minorities (Pyykkönen
2015, 40).
Pyykkönen states that the Sámi were already assimilated religiously and to some
extent linguistically and in terms of livelihood in the late 19th and early 20th cen-
turies. The dominant Finnish majority population regarded Sámi culture at its best
as archaic and bound to disappear in the process of modernization and civilization
(Pyykkönen 2015, 53; Lehtola 2012, 191–195; Isaksson 2001, 202–205). Until the
mid-19th century, the main goal of governance was to make the Sámi abandon their
traditions. The establishment of the educational system, especially the universal pri-
mary education after 1921, was crucial to the integration and assimilation of the
Sámi. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, most Sámi children were placed in boarding
schools. The attitudes towards Sámi language and culture varied. In some schools,
the children were housed in a dormitory whole school year without the possibility
of visiting their homes except during holidays. In some areas, speaking the Sámi lan-
guages was forbidden and punished by the teachers or supervisors. In some schools,
children were allowed to visit their homes every week, all the staff except teachers
were Sámi, Sámi language was taught and the culture was tolerated to some extent
(Lehtola 2012, 288–297; Puuronen 2011, 132–147; about dormitories in Norway
and Sweden, see Hansen in this volume; and in USSR/Russia, see Andersen in this
volume). The establishment of municipal administration was a part of a governing
process that resulted in the construction of the Sámi as governable political subjects
who speak Finnish, belong to the Protestant Church and participate in the local
administration via the organizational and political structures defned and imposed
on them by the state legislation and the majority population.
Rauna Kuokkanen has approached the history and current situation of the Sámi
through feminist and decolonial, especially settler colonial, theory (Kuokkanen
2007, 2019, 2020). The original idea of postcolonial theory in social sciences was to
critique the impact of the legacies of Western imperialism on the cultural identities of
colonized people and the disproportionate division of power among the colonial and
colonized peoples. Postcolonial theorists have also paid attention to the hegemony
of Western sciences and knowledge in colonial relations. Isaksson has studied the
role of racialization of the Sámi by Finnish sciences (Gandhi 1998; Isaksson 2001;
Valkonen 2009; Chibber 2013; McLennan 2013; Rutazibwa and Shilliam 2018;
Sussen 2020).
Kuokkanen emphasizes that the Sámi experience of colonialism is almost entirely
unknown to the majority population in the Nordic countries (Kuokkanen 2020;
Puuronen 2011). Viewed through the settler colonial theory (Wolfe 2006), the domi-
nant population tries to remove the Indigenous People and gain access to their ter-
ritories. Settler colonialism is a process in which Indigenous People disappear in a
variety of ways – extermination, expulsion, incarceration, containment and assimi-
lation. Settler colonialism is a structure and logic of elimination. Settlers come to
stay. They impose their sovereignties and jurisdictions on Indigenous Peoples – in
Finland, on the Sámi people. As a form of governmentality, settler colonialism tries

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to naturalize its existence and domesticate settlers as natives and to locate colonial
dominance in the past. It has an affective dimension; it creates and strengthens set-
tlers’ emotions by supporting perceptions of authority over defnitions of Indigeneity,
fear and suspicion of Indigenous People, anger and frustration over or feeling of
being threatened by Indigenous claims. Settlers may feel guilty and complicit, which
is mitigated by claiming innocence (Kuokkanen 2020, 6–7; Pääkkönen 2008).
Kuokkanen states that current policies and legislation towards the Sámi show
that the Finnish state ‘actively engages with the logic of elimination towards the
Sámi.’ Kuokkanen (2020, 7) maintains that state legislation, policies and some insti-
tutional practices can be regarded as colonial or settler colonial. Municipalities are
a part of state administration; they represent the state at the local level. Despite rela-
tive self-government, in practice, municipalities are strongly tied to the state fnan-
cially and by legislation. In this chapter, a conceptual distinction is made between
settler colonialism and state colonialism. State colonialism and settler colonialism
are intertwined historically. The state and its legislation, institutions and civil serv-
ants have facilitated and legitimized and, if needed, secured by force the settling of
Indigenous territories. Nevertheless, settlers are individuals whose personal char-
acteristics, interests and ways of interaction with Indigenous Peoples vary; thus,
the outcomes of the encounters between settlers and Indigenous Peoples cannot be
entirely reduced to state policies, institutions and their practices.
Kuokkanen (2007) considers the function of key welfare services organized by
municipalities – e.g. education, social and health services – in the Sámi homeland.
She argues that these services have hidden effects on the Sámi people and communi-
ties. The welfare state has provided the Sámi with high-quality social, health and
other services on an individual basis, but at the same time, welfare services have
weakened the collective rights of the Sámi, resulting in their deepening assimila-
tion and integration into mainstream society (Kuokkanen 2007, 148). The notion
that the welfare state in Finland is predominantly ‘a Finnish welfare state’ has been
discussed in the context of immigrant minorities. One of the main fndings has been
that even though these services are universal and should provide equal access, in
practice, they include several exclusionary, discriminatory and even racist elements.
(See Puuronen 2011; Tiilikainen 2003; see also Eriksson in this volume).
A recent version of postcolonial theory introduced by Mary Tuti Baker (2018)
takes note of the change in colonial politics during the last decades. She maintains
that current neoliberal globalization has intensifed colonial economic domination.
Transnational or national corporations, instead of states, carry out the resource
exploitation and land dispossessions. I will trace the signs of corporate colonialism
in the Sámi homeland and its effects on municipal politics in relation to tourism, for-
estry and mining industries, which are largely dominated by international demand
and fnanced and partly owned by international corporations.

MUNICIPAL POLITICS
In Finland, municipalities have authority over, for instance, some social, health, edu-
cational, youth, culture and land use policies (see Palonen 2007). Municipalities have
quite a wide independence based on the Constitution. According to the Municipality
Act, the aim of the municipality is to enhance the well-being of the inhabitants and

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the vitality of the communities and to arrange services for its inhabitants while tak-
ing into consideration economic, social and ecological sustainability. The munici-
pal administration and policy in Finland are based on the idea of self-government.
Municipalities have voluntary tasks and tasks fxed by law. In practice, the main
functions of municipalities are strongly regulated and governed by national leg-
islation. Municipalities fnance their activities by independent taxation, but most
municipalities, especially in the remote areas in Northern and Eastern Finland, are
heavily dependent on state support. Most fnancial resources are used on tasks fxed
by the law, which include education, healthcare and social services (Kuntalaki 2015;
Haveri 2012).
According to the law, a municipality should organize services so that they are
equally accessible to all citizens (Kuntalaki 8§). All municipal inhabitants have
a right to vote in elections and can run for offce. Municipalities, municipal gov-
ernments, councils and boards form the local political arena. Municipalities are a
political platform where Sámi people in principle can articulate and advance their
interests. Municipal elections are most often organized by political parties. Only in
Enontekiö do the Sámi have their own association, which has participated in elec-
tions and managed to get representatives into the municipal decision-making bodies.
In Inari and Utsjoki, local Sámi politicians have been candidates for political parties.
One of the main political questions in the Sámi homeland is the ownership of
land and natural resources. Most land in the area is owned and governed by the state
and administered by the Finnish Forest and Park Service (FFPS) (Metsähallitus), but
the ownership rights of the state have been disputed by Sámi organizations, the Sámi
Parliament and researchers (Nahkiaisoja 2016; Korpijaakko 1989; Korpijaakko-
Labba 2000). Municipalities have a monopoly on land use in their areas, and in this
respect, they could be important political arenas, but the basic problem of owner-
ship rights is a national question over which municipalities have no real infuence as
Finland has not ratifed the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention.
The Sámi-speaking population is a minority in all the aforementioned munici-
palities. In Enontekiö the share of Sámi speakers in the population was 10.7%, in
Inari 6.5% and in Utsjoki 43.8% in 2017 (Statistics Finland 2020). According to the
statistics of the Sámi Parliament, the total number of the Sámi exceeds the number
of Sámi speakers. In Enontekiö the share of the Sámi population was 23.9%, in Inari
31.0% and in Utsjoki 54.6% in 2019 – a statistic that speaks of the cultural coloni-
alization practiced by the Finnish state, particularly through the schooling policies in
the 1930s through the 1960s (Saamelaiskäräjät 2020d). Utsjoki is the only munici-
pality in Finland with a Sámi majority. The political infuence of the Sámi varies
disproportionately; for instance, in Inari the Sámi have occasionally had a majority
in the municipal government, which shows that they have actively participated and
been widely supported in elections.
Municipalities are led by municipal councils, which are normally elected every
fourth year. Municipal councils nominate the municipal government, which is the
most important day-to-day decision maker, typically to refect its own party com-
position. In the three municipalities, left-wing parties and the Greens won new seats
in the latest municipal council elections in 2017. Right-wing or centrist parties have
a majority in all northern municipalities. Compared to the national political power
balance, the Finns Party and the Greens are exceptionally weak in the north. The

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ethnic Sámi association in Enontekiö, Johtti Sápmelaččat, got 2 places out of 17

in the municipal council. Sámi ethnic associations are also active in Utsjoki and
Inari but do not participate in elections. In these municipalities, Sámi politicians
stood for municipal council for political parties and were elected under the Greens,
the National Coalition Party, the Centre Party, the Left Alliance and the Social
Democratic Party.
The strength of the parties in the municipal elections in 2017 are presented in
Table 21.1:

Table 21.1 Members in municipal council (2017) by party.

Party/association Enontekiö Inari Utsjoki

The National Coalition Party 4 10 3
The Centre Party 9 6 5
The Finns Party 0 0 1
The Social Democratic Party 0 4 2
The Left Alliance 0 4 2
The Swedish People´s Party of Finland 0 0 1
The Greens 1 3 0
Johtti Sápmelaččat 2 0 0
Christian Democrats 1 0 1
TOTAL 17 27 15

The Sámi are not politically or ideologically unanimous, which indicates that nei-
ther the articulation nor the representation of Sámi interests is simple in the frame-
work of party-based municipal politics. The ideological cleavages, different values
and different goals of party politics do not allow the articulation of interests based
on ethnic belonging. Party loyalty overcomes, at least potentially, ethnic loyalty.
Traditionally, the formation of political organizations rests on collective identities
connected to the social positions of different groups. The left-wing parties rely on
working class and intellectual identity focused on the class struggle. The Centre Party
congregates around agricultural communities and their peasant and small business
traditions. The right-wing Coalition Party is established on urban and business iden-
tities and values. The Swedish People’s Party is the only one grounded in linguistic
and cultural identity. The Swedish Party has also had some support in the Sámi com-
munity because of its positive attitude towards minority groups and language rights.
In the contemporary political landscape in Finland, new types of identities function
as a party-political focus. The Greens were originally based on ecological concerns,
but during last decades they have also emphasized gender equality, LGBTQ rights,
multiculturalism and human rights in general while the Finns Party has anchored
its programmes and ideology in ethnonational and conservative anti-immigrant slo-
gans and policies. Nancy Fraser identifed a major change from redistribution to
recognition as a foundation of identity formation and political mobilization. Fraser

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claims that class interests have been supplanted by group interests. In addition to the
Swedish People’s Party, the Greens and the Finns Party can be interpreted as identity
political parties in Finland (Frasier 1997, 11; Delanty 1998, 26–28; Phillips 2003,
263).
Even if the current political arena could accommodate better identity-based polit-
ical party formation, the fact that the Sámi in Finland have not engaged in local or
national politics via ethnic associations hints towards the misrecognition of their
interests as Indigenous People and the advanced status of their colonialization. Even
though the representative parliamentary political system allows equal participation
of the Sámi in the political process, it does not allow, or at least does not support,
effective politics around Sámi interests. In the absence of more collectively organ-
ized decision-making structures, the national party-political structure functions as
a colonizing system, which, on the one hand, includes all people but, on the other
hand, excludes some interests. Political parties are centrally led organizations where
Sámi interests and voices are seldom heard. The basic principle of party politics is
quite simple: Politicians support those interests that are most popular among the
voting population. Consequently, in Lapland, leading politicians who control the
party organization hardly ever support the basic interests of the Sámi, who, as a
minority, are an insignifcant electorate on the regional level even if, at the local level,
the situation may be different.

MUNICIPAL POLICIES
According to all interviewees, social policy is the hard core of municipal politics.
The arrangement and fnancing of elderly care and social problems caused by unem-
ployment are important political issues in all municipalities. References to the aging
population and the increasing cost of elderly care and special healthcare were fre-
quent. A consequence of this demographic change is the necessity to reorganize the
educational system, especially school networks. In Utsjoki respondents mentioned
anxieties about child protection and in Inari about youth services and education.
Both in Inari and in Utsjoki, indoor air problems in school buildings were mentioned
in many interviews. In all municipalities, many interviewees emphasized the neces-
sity to develop a more diversifed economy, especially tourism, but also mining, and
industrial use of other resources, like minerals, water, reindeer meat and fsh, were
mentioned.
In the felds of elderly care and education, the close cooperation and partnership
with the Sámi Parliament were frequently mentioned. The third sector non-govern-
mental organization Sámisoster, which operates in the felds of social and health
services among the Sámi, especially organizing the services for elderly Sámi people,
is also an important partner for all municipalities. In the educational feld, Sámi
Parliament also provides resources – for instance, school materials (textbooks in
Sámi language) and other equipment – to Sámi pupils. The Sámi Parliament arranges
language teaching for the municipal civil servants, who are entitled in Utsjoki and
Inari to a one-year course of Sámi language with full salary. Moreover, the Sámi
language offce helps in fnding interpreters in case the municipal civil servants
or other authorities are unable to give services in the Sámi language. The impor-
tance of the Sámi Parliament and Sámisoster was acknowledged both by Sámi and

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Finnish municipal councillors. The unanimity of the councillors is most probably

due to the fact that both Sámi Parliament and Sámisoster get their fnances not from
municipalities but either directly from the state budget or from some other external
sources. Unanimity on certain important issues does not prevent confict on some
other important issues. The most important confictual issue is the use of land and
natural resources.

THE USE AND CONTROL OF LAND AND NATURAL

RESOURCES
In Finland the municipalities have a monopoly on land-use planning. They can decide
what is constructed, by whom and where. Most interviewed politicians drew atten-
tion to the importance of land-use decisions in their municipalities. The struggle over
the control of natural resources, including land, rivers, lakes, springs, forests, fsh and
minerals, has been intensive and persistent (see e.g. Valkonen 2003; Massa 1994). In
Enontekiö and Inari, for instance, the development of tourism is regarded important,
but in Enontekiö, 80% and in Inari 72% of the municipal lands are nature reserves,
restricting investment in tourism. Winter tourism, which is based on ski resorts, is an
important employer. In Inari the Saariselkä ski resort is large and well-known with
more than 7,000 beds (IN3, IN4, Inarin kunta 2020). In Enontekiö, where the high-
est fells of Finland are situated, all of them are in nature reserves governed under
national law, which prohibits the construction of ski resorts (IN4, IN9).
The promotion of the experience of aurora borealis as a tourist attraction during
the last two decades brought thousands of Asian and European tourists to Utsjoki,
Enontekiö and Inari in the 2010s. The increase of culture immersion travel has caused
new problems for municipal politicians related to the basic contradiction between
rights and economic interests. For instance, the contrary interests of tourism enter-
prises and Sámi and Finnish reindeer herders related to land use has been common
in all municipalities. The Sámi Parliament adopted Principles for Responsible and
Ethically Sustainable Sámi Tourism in 2018.

The main purpose of these ethical guidelines is to terminate tourism exploiting

Sámi culture and to eliminate incorrect information about the Sámi distributed
through tourism. The second priority is to safeguard the cultural practices and
traditions of Sámi population outside the travel industry.
(Sámediggi 2018)

Here we see the limits of corporate colonialism being negotiated, as in who can
exploit whose culture and experience and how and in advancement of what.
Tourism in Utsjoki has traditionally been summer fshing tourism around the
river Teno. Teno is one of the most famous salmon rivers in Europe. The fshing
rights have been a long-standing cause of political dispute in the area (see Nykänen
in this volume). The interests of local fshers, fshing tourists, other local inhabit-
ants, old local families and newcomers, fshing tourist enterprisers, the state and its
institutions have been confictual. The local politicians are supposed to be able to
take into consideration conficting interests and interest groups. The municipality of
Utsjoki gave an offcial statement, in the context of renewal of the Finnish Forest and

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Park Service Act in 2016, expressing their concern over the possibility of the local
people infuencing the fshing provisions. It underlines the special character of land
ownership in the area, highlights fshing as a part of the Sámi culture and supports
multipurpose use of natural resources. The municipality requested that the protec-
tion of traditional Sámi livelihoods be put into law (Inari 2016).
The FFPS legally controls the state-owned land and most of the waters in the
Utsjoki area. Consequently, the income from fshing licences is revenue for the FFPS.
Only in Utsjoki is a part of the revenue returned to local owners of fshing rights,
Utsjoki being the only municipality with a Sámi majority. In Utsjoki the Sámi village
tradition has endured in the sense that the knowledge, ownership and usufruct of
the fshing and hunting areas of certain families are respected. The state’s owner-
ship rights of the lands and waters in Utsjoki and other municipalities in the Sámi
homeland have not been acknowledged by the Sámi. In Utsjoki, especially in the
Teno River valley, Sámi families have traditionally owned the land. Their private
ownership rights are partially recognized by state by giving fshing rights to certain
families living on the banks of the river (Inari 2016).
The renewal of the FFPS Act was a major concern in all municipalities in the Sámi
homeland. The new Act (Metsähallituslaki 234/2016) and the related government
decree exclude local people from decision making concerning forests, waters, hunt-
ing and fshing. The state and the settlers have exploited and continue to exploit the
natural resources of the area, and the lands and waters have mainly been dispos-
sessed. Formally, the new Act allows some Sámi people to participate in municipal
committees, which can discuss, give statements and take initiatives concerning the
FFPS’s plans in their areas. These committees have no real decision-making power,
thus evidencing the continuing process of colonization.
Fishing in the Teno River has not just been regulated by the FFPS Act and
Decree, but since Teno forms the border between Norway and Finland, the two
states have agreed on fshing rights. The Teno Agreement (Ministry of Forestry and
Agriculture Decree 198/2020; Act 176/2017) caused strong disputes and experi-
ences of exclusion among Sámi and also Finnish members of the Utsjoki municipal
council (IN2, IN3, IN12). A Sámi interviewee saw the Teno arrangement as a
continuation of the assimilation policies against the Sámi, maintaining that these
agreements, laws and decrees undermined the traditional livelihoods in the area,
resulting in the rupture of the generational transfer of fshing tradition and the loss
of knowledge and leading to the migration of the Sámi youth to employment mar-
kets in Southern Finland, where they live in a mainstream Finnish society (IN12).
The fshing rights of the Sámi depend on their place of residence, not on their
status as Indigenous People.
Salmon fshing is the most important tourist attraction in the municipality of
Utsjoki, but the shortness of the fshing season brought about the necessity to build
up infrastructure for winter tourism. The use of land to construct tourist attractions
or to arrange husky safaris, reindeer rides or snowmobile safaris and other activities
is a constant cause of confict of interest between mostly Sámi reindeer owners and
herders and mostly Finnish tourist centres and entrepreneurs. The municipal deci-
sions concerning land use are often disputed. These disputes reveal the otherwise
hidden confictual interests of ethnic groups and representatives of different liveli-
hoods, as evidenced by the interviews (IN1, IN2, IN12, IN16, IN17).

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Decisions that have great impact on the livelihoods and culture of the local peo-
ple and the reasoning behind them clearly differ. Sámi politicians invoke traditional
Sámi culture and land and water ownership rights of families (IN6, IN13, IN18,
IN3) while Finnish politicians refer to the importance of fshing as a livelihood (fsh-
ing tourism) or recreation and fsh as a source of food (IN15, IN16). Mostly, the
interests of local people, regardless of their ethnicity, are the same: They want to
maintain their fshing rights. Many demand that state allow local people to decide
the number of fshing licences and other measures taken to protect the fshery stock
in Teno River and its side streams. They also insist that the fshing licence revenues
should be given totally to local fshers and fshing communities. In this sector, we
see the beneft of the alignment of interests between the settler community and the
Indigenous People.
Mining is regarded as an important industry in Finland. Due to climate change
and the consequent necessity for new technology to reduce the use of fossil fuels, the
mineral resources of Lapland and the Sámi homeland have sparked the international
mining companies’ interest. The generous national mining legislation has facilitated
the founding of the biggest gold mine in Europe in the municipality of Kittilä, south
of the Sámi homeland. A Finnish mining company has made some initial research
on mineral deposits and their exploitation in Enontekiö, which has been criticized
and opposed by a popular movement. An appeal against the mine was signed by
37,195 people. The Sámi whose reindeer-herding areas are threatened by the mine
were active participants in the movement. All interviewed Sámi politicians opposed
the mining company’s plans and wanted to stop further activities because the opera-
tions endanger reindeer herding and, more generally, the ecological equilibrium of
the environment in the area. We can clearly see how corporate colonialism continues
in the Sámi homeland.

CONCLUSIONS
From the point of view of postcolonial theory, municipalities as a local form of rep-
resentative parliamentary multiparty democracy can be regarded as an institutional
setting, which partly prevents articulation and protection of Sámi interests if they
are different from the interests of the local Finns. Given that most land and water
is owned by the state, the municipal decision-making power is severely restricted
despite the supposed autonomy. Combined with the inability to get backing for Sámi
interests at the national level, the political system perpetuates the colonizing system.
Regardless of the intentions of historical state organs and their individual actors,
the end result of the imposition of the state and church onto Sámi native localities
and home regions has been the partial or total disappearance of Sámi culture, lan-
guages, religion and communities in all the other areas in Finland but the current
Sámi homeland.
The state and settlers have exploited and continue to exploit the natural resources of
the area; the lands and waters have been mainly dispossessed. The process continues,
which is exemplifed by the new FFPS laws. State colonialism has been supplemented
by the ideological colonialization of minds by the Christian church and, more
recently, by the educational system, which is unable to recognize Indigenous knowl-
edge. Nevertheless, the restricted cultural autonomy of Sámi people and resources

359
 — Ve s a P u u r o n e n —

devoted to Sámi language instruction have revitalized the north Sámi language, even
the small languages of Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi. Municipalities organize education
in practice and have supported this linguistic and cultural rebirth (necessitated by
centuries of colonizing practices), especially because it is fnanced by external funds.
This clearly demonstrates the benefts of internationally secured rights, self-govern-
ance and political power to the well-being of the Sámi.
During the last decades, corporate colonialism has developed into a new threat to
the Sámi and partly Finnish local inhabitants of the Sámi homeland. The contradicting
interests of tourism industries based on international demand, international mining
companies and state corporates and the interests of local fshers, reindeer herders, hunt-
ers and local citizens have intensifed. In some conficts, Finns and Sámi politicians have
acted together to stop outside interventions; in some cases, the interests of representa-
tives of the two ethnic groups have conficted.

NOTES
1 All the respondents had studied in the Finnish educational system, in which the language
of instruction has been Finnish. Sámi-speaking interviewees were fully bilingual. The inter-
views were conducted in Finnish between 2016 and 2018. All but two interviews were con-
ducted face-to face; two were telephone interviews. The length of the thematic interviews
varied from 40 minutes to three and a half hours. The themes of the interviews were per-
sonal data; age; ethnic identifcation; education; profession and professional career; reasons
and motives for political engagement; the main phases of the career as a municipal politi-
cian; development of municipal politics during the career; signifcance of and relations to
and between political parties in municipal politics; formal and informal organizations and
culture of municipal policy making; relations between municipality, state, state institutions
and Sámi Parliament; the effects of national legislation and specifc law concerning cultural
autonomy of the Sámi and the Skolt Sámi Act; international conventions and declarations
on municipal policies; and main political questions and conficts. I also asked interviewees
to tell about their main political achievements. The anonymity of the interviewees has been
guaranteed by reducing the amount of information given to a minimum. Interviews are
identifed only by number (IN1, IN2 etc).
2 Janne Seurujärvi (Centre party, 2007–2011) and Heikki Autto (National Coalition Party,
2011–2015, 2019–).

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 CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

T H E S TO C K H O L M SÁ M I
A D M I N I S T R AT I V E A R E A A N D
INDIGENOUS RESURGENCE


Karin Eriksson

INTRODUCTION
We don’t like to be lumped together with the other national minorities. We are
an Indigenous people.
—Stockholm Sámi Association representative Julia in meeting
with Region Stockholm,1 20 November 2017

On 1 February 2019, Stockholm became the 25th Sámi administrative area in

Sweden and the frst outside what is conventionally known as Sápmi. Administrative
areas (förvaltningsområden) in Sweden originated from a new National Minority
Law in 2010 (Lag om nationella minoriteter och minoritetsspråk 2010). The
law recognizes fve national minorities and their languages: Jews with Yiddish,
Roma with multiple Roma languages, Sweden Finns with Finnish, Tornedalians
with Meänkieli2 and Sámi with multiple Sámi languages. The Sámi, Finnish and
Meänkieli languages have enhanced protection through the administrative areas.
This protection means that municipalities and regions need to ensure that there
are staff who can provide service in the relevant languages; individuals have the
right to use the languages in government contacts; parents and guardians have the
right to preschool for their children in the languages; and the elderly have the right
to service and care in the languages, as well as the right to maintain their cultural
identity (about linguistic rights, see also Huss and Lindgren; and Pasanen in this
volume).
The Sámi were formally recognized as an Indigenous People in Sweden by the
Swedish Parliament in 1977 (Sametinget/Regeringskansliet 2013). In 2011, the
recognition of the Sámi as a people was included in the Swedish constitution in
Regeringsformen (Lag om ändring i regeringsformen 2011). Still, Sweden has not yet
ratifed the International Labour Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples
Convention No. 169. The Swedish acknowledgements do not translate to Swedish

364 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-25

 — The Stockholm Sámi administrati ve area —

state actions in practice regarding the Sámi as an Indigenous People. For instance,
the Sámi are not recognized as an Indigenous People in the National Minority Law.
The National Minority Law and the subsequent Sámi administrative areas aim to
provide the services listed here to beneft the Sámi as a national minority. Hence, the
administrative areas strengthen the Sámi positionality as a national minority but not
necessarily as an Indigenous People.
The Stockholm Sámi Association initiated the administrative area process
in 2013 and compelled the Stockholm municipality to apply to become a Sámi
administrative area in 2017. Stockholm simultaneously became a Sámi and
Meänkieli administrative area in 2019, and it had been a Finnish administra-
tive area since 2010. From 2017 through 2019, I followed the Stockholm Sámi
Association’s work with the Stockholm municipality and Region Stockholm to
institute the Stockholm Sámi administrative area. As a researcher, I observed
meetings between the Association and the municipality and region representa-
tives. I also conducted interviews with the Sámi Association’s representatives.
(The Stockholm administrators declined interviews.) The meetings and interviews
provide the material for this chapter. All participants are anonymized, with the
Stockholm Sámi Association representatives identifed by the pseudonyms Elsa,
Erik and Julia.
This chapter discusses how national minority policy through the Sámi administra-
tive area formation was negotiated to accommodate Sámi Indigeneity and potential
Indigenous resurgence. As Julia stated in the quote at the beginning of this chapter,
the Sámi representatives clearly articulated that the Sámi are Indigenous, different
from the other groups served by administrative areas and national minority poli-
cies. Swedish administrative structures and practices emerge from settler colonial-
ism and do not adequately address Sámi needs through national minority policies
(about Finnish municipality politics as a form of state colonialism, see Puuronen in
this volume). I trace how throughout their negotiations with Stockholm authori-
ties, Julia, Elsa and Erik established that the administrative area needed to serve
the Sámi as an Indigenous People to maintain the Sámi presence and future in and
beyond Stockholm. This way, they worked within the context of administrative state
structures to strengthen Sámi Indigeneity and self-determination. Elsa, Erik and Julia
primarily did this by asserting frameworks of Sámi self-determination of the admin-
istrative area and global Indigenous rights discourse. These frameworks centred the
greater Sámi society, the need for a Sámi space in Stockholm and Sámi language
revitalization.

SWEDISH NATIONAL MINORITY POLICIES, SÁMI

INDIGENEITY AND THE STOCKHOLM SÁMI ASSOCIATION
Swedish national minority policies, including administrative areas, were not
created to accommodate Sámi Indigeneity. Therefore, Sámediggi/ Sámedigge/
Sámiediggie/Saemiedigkie, the Sámi Parliament in Sweden, has expressed con-
cern about the potential danger of the concept ‘national minority’ being used
as an avenue to avoid Sámi Indigeneity status through evading the implementa-
tion of Sámi rights as an Indigenous People. Further, international law provides

365
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expanded protections for Indigenous Peoples compared to other minority popu-

lations (Sametinget 2020). The administrative area as an institution attends to
minority groups’ collectivized individual rights to language and culture, rather
than Indigenous Peoples’ collective rights to self-determination, land and water
(Össbo 2020, 441). However, the Stockholm Sámi Association representatives
mobilized the administrative area’s potential to serve the Stockholm Sámi as an
Indigenous People. Erik illustrated that minority and Indigenous rights are not
mutually exclusive but that the latter was a crucial foundation for a thriving Sámi
administrative area:

We emphasized that we are an Indigenous people.  .  .  . [W]e use the term

Indigenous as a lever while national minority is the law we use to apply for the
status of Stockholm as a Sámi administrative area.
—Erik, Stockholm Sámi Association Public Event,
19 October 2017

The application of Sámi Indigeneity and the National Minority Law to facili-
tate Stockholm as a Sámi administrative area potentially disrupted Swedish set-
tler-colonial governmentality (compare Den Ouden and O’Brien 2013, 9). The
Stockholm Sámi Association representatives’ engagement with Indigeneity as
resurgence and resistance aligned with an understanding of Indigeneity and its
relationship to state settler colonialism that J. Kēhaulani Kauanui calls ‘enduring
Indigeneity’ (2016, 1). Enduring Indigeneity posits Indigeneity as a corresponding
analytic to settler colonialism, wherein Indigeneity is enduring, and settler colo-
nialism is a structure that endures Indigeneity. In other words, Indigeneity weath-
ers settler colonialism while settler colonialism holds out against Indigeneity. In
Stockholm, the administrative area’s framework was produced by Swedish set-
tler state colonialism structures holding out against Indigeneity. Simultaneously,
the Stockholm Sámi Association representatives demonstrated Sámi Indigeneity
as persisting through their initiative and articulations in the administrative area
process.
As the capital of Sweden, Stockholm has always had a Sámi presence.3 Today,
Sámi are moving to Stockholm for work and education (Johansson Enlund 2015,
Stockholms stad 2017; about urban Sámi, see also Dankertsen in this volume).
There is Sámi continuity as residents, visitors, merchants and activists in Stockholm
and across central Sweden and farther south (e.g., Broch Johansen 2015; Nordin
2018; Nordin and Ojala 2018; Öhman 2020; Larsson 2021). The Stockholm Sámi
Association was initiated in 1947 by Louise Bäckman, today professor emerita in
comparative religions at Stockholm University (Sámiid Riikkasearvi 2019), and its
primary purpose is to work in Stockholm with surroundings to promote Sámi cul-
tural, social and economic interests. The Association also works to increase knowl-
edge and awareness of Sámi conditions both in and outside Sápmi and to strengthen
Sámi identity and belonging (Sameföreningen i Stockholm 2018).
The Stockholm Sámi Association has a history of emphasizing Sámi Indigeneity
when engaging with the Stockholm municipality. This practice emerges, in turn, from
the long history of Sámi ethnopolitical mobilization and Sámi transnational solidar-
ity (e.g., Lantto 2000, 2018, Broderstad 2011, Broch Johansen 2015, Valkonen et al.

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2017, Tervaniemi and Magga 2019). An essential precursor to initiating the admin-
istrative area process was gifting a Sámi fag to the municipality in 2007 (for more
about the fag, see Alakorva in this volume). Annually on the Sámi National Day, 6
February, the Stockholm Sámi Association holds a National Day fag ceremony out-
side City Hall, with City Hall fagging the Sámi fag. The annual fagging becomes a
powerful embodiment of Sámi Indigeneity in Stockholm, the Sámi as an Indigenous
People transcending nation-state borders and a rupture of Swedish colonial narra-
tives of the Swedish state and its capital.

SERVING THE SÁMI AS AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

On the dark and chilly early evening of 5 November 2018, I attended a meeting
with the Stockholm municipality (the City) and Elsa, Erik and Julia. The meeting’s
theme was the collaboration between the City and the Sámi community regard-
ing the administrative area. It took place shortly before the national government
approved Stockholm’s application to become a Sámi administrative area. The City
representatives working with national minorities were a temporary Director of
Human Rights (hereafter, Director) and two strategists (hereafter, Strategist 1 and
2). They explained that the strengthened minority rights were absolute for admin-
istrative areas, putting the onus on the municipality to guarantee certain services.
The City representatives did not mention anything about the Sámi as an Indigenous
People. Erik initiated that conversation:

ERIK: ‘There’s no defnition of Indigenous Peoples in the guidelines.4 Such a defni-

tion needs to be included.’
DIRECTOR: ‘It’s not possible to make changes to decisions already made. Something
like that can be added as an extra addendum. . . . The City and the Finnish group
have worked together. This work should also be valid for the Sámi. So there is
a model for this.’
JULIA: ‘What is the practical thinking regarding how to implement what can be used
from the Finnish experience?’
DIRECTOR: ‘The surveying of needs will be extremely central to be able to begin the
work.’
JULIA: ‘The Sámi Association has limited outreach capabilities.’
STRATEGIST 2: ‘With the Finns, we had open collaboration meetings in the beginning.’
JULIA: ‘Because of colonial oppression, Sámi may not advertise that they are Sámi.
It’s better to offer services frst, and then the Sámi will show up.’

Erik brought up the necessity of recognizing the Sámi as Indigenous in the City
guidelines. Articulating Indigeneity differentiated the Sámi from the national minor-
ities. In contrast to the Sweden Finns, the Sámi are a signifcantly smaller popula-
tion without a nation-state where Sámi languages would have majority positions
and could support Sámi language work in other countries.5 Erik also challenged the
City’s presentation of the City’s work as defnitive by demanding the inclusion of
a defnition of Indigenous Peoples. The Director portrayed that as an obstacle but
with a potential solution through an addendum. Julia illustrated how the colonial
history and experiences create different Sámi service needs. Then Erik and Julia

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established Sámi Indigeneity as a challenge to the Director’s proposition of the

Sweden Finns’ administrative area as a Sámi administrative area model. Erik also
asserted Sámi Indigeneity in a meeting with Region Stockholm on 20 November
2017, where he clarifed that the Sweden Finnish context was not relevant for the
Sámi as Indigenous and connected Stockholm Sámi experiences to Sámi experiences
in Sápmi.6
One example of challenging the City based on the demands of an Indigenous
People was surveying Sámi needs. In meetings and the City’s written material, the City
representatives frequently proposed to survey local Sámi needs in preparation for the
administrative area. The Sámi representatives consistently resisted this privileging of
surveying to gauge needs. For instance, in the dialogue from 5 November 2018, Julia
explained that the Stockholm Sámi Association had limited outreach resources and
that the Sámi were not necessarily interested in responding to surveys because of their
colonial experiences as an Indigenous People. In contrast to the Sweden Finns, the
Sámi positionality as Indigenous would be more relevant than numbers. Julia sug-
gested instead that the City should build a relationship with the Stockholm Sámi
based on accountability. As a Swedish governmental authority serving Sámi con-
stituents, that accountability should begin with the City offering the administrative
area services. This conversation was also an avenue for Julia and Erik to determine
that Sámi Indigeneity meant that the City needed to serve them differently than the
Sweden Finns.
The Stockholm Sámi Association representatives’ negotiations concerning Indi-
geneity aligned with consultation responses to a 2017 government inquiry about the
Swedish national minority policies. For it, the Sámi Parliament’s plenary made a unan-
imous statement on 5 October 2017:

The Sámi Parliament ascertains that the inquiry has not considered the will of
the Sámi people to be called an Indigenous people and not a national minority.
The Sámi Parliament also fnds defciencies in the analysis since the Indigenous
people, the Sámi, and the Sámi languages are barely included but rather made
invisible in the inquiry.
(Heikki 2017)

In addition, six Sámi administrative area municipalities7 and Stockholm University

concluded that the Sámi status as an Indigenous People should be the foundation for
Sámi language rights. The municipalities wrote that the Sámi identify themselves as
Sweden’s Indigenous People rather than a national minority. Therefore, and because
Indigenous Peoples’ rights are more comprehensive than other minority rights in
international law, the Sámi should be called ‘the Indigenous people the Sámi’ rather
than a national minority in the laws. In agreement, Professor Ulf Mörkenstam,
Stockholm University, stated that it is necessary to develop a Swedish Indigenous
Peoples’ politics based on the fact that the Swedish state has recognized the Sámi
as an Indigenous People and a people with the right to self-determination. These
conditions separate the Sámi from the national minorities (Heikki 2017). Thus, the
Stockholm Sámi Association’s work to require the administrative area to serve the
Stockholm Sámi as Indigenous agreed with the Sámi Parliament and existing Sámi
administrative areas and resisted the settler-colonial administrative practices of elimi-
nating Sámi Indigeneity.
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INDIGENOUS SELF-DETERMINATION OF THE

ADMINISTRATIVE AREA
To establish how the administrative area needed to serve the Sámi as an Indigenous
People, the Stockholm Sámi Association representatives asserted forms of self-
determination. At the 5 November 2018 meeting, Julia explained that the Sámi
Association was a resource regarding competence development efforts within the
City. She emphasized the importance of the Sámi getting opportunities to be involved
in the development work in many different ways:

JULIA: ‘We are happy to be involved and support competency development.’

ERIK: ‘The majority population can’t organize competency development about Sámi
issues. We have to be involved ourselves from the beginning.’
STRATEGIST 1: ‘We can’t become Sámi experts, but we can educate about the rights
that the Sámi have.’
JULIA: ‘The Pursuit of Rights8 is an example of what doesn’t work. Expertise must
be brought in from Sámi society.’
STRATEGIST 1: ‘We are not allowed to hire based on ethnicity. But we can hire based
on language competency.’

Erik and Julia addressed the necessity for the Sámi to own and manage their own
issues. In this context, Sámi society represented the Sámi as an Indigenous People with
a society of their own. Julia and Erik also challenged Strategist 1 on the limitations
of the possible work for the City when servicing a Sámi constituency. As Strategist 1
mentioned, Swedish authorities are legally prohibited from hiring based on ethnicity.
Strategist 1 offered the potential work-around to hire based on language requirements,
which would be close to a guarantee of hiring a Sámi person involved in Sámi society
life. The problematic Swedish legal context of not prioritizing Sámi hires in relevant
administrative authorities was addressed by the Sámi Parliament. In 2019, it requested
a Sámi language law to ensure Sámi language rights and fulfl the Parliament’s lan-
guage political goals. Current conditions were counterproductive to the National
Minority Law’s statement that administrative authorities shall offer services in Sámi
(Sámediggi 2019). Later in the 5 November 2018 meeting, Erik again brought up the
necessity of the Sámi managing their affairs within the administrative area framework.
He addressed that the City needed to hire a Sámi resource person, reconnecting the
conversation to what Julia had said about the need to bring in Sámi expertise.

STRATEGIST 1: ‘What kind of support do you need for your organization? Can the
City assist you?’
ERIK: ‘It would be great with funding for a resource person who is available during
daytime and can organize externally and internally.’

The Sámi representatives repeatedly insisted that the City needed to fund a Sámi
coordinator position. Erik also underlined this in his conversation with me:

A coordinator who sees it all in a system, working to reach all Sámi [in
Stockholm]. We are not only working for the members of the Sámi Association
but for everyone.
(Eriksson and Erik 2018)
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Erik emphasized the Sámi community in Stockholm as encompassing more than the
Stockholm Sámi Association. A Sámi coordinator would ensure that Sámi Indigeneity
was recognized and centred in the administrative area. Many of the other 24 Sámi
administrative area municipalities employ Sámi coordinators. For instance, Umeå is
the second-largest city in Sápmi (after Murmansk) and is also an administrative area
for the Sámi, Finnish and Meänkieli languages. The Umeå municipality employs two
Sámi coordinators who both themselves also are Sámi – one general Sámi coordina-
tor and one coordinator for Sámi eldercare (Umeå kommun 2021). Situating the
Stockholm Sámi relationship with the City differently from the relationship between
the City and the Sweden Finns,9 a Sámi coordinator and funding self-determination
would facilitate the Stockholm Sámi’s managing of the administrative area work as
an Indigenous People working within a framework of Indigenous self-determination.

GLOBAL INDIGENOUS RIGHTS DISCOURSE

A crucial articulation of Sámi Indigeneity in the administrative area process was
asserting international rights for Indigenous Peoples. Over the last decade, the
Stockholm Sámi Association has organized and attended international Indigenous
events. Members have, for instance, participated in international conferences such as
the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In the adminis-
trative area process, global Indigenous human rights discourse emphasized the Sámi
positionality as Indigenous and differentiating the Sámi from the national minori-
ties. Dian Million (2014, 20) understands human rights as an international arena of
struggle with space for Indigenous Peoples to challenge nation-state sovereignties.
For instance, Sweden was criticized in 2020 for the third time by the United Nations
concerning the Sámi. The UN Universal Periodic Review of Sweden recommended
increased effort to strengthen support for the Sámi languages, increased protection
for Sámi rights to land and natural resources and more signifcant infuence for the
Sámi people in decision-making processes that directly affect them (Human Rights
Council 2020). Rauna Kuokkanen illustrates how the framework for Indigenous
self-determination is partially based on global Indigenous rights discourse. She
writes that in regards to UNDRIP10 ‘rights are instruments (though not necessarily
the only ones) through which the value of Indigenous self-determination is put into
practice and exercised on the ground’ (Kuokkanen 2019, 35). Following this under-
standing of Indigenous rights and Indigenous self-determination’s interconnected-
ness, it would be essential to emphasize Indigeneity as entangled with a global rights
discourse. Mobilizing the additional support afforded through UNDRIP further
differentiated the Stockholm Sámi from the Sweden Finns and the other national
minorities. Kuokkanen (2019, 38) continues by contending that ‘the reality of coex-
istence of struggles of self-determination and recognition are mutually constitutive.
The realities of Sámi’ struggles in Stockholm elucidate the relationship between
local Indigeneity and international instruments for Indigenous rights – instruments
beyond the jurisdiction of Swedish authorities.
In their work with Stockholm authorities, the Stockholm Sámi Association rep-
resentatives frequently referred to global Indigenous rights to establish that the
administrative area needed to serve the Stockholm Sámi as Indigenous. For instance,
during a meeting with Region Stockholm on 20 November 2017, Erik emphasized

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the social sustainability of Indigenous Peoples according to Agenda 2030. Agenda

2030 is the United Nation’s global goal for sustainable development.11 In a later
all-national-minority meeting with the City on 31 2019, Erik advanced his stance:

We are the only Indigenous People in [the European Union]. According to

Agenda 2030, proper contact and dialogue must be in place to ensure correct
knowledge and understanding. There are special protections for Indigenous
Peoples, such as the protection of intellectual rights and language rights.

Erik highlighted the unique position of the Sámi as the only Indigenous People in the
European Union and what their Indigeneity meant in connection with Agenda 2030.
He emphasized in several meetings that the social sustainability outlined in Agenda
2030 needed implementation in the administrative area. That Erik addressed the
specifc Indigenous protections in Agenda 2030 centred Sámi Indigeneity in the
Sámi representatives’ engagement with the City and the national minorities. Further,
demanding that the City implement special protections for Indigenous Peoples chal-
lenged the City’s proposed noncommittal ambition. The Sámi representatives fre-
quently made such challenges to settler state authority mediated through Stockholm
City. Erik, Elsa and Julia mobilized global Indigenous rights discourse as a frame-
work for the enforcement of Sámi Indigeneity in the administrative area.

SÁMI SOCIETY
I see it (the administrative area) as a lever. We do this work in Stockholm, and
the Sámi Parliament (for instance) do their work. And (if they) put pressure on
to the greatest extent they can, all small things together will create signifcant
impact, chipping away at the colonial order little by little.
(Eriksson and Julia 2018)

Situating the Stockholm Sámi administrative area as part of greater Sámi society
was crucial for serving the Sámi as an Indigenous People within the frameworks of
Indigenous self-determination and global Indigenous rights discourse. Throughout
the administrative area process, Elsa, Erik and Julia emphasized the importance of
Sámi society beyond Stockholm and the Stockholm Sámi Association. The Stockholm
Sámi Association itself is a member of multiple other Sámi organizations such as
Sáminuorra, Svenska Samers Riksförbund (SSR), Same Ätnam and Giron Sámi
Teáhter. The Association even hosted SSR’s annual meeting in 2019. The adminis-
trative area in Stockholm was not a monolith but intimately connected to the rest
of Sámi society, also beyond Swedish nation-state borders. As Julia stated, Sámi
society and institutions engaged in multiple ways to negotiate the colonial condi-
tions targeting Sámi Indigeneity. The Sámi administrative area in Stockholm had the
potential to be one of them. Indeed, as Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen state, urban
Indigenous identities are ‘complex, highly vernacular engines of Indigenous cultural
power’ (2013, 11). In Stockholm, the administrative area would be one approach to
harnessing this power and illustrate how Indigeneity ‘signifes the dialogic process
of movement and tradition’ (Teves et al. 2015, 113). Erik addressed this dialogic
process in the 5 November 2018 meeting:

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Stockholm is such a generator and driving force for all of Sweden.12 Therefore,
there is a need for Stockholm to become a cultural and societal base for the
whole Sámi society.

The web of relationships connecting Stockholm and Sámi society at large is in line
with Peters and Andersen’s conclusion of ‘the undeniable attachments between urban
and non-urban Indigenous locales that continue to shape, in a mutually (though une-
qually) constitutive manner, the institutional structures and lived experiences of both
communities’ (2013, 386). At a meeting with the City and the national minorities on
31 January 2019, Erik again mentioned that it was important for all of Sámi society
that Stockholm become a Sámi administrative area. He explained that Stockholm was
sparsely populated from a Sámi perspective, far from Sápmi and the Sámi population
spread out over great distances. The sparse population meant it would be challeng-
ing to reach all Sámi in Stockholm in connection with the administrative area. In the
City meeting on 31 January 2019, Erik also stated that it was hard to reach all Sámi
in Stockholm as the Sámi Parliament voting registration roll was not a reliable instru-
ment for capturing the number of Sámi in Stockholm. We had talked about this earlier:

KE: ‘Do you think Stockholm as a Sámi administrative area provides better possibili-
ties to reach Sámi in Stockholm who are not members of the Sámi Association?’
ERIK: ‘Oh yes, I’m sure of it! Like this fall, with the intense marketing about this, there
have been indications from Sámi, whom I know live in Stockholm. . . . That’s
great that things are starting to happen for the Stockholm Sámi Association!
Something is happening, and it has to be communicated to our society or the
Sámi themselves in Stockholm.’
(Eriksson and Erik 2018)

Aligned with Erik is Renya Ramirez’s concept of ‘the hub,’ as theorized by Paiute
community scholar Laverne Roberts. The concept of urban Indigeneity as the hub
supports Indigenous notions of culture, community, identity and belonging also
thriving away from tribal land bases. ‘Like a hub on a wheel,’ Roberts argues,
‘urban Indians occupy the center, connected to their tribal communities by social
networks represented by the wheel’s spokes’ (Ramirez 2007, 2). Similarly, Sámi
Indigeneity in Stockholm was articulated as a hub connected to Sápmi and beyond.
Erik communicated that the administrative area needed to serve the Stockholm
Sámi as part of Sámi society. The Sámi representatives demonstrated the admin-
istrative area’s need to serve the Sámi as an Indigenous People rather than indi-
viduals. They also proclaimed the administrative area to be inseparable from Sámi
society as a whole.

SÁMI SPACE IN STOCKHOLM

For the Stockholm administrative area to suit the Sámi as an Indigenous People, a
designated Sámi space in Stockholm was imperative. At the 5 November 2018 meet-
ing, Erik emphasized how important it was that the Sámi community receive funding
to support different activities connected to Sámi culture:

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ERIK: ‘It’s problematic to get cultural funding from the City if it’s for events target-
ing the Sámi. It only works for public events targeting the general public. What
are the particular rules that allow City funding for Finnish language events?’
STRATEGIST 2: ‘Finnish events have to be open to all Finns.’
ERIK: ‘It would also be like that for Sámi events.’

As part of the administrative area, it would be crucial for the Stockholm Sámi to
access City funding for community-centred events. A minimum to request would
be funding opportunities similar to what the Sweden Finns already had in their
administrative area. Strategist 2 clarifed that Finnish-language events required that
all Finns be welcome. Erik assuaged concerns that Sámi-language events would
bar some Sámi because of the many different Sámi languages. This statement was
also an articulation of the City’s need to collaborate with the Sámi on Sámi terms.
Because of Sámi Indigeneity, these conditions diverged from those of the Sweden
Finns. Self-determination over administrative area funding would allow Stockholm
Sámi to use administrative area funding to organize community-centred events to
strengthen Sámi culture, language and society. It would also challenge Swedish colo-
nizing administrative practices, and the administrative area could potentially facili-
tate a Sámi Indigenous resurgence. Elsa later discussed the diffculties of arranging
community-focused events:

It’s also vital that us Sámi in Stockholm will get it easier with for instance . . .
it’s diffcult with venues, and if we want to have a course or something, it’s dif-
fcult to structure the administrative side of that. So we want to solve that too.
Stuff like that, that maybe the City could provide some support. I see so many
advantages of having the big City machinery involved in this.
(Eriksson and Elsa 2019)

Part of the issue with Sámi community-centred events, as Elsa addressed it, was the lack
of a designated Sámi space such as a community center in Stockholm. In the 5 November
2018 meeting, Erik brought up the Sweden Finnish school’s space at Fridhemsplan:13

It would be a great solution for a Sámi cultural center. That we participate in

activities would facilitate for Sámi in the whole country.

Julia then emphasized the need for a meeting place for youth, where young Sámi
could meet and socialize:

Meeting places for Sámi children and youth are needed. If the City participates
as an organizer, the activity space’s use can expand to more Sámi who are not
members of Sámi associations. It would be a great help to have a permanent
space that’s child-friendly.

How the administrative area could assist the Sámi as Indigenous was discussed
here through the need for a permanent Sámi space in Stockholm. This space would
potentially beneft all Sámi in Stockholm and the whole Sámi society. The space

373
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conversation was also part of the 20 November 2017 Region Stockholm meeting,
just before Stockholm applied to become a Sámi administrative area. Julia clarifed,
‘We need a cultural center. A place where cultural events are continuous and long-
term, rather than separate time-limited projects. We need a platform to meet and
develop Sámi culture.’ Erik mentioned the Fridhemsplan project:

It’s a space for the Sámi Association’s activities. We have applied for activity
funding from Region Stockholm. We also have an idea about collaborating with
the Sámi Parliament about a cultural center. They need a place in Stockholm.

Sámi Indigeneity was demonstrated through the need for a Sámi-operated center in
Stockholm, partially funded by the City through the administrative area. This asser-
tion agreed with Ramirez’s (2007) argument that urban Indigenous community and
belonging as hubs are ‘created in an unbounded network of culture and relation-
ships’ (2007, 22). These hubs are both geographical and virtual, i.e. joined to spe-
cifc places and connected to cultural processes. Elsa, Julia and Erik also addressed
Stockholm and the administrative area as a Sámi meeting place. Astri Dankertsen
(2015, 216) explains the city as a connection point for a Sámi nation-building pro-
cess, in which the Sámi cultural sector becomes an integral part of urban Sámi artic-
ulation (see also Dankertsen in this volume). The Stockholm administrative area and
a Sámi center would be essential for Sámi community-centred events, which would
support all of Sámi society. It could further assist with much-needed child and youth
programming. The City’s fnancial and administrative clout could facilitate this and
mobilize existing opportunities within the administrative areas regarding the exist-
ing Sweden Finns’ venue. The City’s resources would also be useful for reaching out
to the whole of Sámi society in Stockholm, not just individuals organized in Sámi
associations. A center could also house a Sámi Parliament offce and Giron Sámi
Theatre and potentially be a physical home for Sámi revitalization. Such develop-
ment would increase Stockholm’s role as a hub in Sámi society within the frame-
works of Indigenous self-determination and global Indigenous discourse. Enduring
Indigeneity (Kauanui 2016, 1) through physical space was one way the administra-
tive area could serve as an arena for Sámi society and resurgence and simultaneously
weather settler-colonial practices holding out against Sámi Indigeneity.

SÁMI LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION

Well, I see it [the administrative area] as a lever to establish Sámi culture and
language in Stockholm.  .  .  . The Sámi in Stockholm can have a context that
prepares them for operating in Sámi society in the north. An administrative area
could be a platform to get that dynamic.
(Eriksson and Erik 2018)

The importance of language for a fourishing Sámi society made language a critical
articulation of how the administrative area needed to serve the Sámi as Indigenous.
It was, of course, also essential that the service focus for the administrative area itself
was language. These factors were aligned with Ulla Aikio-Puoskari’s description of

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the contemporary Sámi language context as a tension between revitalization and

language shift.14 Aikio-Puoskari also emphasizes the increasing usage of Sámi lan-
guages across public services, media, literature and music. Further, ‘language revi-
talization refects the maintenance and the future of Indigenous society and culture’
(2018, 356).
Sámi language services provided through the administrative area at all life stages
were crucial for the administrative area to successfully serve the Sámi within the
frameworks of Indigenous self-determination and global Indigenous rights dis-
course. Concerning Sámi language revitalization in Sweden, Patricia Fjellgren and
Leena Huss write (2019, 26) that current Sámi-initiated language revitalization
work would not have been possible without the National Minority Law. Fjellgren
and Huss further suggest that the National Minority Law as a policy has undoubt-
edly made it more justifable to work for Sámi language revitalization. However,
they also caution that ‘we recognize that colonization has not ended, neither has
assimilation, and we now witness a race between dominant language assimilation
and Indigenous language revitalization’ (2019, 26) (see also Huss and Lindgren in
this volume). At the 5 November 2018 meeting, the participants emphasized revi-
talization efforts for the Sámi languages. Essential steps to take would be preschool
in Sámi and Sámi home language teaching in schools. This focus on children and
language was in line with Rauna Kuokkanen’s (2019, 57) analysis that teaching
children their Indigenous languages is crucial for ‘advancing collective self-deter-
mination.’ In other words, Sámi languages would be essential for Indigenous life in
and beyond Stockholm. In the earlier quote, Erik also asserted the administrative
area’s potential to promote the Sámi languages in Stockholm. He further addressed
how this would be an essential part of the administrative area’s function to prepare
Stockholm Sámi for the future in Sápmi.
In the 5 November 2018 meeting, the Stockholm Sámi Association representatives
emphasized the need for the City to facilitate the administrative area language ser-
vices. It would be necessary to use multiple Sámi languages across City services and
all stages of life. For language revitalization to be successful, responsibility and sup-
port must be available on individual and community levels (Sarivaara and Keskitalo
2016, 13). Support and accountability on all levels would also expedite Sámi lan-
guage revitalization (about the need for special language planning, see Pasanen in
this volume). Further, growing Sámi language use in Stockholm would strengthen
Stockholm’s position as an urban Sámi hub.
The teaching of Sámi languages to Sámi children in Stockholm schools would be
crucial for the ability of the administrative area to beneft the Stockholm Sámi. In the
5 November 2018 meeting, Elsa emphasized Sámi integration in school to increase
access to Sámi culture and languages for children and youth.

Currently South Sámi language is only taught one hour per week in school. With
at least two hours per week instead, it would also be possible to apply for duodji
and additional Sámi cultural activities to get more Sámi integration in school.

Elsa further stated that the administrator she talked to at the Education Department
said that two hours per week would be possible, to which the Director and Strategist
1 agreed. School can serve as a critical ideological and implementational space

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for Sámi language revitalization. With communities and families facing pressures
against Sámi language use, the school can be a site for teachers’ and students’ ‘co-
construction of Sámi ways of knowing’ (Hornberger and Outakoski 2015, 43). In
2019, the Sámi Parliament requested the reformation of current Sámi language edu-
cation on all levels, from teaching in schools to university-level teacher and language
education. The severe shortage of Sámi language teachers was found to result from
insuffcient Sámi instruction on all educational levels. One problem was that ‘weak’
educational models continued to be prioritized over research-proven ‘strong’ edu-
cational models for school children. Weak educational models teach Sámi for a few
hours per week, mostly outside regular school hours (Sámediggi 2019). The City
employed these models, something that the Stockholm Sámi Association representa-
tives decisively aimed to change. For instance, as stated earlier, at the 5 November
2018 meeting, Elsa demonstrated how the Sámi language intersected with other
Sámi practices as parts of Sámi Indigeneity. Increasing Sámi language teaching by
only one hour per week could potentially bring signifcant benefts to Sámi students
in Stockholm. The students’ benefts would also be decisive for Stockholm as part
of Sámi society and the preparation of Sámi youth growing up in Stockholm for
Indigenous resurgence in Stockholm and Sápmi.
In our conversations, Elsa and Julia emphasized multiple angles of the importance
language holds to serve the Sámi as Indigenous in the administrative area:

JULIA: ‘But if there were a Sámi preschool, that would be very empowering for the
community. That preschool could maybe be more about Sámi culture, that that
could be developed. I think we have to do it that way. Like if we have Sámi
preschool or open preschool once a week for a couple of hours more focused on
Sámi culture: here we listen to Sámi music, here we eat Sámi food or whatever it
is, and half an hour of North Sámi, half an hour of South Sámi.’
(Eriksson and Julia 2018)
ELSA: ‘Almost exactly a year ago, I was at a language meeting with the Sámi
Parliament, and I talked to people from Lycksele15 where they had hired people
for a full-time position that ensured that even if they didn’t teach Sámi 100%
they still had a 100% position. I informed them – Språkcentrum16 – about that,
as a model to create an attractive workplace. “You don’t have to work only 7%,
you get a 100% position, we want to use your qualifcations.” Språkcentrum
probably didn’t do anything with that, but at least I informed them about it.
They did sound positive at the time.
(Eriksson and Elsa 2019)

Julia emphasized the importance of Sámi preschool for Sámi society in Stockholm.
She also articulated the signifcance of combining language teaching with other Sámi
practices. Elsa addressed the need to make Stockholm an attractive workplace for
Sámi language teachers and that she had informed Språkcentrum about how to do
that through innovation already in place in Sápmi. Rauna Kuokkanen (Knobblock
and Kuokkanen 2015, 277) contends that intergenerational transfer of language and
culture is a Sámi feminist issue. She argues that children’s access to Sámi language
is crucial for achieving Sámi self-determination and community building (see also

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Pasanen in this volume). Again, this is also how Julia and Elsa addressed capacity
building for the Stockholm Sámi administrative area. They also included the elderly
and the need to access the Sámi language and other practices across a person’s life
cycle. Like Ulla Aikio-Puoskari (2018, 356), Julia and Elsa emphasized the necessity
of the intergenerational transmission of Sámi languages in every generation. In other
words, they emphasized Sámi language capabilities as crucial for strengthening the
web of relations involving Stockholm and Sápmi as one Sámi society. Kuokkanen
fnds that Sámi women especially regard working ‘toward ensuring the existence of
Sámi daycare, schools, and books for children as a way of expressing and contribut-
ing to Sámi self-determination both on individual and collective levels’ (2019, 57).
Sámi language practice as enduring Indigeneity (Kauanui 2016, 1) was fundamental
for rejecting settler-colonial disruptions of Sámi continuity. Elsa and Julia articulated
how the administrative area language services should bolster Sámi self-determina-
tion as an Indigenous People, buttressing Sámi presence and future in Stockholm.

CONCLUSION
The process of Stockholm becoming a Sámi administrative area was initiated
by the Stockholm Sámi Association. From 2017 through 2019, Stockholm Sámi
Association representatives Elsa, Erik and Julia established that the Stockholm Sámi
administrative area needed to serve the Stockholm Sámi as an Indigenous People.
They executed their administrative area work as participants in a network of Sámi
society (communities, institutions, organizations, Sámi transnationality) and global
Indigeneity (global rights, organizations). They further emphasized the continuity of
Sámi Stockholm and the need for the administrative area as a resource for improving
the Stockholm Sámi organization.
The Stockholm Sámi Association representatives primarily asserted the frame-
works of Sámi self-determination of the administrative area and global Indigenous
rights discourse. These frameworks articulated the critical claims of the adminis-
trative area as part of Sámi society, the need for a Sámi space in Stockholm and
Sámi language revitalization. These essential claims can also be understood as means
through which the administrative area could potentially facilitate Sámi Indigenous
resurgence. In other words, the administrative area needed to serve Sámi Stockholm
as an urban hub of relations advancing Sámi Indigenous life.
Through the formation of the administrative area, the Association deployed deep-
ening relationships with Swedish administrative state settler colonialism and worked
within the administrative area’s colonial framework to enhance Sámi authority. The
administrative area as an institution originated from Swedish law. However, that it
was negotiated by the Stockholm Sámi Association as an agreement to promote Sámi
life is aligned with Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox’s assertion that ‘it is in a sense the political,
social, and psychological capital such agreements have the potential to create that is
part of their real value’ (2009, 164, emphasis added). Thus, negotiating even fawed
state policies as tools for Indigenous resurgence projects allows for crafting viable
alternatives for Indigenous futures. The Stockholm Sámi Association representatives
simultaneously deployed Indigeneity as a challenge to Swedish institutionalized power
and demanded protection by the same authority. Working within and against Swedish
law to advance Sámi presence and self-determination delegitimized Swedish state

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claims over the Sámi as an Indigenous People. Hence, the Stockholm Sámi adminis-
trative area process was also an illustration of enduring Indigeneity (Kauanui 2016,
1). Indigeneity and state settler colonialism were entwined as corresponding ana-
lytics in the administrative area process. Swedish national minority policy originat-
ing in Indigenous erasure was weathered by Sámi Indigeneity. The Stockholm Sámi
Association representatives employed Indigeneity as a lever to negotiate the limitations
of the administrative area established in the National Minority Law. The negotiations
of Sámi Indigeneity as a foundation for the administrative area challenged Swedish
settler-colonial state governmentality and harnessed the potential of the administrative
area for urban Indigenous resurgence and resistance.

NOTES
1 Region Stockholm is responsible for healthcare, dental care, public transportation,
regional planning and some arts funding in Stockholm County. The county has 26 munici-
palities, of which Stockholm City is by far the largest in population size.
2 Meänkieli is the language of the Tornedalians, a population group whose home area is the
Torne River valley. The Torne River is located in Sápmi on the border between Sweden
and Finland.
3 The Sámi presence in the Stockholm area predates the city itself. Until the 1700s, skiing
was exclusively a Sámi practice in Sweden. The oldest depiction of a skier is on a rune
stone from around 1050, located 80 kilometers from Stockholm (Öhman 2020, 439).
4 The City’s guidelines for the work with national minorities’ rights.
5 The Sweden Finns are the largest immigrant group in Sweden. Over time, there have
been many waves of Finnish-speaking immigration. Almost half a million Finns arrived
between 1960 and 1975 for job prospects, mainly in manufacturing and service industries.
6 The Region Stockholm representatives mentioned that they had internal equality training
about the national minorities for their employees. Erik then said, ‘Which infuence can we
Sámi have on the format of that training? The Finns have a different context than us. There
are experiences from the North about how not to treat Sámi in the healthcare system.’
7 Älvdalen, Dorotea, Strömsund, Åre, Berg, Härjedalen.
8 Time-limited City-initiated project in 2018.
9 A few Sámi and Sweden Finnish representatives had an initial meeting to discuss shared
interests regarding the administrative areas’ work. Julia later told me that the Swedish
Finns claimed that they did not have any infuence over how their administrative area
funding was spent. They did not perceive the administrative area funding as ‘theirs,’ either.
10 The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the UN
on September 13, 2007.
11 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld
www.globalamalen.se/
https://start.stockholm/om-stockholms-stad/sa-arbetar-staden/agenda-2030/
12 Roughly 20% of Sweden’s population lives in Stockholm County. Stockholm is also the
political and fnancial center of Sweden.
13 Central location in Stockholm easily accessible by public transport.
14 ‘The intergenerational transmission of the language must be secured by every generation,
again and again, because of the strong infuence and pressure of national languages and
English. These factors are not going to disappear’ (Aikio-Puoskari 2018, 356).
15 Likssjuo/Lycksele is a municipality in Sápmi and a Sámi administrative area.
16 Språkcentrum (The Language Center) is the Stockholm City offce for home language
teaching.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

T H E RO L E O F T H E SÁ M I M E D I A
I N D E M O C R AT I C P R O C E S S E S
The Arctic Railway in Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi


Inker-Anni Sara, Torkel Rasmussen

and Roy Krøvel

INTRODUCTION
This media research was prompted by the Arctic Railway construction project that
is planned to run from the city of Roavvenjárga/Rovaniemi in Finland to the city of
Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes by the Arctic Ocean in Northern Norway crossing the Sámi
homeland, Sápmi. The railway would be part of a larger transport connection linking
northern areas directly to the Northeast Passage, also known as the new Silk Road.
It may also open a new Central European rail link through the Rail Baltica project
and the related Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel. In Finland, the railway would run through the
Sámi homeland area and split 6 of 13 Sámi reindeer-herding cooperatives. In Norway,
the planned Arctic Railway would increase the importance of the port of Kirkonjárga/
Kirkenes but would run through one reindeer-herding district and affect another.
The Arctic Railway is the largest project ever planned in the Sámi homeland of
Finland, with a budget of three billion euros. It would connect the Arctic Region and
its natural resources directly to the Central European economic and political markets
as well as to Asian and Chinese metropolitan areas. Sápmi, the Sámi homeland, and
Sámi communities are located in one of the most resource-rich areas of the world,
in a region where the world superpowers struggle for global commercial exploita-
tion and power. Global warming has turned attention to resources and routes that
it has not been previously possible to exploit – for example, the Northeast Passage.
Meanwhile, the fragility of nature in the Arctic, the human rights of Indigenous
Peoples and the rights of the Sámi to their own culture and way of life are at stake.
The purpose of the chapter is to examine the role of the Sámi media in serving
democracy in Sámi society in Finland and Norway. We do that by investigating Yle
Sápmi’s and NRK Sápmi’s news coverage of the Arctic Railway project from 2013 to
2020. Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi are both Sámi units of the national broadcasting

382 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-26

 — The role of the Sámi media —

companies Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK) and Yleisradio (Yle). These are the most
important media for the Sámi in Norway and Finland, but they are not autonomous
Indigenous media. (For more about the Sámi media system, see also Rasmussen et al.
in this volume.)
On a more general level, this chapter discusses the signifcance of public debate in
Sámi society and the role of the Sámi media in facilitating the democratic participa-
tion of the Sámi people. The role of the news media in general is to inform citizens
about the decision-making processes and actions of various political actors in rep-
resentative democracies and to give voice to diverse groups and opinions in society.
It is very diffcult to imagine a modern world without mass media information and
ongoing public debate. Those who dominate public debate often also dominate deci-
sion making, and those whose voices are not heard in public debate are also often
absent from decision making. Therefore, in addition to its role in providing news
content in the Sámi language, the role of the Sámi media is important in informing
mainstream society about issues important to the Sámi and in bringing diverse Sámi
voices into public debate. Furthermore, the Sámi media plays an important role in
the Indigenous Sámi society by informing them, acting as a watchdog, setting the
agenda for public debate and providing an arena for a multiplicity of Indigenous
voices (Sara 2007). The media is capable of reframing discourses presented in other
arenas and transferring salience from the media agenda to public and policy agendas
that may extend its effects to other sectors in society (Hesmondhalgh 2019, 102).
When the media selects certain issues and people to be included in media cover-
age, some topics and persons become more prominent than others (Althaus and
Tewksbury 2002, 180). We investigate how these democratic functions can be identi-
fed in the online news coverage of Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi.
The news coverage of Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi1 are investigated as an issue arena
in which multiple stakeholders with opposing interests compete for whose voice will
be heard in the media (Vos et al. 2014). By emphasizing different aspects, the various
involved stakeholders aim to dominate the debate. In the case of the Arctic Railway,
the stakeholders are those who are affected by the railway plan or who can affect the
plan (following Freeman 2010). The news coverage of Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi on
the Arctic Railway plan is analyzed by applying six types of framing of social issues2
(see Sara 2018; Meriläinen and Vos 2013; Hallahan 1999). The research is guided by
the following questions: Which actors were included in the public debate concerning
the planning of the Arctic Railway, and how often were they selected as interview-
ees? Which types of framing of social issues (see Meriläinen and Vos 2013; Hallahan
1999) were used in the public debate on the Arctic Railway plan by the pro- and
contra-railway stakeholders? What do these news stories tell about the role of Yle
Sápmi and NRK Sápmi as Sámi news media in informing, commenting, acting as a
watchdog, setting an agenda for the Sámi society and providing a forum for various
voices? The study seeks to shed light on the existing power relations and competing
land-use interests that the Sámi and other Indigenous Peoples face on daily basis.

THE POWER OF THE MEDIA

In the process of constructing nation-states, the media has played a key role world-
wide in creating an image of one national language and identity and a shared

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understanding of the common economic and political interests of the nation-states

(Anderson 2006). Both Finland and Norway, as Nordic social democratic welfare
states, have built well-resourced national public-service broadcasters. Public broad-
casting companies under which the Sámi units also broadcast (for example, Sámi
news via television, radio and internet) have dominated the media feld in both
countries.
The power of media is undeniable in today’s mediated policy making (Herkman
2009), in which those who dominate public debate often also dominate policy mak-
ing, while those who are excluded from public debate are often also excluded from
decision making (Hanitzsch and Vos 2017, 120). Also, on Indigenous issues, the
media has the power to guide public opinion and to select which issues become
prominent by placing certain topics on the news agenda (Ragas and Kiousis 2010,
563). For instance, in Canada, news practices of the mainstream media have often
been found to concentrate on sensations (Hafsteinsson 2010) that place Indigenous
Peoples in stereotypical contexts – for example, news about casinos and child custody
in Indigenous communities (Trudeau and Ahtone 2017, 46–47). In Finland, the Sámi
have been cast as, for example, passive objects of other actors’ activities (Pietikäinen
2000). Similarly, in Australia, stories presenting the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander communities as historical leftovers incapable of modern development have
become prominent. Consequently, sensationalist news about Indigenous Peoples
seems to be considered ‘important’ and has become a salient feature of Indigenous
Peoples in society at large (Molnar 2001, 321–325). In contrast, news stories that
prioritize the relevance of Indigenous livelihoods, languages and ways of life that
could better serve Indigenous Peoples in democracies are often excluded from the
mainstream media’s agenda (Hafsteinsson 2010).
Indigenous movements that often lack a state apparatus have sought access
to their own media to raise wider social awareness of matters important to them
(Pietikäinen 2008, 173–174). For instance, the Zapatistas used the internet in the
early 1990s to gain global support for their concerns (Castells 2002, 53). The
Zapatistas have established an autonomous Indigenous media independent of the
state, fnanced by themselves and their supporters. There are important differences
between the struggles of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico and in Sápmi. Indigenous
Peoples in Mexico have been constantly subjected to threats and violence at a scale
that has not been experienced in Sápmi for at least 100 years.
Hanusch (2014, 5), however, describes the current situation as a ‘renaissance’ of
Indigenous communities, whose activists organized themselves in the form of media
to bring about political change. The Sámi media has to some extent united the Sámi
people in four different states – Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden – and created
an understanding of the existence of a unifed Sámi people (see also Rasmussen et
al. in this volume). In the 1960s, many Sámi villages were not yet affected by main-
stream society, but today, Sámi TV news informs all Sámi about Indigenous news
topics across the wide Sámi. Likewise, the positive media publicity in the main-
stream media for the Sámi political movement in Finland at the end of the 1960s
was signifcant in promoting Sámi affairs such as the establishment of the 2nd Sámi
Committee and the frst test elections of the Sámi Parliament (before the Sámi del-
egation), followed by the establishment of the Sámi Parliament of Finland (Sara
2020)3 (see also Mörkenstam et al. in this volume). Similarly, in Norway, cultural

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expressions manifested in media and television, such as Sámi participation in the

Eurovision Song Contest and television series for children, have contributed to the
growing awareness of Indigenous Peoples, culture and rights.

INDIGENOUS NEWS MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY

It is often taken for granted that democracy is served by the news media within
a certain nation-state and its publics (Ward 2005, 3) that continue to be viewed
through the lens and values of Western journalism, excluding non-Western political
systems and their media development (Hanitzsch and Vos 2018, 159). Globalization
of the media is expected to result in journalists acting as ‘global agents’ and ‘serving
world citizens’ (Ward 2005, 6) as the media fulfls its role as a distributor of reliable
information (Konieczna and Powers 2016, 14). This idea appears to ft the starting
point of Indigenous news media. The multiple modernities perspective provides a
context for the analysis of postcolonial societies for which both Western models and
native cultural elements are combined to investigate the modernization process; for
example, the media is studied as a combination of Western journalistic practices and
values of non-Western cultures (de Albuquerque 2018, 12–13). Similarly, the Sámi
news media combines Western news values with Indigenous Sámi perspectives (Sara
2007). Likewise, when Indigenous news media uncover issues that affect Indigenous
communities, it enables marginalized Indigenous groups to participate in public
debate (Dahal and Aram 2013, 18–22).
We agree with Markelin (2017, 15) that Sámi media and Indigenous media
worldwide are necessary for democratic processes in Indigenous societies because
the agenda of mainstream media lacks diversity, equality and salience related to
Indigenous issues. The missing media representations indicate ‘a failure of demo-
cratic representation and participation,’ such as the lack of reporting on Aboriginal
deaths in custody, where an Indigenous group had no voice in the mainstream media
(Bacon 2005, 20). Likewise, Indigenous communities are often underserved by the
mainstream media (Trudeau and Ahtone 2017). Therefore, free native news media
are important in producing independent information for the positive development
of Indigenous communities and their opportunities to participate in decision mak-
ing affecting them (Rave 2018, 11). In other words, when citizens are well informed
by the news media, it can lead to increased participation and a better functioning
democracy, whereas political activity and opportunities for democratic development
may diminish in poorly informed communities (Gans 1998, 6).
Indigenous news media are inclined to inform the public of what their dem-
ocratically elected representatives decide for them (Meadows 2009). Indigenous
media presents ‘our stories, our voices and our perspectives,’ giving a voice to those
Indigenous individuals affected by the decisions of their Indigenous representative
bodies (Hafsteinsson 2010, 56). Presenting ‘our stories, our voices and our perspec-
tives’ requires a diversity of voices, but even the Sámi media tend to assume that the
Sámi have ‘shared stakes,’ or the same interests. Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi inform
the Finnish and Norwegian mainstream societies by giving voice to a multiplicity
of Sámi stakeholders. In doing so, they also foster democracy in the mainstream
societies. The Indigenous political journalism produced by the free and independent
Sámi media is intended to provide an arena for interaction between Sámi audiences

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and Sámi decision makers and thus offer opportunities for the promotion of
democratic processes (Skogerbø et al. 2018, 4) by participating in informed pub-
lic debate (Rave 2018). Furthermore, Indigenous media has embraced new media
technologies in often-distant Indigenous communities to promote the informed
participation of Indigenous individuals (Meadows 2009, 515) and the inclusion
of Indigenous sources instead of frequently used elite sources (Bacon 2005, 37).
Some Indigenous media scholars have discussed the relationship between media,
democracy and the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples. For example, Plaut
(2015) argues that the role of the Sámi media in consultative democracies appears
to be the provision of independent information as a basis for informed discussion
on their self-determination.

THE ARCTIC RAILWAY PROJECT

In August 2013, the Finnish government announced Finland’s Arctic strategy,
which included the Arctic Railway plan. In 2014, former prime minister of Finland,
Paavo Lipponen, was appointed by the Confederation of Finnish Industries to pre-
pare a report on various track options. The track options were: 1) from Kemijärvi
or Roavvenjárga/Rovaniemi, Finland, to Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes, Norway; 2) from
Kolari, Finland, via Giron/Kiruna, Sweden, to Áhkkánjárga/Narvik, Norway; 3)
from Kolari, Finland, via Ivgubahta/Skibotn, Norway, to Romsa/Tromsø, Norway;
and 4) from Kemijärvi, Finland, to Murmansk, Russia.
The discussion began to take shape over the next few years. In 2015, the prime
minister of Finland, Alexander Stubb, did not promote the decision to implement the
railway project. However, in January 2015, the prime ministers of Finland, Sweden
and Norway discussed the business opportunities involved and the importance of
Nordic cooperation and global social responsibilities related to the Arctic Railway.
In 2016, the former prime minister of Finland, Juha Sipilä, stated that the construc-
tion of the Arctic Railway would be Finland’s number one priority during Finland’s
Arctic Council presidency in 2017. In 2017, the Regional Council of Lapland initi-
ated the Lapland Provincial Planning Process, focusing on the Arctic Railway plan.
In the same year, the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland, in col-
laboration with Norway, ordered an investigation of the railway project.
It was not until January 2018 that the Ministry of Transport and Communications
negotiated with the Sámi Parliament of Finland on the railway plan for the frst time. In
March 2018, the track option from Roavvenjárga/Rovaniemi to Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes
was selected by the Ministry of Transport and Communications for further investiga-
tion. However, an assessment of the impact on Sámi culture and environment was not
carried out at the time. Through its international obligations, Finland has committed
to respect the rights of the Sámi as an Indigenous People and, for example, to consult
the Sámi Parliament regarding all measures that may affect the status of the Sámi as
an Indigenous People (Heinämäki 2017). In January 2019, the Finnish-Norwegian
working group concluded in a report that the railway project would not be proftable.
Nevertheless, in 2019, a well-known Finnish businessman entered into an agreement
with Norwegian partners to carry out further studies on the implementation of the
railway project. At its meeting on 17 May 2021, the board of the Regional Council
of Lapland returned the Northern Lapland regional land use plan for re-preparation.

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THE NEWS COVERAGE OF THE ARCTIC RAILWAY IN YLE

SÁPMI AND NRK SÁPMI
Here, we will analyze the news coverage of the Arctic Railway in more detail and
show which actors were present in the news stories and how they framed the railway
project. For the analysis, we have divided actors involved in the public debate into
two groups: Those supporting the railway construction (pro-railway stakeholders)
and those against the railway plan (contra-railway stakeholders). Stakeholders are
those who are affected by or can affect the achievement of the organization’s objec-
tives (Freeman 2010).

The public debate on the Arctic Railway begins

NRK Sápmi published its frst news article about the Arctic Railway in 2010, but the
next article on the topic was not published until 2013, when Yle Sápmi published its
frst article. In the time frame from 2013 to 2016, there were 13 news stories avail-
able for analysis. In almost every news story, Finland’s leading politicians succeeded
in making their voices heard, including members of the Finnish Parliament; ministers
including the prime ministers of Finland, Norway and Sweden; and other power
stakeholders representing, for example, the business sector in Finnish Lapland. The
main voices discussing business opportunities and promoting the interests of main-
stream society such as transport, mining, tourism etc. were prominent. Only three
news stories, by the president of the Sámi Parliament of Finland, the chairman of the
Reindeer Herding Association of Norway, and a writer from Lapland pointed out
the possibly adverse effects of the Arctic Railway plan. Whereas voices supporting
the project and linking the project to the importance of utilizing the resources of the
Arctic Region for the national economy were salient.
In contrast to Yle Sápmi, NRK Sápmi published only three news stories on the sub-
ject from 2013 through 2016. They gave voice both to prominent elite sources, such
as the Finnish prime minister and the mayor of Mátta-Várjját/Sør-Varanger. Previous
elite research has shown that the mainstream media favours elites as sources, i.e.
actors with political, social or economic power. Nevertheless, NRK Sápmi also high-
lighted the problems the railway would cause to reindeer-herding livelihoods, and
the leader of the Reindeer Herding Association of Norway was quoted as saying that
the planned railway project may be a ‘bloody story’ and a catastrophe for reindeer
herders. The reason that the story made it to the news may have been geographical
closeness to sources as one option was to build the railway through Guovdageaidnu/
Kautokeino, one of the largest reindeer-grazing districts in Norway: NRK Sápmi has
a local offce in this municipality, and the planned railway would have been con-
structed close to NRK Sápmi’s main offce in Kárášjohka/Karasjok.
In this period, the pro-railway stakeholders, representing mainly businesses and
politics in Finland, focused on economic aspects, especially the utilization of natu-
ral resources and business opportunities in the Arctic. All pro-railway stakeholders
stated that the three-billion-euro Arctic Railway project was a large-scale project
with impacts on the environment, the state economy and the Sámi culture that need
to be assessed well in advance. However, some pros claimed that the time was not
right for the railway and that the existing harbours fulfl the current transportation

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needs of the mining industry. Other pros argued that there was an urgent need for
the railway project in promoting the mining industry and in transporting of north-
ern products to the world market.
From 2013 through 2016, the contra-railway stakeholders focused on the severe
consequences of the railway for the Sámi culture, Sámi reindeer herding and the
environment of Lapland and the impacts of industrial development followed by it.
The chairman of the Reindeer Herding Association of Norway pointed out that the
Arctic Railway would kill hundreds of reindeer in Norway. In 2016, the president
of the Sámi Parliament of Finland stated that the planned Arctic Railway was the
real reason the extended participation rights of the Sámi in the reform of the Act
on Metsähallitus,4 the most important land use law in Finland, were not imple-
mented. The president of the Sámi Parliament also expressed her concerns about the
increased international interest in the Arctic region and the exploitation of natural
resources expected to follow the railway project.

The planning of the Arctic Railway continues in the Ministry

of Transport and Communications
In 2017, fve news stories were available by Yle Sápmi on the Arctic Railway pro-
ject. The news coverage was based on interviews with the Minister of Transport and
Communications of Finland, public servants of the ministry and the president of the
Sámi Parliament of Finland. Notably, the news coverage did not contain other Sámi
and local stakeholders, and the president of the Sámi Parliament was the only Sámi
voice participating in the agenda of Yle Sápmi in 2017.
At the time, however, Yle Sápmi to some extent took on the role of an informa-
tion provider and watchdog of the regional authority and the Ministry in charge.
It was also emphasized that the Ministries concerned had not consulted with the
Sámi Parliaments of Finland and Norway. At the time, the Ministry of Transport
and Communications of Finland noted that the Ministry did not know yet whether
it was going to negotiate with the Sámi Parliament at the early stages. However,
at the end of 2017, the Ministry announced that it would negotiate with the Sámi
Parliament in January 2018. Yle Sápmi, acting as a watchdog towards the ministry
in charge, may have led to public pressure to initiate consultation with the Sámi.
Cases from NRK Troms and Finnmark5 in 2017 and 2018 only included elite
sources such as the Finnish and Norwegian ministers of transport and did not
address any consequences for the environment, Sámi livelihoods, cultural practices
or reindeer husbandry. It is interesting to note that NRK Sápmi addressed such
issues only once, early in this period. When the destination for the railway was
set for Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes, NRK Sápmi did not convey anything about possible
problems for reindeer husbandry in that area or the effect on the local Sámi land
use and cultural practices. NRK Troms and Finnmark can be interpreted as an arena
for leading Norwegian and Finnish bureaucrats and politicians up to the ministe-
rial level and a few local leaders to express hope and joy towards the utilization of
northern resources.
The pro-railway stakeholders in Norway focused on economic aspects. They saw
great opportunities for growth and economic development. The elite sources often
mentioned exploitation of natural resources as a positive outcome of this railway

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project and saw a new railway connection as a logistical improvement that would
ensure the fow of people and goods. These elite sources often underlined that the
Arctic area was becoming more important both in the Nordic region and in the EU.
They saw that a railway from the Arctic Ocean to the south would help make trans-
port easier and provide more jobs. In this context, climate change was mentioned as
something inevitable that would create new opportunities for businesses.
At the same time, the contra-railway stakeholders required that the Sámi Parlia-
ment of Finland be included in the planning process in such a way that the Sámi
would have their voices heard and their views taken into account in negotiations at
an early stage. The Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland has been
accused of not having been in contact with the Sámi Parliament so far.

An intensifed period of planning and resistance in 2018–2019

In 2018, Yle Sápmi greatly intensifed its news production on the case of the Arctic
Railway. Simultaneously, discussions and activities were increased and intensifed
in Sámi society, such as extensive Red Line protests organized by Greenpeace, the
Suohpanterror Sámi art group and the Sámi Youth Organization of Finland, together
with the Sámi Parliament of Finland and some affected Sámi reindeer-herding com-
munities. The Sámi Youth Organization of Finland managed to push these issues
on Yle Sápmi’s agenda by publicly discussing the lack of impact assessment for the
Arctic Railway project and the lack of consultations with the Sámi Parliament. These
actors proved themselves able to infuence Yle Sápmi’s news coverage and to set an
agenda for it when opposing the railway project. The number of news stories and
the diversity of voices included in the news coverage on the railway plan increased.
This new interest in the railway case followed the increased activities of both devel-
opers and those opposing the railway construction. A total of 32 news stories
about the planned Arctic Railway construction were available and included various
civil society actors. The most signifcant topic was the Ministry of Transport and
Communications of Finland announcing the selected railway route. The Ministry
fnally opened negotiations with the Sámi Parliament, and the Regional Council of
Lapland organized public hearings concerning Lapland’s regional land-use plan in
Sámi villages.
At the same time, the Arctic Railway disappeared from NRK Sápmi’s news
production and only appeared in short news items produced by NRK Troms and
Finnmark and in news stories produced by Yle Sápmi. It seems that NRK Sápmi
outsourced the coverage of the Arctic Railway to Yle Sápmi and NRK Troms and
Finnmark. This lack of interest coincided with Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes being chosen
as the railway’s terminus.
As in previous years, the minister of transport and communications of Finland,
the offcials of the Ministry, the offcials of the Regional Council of Lapland and
the president of the Sámi Parliament of Finland were the dominant voices in the
news coverage. However, a multiplicity of other stakeholder groups and individual
citizens now entered Yle Sápmi’s agenda. Stakeholder mapping shows that the stake-
holders involved were politicians of Sámi municipalities, the vice chairman of the
Sámi Parliament of Finland and other members of the Sámi Parliament of Finland,
the Saami Council, the Regional Council of Lapland, representatives of Sámi

389
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youth organizations from Finland and Norway, Lapland members of the Finnish
Parliament, regional authorities, the chair of the Skolt Sámi Village Administration,6
the chairs and other representatives of the Reindeer Herding Cooperatives, a
Greenpeace expert, a human rights expert on international law, young Sámi reindeer
herders, Sámi musicians and other active citizens.
By 2018, Yle Sápmi appeared to be more than before an arena for public debate
where Sámi and other local stakeholders could discuss the project. New voices were
beginning to be heard. However, these voices had something in common: Most were
already well known from other public debates. Yle Sápmi had the role of a watchdog
of government and authorities, especially in relation to the concerns of the reindeer
herders. In 2018, Yle Sápmi informed the Sámi and set the agenda for Sámi soci-
ety. Yet it remains unclear to what extent various some stakeholders infuenced the
agenda of the news coverage on the Arctic Railway by pushing their issues onto
Yle Sápmi’s agenda. However, many other Sámi politicians and other representa-
tives of Sámi industries such as fshing and tourism did not have an opportunity to
participate in the discussion. In the end, some topics ‘implementing indigenous news
practices of deep democracy,’ prioritizing the relevance of all Indigenous livelihoods
and ways of life (Hafsteinsson 2010), ended up missing to various extents.
In 2018, some pro-railway stakeholders stated that the railway project would ben-
eft the future of Finland and Lapland by making fsh, forest and mining resources
more accessible and enabling the transport of goods and tourists to the Arctic areas
while emphasizing that the railway should harm the environment and Sámi rein-
deer herding as little as possible. During this period, the pro-railway stakeholders in
Finland emphasized the growing importance of the Arctic and of the railway project
in speeding up development, employment and utilization of the Arctic resources.
They addressed the economic importance of a Central European transport connec-
tion to the Arctic region.
At the time, the framing by the contra-railway stakeholders focused instead on
responsibilities, unbalanced power relations and consequences. Blame was attrib-
uted to the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland for excluding
the Sámi Parliament of Finland from the evaluation of alternative tracks and the
selection of the fnal track. Some who were contra referred to the colonial history of
the Sámi and the related destruction of the Sámi language, religion and industries,
insisting that industrial development and making the utilization of forests and ore
deposits more accessible needed to stop. Some Sámi herders argued that they did not
have a real opportunity to infuence the planning and to say no to it. The vulnerable
position of the Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi minorities and their industries and the loss
of land they have experienced are underlined by contra stakeholders (about the situ-
ation of Inari and Skolt Sámi languages, see Pasanen in this volume). The Skolt Sámi
had to leave their traditional territories in Russia during the Second World War (see
Magnani; and Jouste in this volume). The more recent history of the southern parts
of the Sámi homeland is in many respects similar, as extensive reindeer pastures dis-
appeared under water reservoirs constructed for hydroelectric power. Some contras
have emphasized the severe consequences of railway construction on pastureland,
the loss of land, contamination and the number of reindeer being killed by train
accidents. Others have called for respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and for
early consultation with the Sámi.

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Developers continue to plan the Arctic Railway project in 2019

In the period from 2019 to 2020, the news production of Yle Sápmi on the railway
construction consisted of nine news stories available in 2019 and three in 2020. The
key event during this time was the publication of the Finnish-Norwegian fnal plan-
ning report in 2019 concluding that the railway project was unproftable. Most of
the news stories related to this were based on offcial sources such as the minister
and offcials from the Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland.
Lapland’s regional land-use plan and related hearings were initiated by the Reg-
ional Council of Lapland. This led Yle Sápmi to interview offcials of the Regional
Council of Lapland, some municipal politicians of the Ohcejohka/Utsjoki munici-
pality, individual citizens, the Skolt Sámi Village Administration, the board member
of the Sámi Parliament and chairs of the youth organizations of Finnish political
parties. A heated debate followed when the Council of Lapland decided to continue
the planning of the railway in relation to Lapland’s regional land-use plan. The
debate continued on Twitter and Yle Sápmi when a well-known businessman began
to lead the railway project, exploring the possibilities for its implementation. The
dominant voices in 2019 were the Sámi activists resisting the project and the devel-
opers promoting it. The digital media agenda setting was evident when Sámi activ-
ists’ claim that this businessman gave a face to the destruction of the Sámi culture
was transferred from Twitter to Yle Sápmi’s agenda.
In 2019, the pro stakeholders in Finland stated that there was a need to speed
up the trade route between Asia and Europe as the railway would shorten the
transport of Chinese products to Europe by 20 days. Some contras claimed that
no matter how the Sámi resisted the railway and how unproftable the plan was, it
continued to be in Lapland’s regional land-use plan. Some contras, young Finnish
politicians, stated that the railway plan needed to be stopped for reasons related to
Indigenous Peoples’ rights. All in all, the contra railway stakeholders highlighted
aspects related to the severe consequences of the railway for the Sámi culture and
for the environment. The contras stated that the Sámi had no real infuence on the
project planning and that the industrial development of Sámi territories must be
stopped.

CONCLUSIONS
All in all, from 2013 to 2016, some indications of both NRK Sápmi’s and Yle
Sápmi’s role as ‘watchdog’ and provider of reliable information can be seen. This
study shows that Yle Sápmi to some extent informed its audiences on the Arctic
Railway plan and had an ambition to act as a watchdog of the various powerful
actors involved, such as politicians, businesses and regional authorities in Northern
Finland. Yle Sápmi had a clear intention to inform the Sámi, in the Sámi language
and from Sámi perspectives, on what their democratically elected Finnish MPs were
thinking about the Arctic Railway project. Moreover, Yle Sápmi focused on relevant
issue aspects for the Sámi, such as bringing the railway project, among other Finland
Arctic strategy projects, into the spotlight of public debate. However, the results
question whether Yle Sápmi sets the agenda or instead follows the agenda set by
leading politicians. Yle Sápmi was not very watchdog-like early on but later posed

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some important critical questions by including alternative voices. Those issues that
enter the media agenda are regarded as ‘more noticeable, meaningful, or memorable
to the audience’ (Entman 1993, 53). From 2013 to 2016, almost all news stories on
the issue were relatively short, comprising only one interview each. Although they
formed a kind of discussion, they remained individual texts not linked to larger land-
use debates in Northern Finland, such as ILO Convention no. 169.7 From 2013 to
2017, Yle Sápmi’s news coverage did not provide an arena for a wider public debate,
including a multiplicity of Sámi actors. A deeper analysis of what the construction
of a railway would mean for the Sámi people was missing.
It was not until 2018 that Yle Sápmi’s news coverage of the Arctic Railway was
more comprehensive; more Sámi voices were included in the debate, and a clear
Sámi agenda was visible. Although in 2018, a wide range of actors entered the
media agenda, most of them were well-known public fgures in Sámi and main-
stream society. NRK Sápmi produced very few news stories on the Arctic Railway.
For a short period of time, NRK Sápmi showed interest in the consequences for
reindeer husbandry in Norway, but this attention ceased when the terminus was set
for Kirkonjárga/Kirkenes and thus would no longer affect the important Sámi town
of Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino. The reason for the inadequate news coverage may
be that the change of terminal meant that the railway would have impacted fewer
Sámi and have less impact on reindeer herding in Norway than in Finland. It disap-
peared from NRK Sápmi’s agenda regardless of the fact that the railway would still
have affected important Sámi interests. Yet NRK Sápmi has published a number
of Yle Sápmi’s, NRK Troms’s and NRK Finnmark’s stories. One could argue that
NRK Sápmi partly ‘outsourced’ the journalistic coverage of the Arctic Railway to
their colleagues in Yle Sápmi, NRK Troms and NRK Finnmark. Stories published
by NRK Troms and NRK Finnmark were dominated by elite sources, which high-
lighted the economic benefts of a railway.
Like Yle Sápmi, NRK Sápmi to some extent had a watchdog function, but their
coverage of the issue was haphazard and incomplete, and no conclusions can be
drawn. It may be a question for further research why NRK Sápmi lost interest in
a project described as a catastrophe for an important Sámi livelihood in 2014 and
2016. However, based on previous research on Sámi news media (Sara 2007), we
would have expected that the news coverage of NRK Sápmi would have been more
comprehensive. Sámi media would normally want to cover issues affecting relatively
few people if the consequences were important for those affected (Sara 2007). In
this case, the new track would have had a severe impact on those Sámi affected and
their livelihoods.
To conclude, the various stakeholders involved in the public debate framed
the case of the Arctic Railway differently. The pros emphasized the economic and
developmental aspects of the railway as something that might positively impact the
future prospects and well-being of the people. However, those aspects related to the
rights of the Sámi as an Indigenous People were not so visible. The contras, in turn,
underlined cultural, environmental, Indigenous and human rights aspects and those
related to the adverse consequences of the railway construction.
It seems to be that the framing used by pro-railway stakeholders emphasizing eco-
nomic aspects had a major role in Yle Sápmi’s agenda, while other frames presented
by contra-railway stakeholders were presented as less prominent counter-frames until

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2018. Previous studies have underlined the importance of Indigenous media for demo-
cratic processes in Indigenous societies because mainstream media often lack diversity
and fail to bring Indigenous issues to the fore. This has been referred to as ‘a failure of
democratic representation and participation’ (Bacon 2005, 20). This study indicates
that Indigenous media such as Yle Sápmi and NRK Sápmi do not always succeed in
the ambition to contribute to democratic representation and participation when they
rely too heavily on elite sources to set the agenda and frame the news coverage. While
the Indigenous media holds the promise of presenting ‘our stories, our voices and our
perspectives’ and ‘giving a voice to those indigenous individuals affected by the deci-
sions of their indigenous representative bodies’ (Hafsteinsson 2010, 56), this study
shows that Indigenous media such as NRK Sápmi and Yle Sápmi sometimes need to
ally with civil society and activists to be able to challenge hegemonic frames.
Unless Indigenous activists and Indigenous civil society succeed in making
Indigenous matters prominent in majority society media, Indigenous matters risk
becoming matters that do not matter when decisions are made. Our main concern
here, however, is the importance of Sámi media for democracy and participation in
Sámi society. There is a need to enrich public debate and discussions and strengthen
diversity within Sámi society. This study shows that the Sámi elites of Finland and
Norway are often able to set the Sámi media’s agenda, and other Sámi groups may
be in danger of being excluded. The railway case illustrates how little information
the Sámi public gets on the opinions and positions of leading Sámi politicians (other
than the president of the Sámi Parliament) on issues of great importance for Sámi
society. The president of the Sámi Parliament of Finland in 2017 sovereignly domi-
nated the public debate and was chosen as a Sámi source in all news while voices of
other Sámi politicians and stakeholders were hardly heard. More research is needed
on the role and infuence of Indigenous elites on Indigenous media. The lack of
existing research in this area is especially striking in light of the large and expanding
literature on elites’ agenda-setting power in traditional media.
An extensive existing literature underlines the lack of diversity and understanding
of Indigenous issues in mainstream legacy media. However, the Indigenous media
shows a similar lack of diversity and insight. When issues such as the Arctic Railway
are being reduced to narratives about reindeer herding or business interests, the
interests and perspectives of many other Sámi groups and professions such as fshing,
tourism and hunting are excluded from the agenda. It is important that Indigenous
media research moves beyond merely criticizing mainstream media to employ criti-
cal perspectives on the role and function of Indigenous media as well.

NOTES
1 The collected data includes 61 news stories from Yle Sápmi over eight years from 2013
to 2020 and 11 news stories produced by NRK Sápmi over ten years from 2010 to
2019. NRK Sápmi has published their own news stories as well as news stories pro-
duced by Yle Sápmi and NRK Troms and Finnmark – NRK’s local offce in Norway’s
northernmost county. In order to fnd the stories, we searched NRK’s website and used
Google to search the web for keywords such as ‘Arctic railway,’ ‘Arctic Ocean Rail’ and
‘Kirkenes railway’ in Sámi and Norwegian. Yle Sápmi’s online news coverage on the
Arctic Railway plan has been monitored since 2013, and the collected data contains 61
news stories over eight years from 2013 to 2020. We found and analyzed a total of 11

393
 — Sara, Rasmussen and Krøvel —

news stories produced by NRK Sápmi over the ten years from 2010 to 2019. In addi-
tion, we received help from a reindeer herder who had collected news stories from Sámi
and Norwegian media on this case (Magga 2020). The frst news stories were published
in 2010 and 2014, while the majority were published between 2017 and 2019. Five
news stories were produced by NRK Sápmi and six by the local offces in Troms and
Finnmark.
2 Type 1: Focus on situations; Type 2: Focus on context attributes; Type 3: Focus on risky
choices; Type 4: Focus on consequences; Type 5: Focus on the kind of issue; Type 6: Focus
on responsibilities.
3 Personal communication with Iisko Sara on July 15, 2020. Teacher and reindeer herder
Iisko Sara was a member of the 2nd Sámi Committee that initiated and established the Sámi
Parliament and the frst Sámi test elections in the early 1970s in Finland.
4 Metsähallitus is the name of the state-owned Finnish Forest Management and Park Services.
The Act on Metsähallitus (234/2016) provides that ‘Metsähallitus uses, manages and pro-
tects the state’s land and water assets under its control sustainably.’
5 NRK Troms and Finnmark are region offces for production in Norwegian in the north-
ernmost part of Norway. They belong to NRK’s regional division. NRK Sápmi is a sepa-
rate division of NRK. It is at the same level as the regional division of NRK Troms, and
Finnmark is a subsidiary. NRK Sápmi, NRK Troms and Finnmark do publish each other’s
news stories to some extent.
6 Skolt Sámi Village Administration is the representative body of the Skolt Sámi in Finland,
whose governance model is based on the Sámi’s historical administrative, economic, social
and political system, the siida system.
7 International Labor Organization (ILO) Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989
(No. 169).

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 CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

T H E Á LTÁ A N D D E AT N U
CONFLICTS AND THE
A R T I C U L AT I O N S O F N AT U R E


Tapio Nykänen

Conficts are often pivotal points in social-political processes: they may reveal themes
that have remained at least partially hidden or offer arenas for taking politics in new
directions. Sometimes, conficts are what have been called transformative events:
They may, for example, transform social and political structures in essential ways
and dramatically increase or decrease the level of mobilization (Sewell 1996, 271;
Hess and Martin 2006, 249).
In this chapter, I introduce two major conficts over the use of Sámi lands and
natural resources. These are the Áltá dam controversy of 1979 through 1982 and the
Deatnu fshing dispute that started in 2016 and is still ongoing. Based on the events,
I ask two separate but interrelated questions: 1) What kinds of political alliances did
the Sámi create? and 2) How were the notions of nature and human-nature relation-
ships articulated during the conficts?
Why Áltá and Deatnu? First, Áltá was a transformative event for Sámi people
and the Nordic countries alike. It cemented the position of the Sámi in the inter-
national Indigenous movement and affected the Norwegian legislation. Deatnu, in
turn, refects the more recent political atmosphere and its discourses. The judicial
and political positions of the Sámi have changed since the events in Áltá, which is
also refected in the rhetoric of the protesters. The overall political importance of the
Deatnu struggle remains to be seen, but it has already become clear that it marks a
signifcant political event for the young Sámi generation in the area.
Second, Áltá and Deatnu offer illustrative examples of articulations of nature and
human-nature relationships. As the conficts were about the use of nature and natural
resources, they opened up political spaces that required articulating human-nature
relationships in politically effcient ways. The Sámi nature relationship as a topic of
public discussions is not new, but quite often, the representations of it have been based
on the views of people belonging to majorities (Mathisen 2004, 20–22). The disputes
over the use of nature examined here offer opportunities to see how the Sámi them-
selves have formulated meanings related to nature and human-nature relationships.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-27 397

 — Ta p i o N y k ä n e n —

My aim is not to say that Áltá and Deatnu are politically the most important
environment-related struggles in the history of the Sámi. Other events, such as clos-
ing the state borders to reindeer herding in 1852 and 1889 (see Lehtola 2010) have
had signifcant long-term impacts on the local Sámi communities. From the perspec-
tive of what it means to be Indigenous in the late-modern world, for example, the
banishment of the Rio Tinto zinc mining company from Northern Norway in 1994,
the Gallok mining struggle in Sweden in 2013 and the protests against the Arctic
Railway in Finland in 2018 and 2019 have been very meaningful (see, for example,
Koivurova et al. 2015; Persson et al. 2017; see also Sara et al. in this volume).
As for Áltá, I focus especially on the Sámi Action Group, famous for organizing
hunger strikes in Oslo in 1979 and 1981. As for Deatnu, I examine the Ellos Deatnu
movement, perhaps best known for declaring a moratorium on the Čearretsuolu
Island in the Deatnu River in 2017. Both groups especially represent the political
mindset of the young Sámi generations of their time.1

Á LTÁ CONTROVERSY, LOCAL FACTIONS

AND GLOBAL SUPPORT
The Áltá controversy dates back to the 1960s and early 1970s. The state of Norway
had started to plan new hydroelectric projects around the country, and the Áltá-
Guovdageaidnu River was one of the waterways that was schedules to be dammed.
Published in 1968, the initial plan included construction of a dam and a hydroelec-
tric power plant, including a large reservoir, which would inundate the Sámi village
of Máze. In 1970, inhabitants of Máze founded the Aksjonskomiteen mot neddem-
ming av Masi (‘Action committee against inundating Máze’). Another visible local
protest movement, Altautvalget för bevaring av Alta-Kautokeinovassdraget (‘Alta
choice for maintaining the Alta-Kautokeino waterway’), was established in 1973.
The group argued that the planned dam construction would be lethal to the salmon
population of the river and would pose a signifcant threat to the migration routes
of reindeer. (Hjorthol 2006; Store Norske Leksikon: Alta-Saken; Pehkonen 1999.)
Despite the protests, Stortinget, the parliament of Norway, decided to build
the dam in the Áltá River in 1978, even though the reservoir was to be smaller
than in original plans, and, for example, the village of Máze was not to be inun-
dated. Following Stortinget’s decision, the Folkeaksjonen mot utbygging av Alta/
Kautokeino-vassdraget (‘The People’s Action against construction of the Alta/
Kautokeino waterway’) was founded. The Folkeaksjonen subsequently became the
central organization in the large-scale protests that took place from 1979 through
1982 (Hjorthol 2006; Store Norske Leksikon: Alta-Saken; Pehkonen 1999).
The protests are described in detail in several sources (e.g. Hjorthol 2006; Hansen
and Pihlstrøm 1981; Dalland 1994; Pehkonen 1999), and I will only mention here
the key events over the three-year period. In summer 1979, a large demonstration
camp in Detsika was established. Later the same year, the camp was disestablished,
and a new one was built on the construction side in Stilla. Simultaneously, a smaller
activist group called Sámi Action Group (Samisk Aksjonsgruppe) started to protest
in Oslo in front of the parliament building. The protests in Oslo included, for exam-
ple, a hunger strike by seven young Sámi and a spontaneous demonstration in the
prime minister’s offce by 14 Sámi women. The protests and the Áltá issue became

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the lead story in the Norwegian media and gained worldwide publicity. Following
a week-long hunger strike, the construction work at the Áltá River was temporarily
halted, and the government promised to establish a committee tasked with consider-
ing the Sámi issues.
After a pause of one year, the construction work continued in January 1981. The
decision was followed by the re-establishment of the demonstration camp in Stilla and
another hunger strike in Oslo. In Stilla, over 800 protesters chained themselves to each
other and to the construction machines. In response, the state of Norway mobilized 600
police offcers to the site, and the camp was disestablished by force. The construction
work was again stopped for some months but continued in autumn of the same year.
In March 1982, Niillas Aslaksen Somby, John Reier Martinsen and a person who
has remained anonymous tried to detonate a small bomb by the bridge that crosses
Fállijohka. According to Somby, the detonation was supposed to be a performance
that would emphasize the seriousness of the situation (Somby 2016, 126–127). The
attempt failed, and the bomb exploded accidentally in Somby’s hands, causing him
to lose a hand and an eye. The incident was seen as an attempt at sabotage and was
widely condemned, and the resistance to the construction started to fade out, after
already having shown signs of waning since the previous autumn. The Folkeaksjonen
was disestablished in May, and the construction of the power plant continued and
was fnally completed in 1987.
The protests in Áltá saw the development of different political factions. First,
some protesters emphasized environmental issues. They were led by Norwegian
Alfred Nilsen and organized under the Folkeaksjonen. Others concentrated more
clearly on the rights of Sámi people. These factions were not clearly separate; many
environmentalists promoted Sámi rights, and many Sámi felt concern about the envi-
ronment as well as their rights as a people. People belonging to different groups
also acted together in the protests in Stilla and Detsika. In any case, the cooperation
between the Sámi and the environmentalists can be described as a strategic alliance
that helped both to promote their goals.
The Sámi faction was heterogeneous to some extent. The resistance was primarily
associated with the national society of reindeer herders NBR (Norgga Boazosámiid
Riikkasearvi) and especially NSR, the Norwegian Sámi Association (Norgga Sámiid
Riikasearvi), famous Sámi politician Ole Henrik Magga as its chairperson. The Sámi
Action Group, led by Niillas Aslaksen Somby, among others, was an independent
group of more radical activists working without the clear support of national Sámi
associations. Somby himself later reported having been disappointed with how the
Sámi organizations and Sámi people in general supported the work of the Sámi Action
Group in Oslo (Somby 2020, 34). Moreover, he expressed his suspicions about the
motives of the environmentalists who, in his view, were not ‘particularly interested in
speaking about our [Sámi] rights unless they were forced to’ (Somby 2020, 30).
The protesters also faced organized opposition from the Áltá-based Samenes
Landsforbund (SLF, ‘Sámi Country Alliance’), which was founded to support the
plans of the Norwegian state. The SLF claimed to represent the ‘majority’ of Sámi
and contended that the NBR and the NSR represented primarily the interests of
reindeer herders (about the division into a more radical and moderate wing in Sámi
politics, see Alakorva; and Rasmussen et al. in this volume). According to the SLF,
the diversity of Sámi positions and livelihoods was not factored into the politics of

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the existing Sámi organizations. Moreover, the SLF was critical towards the way in
which Sámi politics was connected to international minority discussions (Pehkonen
1999, 93). SLF agreed that Sámi issues should be put on the national political agenda,
but via negotiations with the Norwegian authorities (Lehtola 1997, 76).
The protesters seemingly lost the Áltá struggle. The dam was built, although
the reservoir was implemented on a smaller scale than was originally planned, and
the village of Máze was saved from inundation. Some activists, such as Finnish
environmentalist Vesa Luhta and Niillas Somby, saw the result as a bitter defeat
(Somby 2016, 2020; Nykänen et al. 2022). However, from the perspective of the
rights of Sámi people and their self-image as Indigenous Peoples, the events in Áltá
and Oslo were to become very important. First, the judicial and political status
of the Sámi took a leap in the 1980s and 1990s in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Especially in Norway, this was heavily infuenced by the Áltá controversy. The
Sámi Act took effect in 1989, and the Sámi Parliament of Norway was established
later the same year. In addition, the Sámi received constitutional recognition in
1988 through the adoption of Article 110 (a) in the Norwegian constitution. As
the frst country to do so, Norway ratifed the ILO Convention on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples in 1991 (Government.no 20.2.2020; see also Mörkenstam et al.
in this volume).
Second, Áltá cemented the position of the Sámi people in the international
Indigenous movement. During the Áltá events, the Sámi had already been involved
in the movement for a decade. However, some representatives of Indigenous Peoples
from South America especially had struggled to accept the Sámi as an Indigenous
People. For them, the Sámi had appeared too ‘European’ and too ‘white’ (Merlan
2009, 308; Reiniharju 2015, 45–47). The Áltá controversy became globally charac-
terized as an Indigenous issue and contributed to broad worldwide acceptance of the
Sámi as an Indigenous People (Merlan 2009, 328; Minde 2003, 79; see also support
letters of Indigenous organizations IWGIA and WCIP in Charta79, 8).
Notions connected to nature and Sámi human-nature relationships during the
Áltá struggle can be found from different sources, and different materials may
emphasize different themes. Here, I take a look at the magazine Charta79, published
by the Sámi Action Group in Oslo in 1979. The magazine does not represent all
protesters or opinions, but rather opens a window to the mindset of the younger
generation of Sámi activists of that time.2
The core content of Charta79 included the demands of the Sámi Action Group:
The group demanded that the construction work in the Áltá-Guovdageaidnu River
be halted until the rights of the Sámi had been adjudicated in the court and that
Norway begin negotiations with the Sámi organizations and groups prior to plan-
ning any operations in the area that the Sámi inhabited (Charta79, 3). Eventually,
the Sámi aimed for self-determination in their own region (Charta79, 20, 31). The
magazine also described the history of the dam project and the correspondence
between the protesters and decision makers (Charta79, 6–7, 21). Moreover, the mag-
azine reported on ‘the lávvu campaign’ in front of Stortinget and elsewhere and on
the thoughts of protesters after the government had decided to stop the construction
work at Stilla (Charta79, 18, 22–23). Finally, the magazine introduced petitions and
support letters by individuals as well as political organizations and parties, especially
from the political left (Charta79, 8–9).

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Nature or human-nature relationships did not have separate roles or sections in

the magazine. Most of the demands focused on the political and judicial rights of
the Sámi as an Indigenous People – i.e. the need for self-determination in the lands
that the Sámi considered theirs (Charta79, 22, 31). However, local nature formed
an essential background for these claims. The dam and the lack of self-determi-
nation in general were represented precisely as a threat to the nature-dependent
livelihoods such as reindeer herding and salmon fshing (Charta79, 3, 10). These
livelihoods, in turn, were portrayed as crucial for Sámi culture. Hence, overall, the
magazine can be understood as an articulation of the meanings connected to the
nature of Sápmi.
The role of nature and human-nature relationships in Charta79 can be described
as essential but also as practical. By this I mean that, in the frst place, nature
appeared as a concrete backbone for traditional practices and livelihoods while also
being the home of the Sámi people. One should note, however, that this does not
imply that nature was understood simply in practical terms by the protesters. It is
very likely that livelihoods and home regions, for example, had several other mean-
ings for them. As, for example, Sámi artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää has formulated, ‘all
these tundras’ form a home that carries the immemorial histories of Sámi people in
its lands and waters (see Valkeapää 1994). Based on this idea, defending a home in
Sápmi is not only a practical act but also a mental – or a spiritual – one.
In three short texts, the local nature itself was described in a more detailed way.
These sentences illustrate the aesthetics of the lands and waters that the protesters
were defending and perhaps also the deeper meanings related to them:

We want the salmon to ascend, silver-grey and elegant, up the Áltá-

Guovdageaidnu river. We want that the bluethroat and other birds could play
on the shores of the river. We want the bog myrtle and the arctic yellow violet
to grow along the riverbank. We want thirty thousand reindeer to travel here as
they have done through the time.
(Charta79, 10)3
Have you seen that beautiful
place
where nature sleeps in peace
where the river quietly fows
and you found the courage to live
Can the machines rage freely
Spoil my land
banish those who have the right
to that land
(Tor Finn Schou, Charta79, 7)

The Áltá events were later interpreted more clearly as an attempt to defend the gen-
eral Indigenous values of substantial interdependence of human and nature (Garcia-
Antón et al. 2020, 10). This is one possible interpretation, especially if the general
values behind the action are emphasized, and the local ways of life are connected to
the human-nature relationship in a more general sense.

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ELLOS DEATNU AND THE WAYS OF ANCESTORS

The initial setting for the Deatnu fshing dispute was somewhat different from that
of Áltá. The explicit aim of the Deatnu Agreement of 2016, the starting point of the
dispute, was not to destroy or fundamentally change the local environment – as a
dam and a reservoir would do – but to protect the threatened salmon population in
the Deatnu River and its tributaries (Turunen et al. 2020, 11).4 The legitimacy of this
aim as such was not rejected by the Sámi protesters – they mostly agreed that the
salmon population needed protection (see e.g. Yle Sápmi 25 June 2021). For them,
however, there were two major problems in the Agreement. First, the Agreement
was negotiated by the states of Finland and Norway without negotiating with Sámi,
regardless of the fact that the constitutions of both countries obliged the states to do
so. This was considered as a transfer of Sámi collective rights to the states. Second,
the restrictions of fshing in general and traditional fshing such as net drifting in
particular were perceived as very harmful to the local Sámi culture in the river valley.
Like the lack of negotiations, this was regarded as a violation of the constitutional
rights of the Sámi and international agreements of Finland and Norway (Kuokkanen
2020). In sum, the Sámi appealed heavily to their legal and constitutional rights,
which had developed in both Norway and Finland since the events in Áltá.
The Deatnu River is the biggest and most signifcant waterway in its region. It has
been an important fairway and a salmon river since time immemorial for local Sámi
(see Alakorva et al. in this volume). Fishing in the river has been regulated by states
since 1872–1873, when some traditional fshing methods such as gigging and goldin
(combination of weir, driftnets and seines) were forbidden (Holmberg 2018, 39–40).
On the Norwegian side, since 1888, permission for fshing with nets has been granted
only to the inhabitants of the river valley who are practicing agriculture (Ween 2012,
157). On the Finnish side, the fshing rights of the local inhabitants have been tied to
the ownership of land (Joks and Law 2017, 154; see also Puuronen in this volume).
Prior to the 2017 agreement, the latest update to the fshing agreement between
Finland and Norway was made in 1989 (Finlex 94/1989; Overenskomst mellom
Kongeriket Norge of Republikken Finland om felles forskrifter om fsket I Tanaelvas
fskeområde).
Negotiations for the new fshing agreement were held between 2012 and 2016,
with scientifc observations of weakened salmon populations as a backdrop. The
agreement, which became effective in 2017, was to ensure

ecologically, economically and socially sustainable fshing in the Tana [Deatnu]

river and safeguarding the fsh stocks of the river based on the best available
knowledge, including traditional knowledge, in order to enable exploitation of
salmon stocks and ensure diversity of fsh stocks.
(Agreement between Finland and Norway relative
to fshing in the Tana River fshing area)

In practice, the purpose was to decrease the fshing-related decline in salmon popula-
tions by one-third (Turunen et al. 2020, 9).
The agreement affected the traditional Sámi fshing methods – weir and drift net
fshing – relatively the most. Fishing permits issued for practicing these methods

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 — The Áltá and Deatnu conflicts —

were reduced by 80% compared to the previous situation. In addition, the fshing
rights of the Sámi who were not permanent residents of the Deatnu River valley
were further restricted. Local inhabitants who resided in the river valley less than
seven months per year became ineligible to apply for fshing permits as residents.
The restriction was seen as especially harmful for the local Sámi youth, who had
moved from their home region to study in southern Finland. Hence, it was seen to
threaten the passing on of the Sámi fshing knowledge and skills to new genera-
tions. After the change, locals residing primarily elsewhere had to purchase a fshing
permit for nonresidents (known as the tourist fshing permit) (Centre for Economic
Development, Transport and the Environment 2020.) Issuance of nonresident fsh-
ing permits, in turn, was reduced by 40% compared to the previous situation, and
the permit prices were increased.5
In response to the agreement, local Sámi activists organized a protest move-
ment called Ellos Deatnu (‘Long live Deatnu’) in 2017. The name of the move-
ment was wordplay on the catchphrase Ellos eatnu, used by the protesters of Áltá
(in Norwegian, la elva leve; see Garcia-Antón et al. 2020). Ellos Deatnu was not a
detached local event but can rather be placed on the continuum of nature-related
protests and statements connected to the region. It was preceded, for example, by
protests by the activist collective Suohpanterror (see Junka-Aikio 2018) and fol-
lowed and accompanied by the short movie Eatnanvuloš Lottit – Maan sisällä lin-
nut (Birds in the Earth) by Marja Helander in 2018; the Red Line demonstrations
against the Arctic Railway in 2018; the movie Eatnameamet – Our Silent Struggle,
directed by documentarist Suvi West in 2021; and the novel Halla Helle by Niillas
Holmberg in 2021.
In the summer of 2017, the group declared a moratorium on the Čearretsuolu
island in Deatnu. The group announced that the moratorium suspending the imple-
mentation of the new fshing regulations would be in effect until the Deatnu fshing
regulations ‘are to be negotiated in a proper and fair way, and all discussions are to
be led by local Saami people.’ During the moratorium in the region, ‘our traditional
concepts of justice and fshing methods will be applied’ (Ellos Deatnu Website). Ellos
Deatnu also organized a beneft concert in the Ohcejohka village – at the intersection
of the rivers Ohcejohka and Deatnu – to raise funds for the movement and to raise
awareness of the issue at both the local and national levels. The concert was a suc-
cess with more than 400 people attending (Lapin Kansa 25 April 2017). The young
Sámi activists stayed on the Čearretsuolu throughout the summer of 2017 in lávvus.
They drafted press releases and letters for decision makers, launched campaigns on
social media and gave interviews to the traditional media (e.g. Yle Sápmi 25 July
2021; Lapin Kansa 24 July 2021).
Simultaneously, fve Sámi activists protested by fshing without Finnish fshing
permits in Veahčajohka and Ohcejohka, tributaries of Deatnu, and by reporting
the events to the police (Yle Rovaniemi 14 February 2019; Yle Sápmi 2 August
2017). The aim of the fshers was to test in court whether the constitutional rights
of the Indigenous Sámi were stronger than the agreements and legislation regulating
fshing in the area – or, in other words, claimed that the constitutional rights were
stronger. The case went to the district court, which overturned all charges against
the fshers in 2019 (Yle Sápmi 8 March 2019). The case is yet to be reviewed by the
Finnish Supreme Court. The forthcoming decision of the Supreme Court will create

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an important precedent on Sámi constitutional rights, which ultimately was the aim
of the fshers.
The Deatnu protests did not attract as much media attention as the Áltá events.
However, regional and also national media reported on the events quite extensively.
The Deatnu protesters also received wide support, for example from artists around
the Nordic countries and other Indigenous activists from Sápmi and elsewhere. A
group of Indigenous and other Greenpeace guests also visited the Čearretsuolu in
autumn 2018 (Ellos Deatnu Facebook site: Greetings and support). The members
of Ellos Deatnu had personal connections to other Indigenous Peoples, especially in
North America. Some of them had visited, for example, the Standing Rock protest
camp of Native Americans before establishing the moratorium in Čearretsuolu. For
the activists, Standing Rock was an inspiration and an important recent practical
example of how to organize nonviolent resistance (Nykänen, Lehtola and Vinkka
2022).
In Deatnu, the Sámi did not engage in visible cooperation with the environmentalists –
apart from the visit of the Greenpeace people – but rather were in strict opposi-
tion to the ways in which the state was seeking to conserve the salmon popula-
tion in the river. As Ellos Deatnu activist Aslak Holmberg put it, these efforts were
seen as an ‘encroachment made under the veil of conservation; theft in the name of
sustainability; colonialism under the mask of science’ (Holmberg 2020, 140). As
was stated earlier, this does not imply that the Sámi protesters themselves were not
interested in protecting nature and the salmon. Instead, they simply said that even
if fshing was to be temporarily reduced, the constitutional rights of the Sámi as an
Indigenous People, their traditional knowledge and their culture were to be consid-
ered (Holmberg 2020, 144–145). They emphasized that salmon fshing was essential
to the Sámi way of life: ‘The Sámi people of Deatnu valley are who we are because
of salmon’ (Holmberg 2020, 142).
Moreover, Ellos Deatnu emphasized that Indigenous Sámi culture itself was all
about cherishing nature. The Čearretsuolu moratorium area rules, published by the
group, included several topics that concentrated on nature and human-nature rela-
tionships. The second section of the rules read as follows:

Čearretsuolu is the island of its birds, animals, insects, plants and other crea-
tures, and the human is a visitor here. Čearretsuolu has the same rights as us,
the people, and so do the other creatures that dwell on and around the island,
such as fsh, birds, and insects. Čearretsuolu in its entirety has the right to have
a good life, biological diversity, balance, clean water and air, and to have the
corrupted practices amended. Čearretsuolu and its habitat is to live and survive
and remain healthy.6
(Ellos Deatnu: Moratorium area rules, The Rights of the Place)

The rules further stated that:

For us, the people, the island is a companion, a friend,7 a spiritual fountain and
a place to dwell/a home.8 We are in contact with the island; we listen to the land
and learn from it. When arriving to the island, it is suitable to ask for a permis-
sion from the place to visit it. When leaving, we thank the place and everything

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that belongs to it. One should not leave anything harmful on the island. When
we leave, we leave in peace. We do care about the connection between us and the
island, as it fosters our mental and physical well-being. We need this connection
to live a good and healthy life.
(Ellos Deatnu: Moratorium area rules, Conversation)9
In Čearretsuolu, we assume responsibility for life, nature, and the entirety of
being a human. The island is a vulnerable area, and its natural resources should
be managed in a sensible and ecological way. We move in the area in a peaceful
manner and do not disturb the island, animals, spirits, or man. The upper part
of the island is reserved for birds and man is not to go there.
(Ellos Deatnu: Moratorium area rules, Care)

In these quotations, the relationship between human and nature is deeply interde-
pendent and more; nature in Čearretsuolu is represented as an entirety that includes
humans, animals, other creatures, plants, land, water and spirits. Moreover, the
island is itself an entity that is to be asked permission to visit.10 All these themes
connected the rules explicitly to the older non-Christian Sámi spirituality (see also
Magga, P.; and Joks in this volume). This spirituality has elements such as a spir-
itual connection with nature, a holistic worldview and an emphasis on the sustain-
able heritage of ancestors (Garcia-Antón et al. 2020, 10–11; Helander-Renvall
2016, 60–79; Rydving 2010). Such spirituality has been represented by other Sámi
artists and other actors during last decades as well – for example, by singer Mari
Boine and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää – and by other Indigenous activists around the
world (Nykänen and Lampela 2017, 284–285; Kraft 2009, 184, 2015, 35). Of Ellos
Deatnu activists, Beaska Niillas, for example, has also written about respecting the
ways of ancestors in a similar spiritual sense elsewhere (Beaska Niillas 2020, 154).
In addition to the themes that regulate the behaviour of the visitors and portray
the rights of nature, the Čearretsuolu moratorium area rules included open political
demands:11

We are in Čearretsuolu to cherish and to return the legacy of our ancestors and
nature. Our aim is to restore the rights of nature and the rights of us [the Sámi],
and to create a beginning to the self-determination of Sápmi in a nonviolent
way. That is our goal, our duty, and our responsibility.
(Ellos Deatnu: Moratorium area rules, Justice)

The demand was stated in a more open manner elsewhere on the website:

The Deatnu River and its tributaries belong to the people of the region. The
people have the right to and responsibility for self-determination in caring for,
overseeing, researching, and governing their own waterways and any income
resulting from their use. We do not accept state ownership and management over
our lands and waters. The Deatnu waterways, including all resources, activities,
and products related to their use, do not belong to the states, but rather to the
local including Saami indigenous inhabitants of the region.12
(Ellos Deatnu: Locals Demand Self-determination
in Deatnu River Valley)

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Overall, the rhetoric of the Ellos Deatnu activists clearly resembled that of the Sámi
Action Group, but it also had a particular emphasis. While both groups defended
local, nature-dependent livelihoods and Sámi self-determination, Ellos Deatnu
focused explicitly and more clearly on the spiritual side of nature and human-nature
relationships (see also Herranen-Tabibi in this volume). It is likely that the represen-
tations refected the general political discussions of the time. From this perspective,
the rhetoric of Ellos Deatnu is strongly reminiscent of the recent discussions on
settler colonialism and decolonialism (see e.g. Kuokkanen et al. 2017; Kuokkanen
2020; Sandström 2020). It is not far-fetched to say that emphasizing the old Sámi
spirituality and the ways of ancestors was, or at least became, a decolonial act.
By emphasizing the nature relationship of ancestors and the old ways in general,
the protesters resigned from colonial ways of using nature and treating minorities
such as the Sámi people (see Sandström 2020, VII). Moreover, the spiritual emphasis
seems to be an attempt to decolonize not only the rules and power relations but
also the minds of majority people and Sámi alike (on decolonizing the mind, see wa
Thiong’o 1986; Valkeapää 1983, 121, 125, 128).

ALLIANCES AND ARTICULATIONS OF NATURE

During the Áltá controversy, politically, the most important alliances of the Sámi were
created with environmentalists, Norwegians, Finns and others. Connections to the
international Indigenous movement were crucial for the struggle as well, especially
in its aftermath. During Deatnu, in turn, the most visible alliances were created with
other Indigenous activists but also, for example, with artists from the Nordic countries.
Interestingly, both struggles show the complexity of the relationship between
Sámi political action and environmentalism. During Áltá, the strategic alliance with
the environmentalists was effcient, even though the battle was seemingly lost, and
some Sámi actors seemed to be suspicious of the environmentalists. Similar alliances
were formed later – for example, during the Inari forest confict (Jokinen 2014) and
the Red Line demonstrations (protests against the Arctic Ocean Railway) (Barents
Observer 10 September 2018; see also Sara et al. in this volume). However, as the
events in Deatnu revealed, state-led environmentalism has also been seen as a threat
to Sámi culture. Indeed, in recent years, efforts to protect the Sámi lands – and
Indigenous lands in general – against the will of Indigenous People have often been
labeled ‘green colonialism’ (see Bjørklund 2020, 47–48; Persen 2020, 56). This does
not imply that Indigenous activists would not want Indigenous lands to be protected –
the conservation efforts should just be led by Indigenous People and according to
their practices (Holmberg 2020, 152).
In my materials from Áltá, nature and Sámi human-nature relationships were
most clearly articulated in light of local practical dimensions, i.e. the possibility of
using the land on the terms of the Sámi people, not the state. In Charta79, the big-
gest problems appeared to be the lack of self-determination and the threats that the
dam and the reservoir posed to the Sámi livelihoods. In a few texts, nature was also
portrayed in aesthetic ways.
At Deatnu, the message was in some ways similar: The protesters claimed self-
determination and defended Sámi livelihoods. However, concurrently, they explicitly
emphasized the signifcance of the holistic and spiritual human-nature relationship.

406
 — The Áltá and Deatnu conflicts —

One can even think that the Deatnu activists were in alliance not only with artists
and Indigenous actors but also with local nature and ancestors. This, in turn, can
be seen as an attempt to knowingly decolonize the political thinking related to the
governance of Sámi lands and waters (see Kuokkanen et al. 2017).

NOTES
1 In both groups, artists and the use of art had visible roles. However, groups included also
other political actors.
2 Charta79 was frst published in Norwegian and translated later the same year (1979) into
Finnish. The magazine was later published in English as a small book titled Charta79: The
Sami People and Human Rights (1982). In this text, I refer to the Finnish version.
3 Translations from Charta79 by Tapio Nykänen.
4 According to a comment I got from a Sámi scholar, the aim of the agreement was also inter-
preted to be to strengthen the control of the state in the area and dismiss the rights of the Sámi.
5 At the time of writing this chapter, the states of Norway and Finland plan to prohibit
salmon fshing totally in the Deatnu River for the fshing season of 2021, in order to
protect the radically declined salmon population. The Sámi Parliament of Finland has
announced that it opposes the plan as it would mean that practicing the Sámi culture in
the river valley would be prohibited as well (Lapin Kansa 7.4.2021). Local Sámi by the
river have both opposed and supported the plan, even if all seem to think that the decision
is harsh (Yle 8.4.2021).
6 Čearretsullo moratorium area rules: all translations from Finnish by Tapio Nykänen.
7 The Finnish word used here is väärti, and the Northern Sámi word is verdde. The word
refers to a particular kind of friendship, usually between the Sámi and non-Sámi, that
includes mutual helping of each other.
8 The Northern Sámi word used here is siida. The word refers to a traditional form of local
Sámi society.
9 The Northern Sámi word used here is gulahallan. It refers to conversation in general but
implies strongly that one should listen and try to understand what others have to say. The
word may also have a connotation of a promise: The participants in a conversation also
promise to hear and understand each other in the future.
10 Similar understanding of the nature relationship was also visible in the interviews of Ellos
Deatnu activists, conducted by researcher Birgitta Vinkka. According to the interviews,
the protesters had themselves visited the island and entered into dialogue with it, asking
permission for the visit (Nykänen et al. 2022).
11 The rules also emphasize repeatedly that the protesters in the Čearretsullo should be nei-
ther violent nor malignant: ‘We love nature, animals, plants, humans, spirits, our culture,
and the legacy or our ancestors. We enforce and encourage to survive and help the Sámi
people in its way towards healthy and safe future. We walk the road of love, not hate’
(Ellos Deatnu: Moratorium area rules, Love).
12 In English in the original source.

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 PART III
1
D U O S TAT – E N V I S I O N I N G
SÁMI FUTURES


1 ’to dare’
 CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

T H E H I S T O RY O F T H E H Y B R I D
SÁ M I M E D I A SYS T E M


Torkel Rasmussen, Inker-Anni Sara and Roy Krøvel

INTRODUCTION
At an international Indigenous conference, one of the authors of this chapter received
a question from the audience after giving a presentation: ‘Did the Sámi have a pre-
colonial written system?’ He thought about a good answer, that it could be that the
Sámi marked their belongings with some kind of house mark and their animals with
earmarks. This, he thought, could be seen as some kind of writing system to send a
message from the sender to the reader. Nevertheless, a Sámi elder in the audience had
a better answer: ‘Yes, we had,’ he claimed. ‘We have stone carvings all over Sápmi.
That was our old written system.’
The stone carvings, which are at least 7,000 years old and found in many places
across the Sámi area, may, in fact, be interpreted as the frst Sámi written media. The
largest rock art site, both in number and land use, consists of both engravings and
paintings and is situated in Jiepmaluokta, close to Alta on Norway’s northern coast.
The site is also listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site. The fgures depict differ-
ent types of animals, people, gods and situations such as hunting, birth and worship-
ping (Helskog 2001, 2014). In each fgure, there is always a message included from
a ‘writer’ to a receiver. Even if we are unable to understand the exact meaning of the
carvings today, they should be considered the frst Sámi media.
However, this chapter explores how the Sámi media system has evolved in the
three Nordic countries, Norway, Sweden and Finland, by proposing a history of
Sámi media starting in 1872. The chapter shows that the Sámi media system is a
hybrid media system consisting of elements resembling ‘settler colonialism’ (about
settler colonialism, see Puuronen in this volume). The Sámi daily media is owned,
controlled and fnanced by the majority populations and their bodies and compa-
nies as well as smaller Sámi media under Sámi control with lower circulation and
publication frequency.
There are, at present, a wide range of Sámi media: Daily news and children’s
programs on television; all-day online radio services; daily newspapers; and periodical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-29 415

 — Rasmussen, Sara and Krøvel —

publications for children and for different Sámi linguistic groups, youth, academ-
ics and reindeer herders, as well as Sámi pages in regional and local newspapers
(about the frst Sámi TV series, see Kyrölä in this volume). Achieving Sámi media
of this range has been a long process. In many ways, Sámi media history is a story
of struggles. The attempts to establish Sámi media are many – as are the failures.
The development of Sámi media has been slow, due to blatant resistance from the
majority societies in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Nevertheless, Sámi media his-
tory is also a story of cooperation between Sámi politicians, Sámi media leaders and
their counterparts in Norway, Finland and Sweden. We limit the scope of our study
to Sámi media in Nordic countries as Sámi media in Russia are few and have been
established in a different media and political system than those in the Nordic coun-
tries. (See Rießler 2015 for an overview of Sámi media in Russia.)
The frst attempt to establish Sámi media happened in 1872 in Gilivuotna/
Lebesby,1 Norway. However, the attempt collapsed due to fnancial problems and
opposition from local authorities; Jens Holmboe, the county governor, declined to
support the initiative fnancially, and the attempt ultimately failed. In the follow-
ing year, another initiative emerged. While the county governor was still against
supporting a Sámi newspaper, the founders remained persistent, and the frst Sámi
newspaper, Muitalægje (Narrator), was issued and continued to be published for
three years. Moreover, most of the Sámi media that exist today were established and
developed after World War II, when national policies regarding Sámi issues changed
from assimilation to reluctant acceptance. Eventually, the Sámi were able to claim
Indigenous status and gained the right to self-determination after the 1980s (about
the Nordic Sámi parliaments, see Mörkenstam et al. in this volume). Therefore, it is
imperative to study Sámi media history and to consider the harsh political realities
Sámi journalists, editors and media leaders had to navigate.
This chapter builds on existing research that has been conducted on the Sámi
media system (see Rasmussen et al. 2021) and on Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) com-
parative analysis of media systems, which seeks to answer the question of ‘how
media systems are linked structurally and historically to the development of the
political system’ (ibid. 5). Nordic media are normally categorized as part of the
Democratic Corporatist Model of Northern Europe. The Democratic Corporatist
Model is ‘characterized by a historical co-existence of commercial media, media tied
to organized social and political groups and by a relatively active but legally limited
role of the state’ (ibid. 11). Thus, we investigate Sámi media systems as Indigenous
media systems (Rasmussen et al. 2021) which have emerged and evolved within the
Democratic Corporatist Model in Northern Europe (see Hallin and Mancini 2004).
The Democratic Corporatist Model seeks to identify links between political and
media systems, where the former affects the ways in which the latter develops (Moe
and Sjøvaag 2008, 132). Moreover, Indigenous media systems, along with other
Indigenous institutions, have evolved in the historical, economic and political con-
texts of colonialism currently heading towards decolonization and self-determination
(Coulthard 2019). It is often claimed that Indigenous media have been established
to counter existing dominant power structures (see Sara 2007; Pietikäinen 2008;
Hanusch 2013, 2014; Krøvel 2017). This makes it particularly interesting to inves-
tigate Sámi media history by critically analyzing the media entrepreneurs and their
motives for establishing new media and by refecting on the subsequent emergence

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of a media system in relation to its historical context. To address these questions, we

revisit existing literature on Sámi media history. We build on several scholars who
have published works on features of Sámi media landscapes, environments, infra-
structure, public spheres and press (Hætta 2003; Ijäs 2011; Lehtola 2001; Markelin
2003; Markelin and Husband 2013; Rasmussen 2017, 2018; Sara 2007; Varsi
1983). Furthermore, this study draws on media systems literature to investigate the
media system in Sápmi, following Bruggeman et al. (2014).

MEDIA SYSTEMS AND INDIGENOUS MEDIA

As explained earlier, this chapter draws on media system theory by Hallin and Mancini
(2004) and positions the development of the Sámi media system within the context of
the Democratic Corporatist Model and its Nordic block. In the model, political par-
allelism and mass-circulation press are important features that help explain the exist-
ing media system in the Nordic region. Political parallelism exists together with a high
degree of journalistic professionalization; the states interfere in the media system while
simultaneously guaranteeing freedom of the press (Allern and Blach-Ørsten 2011, 101).
In terms of political parallelism, the Sámi movement and its activists have historically
been the driving force in founding and funding the Sámi press since the late 19th century.
Political parallelism refers to a similar historical connection between the mainstream
press and political parties across Europe. Moreover, state interference regarding Sámi
public broadcasters is obvious in Finland, Norway and Sweden; in these countries, while
freedom of speech may not be directly restricted, the state hinders the self-determina-
tion of the Sámi through funding and decision making. Therefore, this chapter seeks
to understand the historical development of the Sámi media system by comparing the
characteristics of the Sámi media system to the characteristics of the Nordic block within
the Democratic Corporatist Model.
Hallin and Mancini understand media systems as ‘ideal types’ emerging from
political histories and specifc contexts. Media systems research indicates a strong
infuence from states and corresponding political and economic systems on the
development of media systems (Hallin and Mancini 2004). When it comes to the
Sámi media system, for example, the history of colonialism, assimilation and hard
Finnicization and Norwegianization policies since the 19th century, which again
produced the emergence of the Sámi movement utilizing the power of the Sámi mass
media for its purposes, have contributed to the emergence and development of Sámi
media systems (Rasmussen et al. 2021). The media systems theory by Hallin and
Mancini (2004) is said to differ from other models since it is based on the concept
of ‘coexistence.’ Hallin and Mancini (2017) emphasize that not all media operating
within the same media system are identical, but rather their ways of working cannot
be understood without relating them to the context of the particular media system.
In the case at hand, understanding the Sámi media system as a part of the Nordic
block is important. However, this chapter looks at the Sámi media system operating
partly independently based on the historical, social, cultural and political premises
of the Sámi society.
On the one hand, the way the mainstream media cover Sámi issues has infuenced
the way the Sámi media system has developed. Hence, literature on Indigenous jour-
nalism often focuses on the postcolonial status of Indigenous Peoples, within which

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the mainstream media excludes Indigenous matters from its agenda or frame. For
example, it tends to overlook Indigenous Peoples’ protests against human rights
violations as illegitimate or immoral, such as the case of Standing Rock and the First
Nation’s struggle against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North
Dakota, USA (Kilgo and Harlow 2019, 523). Moreover, the possibility of reconciling
different interests is rarely viewed from the perspective of a history of power imbal-
ance and colonialism by the mainstream media (Walker et al. 2019). Further, it is
also evident that the mainstream media is dominated by marked-centred journalism
on Indigenous issues; in other words, rather than serving Indigenous communities, it
seeks to proft on sensationalizing them (Trudeau and Ahtone 2017, 46 ̶ 47).
On the other hand, literature on Indigenous journalism emphasizes the important
role of Indigenous media in political advocacy (Ross 2016, 3), language revitaliza-
tion, cultural empowerment (Forde et al. 2003, 317), provision of counter-narratives
(Hanusch 2014) and alternative media representations based on Indigenous con-
cerns (Meadows 2009). However, these ideas are not new; as this chapter demon-
strates, the founders of the frst Sámi-language newspapers emphasized the need
for preservation of the Sámi languages, and the establishment of the Sámi media
was thus seen as a powerful tool for maintaining the Sámi languages. By using and
promoting the Sámi language, the frst Sámi newspapers were an empowering force
during the toughest Norwegianization period at the beginning of the 20th century.
The historical Sámi press had a clear connection to the Sámi movement and sought
to provide counter-narratives and alternative media representations when reporting
on Sámi politics, education and language issues.
Simultaneously, in the 19th century, Indigenous public spheres were emerging
across the world to protect Indigenous interests and to infuence legislation affecting
Indigenous communities. As early as the 1820s and 1830s, the Native Americans
realized the need for their own media to ensure the survival of their system of
governance and social structures (Rave 2018). In Aotearoa (New Zealand), the
Maori people established their own media organizations based on the 1840 Treaty
of Waitangi, which obligates the state to revive the Maori language and culture
(Smith 2015, 185–186). Similar developments related to the establishment of the
Sámi press are visible in the 1870s.

SÁMI MEDIA HISTORY

Sámi press history

The origin of the Sámi press history is commonly attributed to 1872. This is not
because Sámi media was established that year, but rather because it was not estab-
lished, as the regional Norwegian authorities rejected an application for economic
support for a Sámi newspaper. The applicant was a Sámi teacher, Peder Larsen Ucce,
from Gilivuotna/Lebesby in the Sea Sámi area. Larsen Ucce argued for the need to
enlighten Sámi people, as he believed that of all ‘ethnic groups in civilized countries,’
the Sámi were ‘the ones lagging behind in terms of enlightenment.’ The Sámi did
not have books, newspapers or magazines in their own language. Moreover, Sámi
children were strongly infuenced by Norwegianization through schooling (about

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Norwegianization and education system, see Hansen in this volume). As a teacher,

Larsen Ucce himself had seen ‘the torments of Norwegianization,’ as he put it. In
practice, this meant that the Sámi children were unable to understand the content of
the teaching since they did not know Norwegian. He was gravely worried that the
Sámi language would disappear completely and therefore wanted to create a Sámi-
language newspaper before it was too late (Ijäs 2011, 11).
Although his application was rejected, Larsen Ucce continued to push for the cre-
ation of a Sámi-language newspaper and was involved in the next Sámi newspaper
project. This project proved to be more successful, and in 1873, the frst Sámi news-
paper, Muitalægje, was published. The editor of the newspaper was Sheriff Christian
Andreassen from Buolbmát/Polmak, and Larsen Ucce served as a diligent writer and
co-editor. The establisher of Muitalægje had a clear goal:

to contribute to the promotion of enlightenment among the Sámi by addressing

them in their own language, which is assumed to be a natural means and the
safest way in which these poorly enlightened brethren can be involved in the
benefts of enlightenment.

However, Norwegian authorities were reluctant to support Sámi media; Muitalægje

was short lived, and its publication was cancelled after only two years.
Nuorttanaste (Northern Star) followed in Norway in 1898. It is still issued today,
making it the oldest existing Sámi media by far. From the outset, it was owned by
Christian missionaries and still has a Christian mission statement. Nuorttanaste has
always been published in the North Sámi language, and it played a particularly impor-
tant role in the Sámi public sphere during the harshest period of active Norwegianization
policies when it was the only Sámi media in Norway. Despite its strong commitment to
the Christian faith, Nuorttanaste was never a mere parish publication (Varsi 1983, 19).
On the contrary, Nuorttanaste has been a champion for the Sámi language, abstinence,
public education and animal and environmental protection.
The third signifcant attempt at a Sámi newspaper was Sagai Muittalægje (The
News Narrator). It was published during 1904 through 1911. Its owners and
founders were Sámi, and it was published in the North Sámi language. Just as the
Norwegian newspapers were related to existing political parties, the frst Sámi news-
papers were connected to the Sámi political movement that emerged between 1900
and 1920 (Ijäs 2011, 42). The newspaper also clearly opposed Norwegianization. In
addition to disseminating news, the newspaper sought to inform Sámi about Sámi
politics; they saw it as their special responsibility to promote enlightenment among
Sámi who did not know the Norwegian language properly. Larsen, the editor of
Sagai Muittalægje, was a tireless opponent of Norwegianization and worked in par-
ticular with language and school issues in the newspaper (Varsi 1983, 20).
In addition to these Sámi newspapers which were published in the North Sámi lan-
guage, Sámi newspapers existed in southern Sámi areas and were published in Norwegian
and Swedish. Waren Sardne (Words from the Mountain) was one of the southern Sámi
publications published in Norwegian in two periods: 1910 through 1913 and 1922
through 1925. The editor, Daniel Mortensen, stated the mission of the newspaper in the
very frst publication: ‘The Waren Sardne is edited with special regard to the interests of
the Sámi and to safeguard their interests in all respects.’ He also expressed a clear goal

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of infuencing the authorities to change legislation so that the Sámi could retain the land
rights they have enjoyed since ancient times (Varsi 1983, 24).
After these projects, several Sámi periodical publications were launched and
failed as a result of resistance and lack of economical support. Most were privately
owned and shared goals such as ‘informing the Sámi people,’ ‘strengthening the Sámi
language’ and ‘spreading Christianity.’ The frst Sámi newspapers did not last very
long due to low circulation and lack of subsidies, advertisements and interest from
governments in supporting Sámi language and culture (Ijäs 2011, 42). By 1930, only
two Sámi newspapers were left: Nuorttanaste in Norway and Samefolkets Egen
Tidning (The Sámi People’s Own Newspaper) in Sweden. The latter had managed
to obtain a small grant from the state. It was published mainly in Swedish and had
a clear objective to support the Sámi people. Specifcally, it sought to refect the
changes that were taking place in terms of Sámi living conditions and present the
Sámi views on various controversial issues. In Finland, a group of Finnish research-
ers and intellectuals established an organization to further Sámi interests, Lapin
sivistysseura (the Society for Promotion of Saami Culture), in 1932. This associa-
tion started to publish Sápmelaš (Sámi Person), a monthly magazine, in the Sámi
language in support of the Sámi. Sápmelaš was published until 2001 (Ijäs 2011, 47,
108; Varsi 1983, 26; Lehtola 2015, 146).
Only a couple of the early publications, Nuorttanaste and Samefolket, have sur-
vived for more than one hundred years. The frst Sámi newspapers were established
in a harsh political climate. Sámi language and culture were neglected and even con-
sidered inferior to the majority language and culture. Thus, the Sámi were subjected
to strict assimilatory policies (see Drugge; Huss and Lindgren; and Hansen in this
volume). Unfortunately, this frst centennial of Sámi press history was marked by a
lack of interest combined with hostility from authorities.
As many scholars have pointed out (e.g. Lehtola 2015; Minde 2005; Årseth
2006), a new and more positive policy towards Sámi slowly emerged at the state
level after World War II. The social Darwinist view of the Sámi as ‘inferior’ to the
majority populations was challenged, and a more human, but still patriarchal policy
prevailed (about the social Darwinist view, see Drugge in this volume). Nevertheless,
the evolution of the Sámi press remained slow. One of the few signifcant events
was the establishment of a new newspaper, Ságat (News), which was launched in
Norway in 1957. In the beginning, Ságat was published in Sámi, but Norwegian
gradually became used more frequently. By the 1970s, Norwegian was the dominant
language of the newspaper.
In the frst years, Ságat was especially cautious of criticizing Norwegian authori-
ties (Ijäs 2011, 55). This changed during the 1970s when more radical editors in chief
were appointed, having backgrounds in the new Sámi organizations. The 1970s was
a turbulent time for the newspaper as it was a turbulent time in Sámi politics. A con-
servative wing in Sámi politics, supporting the Labour party and the Christian Sámi
mission, mobilized against the new radicalism among Sámi activists and managed to
manoeuvre themselves into a majority stock position, eventually taking over Ságat.
With some of the prominent members excluded from their positions in Ságat, the
radical wing established a new newspaper, Sámi Áigi (The Sámi Time), in 1979 to be
entirely published in Sámi. The newspaper had a radical political profle and aimed
to be ‘Pan-Sámi,’ i.e. not restricting itself to only publishing stories from Norway.

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On the contrary, it widely covered Sámi politics and struggles in other areas as well
(Varsi 1983; Ijäs 2011; about conservative and radical wing in the Sámi politics, see
also Alakorva in this volume).
Both conservative and radical Sámi made their voices heard through these two news-
papers. At the same time, due to an ongoing language shift from Sámi to Norwegian
that was particularly notable in the coastal areas, Ságat essentially became the voice
of the Sea Sámi while Sámi Áigi became the voice of the inland Sámi who spoke the
Indigenous language (Ijäs 2011, 70–77). Both newspapers received production grants
from the Norwegian government. Without grants, the newspapers probably would not
have survived for long, as circulation and income from ads were low. The publication
frequency was also low, varying from twice a week to once every second week.
After the establishment of the Sámi Parliament of Norway in 1989, Ságat changed
its editorial line (Ijäs 2011, 64). The newspaper became more independent of con-
servative Sámi politicians and began to cover news in a more unbiased fashion.
The Sámi Parliament became an important arena for news gathering, and the news-
paper declared itself to be ‘neutral’ in terms of Sámi politics. On the other side,
Sámi Áigi went bankrupt in 1993, and two new Sámi-language newspapers, Áššu
(Ember) and Min Áigi (Our Time), were immediately established.2 Like Ságat, Sámi
Áigi was owned by Sámi organizations, municipalities and private persons. From
1993, Norwegian newspapers Altaposten and Finnmark Dagblad came in as minor-
ity owners of the two new Sámi newspapers. In 2008, the two newspapers were
merged into a new newspaper named Ávvir (Attendance) with Norwegian owners
in the majority ever since (Ijäs 2011, 77 ̶ 97). At the same time, subsidies from the
Norwegian government increased enough to ensure that both Ságat and Ávvir were
published fve days a week (Ijäs 2011, 98–103). This led to an increase in the number
of journalists, a general strengthening of the editorial room and the establishment of
local offces in new localities.
In Sweden and Finland, there were few changes during the post–World War II
period, but Samefolkets egen tidning in Sweden stopped publishing in 1958 before
starting again in 1961 under the name Samefolket (Sámi People). It was owned by
Sámi organizations and published mostly in Swedish. In Finland, the Society for
Promotion of Saami Culture, which is dominated by Finnish intellectuals, continued
publishing Sápmelaš in Sámi until 2001 (Ijäs 2011, 47–49). Since 2012, the regional
newspaper Lapin Kansa, which is subsidized by the government, has published news
in Sámi in its ordinary outlets on paper and the internet (Aikio 2013).

History of Sámi broadcasting

The history of the Sámi radio began on Christmas Eve in 1936 when Christian ser-
vices were transmitted directly from the church in Buolbmát/Polmak in Norway. For
the frst time, a Sámi-language program was heard on the radio (Hætta 2003, 21).
Since then, all Sámi radio and TV history has been nearly entirely linked to national
broadcasting corporations in Norway, Sweden and Finland. The only vivid excep-
tion is a local radio station, GLR, in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino in Norway.
After World War II, both Norwegian and Finnish national broadcasting
corporations, NRK and Yle, established permanent transmissions in Sámi in
1946 and 1947. Shortly after, in 1953, the Swedish broadcasting corporation SR

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established Sámi programming. However, the Sámi journalists worked in the broad-
casters’ offces outside the Sámi area. Staff for Sámi programming was limited to
one person in each country, and Sámi programs were only transmitted for 15 to 30
minutes a week (Hætta 2003; Lehtola 2001). Nevertheless, they had a tremendous
impact. Stories tell of ‘whole villages’ gathering in houses with radios to listen to the
programs (Hætta 2003, 30–31).
Still, and especially on NRK in Norway, there has been a continuing struggle
to keep broadcasting the Sámi programs. The head of the broadcasting coopera-
tion and other prominent persons in Northern Norway wanted to stop them. They
argued that radio in the Norwegian language further contributed to the ongoing
Norwegianization of the Sámi people – a process they wanted to continue pursuing.
On the other side, the board of the broadcasting corporation did want to promote
Sámi programming, prominent Sámi persons and Norwegians who supported the
Sámi (Hætta 2003, 42–45).
According to Lehtola (2001, 78), nobody was actively advocating for an inde-
pendent Sámi radio station before the 1960s. The main reasons were both economi-
cal and practical. Sámi people lacked the fnancial resources to establish a radio
station, and even if it had been possible to fnance such projects, an enterprise would
have faced technical challenges in building studios and landlines for radio transmis-
sion in a geographically large and sparsely populated area. On top of that, there
would have been problems in building human capacity beyond the only radio tech-
nology environment existing at that time in Norway, Sweden and Finland.
Both Hætta (2003) and Lehtola (2001) explain that Sámi representatives and
several non-Sámi allies instead built relationships with national broadcasting repre-
sentatives on regional and national levels, arguing that the Sámi needed both infor-
mation and Christian services in their own language. While they experienced some
success, the three decades after World War II remained a period of slow progress in
the history of Sámi broadcasting.
Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s, Sámi representatives and media leaders
wanted to build up a better broadcasting service for the Sámi. A working group
under the Nordic broadcasters’ conferences, The Cape of the North (Nordkalotten),
attempted to unify forces and combine resources. In 1968, they suggested estab-
lishing a Sámi radio and television production centre in Kárášjohka/Karasjok in
Norway. This project was placed on hold due to technical issues as Norway had only
one landline for radio and was unwilling to dedicate more time to Sámi radio pro-
grams on this line (Hætta 2003, 200–206). In 1974, the proposal was again set on
the agenda. A working committee of national broadcasting leaders on regional level
suggested establishing a Sámi production centre in Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino,
Norway with local offces in Sweden and Finland. The centre would have begun
with 15 employees and would have increased to 40 within a period of short time
(Hætta 2003, 207).
The plan was rejected by the Sámi conference the same year. With a majority of
only one vote, the conference instead voted to place the centre in Giron/Kiruna in
Sweden. As a result of this change of location away from Norway, NRK withdrew
from the plan, deciding instead to build up an NRK Sámi radio offce in Kárášjohka/
Karasjok. In 1970, the Swedish radio SR and the Finnish radio Yle also moved their
Sámi offces to a Sámi area, SR to Giron/Kiruna in Sweden and Yle to Anár/Inari in

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Finland, and they built up their own Sámi broadcasting capacity (Hætta 2003, 210,
212; Lehtola 2001, 58, 80, 82).
No in-depth analysis has been published on why the Sámi conference changed the
location of the centre. However, a resolution from a meeting of Sámi radio employ-
ees in 1976 indicated that the conference feared centralization. The conference did
not believe that a centre would improve the Sámi cooperation as promised (Hætta
2003, 214). The resolution indicates that participants might have thought it better
to build up Sámi units within national broadcasters than to start up something new
and unknown.
The failed attempt to establish a Sámi media centre and to coordinate Sámi jour-
nalists across borders needs more research. From a media systems perspective, it was
a crucial moment in Sámi broadcasting history. These efforts indicate a real possibil-
ity of developing a more self-governed Sámi media system across borders. Instead,
the fast-growing felds of Sámi journalism and media came to be gradually more
dominated by national broadcasters and developed according to interests defned
within state systems and borders.
Later, the national broadcasters still chose not to merge the Sami radios. Instead,
the strategy was to build up the Sámi broadcasting capacity in separate units in
each country. Nevertheless, the cooperation between the Sámi units of the national
broadcasters continued exchanging news and radio programs and producing some
radio programs together. The leaders of the Sámi units met annually in the ‘coop-
eration committee’ (Heatta 2017; Lehtola 2001, 85). However, the development
of these three Sámi units differed substantially during this period. As Sámi broad-
casting improved only slowly in Sweden and Finland, the development in NRK’s
Sámi broadcasting services entered a phase of rapid development, which was largely
connected to personal interests on a leadership level. In 1989, for instance, Einar
Førde, a former leading labour politician, became the head of NRK. Additionally,
Nils Johan Heatta served as the head of NRK Sámi radio, a position he held for 30
years. Heatta convinced Førde of the need for a serious commitment to Sámi broad-
casting services, and NRK eventually initiated a development plan to increase Sámi
broadcasting. The annual budget and the number of journalists and other employees
increased, the radio channel got more time on air and Sámi TV production started
up (Heatta 2017; NRK Sápmi 2017; Rasmussen 2018).
In the 1990s, the three Sámi broadcasting units planned a new way of cooperation
on radio program transmission using the new digital audio broadcasting technology.
This would have given them their own radio channel, not to be misunderstood for
a common company, but a possibility to transmit all programs the three companies
produced to listeners in Norway, Sweden and Finland through the same channel.
This plan ended as only Norwegian authorities decided to expand the digital audio
broadcasting network, while Sweden and Finland decided to keep to the FM system
for radio transmission. Today, the Sámi radio units have the possibility of using the
internet to fulfl such an effort for broadcasting purposes but have chosen not to.
In 2001, NRK, Yle and the Swedish Television Broadcaster SVT joined forces to
launch daily TV news in Sámi. The programs are published with subtitles for 15
minutes per day, fve days a week (Heatta 2017; NRK Sápmi 2017). These TV news
programs are signifcant in at least three ways. Firstly, they reach a bigger audience
than any Sámi media has ever reached before, as the rating numbers have been

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between 400,000 and 500,000 on average, and the publishers are able to inform
both Sámi and non-Sámi on Sámi issues. Secondly, the TV news contributed signif-
cantly to the creation of a new Sámi public sphere. With voices in Sámi and subtitles
in Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish, individuals across the Nordic countries were
suddenly able to follow the same news programs and be informed on the same
issues. Thirdly, the TV news promoted the Sámi languages and normalized their use
in the public sphere (see Huss and Lindgren; and Pasanen in this volume). Although
North Sámi is the most used language in the Sámi TV news, the programs have also
offered a space for Sámi languages with fewer speakers; Skolt, Inari, Lule and South
Sámi languages are regularly used in the programs. Moreover, this has contributed to
the strengthening of the languages and to mutual comprehension of Sámi languages.
During the 1990s, the formal status of NRK Sámi Radio was also improved, as
it became a division in NRK, while the head of NRK Sámi Radio became a member
of the group of leaders of NRK. The Sámi broadcaster units in Sweden and Finland
have never achieved such a status as they are under the supervision of lower regional
levels in the companies. Consequently, they have far fewer resources and employees
and less time on air (Heatta 2017; Markelin 2003; Rasmussen 2018).
Nevertheless, the question of establishing an independent Sámi broadcaster has
been discussed a few times in recent years. The Sámi Journalist Association (2004),
in a resolution from the annual meeting in 2004, encouraged Sámi politicians and
media leaders to establish a common Sámi broadcaster. In 2018, Heatta, the former
head of NRK Sámi Radio (the name was changed to NRK Sápmi in 2011), in a new
position as leader of the Sámi Journalist Association, raised the question again in
a media interview, advocating for Sámi self-determination in the media sector and
stating that all public Sámi broadcasting is governed by non-Sámis (Heatta 2018).

A NEW SÁMI MEDIA SYSTEM ARISES

During the 1990s, and especially after 2000, several innovations took place in
Sámi society that could indicate a development towards a more autonomous Sámi
media system. Sámi University College, which was renamed the Sámi University
of Applied Science in 2015, started to teach journalism in the early 1990s, frst as
a one-year introductory course on campus followed by two years at other Nordic
journalism schools. Since 1999, this has developed into a two-year Candidate of
Journalism study, then into a Bachelor of Journalism and eventually a Master’s of
Sámi Journalism from an Indigenous Perspective starting in 2015 (Rasmussen 2017).
On the press organization level, there were also some important developments in
the 1990s. A Sámi publishing organization, SALAS, was established in 1994 and con-
tains the daily Sámi newspapers Ságat and Ávvir (Solbakk 2006, 240). Additionally,
the Sámi Journalist Association was established in 1998. These associations consti-
tute important elements of an independent Sámi media system. The Sámi Journalist
Association worked on Sámi press ethics from the outset and started a Sámi code
of ethics project. A follow-up was planned jointly with Sámi University College in
the early 2000s aimed at planning a full self-regulation scheme for the Sámi press.
According to the project description, the self-regulation scheme would consist of
a Sámi Press Union, Codes of Sámi Press Ethics and a Complaint Commission.

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However, the project was never carried out due to lack of fnances (personal notes
from one of the authors of this book chapter, Torkel Rasmussen).
Since their establishments, the Sámi parliaments in Norway, Finland and Sweden
have started to fnance media. To some extent, they started allocating subsidies to the
existing Sámi media, as well as allocating subsidies to ten new Sámi media outlets. The
Sámi Parliament in Norway grants by far the most; in 2020, their budget included 4.8
million Norwegian kroner in subsidies for a total of nine media outlets. Most of these
media outlets are owned by Sámi organizations and companies and have a low pub-
lishing frequency of one to twelve issues per year (Rasmussen 2018; Sámi Parliament
of Norway 2019, 72). At the end of 2020, the Norwegian Media Authority decided
that one of these small media, Sámi ođasmagasiidna (The Sámi News Magazine), will
receive press subsidies from the Norwegian government. The magazine had fulflled
criteria according to circulation and publishing frequency for a Sámi publication. The
amount for 2019 and 2020 totals 12 million Norwegian kroner.
To summarize, we argue that there is a wide range of Sámi media with a rank
of diversity: Periodical publications for children, youth, different Sámi linguistic
groups, women, academics and reindeer herders; daily newspapers; TV and radio
programs; and Sámi pages in local newspapers. Due to the digital revolution, most
of these media are available online and are easily accessible for users. Still, there have
been few attempts to establish new online media. Compared to the majority media,
Sámi media are few in numbers, publications in a year and circulation and short in
time on air, but they play an important role for the users in preserving Sámi culture
and promoting Sámi rights and interests.

CONCLUSION
In this chapter, we have outlined the history of Sámi journalism and Sámi media from its
inception in 1872 until 2020. The print media history is a story of the many ‘nine days
wonders,’ referring to the fact that many publications have been established and most
of them have lived short lives. Print media history is also a story about private owner-
ship and a goal to ‘inform,’ ‘enlighten’ and ‘strengthen’ Sámi language and to spread
Christianity. Sámi radio and TV history are almost entirely linked to national broadcast-
ing corporations in Norway, Sweden and Finland. A few attempts have been made to
establish a common Sámi broadcaster, but none have succeeded.
Sámi media history began in a harsh political climate in which Sámi language and
culture were neglected, considered inferior and opposed through national assimila-
tory policies. A newer and more positive policy in the post–World War II era led
to the establishment of Sámi parliaments in the late 1980s and 1990s as the Sámi
people’s right to self-determination was recognized. In this era of revitalization for
Sámi culture, several elements of a new Sámi media system arose with its Sámi media
organizations, journalism education and media subsidy allocations from the Sámi
parliaments to support some infrequent publications.
The frst Sámi media leaders (1872–1930) wanted to spread Christianity among the
Sámi people in addition to informing, enlightening and ‘civilizing’ the Sámi. Still, there
appears to be another agenda behind these rather modest objectives: Nation building,
as Sámi media, de facto, contribute to language revitalization and identity building and
strengthening. The arguments made by Sámi media leaders on behalf of their media in

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the initial era must be understood in their historical contexts. While they might appear
to be very modest, seen from the political realities of contemporary Nordic societies,
they were considered radical statements in their time, even when the Sámi media leaders
did not clearly voice resistance to the establishment and authorities.
Still, Sámi media is heavily dependent on national state institutions and power
structures as Sámi broadcasting remains part of national broadcasting corpora-
tions in Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the daily newspapers are dependent on
Norwegian media subsidy allocations. As we showed with the example of Sámi
ođasmagasiidna, when the publishers met the criteria for support in the Norwegian
press support scheme, it triggered signifcantly higher subsidies than what could
have been achieved within the Sámi press support scheme.3
This makes the Sámi media system some kind of a hybrid media system resem-
bling traits of settler colonialism, as colonialist states impose their institutions on the
colonized people. To combat this, there have been efforts to create an over-national
Sámi broadcaster. A self-governed media support scheme and Sámi media organiza-
tions have also been established. Moreover, there has been an effort to develop codes
of Sámi press ethics and a complaint commission for Sámi media. Nevertheless, an
autonomous Sámi media system has not yet unfolded. As a result, there is a need for
further research on why the Sámi media sector still lacks autonomy, which should
especially focus on Sámi parliaments’ media policies.
Returning to the idea of a particular Nordic model or a democratic-corporatist media
system, it is important to note that the Nordic media system is not static. The system
is evolving as the relationship between states, media and population develops; it was
shaped by a particular relationship between states and majority populations character-
ized by popular participation, openness and trust. However, the relationship between
states and the Sámi evolved differently during the same period. It was more often marked
by the many struggles to preserve and revitalize language and culture and defence of ter-
ritories and livelihood. While political parties played a pivotal role in the development
of Nordic media systems, social movements and organizations have been central to the
development of the Sámi media and the hybrid system.
This chapter is also a story about the importance of Sámi activists, entrepre-
neurs and civil society in founding and funding Sámi media for various motives.
Arguments used to support the establishment of Sámi media, to Christianize, inform,
enlighten and ‘civilize’ Sámi people, might have been chosen to please the public –
majority people in power positions – or to make a change. Behind this, we can seek
a motivation to counteract the attempts of the power structures to deprive the Sámi
of their language, culture and established land rights.

NOTES
1 City names are presented with their Sámi name frst, then the national language.
2 Two authors of this paper, Torkel Rasmussen and Inker-Anni Sara, have worked for the
latter newspaper.
3 After the book chapter was completed, the Norwegian Media Appeals Board decided that
the Sámi Magašiidna didn’t fulfll requirements to be funded for 2019 and 2020, and the
Norwegian Media Authority declined an application for support for 2021 (Norwegian
Media Authority 2021).

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 — History of the hybrid Sámi media system —

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429
 CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

‘ I T S H O U L D B E H E R L A N G UAG E ’
New speakers of Sámi languages transmitting the
language to the next generation

Annika Pasanen

INTRODUCTION

AP: Mon muddoost talle šoodâi tunjin mielâ oppâđ sämikielâ?

(At what stage did you then feel like learning the Sámi language?)
NN: No, talle ko šoodâi vuosmuš pärni. Tego tot lâi kuittâg suu kielâ, tâi kolgâččij
leđe suu kielâ, mii lii suu eejist lappum, te kal tot talle lâi.
(Well, when the frst child was born. Like it was her language anyway, or should
be her language, which her father has lost, so that was it.)

Losing language and taking it back are huge, topical questions in the Sámi world
as well as in Indigenous and minority communities at the global scale. Nine Sámi
languages are spoken in the Sámi area, all of which are endangered. Three of them are
spoken in Finland: Inari Sámi, North Sámi and Skolt Sámi. Their speech communities
have been suffering from language deprivation, have faced widespread language shift
from Sámi to Finnish and are nowadays living in the complex reality of assimilation
and language revitalization efforts (see also Huss and Lindgren in this volume).
This chapter is about people who have started to use one of the Sámi languages as
adults. They have decided either to take back the language of their family or to learn
a language of the community in which they have settled. They have spent one year
of their lives enjoying and struggling with Sámi language and found ways to use it in
their surroundings and various networks, including the most personal of networks:
They have chosen to transmit the Sámi language that they have just learned – and
are still learning – to their own children. In this chapter, I will discuss the process of
learning a Sámi language, its intergenerational transmission and the emotions, chal-
lenges and expectations connected to this process.
The chapter is based on my research on the impacts of one-year intensive adult
education in Sámi language and culture and the new speakers who have taken part

430 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-30

 — ‘It should be her language’ —

in the studies. I am interested in how Inari Sámi, North Sámi and Skolt Sámi are
learned, used and transmitted by people who did not acquire the language in their
childhood. I call them ‘new speakers of Sámi languages.’ The chapter addresses the
following questions: 1) How have the new speakers made the decision to transmit
Sámi to their children, and how have they felt about the decision? 2) How have they
dealt with discussions on the transmission of Sámi languages? 3) What kinds of
resources do the new speakers use in their everyday lives when transmitting a Sámi
language to their children as new speakers?
My position as researcher makes me both outsider and insider in relation to the
issue. I am a Finn, born in central Finland, and speak Finnish as my mother tongue.
I have ended up living in Inari and learned the Inari Sámi and North Sámi languages –
through somewhat similar, intensive language studies that I am now researching. I
have also had the chance to immerse my own children in the Inari Sámi language
nest and later in the Inari Sámi-medium education.

LOSING AND TAKING BACK LANGUAGES

In sociolinguistic tradition, the intergenerational transmission of a language is widely
considered the most essential factor of the vitality of a language (e.g. Fishman 1991;
UNESCO 2003). It is the process by which children acquire the language of their
community from the previous generation(s), usually their own parents. With lan-
guage endangerment, on the other hand, a language becomes marginalized, often
stigmatized, and sometimes made illegal to speak. Its functions and prestige decrease.
Authorities may recommend, and sometimes even insist, that parents no longer speak
a language, but quite often they are just silently supposed to shift to a dominant
language with their children, allegedly for the best interests of the child. In societies
where institutional education plays an essential role, parents’ language choices are
usually closely linked to the language politics enforced in educational settings.
Because of interrupted language transmission, children often grow up not speak-
ing one of the languages of their family and community. This group is sometimes
called a ‘lost generation’ (Olthuis et al. 2013). The term does not always refer to a
specifc generation, but to a heterogeneous group of people of different generations.
A lost generation may consist of people with absolutely no language skills, but it can
also include people with various receptive language skills or a type of psychological
barrier towards speaking the language (for more on the variation among and termi-
nology of different speakers, see Pasanen 2015, 40–41, 163–164.) With this term,
I refer to Sámi individuals of any age who did not acquire a Sámi language in their
early childhood from the previous generation(s).
Intergenerational language transmission is a critical issue in all Sámi communities,
but especially in those where the transmission process was totally interrupted. This
is the case among the Inari and Skolt Sámi people. Finnish replaced Inari Sámi as a
medium of communication with small children quite extensively in the 1950s, and
few people born in the 1960s actively acquired the language. This process continued –
with two families of Inari Sámi language activists constituting an exception – until
the frst language nests were established in 1997, and the reversing language shift
began. Parental efforts at reclaiming Inari Sámi as a home language have strengthened

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 — A n n i k a Pa s a n e n —

since 2009, when intensive language education for adults frst began (Pasanen 2015;
Olthuis et al. 2013).
In the Skolt Sámi community, wide language shift in families took place some-
what later. The function and prestige of the language had weakened right after
the World War II, when the Skolt Sámi people were resettled in new areas, namely
several villages in the municipality of Inari (see Magnani; and Jouste in this vol-
ume). Transmission of the Skolt Sámi language had been interrupted in the villages
of Keväjärvi and Nellim earlier than in Sevettijärvi, where the language was still
spoken to many children in the 1970s, but not much so in the 1980s. However, a
new generation of speakers has emerged since language nest activities frst began in
Sevettijärvi in 1997 and in 2008 in Ivalo (Aikio-Puoskari 2016, 28–29). Intensive
language education for adults began in 2012, which has increased the use of Skolt
Sámi with small children.
Intergenerational transmission of the North Sámi language has never fully
stopped. In Finland, a quite rapid and radical language shift took place, especially
in the community of Vuotso, beginning in the 1950s, as Aikio (1988) points out.
In the municipalities of Inari, Enontekiö and Utsjoki as well, the transmission
of North Sámi within many families stopped while it remained vital and strong
in many other families. North Sámi has signifcantly more speakers in Norway,
Sweden and Finland than do Inari and Skolt Sámi, both of which are spoken
mostly in the municipality of Inari. Hence, the prerequisite for revitalization
emerged much earlier and with more resources for the North Sámi language.
Nowadays, there are both vital speech areas for North Sámi and a growing need
for language revitalization.
The Sámi Education Institute in Inari has arranged one-year, full-time stud-
ies of Sámi language and culture in all three languages. North Sámi has been
taught intensively since the 1990s, and in its current form of one academic year
since 1999. Inari Sámi was frst taught for an intensive period of fve months
in the spring of 1999. The frst full-year educational programme was organized
in 2009–2010 by the Giellagas Institute at the University of Oulu, which has
nation-wide responsibility for studies and research in Sámi language and culture.
Co-organizers of the programme include the Sámi Education Institute and the
Association of the Inari Sámi Language. Beginning in 2011, intensive studies
in Inari Sámi have been arranged by the Sámi Education Institute. Skolt Sámi
became a part of the Institute’s curriculum in 2012 (Olthuis et al. 2013; Aikio-
Puoskari 2016, 52–56).
There are also other ways to take a Sámi language into use as an adult: Learning
the language in short courses or via distant education or learning it on one’s own and
through practice. In addition, language immersion, Sámi-medium basic education,
the development of alternative forms of language instruction and community-based
revitalization efforts are all resulting in new speakers among various age groups. A
holistic language learning method Válddán giellan ruovttoluotta (Taking back my
language) has been created and applied by the Isak Saba Language Centre in Nesseby,
Norway. Juuso (2009) introduces this idea of a specifc language course intended for
Sámi people with barriers to speaking Sámi because of, for instance, stigmatizing
attitudes, racism, traumatic childhood memories or a lack of self-esteem (see also

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 — ‘It should be her language’ —

Aikio-Puoskari 2016, 15–17; about stigmatizing attitudes in the Inari region, see
Junka-Aikio in this volume).

RESEARCHING NEW SPEAKERS

Ó Murchadha et al. (2018, 1–8) have analyzed the concept of a ‘new speaker,’ refer-
ring to the fact that as long as there have been contacts between different speech
communities, there have been new speakers of languages. On the other hand, on
a broader level, new speakers of minority languages are quite a recent phenom-
enon. That is because reversing language shift has been going on among numer-
ous Indigenous Peoples and minority groups typically for a few decades. Reversing
language shift (see Fishman 1991; Huss 1999) can be regarded as a counterforce to
linguistic assimilation. It refers to processes of resisting the loss of Indigenous and
minoritized languages – taking back, strengthening and reviving endangered lan-
guages. Reversing language shift means a change in attitudes, prestige and interests
linked to a minority language, and thereby the conditions for minority language
learning also increase outside the home, in institutional settings. Typically, new
speakers emerge through education, like immersion programmes or adult language
courses (O’Rourke et al. 2015).
The phenomenon of new speakers has received attention, especially in the
research on emancipating and reviving minority languages in Europe, like Basque,
Catalan and Irish (O’Rourke et al. 2015). New speakers of Sámi languages have
been researched to some extent, even if mostly not within the framework of new
speaker research. My study is closely linked to the work of Olthuis et al. (2013),
who studied the frst intensive adult education programme offered in the Inari Sámi
language. Jonsson and Rosenfors (2017) have considered the issue of new speakers
in their article on the language repertoire, identity and learning process of a young
Sámi woman named Elle. Sarivaara (2012) paid attention to the phenomenon of
new speakers in her doctoral thesis, which concerns a group that she calls non-status
Sámi, who have learned and taken a Sámi language into use. Mustonen (2017) has
studied language traumas among speakers of Sámi languages, including new speak-
ers. New speakers of North Sámi in two coastal Sámi areas, Nesseby and Kåfjord,
served as a research topic for Rasmus (2019). In general, the endangerment and revi-
talization of Sámi languages have been discussed in many studies (e.g. Aikio 1988;
Huss 1999; Sarivaara 2012; Rasmussen 2013; Olthuis et al. 2013; Pasanen 2015;
Äärelä 2016; Aikio-Puoskari 2016).
This chapter draws from the analysis based on quantitative survey data and
qualitative interview data collected in 2017 from new speakers of Sámi languages.
The survey1 was addressed to people who had studied Inari Sámi, North Sámi or
Skolt Sámi in the form of year-long intensive studies during a certain period. In the
case of Inari Sámi, the research period was 2009–2016, while in the case of North
Sámi it was 2011–2016 and for Skolt Sámi 2012–2016. After the survey, I inter-
viewed2 teachers, former teachers and former students of the intensive education
of each Sámi language. This chapter concentrates on fve former students, three of
whom learned Inari Sámi; one was a speaker of North Sámi and one a speaker of
Skolt Sámi.3

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 — A n n i k a Pa s a n e n —

A YEAR WITH A SÁMI LANGUAGE – FOR WHOM

AND WHY?
Who are the new speakers of Sámi languages in Finland? Where do they come
from, and what has led them to spend a whole year of their life learning Sámi?
The 85 survey respondents comprise a quite heterogeneous group when it comes to
their ages and educational backgrounds. The most common birth decade was the
1980s, and the most common education level was a lower university degree. The one
exceptional background factor, however, was gender: 85% of the respondents were
women and only 15% men (other forms of gender not reported). This distribution
was in line with the whole target group, 133 people, so the results had nothing to do
with women being more eager to respond. This might not be a surprise for anyone
knowing the Sámi world: Women form a large majority of all institutional profes-
sions linked to Sámi language and culture. According to my interview data, both
practical reasons (related to, for example, livelihoods) and cultural, ideological and
emotional factors explain the situation (see also Aikio 1988, 312).
Survey respondents were asked about the ethnic group that they primarily iden-
tify with. Of the 85 respondents, 38 reported Finnish as their primary ethnic iden-
tifcation, whereas 32 identifed primarily as Sámi. The remaining 15 did not want
to specify their primary identifcation or else reported an alternative ethnic identity.
Since the question had to do with identity, it is not possible to determine how the
respondents compare with the whole target group. According to the interviewed
teachers of all three languages, usually both Sámi and non-Sámi people participate
in the education, but the distribution varies from year to year. Overall, the propor-
tion of non-Sámi people (mostly, but not only, Finns) among new speakers of the
Sámi languages must be considered substantial. My study on the revitalization of the
Inari Sámi language (Pasanen 2015) shows that during the approximately 20 years
of revitalization efforts, Inari Sámi has become a prestige language at the local level.
Positive development of Sámi languages and a growing need for them in the labour
market have increased interest in language studies among both the Sámi themselves
and the Finnish population living in the area.
Why have people chosen to spend one year studying Sámi? A multiple-choice
question inquired as to people’s motives for studying it, and the respondents could
choose one or more options. The most common response for language learning was
the desire to reclaim one’s own language or heritage language (45 respondents). This
leads to the conclusion that some of the 15 respondents who did not report a Sámi
or Finnish identity also considered Sámi language either their own language or a her-
itage language. The next most cited alternatives were expanding labour market pros-
pects (36 respondents), a general interest in language (34 respondents) and the desire
to support the Sámi-speaking community (31 respondents). The Sámi in Finland
have reached a stage that many Indigenous Peoples and minorities around the world
can only dream of: Knowing Sámi language is clearly an advantage in the labour
market. This, of course, is relevant mostly in the Sámi domicile area and defnitely
not in all felds. However, at least in the felds of media, healthcare and education,
persons with Sámi language skills have better employment prospects, not to mention
jobs directly linked to language and language planning. This is partly because the
Sámi Language Act obligates national and regional authorities to organize services

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in Sámi languages in the domicile area (about Sámi administrative areas in Sweden,
see Eriksson in this volume).
I have chosen the fve interviewees discussed in this chapter based on their lan-
guage choice with their children. They are not intended to represent the whole target
group. They are all younger parents with small children, and they have started to
use language more actively than on average. On the other hand, they do somewhat
refect the target group at a more focused level. One of them is male, and the other
four are women. Their educational background is mainly at the level of a lower
university degree or vocational education. Some are Sámi, and the others are of
non-Sámi origin. All acquired Finnish in early childhood. For the Sámi interviewees,
the main motivation for attending the intensive education of Sámi language was to
learn the language of their family. For the non-Sámi interviewees, it was all about
the children: They wanted their children to learn the Sámi language another parent
was unable to transmit. The one remaining person wanted to study a Sámi language
because of a Sámi spouse, and in addition, it seemed to them a nice change of scenery
and a break from work.

SÁMI LANGUAGE AT HOME

Of the 85 persons who responded to the 2017 survey, 51 persons had children.
Twenty-nine of them reported that learning a Sámi language had increased
their use of it with children to some extent, while ten respondents reported
a considerable increase in language use: Sámi had become a regular home
language with their children. The five interviewees described in this chapter
belong to this latter group. Three interviewees had learned Inari Sámi, one
North and one Skolt Sámi. Two of the five are Sámi, one of whom has a Sámi
spouse and the other a non-Sámi spouse, with neither of them speaking Sámi.
The remaining three interviewees are non-Sámi persons, each of whom has
a Sámi spouse. The spouses know Sámi at varying levels, but they do not
speak it actively with their children. This means that in all five families, the
new speakers of Sámi are responsible for transmitting the language to the
children. In the following analysis, I will discuss their language choices and
practices. I focus on their decision to choose a Sámi language, their feelings
related to mixed messages about their role as Sámi-speaking parents and the
daily resources supporting their language transmission.

Jis mun jiem tom poorgâ, te kii tom parga? (If I don’t do it, then
who will?) - The decision and the hesitations
How did the interviewees make the decision to start speaking Sámi with their chil-
dren? Two of the fve already had children when they started to study Sámi, while
three of them had become parents after taking part in the language education pro-
gramme. The two who were already parents decided to learn a Sámi language out of
a concrete need to transmit the language to their children. Early childhood education
in Sámi language played an important role in both these cases. That is where the
language acquisition of the children started, and that is what encouraged the parents
to learn Sámi.

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AP: Mon muddoost talle šoodâi tunjin mielâ oppâđ sämikielâ?

(At what stage did you then feel like learning the Sámi language?)
NN: No, talle ko šoodâi vuosmuš pärni. Tego tot lâi kuittâg suu kielâ, tâi kolgâččij
leđe suu kielâ, mii lii suu eejist lappum, te kal tot talle lâi.
(Well, when the frst child was born. Like, it was her language anyway, or should
be her language that her father had lost, so that was it.)
Ja sitä kautta se tuli sitten, että kyllä mun pittää nyt, että pystyy tukemaan lapsia –
että pitäähän minun pystyä kommunikoimaan niitten kanssa ja auttaa läksyissä
ja kaikkee, että jos sille tielle kerran mennään.
(And that’s how I got the thought that I have to be able to support the children –
that I have to be able to communicate with them and help [them] with their home-
work and so on, if we are really going down that road.)

Those who learned the language before becoming parents were in a somewhat
different position when choosing the family language. One of them felt that the
decision was easy to make. Another had already planned to speak Sámi to his chil-
dren in the future when he applied for the language education programme. The third
considered the choice from many points of view and saw it not only as a personal
choice but also as a broader choice for the community.

Muu mielâst tot lâi aaibâs čielgâs. – jiem mun ubâ uáinám tast eres muulsâiävtu
ko tom. Mut tom kolgim meridiđ, et mun koolgâm tállân algâttiđ, jiemge pyevti
toohâđ nuuvt, et mun vuárdám veháš ääigi, et vistig sáárnum sunjin suomâkielâ.
(For me, it was totally clear – I didn’t see any other option. But I had to decide
that I have to start it right away; I cannot keep waiting a little, and then start
speaking Finnish to him in the beginning.)
Se oli oikeestaan aika selvä juttu aluksi, että silloin kun minä hakeuduinkin
siihen koulutukseen, niin se oli mulla myös ajatuksena että sitten joskus – sitten,
kun on omia lapsia, niin voisin puhua niille saamea.
(It was actually quite clear at the beginning, already when I applied for the
education programme; I had the thought that some day – when having children,
I could speak Sámi to them.)
Feeriim, et tot tego kenigât tot kielâtáiđu toos, et tot lii pággu meiddei. Veikâ
tiettim, et – ličij nuuvt älkkee tuše kevttiđ ubâpaje suomâkielâ. Mut arvâlim, et
tot älkkeevuotâ lii kenski váhá hyenees suijâ orroođ keevtihánnáá tom.
(I feel that knowing the language obligates you to that [speaking it]: it’s also
an imperative. Even if I knew that – it would be so easy to use only Finnish. But
I regarded its very easiness as a little bit of a bad reason not to use it [the Sámi
language])
Mun vissâ nuuvt tom smiettim, et jis mun jiem tom poorgâ, te kii tom talle
parga. – Et jis mungin jiem, kote lijjim kuittâg jo oovtâ ive masa lamaš pargoost
já hárjánâm viehâ ennuv kuittâg jo sámástiđ jyehi peeivi, te – jis taat ij tuhhii
toos, taat kielâtáiđu, te mii talle tohhee.
(I must have thought [about] it, like, if I don’t do it, then who will. – If not
me, having worked for almost one year [in the Sámi language] and gotten used
to speaking Sámi every day, so – if this is not good enough, these language skills,
then what is.)

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One of the interviewees had chosen to speak both Sámi and Finnish with the chil-
dren, depending on the situation, mood and topic. Others reported having chosen
to speak only Sámi language and not Finnish. Some noted that they have never, for
instance, read children’s books in Finnish, choosing instead to translate Finnish text
into Sámi or else just read Sámi books. One interviewee is reportedly still working
out the daily language choices with the child.

Joo ei mulloo mitään linjaa, mie puhun aivan sekasin [nauraa]. – Se menee
ihan luonnostaan, emmie ota stressiä semmosesta. Mitä mie osaan, niin puhun
saameksi, ja mitä en osaa, ni suomeksi, ja viesti menee perille.
(Yeah, I don’t have any line; I often mix the languages [laughs]. – It goes just
naturally; I don’t stress out over it. When I can, I speak in Sámi, and when I
can’t, in Finnish, and the message gets through.)
Jiem sáárnu suomâkielâ párnáiguin, jiem Oulust, jiem Avelist käävpist, jiem kosten.
(I don’t speak Finnish with the kids, not in Oulu, not in the shop in Ivalo, not
anywhere.)
Mutta en tiiä, en minä sitten toisaalta haluais lukea suomenkielisiä kir-
joja. Suomenkielisiä lauluja minä oon kyllä laulanu jonku verran, että minä
oon sitte siinä tehny myönnytyksen, ku minusta on mukava laulaa kuitenki.
Niin, en tiiä.
(But I don’t know; on the other hand, I wouldn’t like to read books in Finnish.
Some Finnish songs I have sung, that’s a concession I have made, ’cause I like
singing. Yeah, I don’t know.)

Speaking a language that one is still learning in such an intensive relationship is not
easy. There is too little support, not enough children’s material in Sámi, not enough
of so many things, and then there is the constant competition with the dominant
language that is heard and spoken everywhere. All fve informants described hav-
ing mixed emotions and a sense of being inadequate to the task of speaking Sámi
with the child. A lack of vocabulary linked to small children and family life was a
limitation expressed by all the interviewees, as well as hesitations about whether
such an effort is rational or not – at least at the beginning. The role of language
police in the family is not always the nicest one.

Ko must šoodâi tot [páárnáš] te – ij must lamaš haajâgin, et moh toh sáneh láá,
et mun kolgim nuurrâđ toid kuuloold já kolgim opâttâllâđ toid saanijd. Mast
mun tiettim, et mii lii ‘röyhtäistä’ tâi ‘röyhtäyttää’?
(When [the child] was born, so – I had no clue about those words, so I had
to compile them little by little and I had to learn those words. How did I know,
what is ‘belch’ or ‘burp’?)
Semmoset arkiasiat ja vauvanhoitoon liittyvät asiat ja sellaset, niin ei mulla
ollu mitään tietoa niistä sanoista, että mikä on joku tutti ja vaippa ja vaihtaa
vaippa.
(Kind of everyday issues, topics related to baby care and so on, I didn’t know
those words at all, like, what is, let’s say,‘pacifer’ or ‘diaper’ or ‘change a diaper.’)
Ko tot páárnáš ij vala sáárnu maiden já tun koolgah ubâpaje ohtuunâd
sárnuđ, te kal tot lii, kal tot oro, et ij tast lah jiermi ollágin.

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(When the child doesn’t speak anything yet and you just have to talk alone, it
is really, it feels like there is no sense at all.)
Uáli kuhháá tast lii uážžum monologi toollâđ, nuuvtko sämikielân. Mun lam
smiettâm talle aalgâst, et uáppá-uvsun tot maiden vâi ij. Ko ij pyevti tiettiđ, ko ij kuulâ.
(You have kept a monologue of your own for quite some time, like, in the Sámi
language. In the beginning, I have wondered whether he is learning anything or
not. ’Cause you can’t know, ’cause you don’t hear.)
Joskus tosiaan niinku oikeen ärsyttää, että antaapa olla niinku vähäksi aikaa.
Et jos mä oon ainut, joka on kielipolisiina koko ajan, niin se on aika raskas
rooli, kyllä siihenki niinku väsyy ja palaa loppuun. Ja sitte sitä taas kasaa ne
energiansa jossain vaiheessa ja taas innostuu niinku enemmän käyttämään.
(Sometimes it really irritates you, like, let it be for a while. ’Cause if I’m the only
one who is constantly acting as the language police, it’s quite a heavy role, you do
get tired of it and burned out. And then you pull your energies back together at
some point and once again brace yourself to use [the Sámi language] more.)

Se tunnekieliasia, mistä puhutaan paljon. (That issue of the language

of attachment that is often talked about) – About the legitimacy of
transmitting a non-native language
One person in particular talked about the challenges that she encountered during
pregnancy, when she had already decided to start speaking Sámi with the child. In
both offcial and private contexts, she was advised to speak her frst language – it
would be in the best interest of the child. Some, however, did support her decision,
and she did not give up. During the interview, she reported being happy with that
decision. How would she ever have lived with the decision to not transmit the Sámi
language to her child?

Sitä minä myös mietin, että mitä [lapsi] sitte ajattelis ite aikuisena. Että jos se
tietäis, että äiti on koko ajan tehny saamen kanssa töitä ja puhunu ja käyttäny,
ois osannu puhua sitä, mutta että miksei se sitte puhunu mulle sitä.
(What I also thought was, how would [the child] himself think about it as an
adult? If he knew that his mother had all the time worked with the Sámi lan-
guage, spoken it and used it, would have been able to speak it, but why didn’t
she then speak it to me?)

Another informant’s relative had given some advice that refects an interesting
attitude towards reviving language. It begs the question, Whose responsibility it is to
transmit and revitalize Sámi languages in the frst place?

Ovdâmerkkân [hyelkki] lâi ton mielâ, et puoh älkkeemus, ko kuohtuuh sárnuv-

ettee suomâkielâ já piejâvettee piervâlân talle.
[For instance, [a relative] regarded it as easiest that you both speak Finnish
and then put [the child] into the language nest.]

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This issue came up in all the interviews. Not all the people around the new
speakers of Sámi languages understand the choice to transmit a language that
one has not learned in childhood and does not know as fuently as the majority
language. New speakers have experienced expressions of wonder and criticism
from friends, relatives and healthcare professionals. One particular term was
often used in this discussion – in Finnish, tunnekieli, the language of attachment.
Parents are supposed to, and encouraged to, transmit the language of attachment
to their children. This recommendation appears often without any attempt to
defne at all what is meant by language of attachment. Further, we are obviously
supposed to have one language of attachment. I consider this discourse part
of a narrow and monolingual-normative understanding of languages. Rampton
(1995), for instance, points out that a person’s connection to a language must be
viewed from many perspectives. The main categories in his model are expertise,
affliation and inheritance. The categories are not necessarily interdependent.
One can identify deeply with and have a strong emotional bond with a language
that has not been inherited at home.
I have dealt with new speaker parents’ concerns regarding discussions
about the language of attachment in all my roles in Sámi communities,
e.g. when working as a language nest coordinator in the Sámi Parliament
in 2018–2019. I regard these attitudes, even official practices, as a crucial
issue in the revitalization of Sámi languages. How many parents have given
up transmitting a Sámi language to their children because of this narrow
idea about the language of attachment? How many Sámi children have
been left without a knowledge of the Sámi language because their parents’
language choice has been questioned? After the Sámi generations advised
to speak Finnish for the children’s sake and the lost generations of the
Sámi, should not a child’s right to speak and have access to a Sámi language
be supported in every possible way by, for instance, healthcare profession-
als? Not all parents have such strong self-confidence as new speakers of
a Sámi language as those interviewed for this research project, those who
have persisted in their decision to speak Sámi and do not believe that their
choice will hinder their child’s development.

AP: Na láá-uv toh kuássin fnnim tuu epidiđ?

(Well, have they ever made you hesitate?)
NN: Jiem mun lah adelâm tom, jiem, jiem. Já mun lam ohtii meridâm, et sáárnum
anarâškielâ, te jiem mun pyevti tom fakkist molsođ, ij, tot ij luhostuu innig.
(I haven’t let it, no, no. Once I’ve made the decision to speak Inari Sámi, I cannot
just suddenly shift it; no, it won’t work out anymore.)
Joo, ij, kal sun čáittá tobdoid, já kal mun lam puáhtám aaibâs čielgâsávt sirdeđ
toid muu tobdoid. Et kal sun máttá toid čäittiđ anarâškielân, máttá rijdâliđ, et
ij tot lah tast kiddâ [povvâst].
(Yeah, no, he expresses his emotions indeed, and I have defnitely been able to
transfer my emotions. He is really able to express those in Inari Sámi, [he is] able
to argue, it’s not depending on that [laughter].)

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Vyerdibâ, já suáitám äijihân (Wait a moment, and I call grandpa) –

Resources of the new speaker parent
All fve parents have encountered challenges and experienced hesitations related
to their language choice. However, what also emerges from the narratives are the
resources they have been able to locate and build on to support their language trans-
mission and their children’s language acquisition. The two interviewees with Sámi
spouses have found strong support from the spouses’ Sámi families.

Onneks meillä on kuuma linja [sukulaiselle], kun se on saamen kielen opettaja,

niin sinne sitten soitellaan, että mikä tämä on.
(Luckily, we have the hot line [to one relative], who is a teacher of the Sámi
language, so we keep calling there asking, what is this?)
AP: Na maht tun talle poorgah, jis jieh tieđe mottoom sääni, mon taarbâšiččih
párnáigijn?
(So, what do you do if you don’t know a word that you would need with the kids?)
NN: Irâttâm karveđ já talle, teikâ maŋgii suáitám njuolgist, et vyerdibâ, já suái-
tám äijihân, et mii taat lii.
(I try to evade, and then, or often I call right away, like wait a moment, and I call
grandpa asking, what is this?)
AP: Naa, te talle njuolgâ linje äijihân?
(So, direct line to grandpa?)
NN: Naa. Jis äijih ij västid, te talle suáitám [nube puárásub ulmui]. Kal toh vás-
tádâsah puátih masa jo ain.
(Yeah. If grandpa doesn’t answer, I call [another elder]. Answers are found
almost every time.)

One of the fve has Sámi-speaking family members of his own. He told them very
clearly that they are expected to speak only Sámi to him and, after the birth of the
child, that they should speak Sámi with the child as well. In the beginning, it was not
easy for everybody. With one close family member, the interviewee had to reportedly
use quite extreme methods.

Tot lâi ohtâ kerdi, ko muoi láin monâmin [saajeest nubán], já ko sun lâi autost, te
mun lijjim, et tääl tust lii pággu sárnuškyettiđ. Já mun tuš palijdim anarâškielân
nuuvt kuhháá, et sun aalgij västidiđ munjin.
(It was once when we were driving [from one place to another], and when he
was in the car, I was like, now you have no other option but to start speaking.
And I just kept speaking Inari Sámi for so long that he started to answer me.)

In this case, the family member considered it already self-evident to only speak Sámi
to the child of the interviewee. Reversing language shift had taken place in the family.
Not all the new speakers, however, have received support from the family. There
may be no Sámi speakers left in the family, or they may live far away. Two inform-
ants especially talked about actively using the new technology, media and tools
of language planning. They reportedly use digital dictionaries and other language
technology applications, they delve into audio archives, and they beneft from

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friends working in the feld of language planning. One mentioned having a friend
who is always willing to translate Finnish children’s songs into Sámi if you just ask.
Another knows how to develop new vocabulary and is used to applying these skills
in family life as well. Altogether, all fve are capable of fnding even the most meagre
of resources to help with and enrich their daily language transmission activities.
One additional resource is that of peer support – other new speakers ‘struggling
with the same issue.’

Siellä nää sukulaiset taistelee ihan saman homman kanssa, niin siellon mukava,
voi puhua huonoa saamea ihan reilusti [nauraa].
(These relatives there are struggling with the same issue, and it’s so nice there,
you can speak bad Sámi just openly [laughs].)

Despite criticism and the challenges they have faced, all fve new speakers of a Sámi
language that I interviewed reported being happy with their decision to transmit
Sámi to their children. They enjoy the moments when they see and hear the results
of their efforts. There are also reasons for satisfaction on a deeper level, morally, for
the sake of the community and for the future of the child.

INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF THE SÁMI

LANGUAGES IN THE FUTURE: WHAT IS NEEDED?
In this chapter, I have discussed the backgrounds, motivation, choices, challenges
and resources of a constantly growing speaker group – a group that, in the Sámi
world, is both visible and invisible at the same time. My research draws a picture
of persons with strong motivation to learn and transmit Sámi language and the
conscious language choices underpinning such a desire. They face various challenges
with respect to daily language transmission and also in relation to acceptance by
other people. However, these speakers also have a strong capacity to seek out and
build resources supporting Sámi language use in their families.
The phenomenon of learning and taking the Sámi languages into use at an adult
age will obviously continue in all Sámi communities. Despite the strengthening lan-
guage revitalization, the dilemma of a lost generation still emerges as a tragedy on
the individual and collective levels. Recreation of the lost generation will take many
generations, and reclaiming Sámi languages should be understood as a constant need
and a linguistic right of the Sámi people. There are various ways to become a new
speaker of a Sámi language. In the form of one-year intensive studies, it has been
supported for several decades in the case of North Sámi, and in the case of the other
two Sámi languages for about ten years. However, we still do not know much about
new speakers of Sámi. ‘New speakerness’ is a sensitive issue, one that might well
be ideologically and also politically loaded (Sarivaara 2012). New speakers of dif-
ferent Sámi languages have very different experiences in relation to the attitudes of
native speakers and the possibilities for language use after completing their educa-
tion (Pasanen 2019). All this makes it a question that simply cannot be ignored in
research on the sociology of the Sámi languages. In future research, I want to pay
more attention to the language ideologies of the new speakers and the attitudes of

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the native speakers towards the new speakers, as well as younger new speakers who
have learned Sámi languages through language immersion or instruction.
At best, research can help create more ways to support new speaker parents. On
the basis of my research, support is needed, for instance, a) in the field of public
healthcare, most of all in maternity and child health clinics (in Finnish, äitiys- ja
lastenneuvola)4; b) as peer support; and c) in the form of children’s material in Sámi
languages. The parents in my data proved quite realistic in their stated desires. They
know that Sámi-speaking professionals are not and will not be available everywhere.
An elementary understanding of the linguistic situation and needs of the Sámi people
would be a step forward.

Joo, minusta neuvolassa pitäis tarjota jotakin semmosta, että siellä enemmän
kannustettais siihen saamen kielen puhumiseen. – Ettei siitä tulis semmosta
hankalaa, vähän niin kuin tabua, että siitä ei sitte uskalla puhua siellä. Että sii-
hen kannustettais ja että siellä tosiaan ois niitä materiaaleja myös saameksi. Ja
se nyt tietenki on hankala vaatimus, että ois saamenkielistä palvelua sieltä, että
ois saamenkielisiä terveydenhoitajia, mutta sehän ois ihan täydellistä, jos ois.
(Yeah, I think there should be something like that offered in the maternity
and child health clinics so they would be more encouraging toward speaking
Sámi. – That it wouldn’t get awkward, like a taboo, that you don’t dare talk
about it. That they would encourage you and that they would have those mate-
rials in Sámi, too. And, of course, it’s a difficult demand that they would have
services available in the Sámi language, Sámi-speaking nurses, but if they had
[them], that would be just perfect.)

In the light of assimilation history and the current sociolinguistic reality of the Sámi,
new speakers of Sámi languages should be seen as normal speakers. New and native
speakers should not be regarded as different categories of speakers. Many first-lan-
guage speakers struggle with the same issues as new speakers – a lack of Sámi-
speaking networks, insufficient input for the children, weak implementation of the
language rights, personal feelings of inadequacy and so forth. All types of speakers
need more cultural products and community-based activities in Sámi languages and
possibilities to develop their language skills. All that is strengthening Sámi languages
and the language rights of native speakers is also good for new speakers, and what-
ever support new speakers receive is also good for native speakers.
That being said, new speaker parents do have one very important special need: The
message from the Sámi community, and also the entire society, that speaking and trans-
mitting a Sámi language as a second-language speaker is accepted and supported.
There is much still to do for developing conditions in which all Sámi-speaking
parents could consider transmission of a Sámi language possible. Not every new
speaker parent will transmit a Sámi language to the next generation, but then neither
do all first-language speakers. People differ in terms of how much effort they are
able and willing to put into a language that will always demand more effort than
the dominant language. In addition, people struggling with the trauma of language
loss – on either an individual or a societal level – have very different survival strate-
gies. The intergenerational transmission of Sámi languages is a political, societal and
cultural issue, but at the same time, it is a very private issue, one linked to the deepest

442
 — ‘It should be her language’ —

emotions and needs of an individual. One interviewee refected this idea quite con-
cretely when explaining what gives her strength to speak Sámi with her child. After
describing beautifully the role of her closest family and friends, she paused and
added one more thing – her own feelings about doing it right.

Varmaan just se oma omatunto tai sellanen. Että se ois itelle sitte aika iso juttu,
jos ei oiskaan siirtäny sitä.
(It’s probably my own conscience or something. That it would be quite a big
issue for me if I hadn’t transmitted it.)

NOTES
1 The electronic questionnaire resulted in 85 responses altogether. Of the 85 responses, 40
came from students of Inari Sámi, 31 from students of North Sámi and 14 from students of
Skolt Sámi. Out of the whole target group of 133 students, the percentage of responses was
64%. The survey included three thematic components: 1) the backgrounds of the students
and their motivations for language learning, 2) the students’ experiences throughout the
education year and language-learning process, and 3) the impact of language learning, use
of a Sámi language in different domains and identifying with the speech community.
2 Interviews with the new speakers were semi-structured thematic interviews. They were
done in Inari Sámi and in Finnish, depending on the wishes and the language repertoire
of the interviewees, as well as on the fact that I do not speak Skolt Sámi. For the sake of
anonymity, I refer to the fve people only as interviewees, informants or new speakers.
Imaginary names, initials or codes are not used, so the different quotations from a certain
interviewee cannot be connected as an entity. In the interview excerpts, AP refers to me
and NN to the interviewee. Whenever possible, I refer to male and female interviewees as
well as to their spouses and children by a male or female pronoun at random. Naturally, I
have deleted proper nouns and other recognizable information in the quotations. However,
the quotations are introduced both in the original language and in English. That weakens
anonymity, but on the other hand, it highlights more clearly the voices of the people central
to this study.
3 The imbalance in numbers is caused by the fact that especially former students of Inari
Sámi had reported on their use of the Sámi language with their children, and they were
also the most positive about being interviewed. Because of this imbalance and the small
number of informants in general, my approach in this chapter is not comparative. I do not
pay attention to the differences between Sámi languages as I have somewhat done in my
previous work (Pasanen 2018, 2019).
4 These healthcare clinics play an important role in the life of pregnant women, their families
and children under school age in Finland. As part of the free national public healthcare sys-
tem, these clinics offer rather intensive consultation and monitoring, which reaches almost
100% of pregnant women and babies. In the Sámi context, these clinics are a potential
discussion forum for language issues and naturally a place where the choice to transmit a
Sámi language should be supported.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

L Á D J O G A H P I R R E M AT R I AT E D
Decolonization of the Sámi women’s hat of pride


Eeva-Kristiina Nylander

INTRODUCTION
On 6 December 2017, Finland celebrated 100 years of independence, and the Finnish
president hosted the annual ball at the presidential residence. One of the guests was
Sámi visual artist Outi Pieski. Dressed in her gákti,1 a Sámi dress, she chose not to
wear a current hat but a ládjogahpir, a striking hat with a distinctive appearance,
worn by the Sámi women over 100 years ago (for more about gákti, see Magga,
S.-M. in this volume). When Pieski was seen on television shaking hands with the
president, her Facebook feed2 was overwhelmed with positive comments from Sámi
women who commented:

Warrior princess Outi! I received so much power from you! (Pirita Näkkäläjärvi).
I yoiked! Our great-great-grandmother’s jewel antler (with heart emoji) (Åsá
Márgget Anti).
I am crying out of affection, pride, and gratefulness! Wonderful Outi, wonderful
foremothers (Heidi Hannele Vuomajoki).

It became apparent that her choice to wear the ládjogahpir – a broken tradition to be
mostly found in historical stories and ethnographic collections – had clearly awoken
strong emotions among Sámi women, but why?
In this chapter, I study the ládjogahpir as an historical and a re-remembered,
remade and reused object. What kinds of narratives are linked to the ládjogahpir?
What are the particular meanings attached to it in current Sámi society, and in their
processes of remaking and reusing the ládjogahpir, how do Sámi women engage with
it and discuss it? In this chapter, I wish to bring new angles to the discussion of repa-
triation and revitalization and suggest a decolonizing method of carrying out Sámi
object studies. I suggest the concept of rematriation to depict the process by which
new Sámi ontologies are built through the ládjogahpir.

446 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-31

 — Ládjogahpir rematriated —

Figure 27.1 Outi Pieski in 2017 wearing the ládjogahpir, inspired by the ládjogahpir
worn by her máttaráhku (ancestor) Golle-Gáddjá. “When I go to the presidential residence
wearing ládjogahpir, my ancestor Golle-Gádja meets the President of Finland. I am the
mediator. In the current context, this power hat can also be seen as a symbol of the vitality
of the Sámi woman, that we seek strength for the challenges posed by colonialism, even from
our ancestors. This is a way to show the power we have and the desire to commit to and
cherish our own traditions. This is a clear message. We are still here.”
Source: Photograph by the author.

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 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

BACKGROUND
My ládjogahpir research (published earlier with my former name Harlin) draws from
my collaboration with Sámi visual artist Outi Pieski. Since 2017, we have led the
project Ládjogahpir – Máttaráhku gábágahpir (The Ládjogahpir – Foremothers’ hat
of pride), which combines Sámi research and Sámi art.3 Our project engages sev-
eral felds linking historical and archaeological research, social activism and craftiv-
ism, including the revitalizing of duodji Sámi craft traditions and artistic practices.
Our ládjogahpir project arose from our personal interests, which we realized were
shared by many Sámi women. The central starting point for our project was to return
lost knowledge about Sámi traditions to Sámi society, especially to Sámi women. At
the beginning of our project, we travelled to European archives and museums and
studied, photographed and drew patterns of ládjogahpirs stored far away from their
homes (about the museums and their relation with the Sámi, see Aikio in this volume).
In her art, my partner in this project, Outi Pieski, deals with Indigenous land
rights, relationships with the land and spirituality in the landscape, combining Sámi
duodji with contemporary art traditions. In the project, she studied Sámi women’s
history with the help of crafting and her artwork, but it was concurrently a process
of healing, empowering and getting to know her own history on a deeper level. The
overall results of our project are presented in several international exhibitions and
in a book that bears the name of our project published in North Sámi and English
(see Harlin and Pieski 2020).
To carry out research in dialogue with Sámi women, one part of this dialogue has
taken the form of lectures, which we have given in Sápmi, Helsinki and Oslo. Secondly,
in 2018 and 2019, we arranged ládjogahpir workshops in Deanu šaldi, Ohcejohka
and Kárášjohka, to which we invited Sámi women interested in ládjogahpir to reha-
bilitate the making of the hat. In these workshops, Pieski shared her way of making
the ferra, a part of the ládjogahpir, from felt instead of leather or wood. We used the
original patterns we had drawn in museum collections, and the participants discussed,
planned and worked together as they made their own ládjogahpir. In these workshops,
my role was to share my knowledge related to the hats in museum collections and the
results of our research and also to conduct personal interviews with most of the par-
ticipants.4 The discussions and the interviews in the workshops are the research mate-
rial I have used to analyze the issues this hat represents and how the hat infuences the
makers and users of today. By using their quotations, I have highlighted the voices of
Sámi women and let them express their views on the ládjogahpir.
Although the ládjogahpir is known to the Sámi, our project has made the lád-
jogahpir more visible and has stimulated new discussion. Many Sámi scholars have
noted that the study of Sámi women’s history has been neglected and infuenced by
the common patriarchal bias of ethnographic interpretations of cultural practices
(Balto 1986, 46; Hirvonen 1999, 34–35; Kuokkanen 2006, 259, 2007b, 263, 2007a,
72). Our project introduced the concept and practice of rematriation to the study of
Sámi women’s history.
Rematriation is a fairly new concept which was frst used in Indigenous feminist
thinking and activism, and it has not yet been widely used in the feld of cultural
heritage studies (see, for example, Finbog 2020). South African scholar Bernedette
Muthien describes rematriation as the reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality,

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culture, knowledge and resources, instead of the more patriarchally associated

repatriation. It simply means back to Mother Earth, a return to our origins, to life
and co-creation, rather than patriarchal destruction and colonization, a reclamation
of germination (Muthien in Rotz 2019).
According to scholar Sarah Rotz (2019), rematriation is not limited to righting
past injustices but aims to reconstruct rightful relationships and to a real transforma-
tion of a collective future. The concept also refers to the essential role of Indigenous
women as carriers and reformers of ancestral heritage, thus refecting the natural
laws of reciprocity and equality, given that the sacred feminine is what nourishes
and sustains all living things (see also Angarova and Francour 2020; Newcomb
1995; White, R. 2018). The concept of rematriation has been used also in stud-
ies of Indigenous governance (Kuokkanen 2016, 2019, 118, 123; Maracle 2007,
30), research methodology (Tuck 2011; Tuck and Yang 2018), land repatriation
(Newcomb 1995) and environmental studies (Sepie 2018).
I understand rematriation as a process that starts where repatriation ends, con-
cerning the repatriation of both objects and knowledge. It is something that happens
within an Indigenous community when its members study, discuss and use bodily
movements to remake their objects, or rather, cultural belongings. I see rematriation
as a part of decolonization, even indigenization.
The concept of decolonization has been used in many contexts, but in general, it
means the dismantling of colonialist structures and the effect this has (e.g. McFarlane
and Schabus 2017; Smith 1999). According to Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen
(2018), the decolonization of academia ‘means a critical examination of academic
discourse and knowledge production and taking indigenous research questions, per-
spectives, interests and needs as the starting point for research.’
Indigenization has been defned as a process of making something more native
(United Nations 2020). It can be understood as seeing Indigenous knowledge systems
and ontologies in the centre of practice and seeing them as equal to Western knowl-
edge systems and braiding them together as equal (Antoine et al. 2018). Sámi scholar
Liisa-Rávna Finbog (2020, 52) has defned indigenization as a process ‘whereby the
signifcance and application of Indigenous knowledge is asserted into academia, but
from a place of Indigenous sovereignty, and centred in Indigenous values, practices,
and knowledge systems.’
I fnd the terms ‘decolonization’ and ‘indigenization’ complementary, and in the
case of our project with the ládjogahpir, it has been an attempt to do both. While
working closely with the Sámi women, we have tried to decolonize the way we
work and to indigenize our own way of thinking. Furthermore, by bringing the
Sámi women to the centre, we have promoted Sámi knowledge systems and their
worldview as the most important value. I suggest that this process is not only the
rematriation of the ládjogahpir but also the rematriation of a part of Sámi women’s
history related to this object, the ládjogahpir.

LÁDJOGAHPIR – TALL, BEAUTIFUL AND PROUD

One woman in our workshop beautifully depicted the ládjogahpir resembling ant-
lers, as a crown-like, graceful piece of headwear, saying: ‘We make the hat as the
reindeer antler is: so high, beautiful, and proud, this lifts us up’ (N5).

449
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

Sámi women have for centuries worn diverse headwear as a sign of belong-
ing to an area or family. The ládjogahpir was worn by Sámi women from the
middle part of 18th century until the end of 19th century in the Sámi area on
the coast and inland of Finnmárku, from Guovdageaidnu to Várjját in Norway
and in Ohcejohka, Aanaar and Eanodat in Finland. The ládjogahpirs in museum
collections are made of red, blue, green, black or yellow cloth and decorated in
a certain way, but also according to individual taste. A ládjogahpir consists of a
curved ládju or a ferra, which is a wooden part carved of birch, pine or alder, and
a cloth bonnet, which the ferra, situated at the back of the head and covered with
cloth, is attached to. The lower part of the hat is a tight bonnet that is decorated
with colourful cotton or silk fabric or ribbons. The base of the wooden part is
decorated with a precious gold- or silver-coloured or woven ribbon, which is tied
around the base. The prominent appearance of the ládjogahpir has probably led
to the name ‘horn hat’5 used by surrounding nations. The ládjogahpir has been
a subject of several studies (e.g. Guttorm 2007) that have concentrated on the
origin, history and patterns, and the production of the ládjogahpir (Harlin and
Pieski 2020).
The frst certain description of the ládjogahpir was made by the Italian traveller
Giuseppe Acerbi in the Eanodat area in 1799 (Saarenheimo 1989, 152, 211),
although some drawings made by the priest Knut Leem in the 1760s seem to resem-
ble the ládjogahpir (see Harlin and Pieski 2020). The use of the hat ended in the
Guovdageaidnu area in the frst half of the 19th century, so the pictorial or other
records of the use of the ládjogahpir in that area are rare. At the latest, the ládjogah-
pir was worn in the early 20th century in Várjját, on the eastern cost of Northern
Norway. This is described in written sources by church offcials (e.g. Fellman 1906)
and by travellers (e.g. Wahlenberg 1804, 25–26). The hat has also been illustrated by
many artists (e.g. Campbell 1849–1873) and appeared in many early photographs
(e.g. Tromholt 1886) taken by public servants and scholars (see Harlin and Pieski
2020).
In the northern environment, some headwear is necessary for warmth and
protection. As with all clothing, the hat is also a way to express oneself and to
communicate things such as social status, wealth, religious orientation and even the
state of mind (Demant Hatt 2013, 81–82; Jannok-Porsbo 1999, 21–22).
It is also a means of displaying pride in one’s own roots and foremothers. Some
of the Sámi women expressed this by saying:

Well my daughter says that I must be very proud when I use it. . . . I should be
like Golle-Gáddjá.
(N6)

It is a part that was taken away, that is missing from us. We take it back, it is so
beautiful, I cannot describe it with words.
(N7)

For such a long time, I have wanted a ládjogahpir. . . . I have been waiting for
40 years to get it. . . . My deceased father didn’t want to make a wooden ferra.
(N5)

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For a long time I have wanted to try to make one.”

(N18)

As previous quotes suggest, there are strong emotions towards and admiration of
the appearance of the hat. Simultaneously, there is a longing for something that is
missing, which the ládjogahpir represents. There is a strong desire to make the hat,
and clearly it is not just a hat per se, but it represents something that ‘has enthralled
me for a long time’ (N14). This raises the question of what this ‘something’ is that
makes the hat so special.

LÁDJOGAHPIR – IT RESEMBLED A DEVIL’S HORN

In 2002, a Sámi yoik called Ládjogahpir (Album Máttaráhku Askái/‘In Our Foremother’s
Arms’) was published by Sámi artist Ulla Pirttijärvi-Länsman. In her lyrics, she described
how Sámi women used to have the ládjogahpir, but the vicars considered that the hat
resembled the devil’s horn and had to be thrown into the fre, and so the ládjogahpir was
lost from Sámi women (for the lyrics in English, see Harlin and Pieski 2021).
The period (at the latest 1750–1920) when the ládjogahpir was worn and then
fnally no longer used was an era when strong changes such as border closures, pres-
sure created by settler colonialism and new religious pietistic movements affected
Sámi society (Balto 1986, 46; Kuokkanen 2006, 259, 2007a, 72, 2007b, 263; see
also Olsen in this volume).
Although the ládjogahpir was no longer worn by Sámi women, it did not disappear
from oral histories and folklore. The yoik text written at the beginning of 21st century
by Ulla Pirttijärvi-Länsman represents a strong narrative that is connected to the end
of the use of the headwear. The priests prohibited the ládjogahpir as they thought the
devil lived in the ferra. This led to the burning of the hats. This narrative has inspired
many Sámi artists (e.g. Eira 2015), and it has become a subject of art presentations (see
Harlin and Pieski 2020). The Sami women in our workshops told me the hat was not
the only piece of clothing that was demonized. One interviewee noted:

I have heard they changed the hat of Sámi women, because the devil lived in the
hat and not just in the hat but also on the tips of our shoes.
(N6)

The concept of the devil’s horn and its connection to the devil still lives in Sámi soci-
ety. Another interviewee mentioned this by saying:

Mother also said that the devil lives there. . . . But how do you know, maybe
there are angels living there.
(N9)

This interviewee tried to turn the narrative around and give it a new Christian mean-
ing that opposed the devil by changing the topic to talk about angels instead. At the
same time, she opposed the old ways depicting the Sámi worldview and practices
as the work of the devil in documents written by missionaries and priests (see, for
example, Pollan 2007).

451
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

One of the participants stated:

The hat was not spoken about, they didn’t even want to speak about it.  .  .  .
[T]hey were old people those who wore it. It was as if it was shameful to speak
about it. Once it had been stolen, taken away, it became shameful.
(N6)

The shame the speaker (N6) describes, which was related to ládjogahpir, suggests
that there could have been meanings attached to it that became a reason to label it
as the devil’s horn.
Some other types of Sámi hats have carried and still carry a symbolism related to
female fertility. In Skolt Sámi culture, a certain type of hat worn by girls was a sign
of puberty.6 If this was the case with the ládjogahpir, maybe this was one reason why
such a visible and decorative piece of headwear became loaded with values that were
no longer openly discussed.
The knowledge of the possible symbolism that the ládjogahpir carried is no longer
open to us and can only be speculated on. One of the interviewees voiced this senti-
ment by saying:

In Sápmi, it is often that a part of our heritage is hidden, it disappears, and it is

forgotten.
(N19)

In addition to the devil’s horn narrative, the Sámi knowledge related to the ládjogahpir
seems somewhat forgotten, or silenced at least, in the Deatnu River area.7
The connection between preserving and moving duodji forward includes the
history behind it. As duodji is practised, narratives and Sámi knowledge related to
that particular piece continue living (Guttorm 2001), as one woman who participated
in our workshop noted:

I believe the ládjogahpir is special in many ways, I think it has also had some
sort of a spiritual meaning . . . because we have this tradition of diiddastallat
[narration of spells], the diida [spell] tradition like my mother told me. . . . I
believe that this hat also has this.
(N18)

Presumably diiddat (proverbs) related to ládjogahpir were forsaken once it was no

longer made and worn, and therefore this knowledge was not transferred to new
generations. Maybe this was because the hat was considered shameful, sinful and
unpleasant and was even mocked in religious spheres.
After the ládjogahpir was no longer worn, some Sámi women wore a tight bonnet
called a jollegahpir, a scarf or other kind of headwear. This headwear had a more
modest appearance. There are indications in museum collections that the ládjogah-
pir was remodeled into a jollegahpir (e.g. NM.0070196 in Nordiska Museet), but
this is something that would need further studying. The happenings attached to the
hat also raised angry feelings, as one woman expressed by saying:

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They [the priests and missionaries] cheated our foremothers to take this hat
away, they took away the ferra and it became a jollegahpir.
(N5)

During the 19th century, many new Christian movements spread to Sámi areas.
Laestadianism, a pietistic movement, became infuential in the area where North
Sámi was spoken, especially among reindeer-herding Sámi (see Rydving 1995,
317, 321; see also Olsen in this volume).8 The founder of the movement, Lars Levi
Laestadius (1800–1861), was a Sámi priest and botanist who mastered the Sámi
language and at that time was the vicar of Gárásavvon, which was a signifcant
meeting place for nomadic Sámi. Laestadius succeeded in what the church had not
fully accomplished – that is, the Christianization of Sámi society. He included ele-
ments and concepts from the Sámi cosmology which were familiar to the Sámi and
therefore spoke in a way that was familiar to them. The movement was popular and
meaningful in many ways, as it strengthened the cultural community of Sámi society
and acted as a counterweight against colonial tactics in the North (Lehtola 2012;
Minde 1996, 168–169; Rydving 1995, 321).
Within the Laestadian movement, there was a conception that people should
come to the church in mourning and wear graceless clothing and not use belts.
Women should wear fat and tight headwear for the same reason (Stockfeth 1860).
According to Zeitlizt, the vicar of Čuđegieddi, a young Laestadian Sámi woman
dreamed of the devil inside the hat, and after the Christmas service in 1848 in
Guovdageaidnu, she threw the ferra into the snow, and other women in the congre-
gation followed her (Zordrager 1997, 220). A narrative from Guovdageaidnu says
that the women threw their ferras into a small lake near the church (N25).
Along with the new religious movements, new values and meanings were intro-
duced into Sami society, and they infuenced women’s self-understanding and Sámi
cultural values and practices (e.g. Valkonen 2013, 206). The Sámi way of dressing –
strong colours and accessories such as silver – were considered worldly, fashy and
sinful (Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo 2015; see also Olsen in this volume.). This
probably strongly infuenced the wearing of the ládjogahpir. Women who produced
the clothing and showed their skills by dressing their families were affected by this
social norm. In some cases, the strict rules were not accepted as such, but still, some
ancient understanding and knowledge of the ornaments and their meanings which
were essential in the duodji traditions were forgotten (e.g. Dunfjeld 2006, 38, 41;
Jannok-Porsbo 1999, 18–19).
The frst narrative about the priests, preachers and their actions places the Sámi
women in an underprivileged position, frst inside the Lutheran church and then
inside the Laestadian movement, whereas in the narratives from Guovdageaidnu,
a Sámi woman was the instigator. A counter-narrative suggests that the ládjogahpir
was impractical and therefore abandoned as it lost its original meanings. Possibly,
the ládjogahpir was impractical but still worn for a long time before the fashion
changed. Maybe this happened because of the meanings and symbolism that the lád-
jogahpir and other Sámi headwear carry. Women began to think that the ládjogahpir
was old fashioned and did not represent the values of the Laestadian movement, and
so it was abandoned.

453
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

The narrative of burning the hat is presented in the yoik by Ulla Pirttijärvi-
Länsman and in the flm by Elle-Márjá Eira. This narrative joins together the lád-
jogahpir and the sacred drums that were burned in 1671 in the administrative area
of Kemi Lappmark by vicar Gabriel Tuderus (published in 1773) as they were too
‘large and wide’ to be transported to the capitol, Stockholm.
As a piece of Sámi women’s history in certain areas, the ládjogahpir awakens
multiple feelings, such as sadness and love. Like all pieces of Sámi duodji, it holds a
lot of hard work within it, but also love, as one of the interviewees noted:

It is so violent, isn’t it, to take someone’s clothing and throw it into the fre?
There is so much love that you put into them. . . . that is a huge act of violence
when you throw it into the fre.
(N7)

Regardless of whether it was the Laestadian priests or the women inside the movement
who condemned and rejected the ládjogahpir, it probably went through a process of
monsterization since, after a quite short period of time, it was no longer made or used
(see Latva 2019). Gradually, the narratives and layers of stories became a part of the
cultural burden of the ládjogahpir, and it became known as the devil’s horn.

LÁDJOGAHPIR – A BOND WITH OUR FOREMOTHERS

I have a connection to my ancestors; I am rooted in this earth and I will not fy away.
(N15)

Through its revitalization, the Ládjogahpir has been taken back to once again be a part
of the Sámi dress, the gákti. Gákti is one important part of the Sámi duodji tradition
and is one of the hallmarks of Sámi culture. Gákti is, as Tervaniemi and Magga (2019)
expressed, a message bearer of home and the home region. Duodji, on the other hand,
is a holistic concept. It has a practical signifcance since everything is made for a use.
It contains products that have been made and used in everyday Sámi society, such as
clothes, accessories, vessels, utensils and means of transport. Duodji has made it possible
to survive in the Arctic conditions, and many materials that have been used in duodji are
byproducts of the traditional livelihoods. However, it is also a way of living, of seeing the
world, building a cultural identity and expressing it. It also signals belonging to a family
and the community, ‘but the ládjogahpir is a kind of bond to our foremothers’ (N20).
Duodji is even considered to build a coherency in the Sámi society. It has moved
from generation to generation, and this is the way it is controlled and maintained
by the society (Magga 2012, 2018, 26, 69; Lehtola and Länsman 2012, 19). Even
though the meanings of ládjogahpir have been weakened, it still contains spiritual
aspects based on Sámi cosmology, in which sacred elements are a part of everyday
life and fuctuate through the whole of existence (Dunfjeld 2006; Hansen 2016,
243; Magga 2020). In a nutshell, I understand duodji to be a cultural database for
those who can read it, and it carries the history of the Sámi ancestors, something to
pass on to future generations. One of our interviewees noted this by saying, ‘I am an
elderly person. I will make sure to teach this to my offspring’ (N6).

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 — Ládjogahpir rematriated —

Figure 27.2 Čiske Jovsset-Biret-Hánsa Outi (Outi Pieski) and Elle-Biehtár-Arvo Hanna
(Hanna Helander) in the repatriation exhibition Bååstede in Trondheim 2017 admiring the
ládjogahpir used by their foremother.
Source: Photograph by the author.

Connection to their ancestors was something that many of the women in our
workshops experienced. One noted:

I feel some sort of a stronger bond to my ancestors while I sew this hat. . . .
[A] connection has evolved with my foremothers.
(N21)

455
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

These kinds of emotions have also previously been expressed by Sámi duojárs
(crafters) while they have been working with museum objects (Harlin 2019,
56–60). Studying and sewing the ládjogahpir created a space that made it pos-
sible for some of the participants to ‘travel in a spiritual way to the time of our
ancestors’ (N14).
One of the participants also heard her ancestral mothers in her thoughts,
encouraging her to make the hat decorative, maybe more decorative than her
upbringing and regular duodječalbmi – that is, the way she normally saw duodji to
be vuogas (beautiful, appropriate and usable) – considered normal. She said:

I hear her speaking. . . . She is there on the other side. She says, that’s just it, it
[the ládjogahpir] must be beautiful.
(N6)

It was a moving moment when, during our interview, one of the women said to me,
as tears welled up in her eyes:

My grandmother’s mother just came here. These are not my tears, these are her
tears. . . . she keeps them coming, these tears.
(N8)

She meant that her ancestral mother was crying out of joy, because she was so
pleased to see her making the hat that she had used over a hundred years before.
These comments reveal that many emotions and reactions arise when working with
the ládjogahpir. As my colleague Outi Pieski puts it:

This experience [studying ládjogahpir] has been medicine for me. Duodji has
always been an important help when I have searched connection to my ances-
tors and lost traditions. Duodji is one of the collective ways to deal with the
common painful Sámi colonial history, to revive and get through diffcult times.

(Outi Pieski 2017)

WORKSHOPS – TAKING BACK INDEPENDENT

WOMANHOOD
We take back those things that the assimilation has taken from us. The main
issue is that we do not give up. When we take things back, it is a victory. . . . [I]t
is sad that such an important part of our traditional duodji has been forbidden.
(N4)

This quotation talks about assimilation processes and taking back the ládjogahpir
as a victory over assimilation. It is diffcult to be certain about the status and roles
of Sámi women in the past, since Christianity and Laestadianism have affected Sámi
society for centuries. They have had an infuence on all genders, but the colonial pow-
ers and the patriarchal gender roles they contained affected primarily the position of

456
 — Ládjogahpir rematriated —

women (e.g. Bäckman 1984; Kuokkanen 2007a, 75; 2016, 2008; see also Alakorva
et al.; and Knobblock in this volume). Laestadianism emphasized and added a layer
of female piety and humility to the Christian dualistic notions of women as either
good or evil. Some elements, linked to celebration and joy, such as sexuality, became
a sinful taboo and brought women under a different kind of control (Kuokkanen
2006, 264, 2007c, 80; Paltto 1999, 48, 59, 60; Pollan 2017, 239; see also Kyrölä
in this volume). One participant equated the act of making a ládjogahpir with the
following:

We are taking back independent womanhood, and this awakens strong

feelings.
(N1)

The 32 women who took part in these workshops were of all ages. For us as organ-
izers and for the participants, it was particularly important that different generations
took part in the process, as Sámi learning goes from generation to generation. As one
of member of the younger generation put it, ‘It is good that the older women are also
with us’ (N12). In Sámi culture, as in many Indigenous cultures, elders are respected,
and support from the elders is very important in duodji, as one of our participants
explained: ‘Our generation . . . we have laboured so for all Sámi rights and if we do
not have the courage to make the ládjogahpir visible and use it, then who has the
courage?’ (N19).
For many of those who participated in our workshops, while the main goal was
to make the ládjogahpir, at least equally important seemed to be the process itself.
This was expressed by the participants:

The most important thing for the moment, in addition to the knowledge of
making the ládjogahpir, is that surely, we who have been here will remember
forever that we were here in this workshop together. . . . [W]e have become a
real independent group. . . . [I]t is very important.
(N13)

I am so happy that together we can talk about deeper meanings. . . . [T]his is

our foremothers’ duodji that we should also respect . . . and these discussions
are important and valuable.
(N21)

During our workshops, it became clear that there is a need for safe spaces for
Sámi women to discuss colonial infuences and gender issues in an environment
where they can speak Sámi and act freely, without having to defend their use of
the Sámi language or explain their culture and customs. As one of our partici-
pants noted: ‘This hat binds us together, makes us stronger and gives us, well,
positive expectations, and for sure also a little fear, but not so much.’
(N18)

When the Sámi women came together in our workshop, inherited knowledge, duodji
instructions and narratives about families and old times were shared in the group,

457
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

and the participants were positioned in a kin network. A wide variety of information
was shared, and there was a lot of laughter as different roles were taken. The event
involved humour and even the singing of traditional yoiks. One of the participants
summed this up aptly when she noted,

‘We who have entered this workshop and started to work with the hat, for us it
is somehow sacred’.
(N21)

It is challenging to make and start wearing forgotten duodji like the ládjogahpir again.
The original symbolism, meanings, rules and aesthetics are hidden, perhaps lost, like a
large part of the history of the Sámi women. When working with historical Sámi objects
from museum collections, it is important to return the knowledge that is situated in
diverse institutions and then work collectively and have discussions within society. As
the Sámi women from different generations worked together, using similar materials,
and repeated the same physical movements as their ancestral mothers did, they learned
about the thinking behind the duodji. One noted, ‘I have had that feeling, the feeling
that the ancient Sámi women had’ (N8). Another said:

Through these courses we have now learned . . . it is no longer just in an exhi-
bition, there, inside glass boxes, it has come back to our homes. And that we
produce them with our hands, it is not just that we can see with our eyes but our
whole body feels how we have worked with it and that is why there is a different
connection and a sense of belonging to the ládjogahpir.
(N19)

Working together in the Sámi language has been an empowering and healing
experience, and a new relationship has been built. New meanings have been
intertwined with the ládjogahpir. It is important to gather the fragments of information
on the ládjogahpir, consider and suggest what the old meanings are, but also to notice
the new meanings that occur while making the hat. This process is born from combining
archival and museal information and working with your hands to make a ládjogahpir
from today’s perspective. The meanings probably differ from the original meanings but
are equally important. This process – our project – is what we mean by rematriation.

REMATRIATION OF THE LÁDJOGAHPIR – A STRONG

FEELING OF JOY
The owners of the narratives, histories, patterns, archival material and symbolism
connected to the ládjogahpir are the Sámi women. They are the offspring of the
women who once knew the symbolism and meanings, made the hat, wore it and
fnally stopped wearing it. We may never know the original meanings of the hat and
why the women stopped wearing it. However, the signifcance of the ládjogahpir
emerges in current Sámi oral traditions and cultural expressions. As Sámi artist Nils-
Aslak Valkeapää (in Lehtola 2015, 210) concluded, when old symbols are reim-
ported into living Sámi culture and nature, they can be reread and reinterpreted in

458
 — Ládjogahpir rematriated —

Figure 27.3 Kolonialisttalaš metamorfosa 1852/Colonialist Metamorphosis 1852, mixed

media, 2018, by Outi Pieski. This artwork is inspired by the end of the use of ládjogahpir
and the beginning of the use of jollegahpir. The ferra is cropped away from the hat, and it is
lying on the ground, abandoned.
Source: Photograph by Outi Pieski.

a new light, as new artistic impressions. They receive new meanings, and these two
exist side by side, equally important. Therefore, the process of working with the
ládjogahpir embraces and takes on new meanings, and this can be a positive symbol
of the power and vigour of Sámi women. There are meanings that are empowering
and create a ‘strong feeling of joy’ (N21) and show the will to cherish Sámi culture
and communicate that ‘we are still here’ (about meaning of joy in world-making
practices, see Dankertsen in this volume).
For many of today’s Sámi women, the ládjogahpir symbolizes the strong role of
belonging in an eternal chain of generations and especially encompasses the connec-
tion to their ancestral mothers. This is clearly indicated in the emotions and emanci-
pations raised in the workshops. The revitalization of cultural elements as a part of
the decolonization process raises many emotions – pain, sorrow, even fear, but also
joyfulness and empowerment. It can connect people and enable collective healing
and bring up discussions that have been silenced for a long time.

It was a quite powerful process and it came to your dreams.  .  .  . it followed

you. . . . I do not know how long it will follow.
(N14)

459
 — Eeva-Kristiina Nylander —

Inspired by the journey of the ládjogahpir I have travelled on with the Sámi
women who attended our workshops, I suggest that repatriation alone does not
use the whole potential of the objects that are making their way home after
decades of being in exile and that additional work must be done. It is impor-
tant to notice that cultural belongings such as objects or archive material must
be mobilized for them to become again a crucial part of the source community
and help support cultural memories (Assmann 1995; see also Magnani in this
volume; on world making through the objects, see Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik in
this volume).
In this chapter, I have introduced the concept of rematriation as a process by
which research, knowledge and history are brought together, shared and inter-
twined with Sámi communal crafting. This process combines narratives, memories,
meanings and emotions that are intertwined with these objects today. Through
rematriation these objects can truly be of infuence, and by opening discussions,
they act as mediators in the decolonization processes in Sámi society. They can be
of help when healing colonial wounds and empowering Indigenous Peoples (see
e.g. Simpson 2008, 67–68, 74–75; White, W. 2018), and they can support discus-
sion about diffcult histories.
Here, I have presented one important perspective on why Sámi objects scat-
tered in museums and archives outside Sápmi should be brought back home.
Rematriation could be a Sami way of carrying out object research, and Sámi
museums will naturally become the arena where Sámi societies and returning
objects unite again for future purposes. This poses a challenge to the Sámi muse-
ums; a lot of provenience research must be done since many of the objects lack
adequate contextual information (see Harlin 2019), and Sámi museums will have
to consider their ways of working and making their collections accessible and
fnd suitable ways to work collectively in a healing and supportive atmosphere.
As duojár Anna Stina Svakko said about the objects that return, ‘The items are
silent, but we can make them speak.’

NOTES
1 In this article, I use North Sámi terms, spoken in the area where ládjogahpir was used.
2 Comments on Outi Pieski’s and Pirita Näkkäläjärvi’s Facebook page 6 December 2017,
cited with permission.
3 Our project has been fnanced by personal working grants from The Kone Foundation
(Harlin [Nylander]) and Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Pieski).
4 I conducted my interviews mostly in North Sámi language; only one was done in Finnish
and two in Norwegian. The North Sámi quotes were transcribed by me, and the lan-
guage was checked by translator Arla Magga. I am responsible for the translations into
English.
5 Sarvilakki (FI), Hornlue (NO), Hornmössa (SWE).
6 Personal communication with Skolt Sámi journalist Sara Wesslin in 2019, who gained this
knowledge from her grandmother.
7 People from the Tana River valley and women I interviewed in our workshops.
8 Dunfjeld (2006, 38), Lohi (1997), Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo (2015, 3), Valkonen
(2013, 207).

460
 — Ládjogahpir rematriated —

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Harlin, E.-K. 2018–2019. Interviews with Sámi Women during ládjogahpir workshops.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

S Á M I R E S E A RC H E T H I C S U N D E R
CONSTRUCTION


Anna-Lill Drugge

INTRODUCTION
A lot has happened in terms of addressing ethical issues in relation to Sámi research in
the Nordic context during the past decades. Following international development, in
which the decolonizing endeavour has had a major role in developing Indigenous per-
spectives in research, ethical discussions have also gained increased attention in Sápmi,
both inside and outside scientifc settings. Ethical discussions in a Nordic context have
now turned from being largely neglected or ignored to being both frequent and vivid
in Sámi education and research. These discussions are often related to the theoretical
and methodological standpoints developed within the paradigms of traditional knowl-
edge and Indigenous methodologies, both of which address the need for mainstream
research(ers) to scrutinize historical and scientifcally recognized truths, methods and
norms and call instead for a broadening of the perspective to include Indigenous view-
points as relevant to the research process (Denzin et al. 2008; Smith 2012). This chap-
ter refects on what characterizes recent development on Sámi research ethics in the
Nordic context. The aim of the text is to provide an overview of the direction of both
mainstream and Indigenous development in relation to the feld of Indigenous research
ethics in contemporary Sápmi in general, and the Swedish side of Sápmi in particular,
and to refect on some issues that have emerged along the way, or might emerge in the
future, that call for further conversations and research to take place.

THE BACKGROUND OF RESEARCH ETHICS

Even though a number of international ethical agreements have had a great impact
on how ethical strategies are formulated at a national level, there is no such thing
as an international ethics system that ‘functions for all.’ Instead, the development
of ethical standards for research differs between national contexts and different
research felds and changes over time. Defning what is ethical and what is not
is therefore a challenging task, not least in Indigenous research, and especially in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-32 465

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comparative research projects with scholars who are based in different national con-
texts (Gallagher et al. 2016; Nygård and Saus 2016, 12).
Discussions about the need for ethical guidelines for research gained momen-
tum in Europe after the end of World War II. Ethical regulatory systems, primarily
in medical research, were then formulated through the so-called Nuremberg Code
(1947), consisting of a number of principles divided into three main themes: consent,
harm minimization and the fair distribution of burdens and benefts. The individual
was clearly defned as the primary agent, and the concept of free choice stood out as
the core argument in ethical discourse at the time (Trials of war criminals before the
Nuernberg military tribunals under control council law no. 10: Nuernberg October
1946–April 1949, 1949; West-McGruer 2020). Both the Nuremberg code and later
the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) were clearly created to prevent unjust treatment
and abuse through research. However, the ethical standards developed for research
have functioned better for some than for others, as ‘not all groups have experi-
enced the promised protections evenly’ (West-McGruer 2020, 185). In addition, for
the Indigenous community, ‘the Nuremberg Code came too late, as the history of
research as exploitation was already embedded in European Imperialism leading
into the 20th century’ (Smith 2006, 9).
Although ambitious, the ethical codes of conduct for research that have been
developed around the world tend to fail to address unequal power relations and
their consequences, deriving from historical and contemporary experiences of
colonialism. As Kiri West-McGruer points out:

Ethics are complicated by their positioning in contested hierarchical spaces

where one set of morals and values, which generally refect a colonial world-
view, are prioritised and valorised at the expense of all others. These struggles
of power are further complicated by a history of the codifcation of the western
biomedical model of ethics.
(West-McGruer 2020, 186)

Stemming from the early initiatives to establish ethical standards for research
described here, conversations around research ethics have expanded from issues
within medical research to being incorporated into all research felds. Ethical review
boards and committees have been established all around the world, legislation
around research ethics has been developed, and research ethics is a core and grow-
ing feld of interest in Sápmi on both a national and a European level (Drugge 2017;
General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679; Juutilainen and Heikkilä 2016;
Takala and Häyry 2019).

MAINSTREAM ACADEMIC RESEARCH ETHICS – THE

SWEDISH CASE
As in the other northern countries and many other countries worldwide, researchers
in Sweden are obliged to comply with national and EU legislation concerning research
ethics throughout their research processes, regardless of the subject area or what eth-
nic group the research participants belong to (General Data Protection Regulation
(EU) 2016/679, 2016; Lag (2003, 460); om etikprövning av forskning som avser

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människor Stockholm: Regeringskansliet 2015). However, there are no requirements

or any specifc ethical guidelines for how research on issues that concern the Sámi
people should be conducted. In practice, this means that researchers, postgraduate
students, visiting researchers, postdocs and other active academics lack offcial guide-
lines to which to adhere when evaluating whether their research is ethical if assessed
from an Indigenous perspective. In previous publications on this topic, the lack of
ethical guidelines for Sámi research has been pointed out, advocating for a change in
order to establish tools and methods for researchers’ processes to be ethically sustain-
able (Drugge 2016b, 2017). However, regulatory systems for ethical procedures can
never be a guarantee for adequate ethical behaviour but do imply a certain risk, if the
researcher uses the ethical process as a matter of ‘ticking a box’ rather than actively
striving to act ethically appropriately (West-McGruer 2020).
Despite being aware of the complexity, in the Swedish Sámi research feld, many
researchers who have set out to ‘do things right’ are not necessarily sure about ‘how’
to proceed in doing so. Ethical guidelines from a variety of Indigenous contexts
around the world are used as inspiration or as guiding principles at a general level,
but the local adjustment to Sámi settings has to be done by the individual researchers
themselves, creating a situation in which

[d]eciding what the process of ‘doing things right’ involves is currently left up
to the isolated scholar to determine, inevitably nourishing a range of different
approaches and strategies that could be eminently suitable or, in the worst case
scenario, completely inappropriate.
(Drugge 2016b, 277)

Arguments for ethical processes have, to a great extent, been held on a theoretical
level but not as easily transferred into practice. Due to the absence of ethical guide-
lines for Sámi research, the individual researcher has no other option than to lean
on the general national legislation on research ethics and international guidelines
that are elaborated to ft other Indigenous contexts (Drugge 2016b; Juutilainen and
Heikkilä 2016). Consequently, ‘[t]he current lack of mechanisms specifcally adapted
to meet Sámi-related research standards creates a situation in which ethnically non-
indigenous researchers working with the Sámi can easily be forced into colonising
positions and research projects’ (Boekraad 2016, 9).
Colonial experiences carried by Indigenous populations differ in details depend-
ing on the local context. Therefore, different Indigenous groups have their very own
specifc relation to colonial practices that, to a lesser or greater extent, affect cur-
rent possibilities for engaging in trustworthy relationships with the academy as a
knowledge-producing institution. In Sweden, a complicated history of race biology
research has certainly affected these relations and needs to be highlighted in order
to understand the complexity of Sámi history and research, which will be described
in the following.

THE LEGACY OF RACE BIOLOGY RESEARCH

In the context of Indigenous Peoples, the term ‘research’ has long been associ-
ated with negative experiences of abuse, which have often given the term negative

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connotations. One of the challenges for Indigenous researchers across the world
has therefore been to address this problem and fnd ways to reformulate what
research could and should be, as understood through an Indigenous lens (Chilisa
2011; Denzin et al. 2008; Kuokkanen 2008; Smith 2012; Smith et al. 2016). In
a Sámi context, there are examples of research that has been performed in ethi-
cally doubtful manners throughout history, with race biology research standing
out as particularly problematic. In the 1840s, systematic research on race began
in Sweden with the introduction of the scientifc feld of craniometry, which used
the concepts of ‘long-skulls’ and ‘short-skulls’ to further the idea of superior
(Swedish) and inferior (Sámi) races (Saura 2020). Among the clearest examples
of research-related abuse in the last century against the Sámi were the activities
conducted at the National Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala. The institute
was opened as the frst racial biology institute in the world in 1922 and merged
with Uppsala University in 1958 as the Department of Medical Genetics (Broberg
1995; Lundmark 2002). The founding of the institute had strong political support
and was at the time the only institute of its kind that was fnanced by a govern-
ment. Although it remained the only race biology institute in the Nordic countries,
it served as a model for similar establishments that opened in Europe during the
same period (Saura 2020).
At the Institute of Racial Biology, the aim was to focus on issues related to
racial hygiene, in order to ensure the high quality of what was considered to be
‘the Swedish race.’ Measurements of almost 100,000 Swedes were carried out,
and the results were published in The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation, a
work that was later translated into both Swedish and German. Through the activ-
ities conducted at the National Institute of Racial Biology, a Swedish research
tradition was created which had a great international impact (Broberg 1995;
Lundmark 2002; Saura 2020, Broberg 1995; Hagerman 2015; Lundmark 2002;
Wahlund and Lundborg 1932, 1941).
When speaking about race biology research in Swedish Sápmi, the abuse towards
individual persons is often the focus. However, the consequences of race biology
research are more far-reaching than the individual experience. The ideologies sup-
porting race biology research heavily affected the Swedish state politics towards
the Sámi, leading to a number of political strategies to either isolate and preserve
or assimilate the Sámi population into the majority population. For instance, a
schooling system was implemented with the aim of preserving Sámi authenticity,
and the distribution of land and water rights was directed towards those who were
defned as authentic Sámi by the state. Sámi whom the state defned as the ‘real’
Sámi were those who lived off reindeer herding and led a nomadic lifestyle in the
mountain areas. Sámi who did not live up to this defnition, such as the large group
of Forest Sámi engaged in reindeer herding, fshing and farming, were defned as
‘less’ Sámi, and the general political view was that they should therefore be assimi-
lated into the mainstream Swedish population (Lantto 2000; Mörkenstam 1999;
Sjögren 2010). Consequently, race biology research not only damaged the trust
in research as such but also, by extension, contributed to the creation of tension
between different Sámi groups since some Sámi have been supported by legislation
in preserving their connection to land, water, language, culture and identity while
other Sámi have not.

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THE CHARACTER OF ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR

INDIGENOUS RESEARCH
Given that the majority of research conducted in connection with Indigenous issues
has been carried out by non-Indigenous scholars and has not necessarily benefted
Indigenous groups, ethical guidelines for Indigenous research have been formulated
from the desire that future research be based on respectful relationships between
researchers (regardless of background) and Indigenous Peoples. For guidelines to
be relevant to the Indigenous community, they have been established on the basis
of Indigenous Peoples’ demands, wishes and needs, which are, in turn, built on val-
ues that are considered valid for many Indigenous groups within specifc national
contexts (‘Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research,’ 2020;
Hudson et al. 2010; Canada Research Coordinating Committee 2020; The Tri-
Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans 1998;
Values and ethics: Guidelines for ethical conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander health research 2003). From an Indigenous perspective, research ethics are
not merely institutional regulations but include a more profound focus on building
and maintaining relationships and connectivity:

For indigenous and other marginalised communities, research ethics is, at a very
basic level, about establishing, maintaining, nurturing reciprocal and respectful
relationships, not just among people as individuals, but with people as collec-
tives, as members of communities and with humans who live in and with other
entities in the environment.
(Smith 2006, 10)

Also typical of our time is the growing interest in truth and reconciliation processes,
which, on some occasions, has led to ethical awareness and the construction of
ethical guidelines or strategies for Indigenous research (Kuokkanen 2020; Lindmark
and Sundström 2017; Canada Research Coordinating Committee 2020; Spangen
et al. 2015). In countries that have long-established ethical guidelines for Indigenous
research, it is rarely discussed anymore whether or not these are necessary. In con-
texts in which ethical guidelines for research are absent, however, researchers are
left with insuffcient guidance on how to proceed in an ethically sustainable manner,
which, in turn, leads to varying ethical strategies and insecurity within the research
collective (Drugge 2016b).
On a global level, there are a vast number of ethical guidelines for Indigenous
research. (Some examples are demonstrated in Broderstad 2016; Tunón et al. 2016;
Weijer et al. 1999.) Even though they differ depending on the specifc context in
which they were formulated, there are commonalities in approach and content.
Some of these will be described here, acknowledging that the list is by no means
exhaustive and should therefore be seen as an illustration of the feld, rather than a
complete record.
One basic premise visible in ethical guidelines is that they need to be formulated
from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples themselves. Indigenous Peoples’ representatives
do not necessarily have to do this on their own – there may even be strategic
reasons for including representatives of the majority society in the work process and

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design – but for the guidelines to gain legitimacy and be considered credible by the
Indigenous Peoples themselves, it is crucial that they are designed and established
under Indigenous control of both process and end result (Committee 2020; Eriksen
et al. 2021; Hudson et al. 2010).
There are core concepts that reoccur in ethical guidelines for Indigenous research
on different occasions and in different settings, such as respect, reciprocity, recognition
of rights, responsibility, cultural safety, self-determination, equal status, participation
and mutual benefts (Committee 2020; Kvernmo et al. 2018; Tunón et al. 2016; Weijer
et al. 1999). How these concepts are to be put into practice is manifested through the
elaboration of ethical guidelines, codes of conduct or similar tools in which intentions
are made to translate theoretical standpoints into practical guidance.
Acknowledging and respecting the community (and not focusing merely on the
individual, which is commonly the case in mainstream discourse) are recurrent
themes in Indigenous research ethics. In a Sámi context, lacking focus on the commu-
nity has itself been explained as ‘the result of the Sámi’s ongoing invisibility caused
by the strong belief in integration’ (Nygård and Saus 2016, 669). Recognizing and
including the Indigenous community on both an individual and a collective level is
about shifting the perspective and charging the concept of research with content that
encourages Indigenous Peoples’ development in culturally appropriate ways:

Indigenous People expressed a greater need to set their own research priorities
and to lead their own research. They called for research that directly addresses
issues and concerns tied to community well-being and healing, and that contrib-
utes to sustainable socio-economic development. Nothing about us without us
was often repeated in engagement sessions.
(Committee 2020, 5)

Ethical guidelines for Indigenous research also draw attention to issues of an epis-
temological nature, encouraging alternative research methods to be recognized and
traditional knowledge, Indigenous worldviews and oral traditions to be valued in
the knowledge production process (Hudson et al. 2016; Weijer et al. 1999).
Another key issue is that of consent. Informed consent given by the individual
in an Indigenous community sometimes risks affecting the community in negative
ways. One example of this has been pointed out by McGruer in relation to the
growing feld of research on DNA: ‘When individuals agree for their DNA to be
taken, there is an element of “proxy-consent” happening, where they are also con-
senting on behalf of their entire whānau [extended family)]’ (West-McGruer 2020,
190). Although there are risks with community consent, not least with regard to the
complex issue of representation (who should represent the collective?), the benefts
and importance of collective consent have been considered to outweigh these risks
(Weijer et al. 1999). In order for the research to be meaningful for the Indigenous
Peoples’ collective, however, the research process itself is considered more relevant
than the offcially informed consent (Canada Research Coordinating Committee
2020). In this aspect, the research process as such is understood from its very begin-
ning and well past its offcial end (Eriksen et al. 2021). A very clear example of how
consent is handled in a Finnish Sámi setting is the offcial guiding procedure on
consent of the Sámi, developed by the Sámi Parliament in Finland (Procedure for

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seeking consent for research projects dealing with Sámi cultural heritage and tradi-
tional knowledge, Sámediggi – The Sámi Parliament in Finland, 2019).
Indigenous Peoples around the world share similar experiences of colonialism and
stories of abuse and violations that live on in the collective historical consciousness
even today. Among other things, this has its background in the fact that knowledge
and materials have been collected, confscated or stolen in the name of research and
then documented, saved or used for purposes that are not necessarily in line with
the wishes of Indigenous Peoples (Kuokkanen 2008; Smith 2012). Managing and
documenting collected research material are recurring issues in ethical guidelines
for Indigenous Peoples’ research, in which the importance of holistic approaches is
emphasized. Collected materials of various kinds are valuable as part of a broader
holistic perspective, in which balance between society, man and nature is of great
importance. The call for well-thought-out strategies for how research material is
to be stored and managed in the future in order to avoid conficts which, in turn,
undermine confdence in research is a core issue in contemporary ethical discussions
(‘Etiske retningslinjer og kollektiv samtykke innenfor samisk helseforskning,’ 2019;
Tunón et al. 2016, Carrol et al. 2020).
A piece of recurring criticism from Indigenous Peoples is that researchers tend to col-
lect Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge of various kinds but fail to ‘give back’ to the local
Indigenous community and/or Indigenous communities in general (Eriksen et al. 2021;
Kuokkanen 2008; Smith 2012). For this reason, the issue of dissemination of research
results not only means scientifc publications or conferences but also includes a broader
understanding of how the research can actually be transferred back to the community in
ways that are suitable for the specifc group (Löf and Stinnerbom 2016).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIGENOUS RESEARCH

ETHICS IN SÁPMI
The need for ethics in Sámi research has been the subject of discussion in Sápmi
for several decades. The Nordic countries’ development regarding ethics in Sámi
research has, in turn, been strongly infuenced by international discourse on eth-
ics in Indigenous research, which has gained increasing recognition since the late
1990s. On the Norwegian side in particular, questions about ethics have been high-
lighted as relevant and necessary, and an increasing number of researchers have
drawn attention to the importance of particularly pronounced ethical awareness
in research concerning Sámi issues. Already in connection with the establishment
of the Nordic Sámi Institute in Kautokeino in the mid-1970s, clear demands were
raised that research on Sámi issues be based on Sámi perspectives (Gaski 2013). Alf
Isak Keskitalo’s work ‘Research as an Inter-Ethnic Relation’ laid the foundation for
future discussions on research ethics to take place as he highlighted the problematic
power relations between majority and minority and how these heavily infuenced the
ways in which research was conducted. Keskitalo pointed out the fact that research
was being done ‘on’ the Sámi and pushed for a change in which the Sámi were
responsible for conducting research on themselves – by themselves (Juutilainen and
Heikkilä 2016; Keskitalo 1994). The arguments put forward by Keskitalo were in
many ways similar to those that later gained international recognition through the
work of other Indigenous scholars (for instance, Rigney 2001; Smith 2012).

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The issue of research ethics has been discussed at the Nordic level in later politi-
cal processes as well. As early as 1986, work was initiated to establish a Nordic
Sámi Convention, aiming to defne common rights for the Sámi people in Finland,
Sweden and Norway. In 2005, an expert group delivered a proposal in which
Article 27 highlighted the importance of establishing relevant structures for Sámi
research in which ‘regard shall be paid to the linguistic and cultural conditions in
the Saami society’ and ‘[r]esearch concerning Saami matters shall be adapted to
such ethical rules that the Saami’s status as an indigenous people requires’ (Nordic
Saami Convention 2005). Negotiations continued, leading to a fnal draft pub-
lished in 2017, which highlights research in Article 24 and clarifes the need for
research to be carried out according to ethical standards and international prin-
ciples on Indigenous research (Nordisk Samekonvention 2017). Even though the
process preceding the proposed Nordic Sámi Convention has been going on for a
number of years, the draft has still not been approved by the governments of the
different countries (Boekraad 2016).
On several occasions over the past decades, research ethics in Sámi research have
been highlighted through seminars, discussions and workshops. Standing out again
in this development is Norway, where the discussion of research ethics in relation to
the Sámi people has been a recurring theme (Porsanger 2008; Stordahl et al. 2015).
The creation of ethical guidelines, ethical discussions and strategies has developed
strongly in Norway over the past decade, particularly in the feld of Sámi health
research. In 2019, ethical guidelines for Sámi health research were adopted by the
Norwegian Sámi Parliament, based on the work carried out by a working commit-
tee appointed by the Sámi Parliament in 2016, which drafted ethical guidelines for
Sámi health research the following year. The working group consisted of representa-
tives from Norway, Finland and Sweden, even though the guidelines have thus far
only been offcially adopted by the Norwegian Sámi Parliament. Despite focusing on
health research, the core values expressed in the guidelines (respect, responsibility,
reciprocity, cultural safety, self-determination, equal status, integrity and recogni-
tion) could likely serve very well as a starting point for ethical discussions for other
areas of Sámi research (‘Etiske retningslinjer og kollektiv samtykke innenfor samisk
helseforskning,’ 2019; Kvernmo et al. 2018).
Apart from the guidelines for Sámi health research, the Sámi Parliament in
Norway has also established an ethical committee for Sámi health research, respon-
sible for reviewing research projects in the health subject area and providing collec-
tive consent on behalf of the Sámi community (Eriksen et al. 2021; Sakkyndig, etisk
komité for samisk helseforskning 2019).
In Finland, efforts have been made to encourage ethical development in Sámi
research. Although it is present all over Sápmi, the issue of defning Sámi identity has
been most present in the Finnish debate in recent years, also affecting the possibility
of establishing ethical policies for research:

The challenge of developing ethical guidelines for the Sami in Finland is nuanced
by the reality that contemporary Sámi people have complicated and cross-bor-
der identity positions with aspects of both traditional Sami and contemporary
Nordic/Arctic roles and opportunities refected in their daily lives.
(Eriksen et al. 2021, 3 referencing Lehtola 1997)

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Similar experiences of unequal power relations in research processes have also been
identifed in Finland (the Sámi being defned by outsiders, treated as research objects,
lacking inclusion in all stages of the research process etc.). Individual researchers
have set out to change power dynamics and introduce ethically sustainable research
methods, and currently there is an ongoing process pushing to establish national
guidelines for Sámi research (Eriksen et al. 2021; Juutilainen and Heikkilä 2016;
Kuokkanen 2008; Spangen et al. 2015).
Focusing specifcally on the Swedish part of Sápmi, even though problematic and
complex issues have frequently been addressed by individual researchers within the
Sámi research feld and in specifc research projects, the overall academic discussion on
research ethics did not take place on a broader level until the frst decade of the 21st
century. A research ethics seminar was arranged in Uppsala in 2010, leading to the
publication of a conference proceeding (Bockgård 2010). The following year, the book
Árbediehtu was published, authored by Åsa Nordin Jonsson (Nordin 2010). Following
these early initiatives, the international workshop Ethics in indigenous research. Past
Experiences – Future Challenges was arranged in 2014, gathering scholars from differ-
ent Indigenous research contexts and leading to a subsequent conference proceeding
being published in 2016 with the same title (Drugge 2016a).
In Sweden, research focusing on Sámi issues has long been a popular scientifc feld
that has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines. Given the fact
that offcial guidelines do not yet exist for how this research can be best conducted
from Indigenous ethical perspectives, the responsibility of the Sámi Parliament to
take action on this issue has been pointed out (Drugge 2016b). Recently, the Sámi
Parliament in Sweden adopted a research policy strategy to inform Sámi research
(Forskningspolitisk strategi, Sámediggi – The Sámi Parliament in Sweden 2021). At
an organizational level and focusing on research related to the reindeer-herding Sámi
community, the Swedish Sámi Association (SSR) recently published their own guide-
lines for research (Riktlinjer vid forsknings- och projektsamarbeten med SSR 2019).
Today, a continuous discussion on ethics in Sámi research is taking place among
both students and scholars in all Nordic countries and is now generally considered
to be a crucial issue to address for anyone who is involved in education or research
that focuses on Sámi issues in any way. The digital era in which we fnd ourselves
has encouraged new discussions, making it easier to gather scholars from different
parts of Sápmi.1

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
As has been demonstrated in this work, the feld of Indigenous research ethics is
vibrant and dynamic. In a Nordic Sámi context, the conversation on research ethics
has grown substantially during the past years, making room for new constructive
tools for researchers to apply in their scientifc endeavours. Though research ethics
used to be an issue that was frst and foremost discussed within the academic sphere,
it has recently changed focus and is now driven forward from the Sámi political and
organizational arena. Important steps have thus clearly been taken for self-determi-
nation and reclaiming power over the knowledge production process.
Guidelines and strategies for ethical research practices that have recently been
constructed in Indigenous contexts stress the need for these to be initiated and led by

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Indigenous representatives but simultaneously be anchored by other relevant insti-

tutions, organizations, authorities and individuals whom the guidelines are meant
to serve (‘Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research,’ 2020;
‘Etiske retningslinjer og kollektiv samtykke innenfor samisk helseforskning,’ 2019;
Hudson et al. 2010; Canada Research Coordinating Committee 2020). Investment
in this kind of engagement process opens up the possibility for different Indigenous
communities to share their stories and perspectives and to express needs and aspira-
tions for research, as well as encouraging researchers to address these needs while
simultaneously having the opportunity to clarify limits and challenges that affect the
scientifc process on a legal, institutional and personal level. In that sense, ‘[e]ngage-
ment is not envisioned as a consultation, but rather as an opportunity to develop
and strengthen long-term relationships with Indigenous Peoples in a peer-to-peer
context.’ (Canada Research Coordinating Committee 2020, 3). In Sweden, these
anchoring processes are still to be developed on a broader scale and are necessary for
two specifc reasons: frstly, for the target group (researchers/academy in this con-
text) to comprehend the reasons ethics is of concern and secondly, for the Indigenous
community in question to reach a deeper understanding of what the academic pro-
cess entails, how legislation around research affects the research process and where
the limits are for what can and cannot be done by a professional scholar engaged in
Indigenous research, regardless of ethnic belonging.
The feld of Indigenous research ethics is evolving constantly. Simultaneously,
mainstream structures at both a political and an academic level also change rapidly
and affect the ways in which research can be carried out. The increased focus on
data collection and management, the constantly growing knowledge production tak-
ing place in the digital sphere and national and international agreements that affect
the governance of academia are some examples of discursive development that call
for ethical considerations from Indigenous perspectives (Carroll et al. 2020; Dubois
and Cocq 2019; General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679).
Finding ourselves in this ‘new normal,’ discussions on research ethics are tak-
ing place on a regular basis in the academic context, and the reasons to take part
in ethical discussions both inside and outside the academic context are constantly
increasing. We must not forget, though, that it is still a new feld and that we are
located in a formative phase that is under construction and constant development.
In this context, it is therefore expected that different and sometimes contradicting
views on how ethical Sámi research should best be performed will emerge as the
feld develops. It is the variety of opinions, the presence of different perspectives and
the various – sometimes conficting – standpoints that prove this upcoming research
feld to be relevant. After all, up until recently, the space to even have these kinds of
discussions within the academic sphere of Sámi research did not exist at all.

NOTE
1 For instance, ‘Sámi Research Ethics – current work and future prospects.’ An Arctic Seven
online seminar, 30 November 2020, the Arctic University of Norway/Umeå University;
‘Ethical Issues and Indigenous Research in a Digital Age,’ Humlab Share, 19 November,
Umeå University; and ‘Indigenous Health Research Ethics in the Arctic,’ Umeå University,
9 March 2021.

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 CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

D R I V I N G A RO U N D W I T H AU N T
MÁRET
Historical consciousness of the Sámi in transition


Veli-Pekka Lehtola

My aunt Biret-Máret (‘Máret of Biret,’ Maarit Vuomajoki, nee Pieski), living in the
little Vuomajoki village by the Inari River, has engendered a signifcant path for me
to the heart of Sámi historical consciousness. I absorbed ‘our histories’ from her sto-
ries since my childhood: oral history of our family, kin and my mother’s childhood
village in wartime and peace, as well as notables in the Deatnu region. Later, as an
adult, I interviewed her several times for my historical studies.1
Along with offcial interview sessions, I remember being her chauffeur on shopping
trips to Kárášjohka or Karasjok on the Norwegian side 80 kilometres away. As soon as
the car started moving, stories and remembrances began to pour out. A car is quite rarely
considered to be an arena for intermediating Indigenous knowledge. Looking from the
window, changing surroundings and different places reminded Máret of experiences,
some of them quite dramatic. Each house, some of which we visited, evoked its own
stories. The detailed information related to the past of our kin or region, which I had
thought I was somewhat familiar with – at least on a general level. Back at home, she
pointed around her and said, ‘Here, even walls tell me stories.’
For me, Máret was an embodiment of Sámi memory: Past generations and events
intersected with the present day in her. Sámi researcher Jelena Porsanger has stated that
the past constantly emerges ‘as whispers’ to the contemporary Sámi (An oral notion
by Jelena Porsanger in 2017). The past has lived in daily life, Indigenous knowledge
and language, as well as in the environment in which the family or kin has lived from
generation to generation. Historian Pentti Renvall has stated the same in a phrase that
has become well known among Finnish cultural historians: ‘[C]ulture is quite intrinsi-
cally that the past lives in us’ (Renvall 1965, 400; Tuominen 2005).
I remember how diffcult it was for me to place these experiences and stories told
by Máret in those historical narratives that I heard or read about the ‘Lapps’ or the
Sámi frst in school, later in public and fnally at the universities. Instead, I found
them framed in a more familiar way in Sámi art, media and museums. Concerning

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-33 479

 — Ve l i - Pe k k a L e h t o l a —

the majority-minority relations, I was also confused by the strong need to deal with
the colonial past, which, especially in the public Sámi or Indigenous discourses, was
and often still is depicted as an overwhelming force, displaying ‘traditional’ forms of
Sámi culture. It could be relatively easy in more general frames, but when recalling
my own local context, the mainstream was more easygoing storytelling and every-
day experiences, emphasizing more funny twists and coping with even hard experi-
ences through irony and humour (see Kyrölä; and Dankertsen in this volume).
Historian Jorma Kalela has noted that many small communities tell their own
histories, which can strongly differ from established or offcial historical descrip-
tions or scientifc representations of the past (Kalela 2012, 29–30). During recent
decades, the Sámi have also constructed their own history narratives. In connection
to majorities, they are dominated by an emancipatory perspective which empha-
sizes asymmetric power relations, subjugation and colonialism. Thus, the focus is on
interethnic majority-minority relations.
Contrary to these, Sámi communities construct their ‘our histories’ on a local
intra-ethnic level, perceiving internal patterns and strategies which are common to
‘us.’ From this level, the offcial or academic histories can sound distant or strange.
Sámi individuals or groups do not necessarily recognize themselves in the general
histories of nation-states, regionalities such as Lapland or even the bigger narrative
of Sámi people, nor may they identify with histories of oppression, although these
histories can be interpreted from their stories.
In this chapter, I discuss how the different levels of history intertwine and feed each
other, but there are also tensions between them, as I discuss in this chapter. I examine
the presence of the past in Sámi oral traditions and how it is elaborated in the con-
temporary Sámi society. Sámi memory or the local historical consciousness is frmly
attached to the environment and people whom it concerns. Apart from Sámi languages
and the Sámi cultural environment, kin, for example, is important to remembering.
As the Sámi society has modernized and become a more elementary part of major-
ity societies, the awareness of Sámi history has also changed from oral and local
experience-based knowledge to comprehending the Sámi history in a wider sense
and on a longer timescale. As I shall demonstrate, the role of Sámi arts and media,
Sámi education, Sámi museums and other memory archives has been essential in
refecting and constructing the new history consciousness while academic Sámi his-
torians have always been very rare. I shall ponder how this infuences the under-
standing of the Sámi past as something which is living in us and how it infuences
the study of Sámi cultural heritage, which is a strong trend in research concerning
the Sámi and an obvious arena of historical consciousness.

THE PAST LIVES IN US

Liaison with my aunt Biret-Máret got me to contemplate more thoroughly how ‘oral
culture’ remembers. The past infuences every person on many levels, which one
usually does not even consciously recognize. The mother language or the Indigenous
language already links a speaker to past generations. In addition to communication,
language is a tool of remembering and belonging, as well as the main factor in peo-
ple’s identifcation with their own group. Language refects experience and knowl-
edge accumulated over centuries and even millennia. The close relationship between

480
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nature and language builds a strong emotional bond to ancestors who have lived in
these same areas and pastures (Olthuis et al. 2013, 36–39; Fjellgren and Huss 2019;
see also Magga P.; and Joks in this volume).
At the same manner as a person learns language, learning by doing builds an
emotional bond to the place and parents that have taught that doing. When certain
basic skills are learned in childhood, they are stored in muscle memory and become
instinctive. Reindeer herders and fshermen develop a solid skill memory about the
use of their territory (see Eira in this volume). They know which route is best for
herding the reindeer across a river or where to cast nets in early summer. They have
traditional knowledge of where cloudberries can be found in a dry summer and
whether it is worthwhile to go gathering wood in a certain area or if it is the neigh-
bour’s territory (Helander-Renvall 2016, 34–35; see also Joks in this volume).
The close connection of the memory to the heritage of past generations is crystallized
in duodji, traditional handicraft. Making duodji is not just technical production of hand-
icraft or mere artifacts; it involves a lot of experiential knowledge, which is passed on
in connection with learning (see Magga, S.-M. in this volume). Usually, the knowledge
is not given directly, but as comments, stories and appraisals during the work. Selecting
duodji materials involves strong natural knowledge, which is passed on from the teacher
to the student by moving in nature (Magga 2018, 14–16; Guttorm 2001, 22).
Oral tradition is the main archive of memory. Myths, folklore and music encase
many felds of modern education (about oral tradition in Skolt Sámi music, see Jouste
in this volume). In Indigenous knowledge, one can fnd one’s own religion, science,
ethics and philosophy, as well as genealogy – deeply rooted knowledge of kin (Cocq
2008, 24–25). Yoik music is a special Sámi form of remembering. According to Sámi
author Johan Turi, it is an art of remembering. It dissolves distance and brings the
represented subject – even deceased – back to our midst. You are not forgotten as
long as you are being yoiked (Turi 2010, 196).
All these practices of remembering are related to a wider framework, which has been
the history book of ancient Sámi – natural environment and landscape. Sámi researcher
Päivi Magga has been developing an idea of a Sámi cultural environment with a link to
ancestral experiences and traditional knowledge a strong theme. Magga speaks about a
lived environment, which contains both visible memories and invisible knowledge. Traces
of known and unknown predecessors remaining in the land already deepen the emotional
bond with one’s own place (Magga 2013; see also Magga P. in this volume).
Using the environment and controlling territories refect a frm kin relationship
which has remained one of the most fundamental manifestations of communality
among the Sámi. Belonging to certain kin has historically been a primary ethnic
characteristic of the Sámi, an indication of belonging to ‘us.’ In practice, kinship
manifests itself in sharing ‘our lands’ – i.e. in how each family can utilize the tradi-
tional territories of the kin (Tervaniemi and Magga 2019).
The basic form of the Sámi society has been the siida or Lapp village system, in which
usufructuary areas were divided between Sámi families and kin. Even after the siida
system disappeared, the concept of ‘our lands’ has been characteristic of the Sámi. Each
kin and family has their own cloudberry fens and wood-gathering places. Freeholders
can also have their own muorrabáiki for gathering wood, luomebáiki for picking
cloudberries or guollebáiki for fshing, even quite far from home (Länsman 2005; Aikio
2005, 120–133; Valkonen et al. 2017; see Magga P.; and Joks in this volume).

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 — Ve l i - Pe k k a L e h t o l a —

The spiritual or invisible meanings of the landscape emerge in oral tradition,

which binds landscapes and the environment with memory. It creates a living con-
nection to land and the environment. The stories of places, the people and animals
that have moved in the landscape and incidents related to travelling live on in sto-
ries, place names and music. It does not just concern the distant past; it relates to us
and thereby to the present day. Places connect the past to the contemporary and the
future. (See Magga P. in this volume.)
Memory in the Sámi cultural environment is often more connected with places
and landscape than time. Places tell stories of the past; they retrieve experiences
and memories. This is clearly apparent in Johan Turi’s work Muitalus sámiid birra
(An Account of the Sámi, 1910). When reindeer Sámi migrate seasonally, memory
relates to place, not chronology: The most important thing is what is associated with
this place and us here, no matter whether it happened last year or a hundred years
ago (Turi 2010, e.g. 22–40). The same way that yoik (or Inari Sámi livđe and Skolt
Sámi leu´dd music) vividly reminds us of signifcant places or people or animals, a
certain place can also repatriate memories of persons or events. As with my aunt
Máret, places were the most important sources evoking memories, whenever they
were located temporally, in the recent past or distant history.
One of the essential factors connecting languages, storytelling and Sámi land use
is refected in place names. They refect traditional knowledge from beyond centu-
ries, even millennia. They represent oral geography, which includes solid knowledge
of nature and the environment. They contain history, communal values and mean-
ings. Place names speak about land use and human activity, even amusing incidents.
Meanings can be multilevel, and communal values, for example, can be buried quite
deep. Although you would not understand the original meanings of place names,
you can feel the presence of the past (Helander 2014, 327–328; Valtonen 2014,
19–22; Taarna Valtonen’s oral description).
‘Our lands’ have been a mutual Sámi tradition, which other locals also may have
learned to follow. Finnish administration, on the other hand, has not been aware of this
area division; it has applied its own everyman’s right2 to these areas (Helander-Renvall
2016; Länsman 2005, 56ff). What happened to Sámi people’s own histories when they
were challenged by the historical conceptions of a national state, which were based
on ‘the language of papers,’ as Nils-Aslak Valkeapää crystallizes the connection of the
past and places us in his poem (Valkeapää 1985/1994, no page numbers):

How I respect old Sápmi

Even if others show me
papers they had written themselves
even if they had written a great deal
what do they know about our feelings
Our ancestors have made a fre
on every slope
they have stepped on every stone
our ancestors
they have lived and died here
(Nils-Aslak Valkeapää 1985)

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 — Driving around with Aunt Máret —

OUR INTERPRETATIONS
After World War II, when the infrastructure and society of Lapland in Finland and
Finnmark in Norway were reconstructed, Sámi minds were also ‘rebuilt.’ For many
Sámi, it resulted in a loss of language and many cultural traditions (Lehtola 2021,
41–43). These kinds of disruptions and fractures have aroused a lot of emotions,
even traumas, which are still bubbling today, repressed under the everyday surface.
Forgetting is the reverse side of remembering. The 1960s and 1970s especially are
considered a period when many Sámi had a desire or need or force to be ‘more
Finnish than Finns themselves’ and forget their Sámi knowledge (Sara 1982).
The shame of poor Finnish language skills in the evacuee and reconstruction era,
as well as traumatic experiences in residential schools, induced parents to speak
Finnish to their children in the boomer generation in order to ensure them a better
future (about language choices, see Huss and Lindgren; and Pasanen in this volume).
They themselves had not learned Finnish until at school age, and part of the emo-
tional world of the native language was thereby lost in the upbringing. Some chil-
dren, who had learned the Sámi language at home, had to be ashamed of it in school.
They ceased speaking their native language – even on vacation at home with their
parents. This was another factor separating parents and children on an emotional
level (Rasmus 2008, 82–83).
Learning of basic cultural skills could also be interrupted when children were
wrenched quite early to another environment which required and taught completely
different skills. It was increasingly common among Sámi born after World War II that – as
many Sámi parents expressed it – school ‘corrupted’ the practical skills and cultural
understanding of many Sámi. It was not customary to add that it brought many other
skills in return. The school system of the majority population has had great impor-
tance in the increasing emphasis on written history and culture and also in the think-
ing of the Sámi. Sámi history was not taught in school – and neither was the past of
other local people or Lapland (Nyyssönen 2018; Kortekangas et al. 2019).
The overwhelming and even distorting force of the majority education has
been a shared experience for Indigenous Peoples across the whole world, but it
also had another dimension. It resulted in the young educated generation in 1960s
and 1970s, which started to build a bridge between the old traditional knowledge
and the new information systems of the modern age. The ethnopolitical move-
ment emphasized the signifcance of cultural heritage, which faced a crisis after
World War II. (See e.g. references in Länsman and Lehtola 2015, 80; see also
Alakorva in this volume.)
The Sámi ethnopolitical movement highlighted the role of Sámi museums at an
early stage. Adopting the European idea of a museum to the Sámi environment ena-
bled the development of an institutional ‘Sámi cultural broker’ to invite two differ-
ent worlds – the majority and minority cultures – to meet. Museums created contact
zones or spaces where different cultures meet each other and competing dialogues
are heard, challenging the one-way transmission and translation. Later, the Sámi
museums also functioned as cultural centres, acting as mediators between different
generations as well as different means of discussing the heritage of Sámi culture (See
Lehtola 2019b, 88–89; Harlin 2019a; Potinkara 2020; Aikio 2021; see also Aikio
in this volume).

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The Sámi Institute in Guovdageaidnu, Norway, established in 1973, was the frst
research institute founded and administered by the Sámi themselves. In addition to
languages and livelihoods, it took a remarkable stance concerning Sámi history (Sara
1985; Kalstad 2005.) It started a comprehensive legal history project aiming to use
historical research methods to constitute a justifable picture of Sámi rights to the
land and water of their own territories. When the Sámi scholars were challenging
earlier majority representations of the Sámi as passive victims of history, new con-
clusions, overviews and textbooks were produced for the Sámi schools and educa-
tion centres. Sámi reinterpretations in the 1970s and 1980s were typically published
as pamphlets, handouts or textbooks (e.g. Aikio 1980).3
During a transitional historical phase in the 1970s and 1980s, oral traditions
turned into memoirs or reminiscence literature as well as textbooks (about Sámi
reminiscence literature, see Helander and Lehtola in this volume). Because of the
lack of offcial education based on Sámi cultural values, Sámi history was inter-
preted in other arenas, such as art. Sámi poets in the 1970s and Sámi theatres in the
1980s spoke their opinions when trying to rebuild Sámi identities in the new era and
when criticizing the majority misinterpretations of Sámi history. Sámi novels in the
1980s started to reminisce and analyze the postwar histories of local Sámi areas. (See
Lehtola 2004, 95–96; Hansen 2016.)
Sámi museums have been important institutions telling ‘our histories’ or histori-
cal narratives from the Sámi perspective. Among nonacademic ‘amateur histori-
ans,’ genealogy has a strong tradition, combining archival information with oral
knowledge, based on the strong engagement of Sámi individuals in kinship relations
(Valkonen et al. 2017, 88–89). Place name studies have opened mental cartographies
of the Sámi, revealing traditional means of land use and the cultural environment.
The concepts of Sámi common law, close relations between the reindeer-herding
systems and kinship and how the Sámi cultural environment has been discussed
in recent Sámi research all have a strong historical bond (e.g. Näkkäläjärvi 2013;
about Sámi law, see Labba in this volume). Ethnomusicology, sociolinguistic stud-
ies and cultural history can provide keys to study the hidden meanings or values
of past communities – for example, by examining yoik, leu´dd and livđe music as
expressions of relations (Jouste 2011) or place name systems refecting the connec-
tion of humans to the land and non-humans (Helander 2014; Valtonen 2014) or by
implementing new insider approaches to earlier outsider depictions (Lehtola 2019a).
One important infuence for the constructing a new understanding of the past
has been the global Indigenous network, with a strong idea that reassessing histori-
cal interpretations is part of the struggle for the right to self-determination (Smith
1999). There are multiple shared historical experiences, such as colonial education
and the struggle for land rights, connecting the Sámi to other Indigenous Peoples.
Repatriation policies of the Sámi, starting in the 1990s, have been inspired by the
experiences of other Indigenous Peoples. The same goes for the idea of truth and
reconciliation processes (see Harlin 2019a).
It seems that along with the institutionalization of the Sámi society in the 1990s
and 2000s (Länsman and Lehtola 2015), the use of Sámi history in public repre-
sentations became more instrumental, refecting the politically motivated forms of
struggle due to Sámi-state relations. To support the ‘politics of difference,’ which
had successfully gained remarkable rights for the Sámi movement in relation to

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Scandinavian states, public representations of Sámi histories concentrated on asym-

metric power relations, subjugation and the destructive forces of colonialism. This
tendency was supported by the common discourse of the majority public and even
scholars, which represented the Sámi as victims of development and modernization.
This discourse has more and more interlaced with a counter-story of the Sámi mori-
heapmi, or ‘awakening,’ to struggle against the mighty colonial powers.
The emancipatory approach to Indigenous histories is an important means of
discussion and of challenging majorities to take part in healing painful wounds of
the past. The public representations tend, however, to (over)generalize historical
experiences, and they can ‘freeze’ in the political use, as Valkonen (2009, 180) has
pointed out. Public representations can alienate themselves from the everyday expe-
riences of individuals or subgroups. According to Michael Nakata, a Torres Islander
Aboriginal, it can even steer the interpretations as a collective pressure to construct
‘stories of trauma, loss and disadvantage,’ rather than to intermediate other kinds
of stories, such as positive or even hilarious Indigenous histories of everyday life
(Nakata 2012, 100–105; on the need for research about the positive forces in Sámi
society, see Dankertsen in this volume).
It is characteristic of our own histories that the Sámi restrict their experiences to
quite local phenomena. In their life stories, they seldom discuss ‘grand histories’ tak-
ing place around them, nor do they describe their own feelings or experiences. The
storytellers seem to assume that the listeners themselves provide the wider frame-
work and understand the narrator’s emotions from a few hints. Local narrators of
‘small histories’ may recount our histories, perhaps without any reference to Finns
or the society outside. These everyday experiential histories can even be disappoint-
ing to outsider researchers, because they are hard to generalize directly as part of
wider histories (e.g. Lehtola 2017).
It seems that the Sámi museums have been important intermediators refecting
these parallel or concurrent ‘realities.’ Museums have the potential to implement the
fndings of general histories to everyday experiences and, vice versa, to give grass-
root perspectives to historical phenomena and events which could otherwise be seen
in an overly abstract or generalized light. They are also effective arenas to revise
Sámi representations, both to the Sámi themselves and to outsiders. It is, however,
also characteristic of museum exhibitions that the fresh representations can freeze
in 10 to 20 years, following the changes of historical interpretations. (See Aikio in
this volume.)

TRADITIONS AND HISTORY

There has been an obvious gap between the academic research on Sámi histories
and the ‘our histories’ of the Sámi. The latter mostly refects the remembrances of
four or fve generations, and there is a lack of Sámi academic historians who could
delve into original historical source materials instead of relying on printed sources.
The fact is that Sámi history research from the Sámi’s own perspective does not have
long traditions yet. In addition, majority schools have not encouraged enough the
Sámi children to study their own histories but forced them to adopt the majority’s
conceptions of history. Source materials for the older history have been located far
from the Sámi territory and they have usually been written in majority languages.

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Repatriating them has intensifed in the 1990s and 2000s with the establishment
of Sámi people’s own memory organizations, parallel to those of other Indigenous
Peoples (Jouste 2007; Christen 2011; Harkin 2016; Harlin 2019a).
The academic research on Sámi history, for its part, has mostly been carried
out by majority historians, who have focused on events in the 17th and 18th cen-
turies (see Alakorva et al. in this volume). Although these periods are interesting
from the point of view of legal history, they have gotten an inordinate amount
of attention, as was stated in the 1990s (Aikio 1991). More modern times have
largely not been studied by the academic historians in Finland. In the background,
there may be a phenomenon which cultural historian Kari Immonen describes as
‘fear of modernity.’ He suggests that the requirement to put oneself in the place of
an outsider and the underlying ideal of objectivity have made historical research
impossible with respect to modernity, and other sciences, arts and journalism
have taken its place (cited by Tuominen 2005). Immonen does not refer to the
Sámi, but the characterization goes well with the fear of Sámi research ‘becoming
political’ (see Harlin 2019b).
Professor Marja Tuominen’s argument to Immonen, on the other hand, is valid
for the attitudes of the Sámi themselves:

But I would like to ask if at the same time these sciences ‘capable with respect to
modernity’ (perhaps also journalism and even arts?) are afficted with a fear of
the past, which manifests itself as inability or at least unwillingness to perceive
those long-term mental processes and deep structures, the multitemporal history
that demands us to relinquish the ’once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’
thinking of traditional event history.
(Tuominen 2005)

Lack of professional Sámi historians means that the oral heritage of the Sámi has
not been made visible to historians or been a relevant part of their sources. It may
have negative consequences when the interpreters or mediators of ‘our histories’ are
few, and the conclusions are based on secondary sources. The existing discourse,
which emphasizes colonialism and the wrongs of history, can result in unhistorical
approaches when the complexities of historical processes are moderated to contem-
porary perspectives of such modern juridical terms as ‘heritage’ or ‘tradition,’ for
example. Deliberately focusing on appropriate ethnic labels and their potential and
using readily identifable and disjunctive symbols and images, this selective strat-
egy can be contentious and defensive at the same time. When aiming at ‘righting
wrongs,’ it can lead to the judicialization of the past, acts of recalling the past in
hope for redress (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012, 34–35).
Declining historical awareness may also mean that concepts important to Indigenous
Peoples, such as the term ‘Indigenous heritage,’ can lose their historical context. In 2015,
I participated a conference in Rovaniemi, where protecting the cultural heritage of
Indigenous Peoples was debated for a declaration of the UN Human Rights Council.
The result was a 24-page document Proposal for promotion and protection of indig-
enous cultural heritage. I noticed that history was mentioned only once in the report (in
the list of ‘other sectors in indigenous cultures to be respected’), the concept of memory
not at all (Expert Mechanism Advice No. 8, 2015).

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There is a risk of starting to repeat the contrast between ‘traditional’ and modern
that has been criticized in the representations of majority populations – i.e. that the
traditions of Indigenous Peoples are regarded as ancient culture which has survived till
the present day in a petrifed form (see Aikio in this volume). This contrast is a result
of historical imagination because cultural heritage is highly changeable historically.
Traditional knowledge restructures constantly and creatively. Each artifact, custom
and cultural characteristic has its history and lifespan. One can argue that many cur-
rently solid Sámi traditions or practices were once modern novelties which history has
pitched at the Sámi or which they have looked for on their own initiative. Over time
they have become an essential part of the Sámi cultural heritage (cf. Mallon 2016).
Speaking about tradition passing from generation to generation may give the
false impression that tradition remains unchanged and contains no creativity or
inventiveness. However, despite even dramatic historical changes, the Sámi have
always been willing to and adept at assimilating new infuences from quite differ-
ent directions. Modernization or drawing from it has not been a sudden miracle or
culturally destructive phenomenon to the Sámi, as outsiders have often described it.
As with other people, curiosity or pure practicality has driven the Sámi to familiarize
themselves with new phenomena that can be useful. They have also followed trends.
Notions about the ‘genuine’ tradition depend on which time and background
are discussed. Each present moment considers itself exceptional, and different times
produce their own layers in the traditions (about the ethnographic present, see Aikio
in this volume). Which period’s reindeer husbandry, for instance, should we fnd
genuine and right, when there have been vast upheavals from the 16th century to
the 19th century, as well as in the 20th century, with world wars, the so-called snow-
mobile revolution, the European Union and new communications technology? The
connection between reindeer and man represents stability, and even it has changed
in history (Valkonen and Ruuska 2019).
Rather than merely looking for external changes, it is more fruitful to perceive
how Sámi traditions – as well as historical consciousness – consist of many different
layers, in which infuences and stabilities from different times meet. French historian
Fernand Braudel has divided memory and temporal duration into three levels, all of
which also infuence modern man. Frequent use has changed the division by Braudel
into almost a cliché, but it is highly interesting regarding the historical awareness of
the Sámi (Braudel 2009).
I learned to understand Braudel’s thinking by reminiscing about my drive with
Aunt Biret-Máret. She told me about her journey through Karigasniemi to Ivalo to
give birth to her child. According to Braudel’s division, slow or almost immutable
time (long duration of history) in Máret’s story was represented by the Inari River,
which has provided livelihood and a waterway to the ancient Sámi. It was also an
important waterway for Máret’s journey to Ivalo. Instead of having her child at home,
as earlier, she had to travel nearly 200 kilometres, frst in a sledge pulled by a reindeer
to Karigasniemi and from there by road in a taxi to Ivalo. When she was returning,
the local vicar happened to drive up to the river, and she got a ride in a horse sled.
The second temporal level – in Braudel’s terms, ‘conjuncture,’ which can
somehow be timed historically – was represented by Máret herself as a Sámi
person. The roots of the Sámi language she spoke extended back a couple of
millennia. Her ancestors in numerous generations had inherited it from their

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parents, developed new expressions in changing circumstances and passed their

native language affectionately on to their descendants. The roots of the Sámi
clothing Máret was wearing extended to late medieval Nordic history, when
the tunic-type dress was adopted for both women and men in connection with
trading on the Arctic Sea coast. When the dress type fell out of use elsewhere, it
prevailed among the Sámi. Although the dress type was a novelty in Sámi culture
in its time, it has been assimilated and modifed over centuries to become one
of the most important Sámi characteristics (see Magga, S.-M. in this volume).
Historical infuences create traditions which are eventually not even recognized
as historically engendered and altered.
The third Braudel level is short-term duration or an event during the last three
or four generations. It has been called the history of one’s own time, which seems to
have involved continuous change in all times. Máret’s stories from her lifetime rep-
resented the shortest period. They even acquired adventurous characteristics – for
example, in the story of her homecoming from Ivalo in a local vicar’s horse sleigh,
zig-zagging between open cracks on an ice-covered river in spring.
The background of Máret’s story was her own home, a reconstruction-era
house that represented a different dwelling type from that of her ancestors
(Soikkeli 2021). As dwellers in the house, Máret and her husband Jovnná were
Finnish citizens. They were thereby subject to different Nordic national structures
than the Sámi living across the Inari or Tana River in Norway, many of them
relatives speaking the same language. Although the Deatnu and Inari Rivers were
traditionally a connecting factor to the Sámi, as a national border, they separated
relatives from each other, sometimes more strictly, like after World War II, when
the inhabitants had to get border passes to meet their relatives. The closure of
connections over state borders during the COVID-19 pandemic caused the same
effect in 2020 and 2021.
For Sámi, kin meant a strong bond to ancestors; it connected a person to the
environment which was flled with heritage from past generations. The history of
her own family, on the other hand, constituted the perception method of Máret’s
memory, not as dates but rather based on, for example, how old her father had been
when they were evacuated or in which class her oldest child had been when she left
to give birth to her youngest one.
In these cases, Máret’s stories related to present-day institutions and traffic
connections, as they did with the travel to Ivalo. The road from Kárášjohka to
Inari represented a modern influence, first built by Germans during the Second
World War and then by the Finnish government. The Church, already a ‘tra-
ditional’ institution among the Sámi, was personified in the legendary vicar
Yrjö Aittokallio, who is known as a great personality in Northern Lapland,
better in oral tradition than in history books. Apart from the Church, the
spiritual world of Máret’s environment had been shaped by Laestadianism,
an old pietistic revivalist movement which was also a particularly important
network to Máret. In addition to Christian psalms, the ‘Word’ in the Sámi
language involved a deep emotional bond that connected Máret to her own
parents and, further, to the faith of her ancestors. (About the Laestadianism
and the Sámi, see e.g. Minde 1996 , Valkonen and Wallenius-Korkalo 2015;
see also Olsen in this volume .)

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In Máret’s folksy historical awareness, these three levels appeared one on top
of the other or side by side. They were parallel and interlacing, simultaneous and
interrelated realities or worlds in which Máret was an actor, constructing them by
choosing or discarding practices. Past events arose simultaneously with present-day
phenomena – places, feelings, smells. Infuences from different times and different
generations intersected in her. In my mind, Máret’s stories illustrated the multi-tem-
porality of history that has been emphasized in cultural history. This has been clearly
apparent among the Sámi till the present day.
Multi-temporality does not mean that all Sámi practices would be equally
strong. Some are prevalent, some of them become old fashioned and maybe van-
ish, while other elements emerge, maybe in order to form new traditions. The
continuity connecting them is the Indigenous knowledge that passed from one
generation to another. Someone carries tradition both internally and externally.
However, Sámi practices and knowledge change all the time, visibly or more hid-
den. The change can be great, but certain characteristics reveal that it belongs to
the same tradition.
Many cultural phenomena that we regard as age-old tradition can be his-
torically dated and located, but their specifcity resides in how they have been
adapted to local conditions and to the use of the Sámi. Thomas Hylland Eriksen
states that it is not where the infuences come from, but what you do with them
(T. Hylland Eriksen, personal comment). Furthermore, Sámi culture is infuenced
by rapid changes, some of which may be transformed into tradition while some
may disappear completely.
Recurring talk about the constant change which the Sámi culture is encounter-
ing highlights the need to preserve and protect Sámi traditional knowledge and
customs – those that connect us to our ancestors most concretely. It defnitely
is an important goal, but lack of historical awareness may lead us to think that
changes are something quite new in Sámi culture and that modern infuences are
the antithesis of tradition. The case is probably the other way around; changes
have always been a precondition to the preservation of Sámi traditions. Like
other Indigenous Peoples, Sámi communities apply modernity to preserve their
traditional values. As Dakota historian Philip Deloria Jr. states, the reason for
Indigenous Peoples to adopt modern infuences is not ‘colonialist pressure’ or
‘assimilation’ or ‘imitation’ – the reason may also be that they are interested in
doing so (Deloria 2004, 6–7, 231).

CONCLUSIONS
Often, the studies on Sámi history have focused on the multifaceted relations between
the Sámi and majority peoples, analyzing the colonial encounters and interethnic
power structures in the contact/confict zones of different ethnic groups and cultures.
In my chapter, I have turned into another direction, to ‘our own histories,’ concen-
trating more on Sámi concepts and the awareness of the Sámi of their own agencies
in history. I have tried to illustrate that the latter conception of the Sámi past is not
uniform or unproblematic either. There is not one Sámi history or one Sámi way
to understand history but rather a multitude of Sámi histories that become visible
through different sources.

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Michael Nakata, the Torres Island professor mentioned earlier, has depicted con-
tradictious expectations of his young Indigenous students concerning the Aboriginal
‘own stories.’ According to Nakata, they are

being caught in the tensions between the meanings derived from their own
[personal] histories, the generalized meanings of Aboriginality within current
Indigenous studies and the meanings transmitted by community members with
a particular and local experience of being Indigenous.
(Nakata 2012, 105)

In the same manner, the Sámi people can be confused when trying to compre-
hend questions concerning their past. There is a need to deal with the colonial past,
which, especially in the public Sámi or Indigenous discourses, is often depicted as
an overwhelming force, displaying ‘traditional’ forms of Sámi culture. The stories of
their own local context, with more easygoing storytelling and everyday experiences,
emphasizing more funny twists and coping with even hard experiences through
irony and humour may be diffcult to apply to these frames. In addition, there are
also personal experiences and individual memories, in which the generalized ideas of
colonial histories may be more or less applicable.
Balancing these diverse and even contradictious discourses has been an interest-
ing challenge and a driving force for many Sámi and Indigenous scholars, artists
and politicians in many generations, to engender creative forces in many levels. In
order to have a better picture of the past, one should consider it as an expedition to
‘foreign land,’ which is as manifold and complex as contemporary reality – or as a
drive to Kárášjohka with Aunt Biret-Máret.

NOTES
1 Máret was my main interviewee and main inspiration for my research dealing with the
infuences of the Second World War on the Sámi society. Starting in the 1990s, I have
published books and many articles, leading up to the monograph in English, Surviving
the Upheaval of Arctic War. Evacuation and Return of the Sámi People in Sápmi and
Finland During and After the Second World War. Máret is one of the main characters
in the book. The book tells the story of WW2 and its consequences, mainly from the
viewpoint of a Sámi woman.
2 In Finland, the concept jokamiehen oikeudet, or ‘the everyman’s rights,’ means the freedom
of to enjoy nature respectfully. The general public’s right allows anyone living in or visiting
Finland the freedom to roam the countryside, forage, fsh with a line and rod and enjoy the
recreational use of natural areas.
3 In 1980 Samuli Aikio, for instance, published a handout Sámiid historja (History of the
Sámi, later the textbook Olbmot ovdal min in 1992), which reinterpreted written historical
sources from the Sámi perspective.

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T H E C H A R AC T E R I S T I C S A N D
L E G A L S TAT U S O F S Á M I L E G A L
T R A D I T I O N A N D L AW


Kristina Labba

INTRODUCTION
Since time immemorial, the Sámi people have had their own legal tradition and law to
manage, for instance, their traditional livelihoods, land use and distribution of natu-
ral resources (see, for instance, Solem 1970; Korpijaakko-Labba 1994; Lundmark
1998; Åhrén 2004; Hågvar 2006; Päiviö 2011; Andersen et al. 2021). However,
although Sámi legal tradition and law have existed historically, and still exist, in
parallel with the civil law tradition and the state-based laws that the four states
encompassing Sápmi are part of and apply, their content, relevance and even exist-
ence are unknown to most people in the four states, including legal professionals (e.g.
Domstoladministrasjonen 2011). Presumably, the main explanation for this situation
is that Sámi legal tradition and law have received and still receive limited recognition
by the four states and their laws. However, there are historical and present-day excep-
tions to this situation, such as the Lap Codicil from 1751 and the Norwegian legal
sources recognition of the Sámi siida custom in reindeer herding.
Another reason Sámi legal tradition and law are unknown to most people in the
four states is probably because the tradition and law receive limited attention in
research. For instance, in Sámi legal scholarship, the focus of the research has been
to analyze which individual and collective rights and duties Sámi have according
to relevant state-based laws and international law. More specifcally, research on
Sámi rights to lands, waters, and resources, which are at the core of the Sámi peo-
ple’s struggles, has received the most attention (e.g. Strøm Bull 1997; Jebens 1999;
Funderud Skogvang 2012; contributions in Indigenous Rights in Scandinavia 2015;
Allard 2015; Åhrén 2016; Brännström 2017; Ravna 2019).
Against this backdrop, the overarching aim of this chapter is to present Sámi legal
tradition and law with a basis in research questions: What is Sámi legal tradition and
law? What is the Sámi siida custom, and which legal status does the custom have
according to Norwegian legal sources that have recognized it as law?

494 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-34

 — Sámi legal tradition and law —

Section 2 describes some characteristics of Sámi legal tradition and law by show-
ing how they differ from the main characteristics of the Norwegian legal system
and law, by illustrating how state-based laws address and have addressed Sámi law.
Section 3 describes the Sámi siida custom in reindeer herding and some of the norms
that relate to it. Together, the custom and relating norms constitute the siida system,
which this chapter assumes constitutes Sámi law, although it has not been explicitly
approved as law, for instance, by the national lawmakers and courts in the states
that encompass Sápmi, not even in Norway. Section 3 also describes how Norwegian
legal sources recognize the custom.
Three aspects must be mentioned that concern the methodology in this chapter.
Firstly, so far, Sámi legal tradition has not been systematized in the manner in which
national legal systems often are systematized (e.g. Sæther Mæhle and Aarli 2017). The
content of Sámi law has only on a very limited scale been recorded and systematized
with the aim to make it easily accessible in Sámi internal contexts and in relation to
state-based laws. Consequently, it is challenging to describe Sámi legal tradition and law
in a detailed and systematized manner. Nevertheless, sources that study Sámi legal tra-
dition and law exist. One of the sources is Solem’s book Lappiske rettsstudier (Lappish
Legal Studies), published in 1933 and reprinted in 1970. His book is one of the most
cited and oldest publications in this feld, and it is based on his studies of historical
literature and observations of the Sámi society and traditional Sámi livelihoods, when,
at the beginning of the 20th century, he served as a judge in the most northern part of
Norway. As will be described in Section 2, Merryman and Pérez-Pordomo’s (2010)
defnition of the term ‘legal tradition’ contains several perspectives on law. If all the
perspectives are met, a comprehensive description will be provided of the legal tradi-
tion in question. The description of Sámi legal tradition and law does not provide such
a comprehensive description, nor does it cover in detail any of the perspectives in the
scholars’ defnition of a legal tradition. While the description of the main characteristics
of the Norwegian legal system is limited to touching upon the organization of the sys-
tem and how law is made within the system, the description of the main characteristics
of Sámi legal tradition touches mainly upon how law is made.
Secondly, to supplement the sources about Sámi legal tradition and law, I will view
how Indigenous legal tradition and law are taken into account in other Indigenous
contexts outside Sápmi. For instance, it is relevant to look at Canada, although
the Indigenous political discourse there very much differs from that of Finland,
Sweden and Norway (Kuokkanen 2020). Like the three states, Canada encompasses
Indigenous territories and has mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.
In addition, Sámi face similar struggles as Indigenous Peoples in Canada, regarding,
for instance, rights to lands and waters. In Canada, the academic interest in rebuild-
ing and revitalizing Indigenous Peoples’ laws and legal traditions has increased over
the last two decades (e.g. Coyle 2017).
Thirdly, I have limited my research to Norway and use examples from the Sámi
there because, compared to other states with Sámi population, Norway has come
the furthest in paying attention to and recognizing Sámi legal tradition and law. For
instance, most of the research on the topic has been conducted in Norway and in
relation to Norwegian law. In addition, most of the examples in this chapter relate
to Sámi reindeer husbandry since it contains the living siida tradition, which can be
examined from a legal perspective.

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WHAT IS SÁMI LEGAL TRADITION AND LAW?

It is challenging to manage and defne the central concept of this section, ‘legal
tradition,’ as it has been the subject of many analyses and debates internationally.
However, Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo’s (2010) perception of the term seems to
be widely accepted. They argue that a legal tradition is

a set of deeply rooted, historically conditioned attitudes about the nature of law,
about the role of law in the society and the polity, about the proper organization
and operation of a legal system, and about the way law is or should be made,
applied, studied, perfected, and thought.

The two scholars also argue that a legal tradition puts a legal system – which, in turn, is
an operating set of legal institutions, procedures and rules – into a cultural perspective.
Furthermore, they argue that, in a world with sovereign states, there are as many legal
systems as there are such states. National legal systems are frequently classifed either
into groups or families (Merryman and Pérez-Perdomo 2010). The civil law tradition
and the common law tradition are two of the world’s most infuential legal traditions.
The Nordic states’ legal systems, such as the Norwegian legal system, are considered to
constitute their own subgroups within the civil law tradition (Bernitz 2010).
Norwegian legal sources and research provide much information about the
Norwegian legal system and law. The sources confrm that the system is well systema-
tized and that it contains detailed and clear norms about how the system is structured
and supposed to function. The norms instruct, among other things, that three branches
share the power in the state: The legislative branch, the executive branch and the
judicial branch. The norms also instruct that law comes from a central authority; that
authoritative legal sources consist of, among other sources, legislation, preparatory
works and case law; and that each source has a certain dignity in relation to the others,
although legislation is the most prominent among them. The legal sources and research
also inform that Norwegian law, for the most part, is written and comprehensive and
that legal norms give instructions in a very detailed manner (e.g. Sæther Mæhle and
Aarli 2017; Skoghøy 2018). Altogether, the Norwegian legal system is easily accessible
to the population in Norway and especially to legal professionals.
The Sámi legal tradition is not part of either the civil law tradition or the common
law tradition. For instance, it does not contain certain branches among which power
is divided, nor is it technically similar to or as comprehensive as the Norwegian
legal system (e.g. Husa 2016). Instead, the Sámi legal tradition has the same main
characteristics as have other Indigenous Peoples’ legal traditions. About Indigenous
legal traditions and laws, Borrows (2005), who is one of the leading scholars in the
feld in Canada, writes:

Laws can arise whenever human interactions create expectations about proper
conduct. Indigenous legal traditions developed in this fashion and were based
on the customs and practices of their people.

Solem (1970), who has theorized what law is with Sámi law in mind, explains that
law is created by life and that the formation of law goes far back in the evolutionary

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history of mankind. He also explains that, at an early stage of a culture’s develop-

ment, customs form rules, and the boundary between law and morality is far more
fuid than it is in modern society. He argues that rules in any society are largely
dependent on the material living conditions there. According to him, however, not
only material interests matter when law is created; folk mentality has also infuenced
and infuences the law. According to Solem, to understand fully the legal develop-
ment of a primitive tribe, as he calls Indigenous Peoples (typically for the time), it
is frst and foremost necessary to have knowledge of the material conditions under
which the tribe has lived.
Far back in history, Sámi livelihoods consisted of hunting, capturing, fshing and
gathering, but gradually, Sámi picked up new forms of livelihood. For instance, Sámi
hunting of reindeer turned into reindeer herding (e.g. Hansen 2017).
Regardless of livelihood, Sámi material living conditions have an intrinsic rela-
tionship to Sámi territories and the natural environment. With a basis in this, the are-
nas from which Sámi law derives constitute the Sámi societies that use the territories
and conduct Sámi livelihoods, but presumably also other Sámi arenas. Moreover,
Sámi law’s existence and content derive from social acceptance, and primarily, they
transfer orally and through living practices among the Sámi (Labba 2020b; see also
Eriksen 2002; Åhrén 2004; Hågvar 2006; Ravna 2009; Funderud Skogvang 2017).
However, a consequence of these characteristics is that Sámi law can be challeng-
ing to access, especially for people outside arenas where Sámi law prevails (e.g.
Helander 2013).
So far, no Sámi law methodology exists according to which, for instance, Sámi
law can be found, systematized and expressed and which could elaborate what con-
stitutes Sámi legal sources. Most of the existing research on Sámi legal tradition
and law, as theorizations and recordings of it, has been conducted in Norway and
in relation to Norwegian law. One explanation for this situation probably is that
Norway, among the countries with a Sámi population, has had the most progressive
Sámi policy since the 1980s (Kuokkanen 2020).
Norwegian legal sources assume that the sources of Sámi law constitute Sámi
customs (sedvaner) and legal opinions (rettsoppfattninger) (Smith 2004; Funderud
Skogvang 2017). However, this assumption corresponds with the two interna-
tional Indigenous Peoples’ rights instruments: The Indigenous and Tribal Peoples
Convention, 1989 (No. 169) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (UNDRIP) since both establish a basis for the recognition of customs and
customary law as sources of law (e.g. Tobin 2014).
Norway, Finland and Sweden voted in favour of adopting the UNDRIP when it
was adopted by the UN in 2007. For instance, according to article 9 of the UNDRIP,
Indigenous Peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions
and customs. Only Norway has ratifed the ILO Convention No. 169, including
committing to complying with article 8 of the Convention, which establishes that
‘states shall pay due regard to Indigenous peoples’ customs and customary law in
the implementation of national laws and regulations.’ Of concern to Sweden is that
article 8 of the ILO Convention (No. 169) has had legal impact there, even though
Sweden has not ratifed the Convention. In the Swedish Supreme Court ruling in
the Girjas case from 2020, the Court referred to the article in justifying its decision
(NJA 2020 p.  3). The Court held that the article expresses a public international

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law principle and that, in applying domestic law, due regard shall be taken of Sámi
customs and customary laws (e.g. Allard and Brännström 2021).
In Norway, Sámi customs have been invoked with reference to article 8 in sev-
eral criminal law cases (Funderud Skogvang 2017), and several of them also have
found their way to the Supreme Court (e.g. Rt-2001–1116; Rt-2006–957; Rt-
2008–1789). The Supreme Court rulings state that, for a Sámi custom to consti-
tute Sámi customary law, which is law approved by Norwegian legal authorities
(Skoghøy 2018), it must meet a particular legal test – for instance, be suffciently
qualitative. This requires that a custom, among other things, be of importance
for maintaining Sámi culture in the specifc area in question (Rt-2008–1789).
However, in the criminal law cases, the invoked customs did not meet the test.
Funderud Skogvang (2009, 2017) has analyzed some of the cases, and her opinion
seems to be that the invoked customs, except for the one invoked case about the
salmon letter (laksebrev) for fshing in the Tana River (LH-200549756), were not
qualitative enough, even from a Sámi perspective. The Supreme Court’s conclusion
in, for instance, Rt-2001–1116 appears reasonable. In that case, it was argued that
article 8 meant that the person concerned could not be punished under Norwegian
law for failing to keep his dog leashed while fshing in a watercourse in the forest
when restraint was applied. My impression is that the defendant, in the absence
of appropriate state-based rules, claimed that the unlawful practice constituted a
Sámi custom protected by article 8.
The Lap Codicil from 1751 can be said to confrm that Sámi law existed and
was historically recognized by state-based laws. The Lap Codicil is an Appendix to
the Strömstad Border Treaty of former Norway-Denmark and Sweden-Finland that
fxed and defned the border between what today constitutes Norway and Sweden.
The Appendix secured the Sámi right to cross borders necessary to their customary
land uses, such as for reindeer herding. Since the border interrupted Sámi custom-
ary land use, such as in reindeer husbandry, and inhibited the Sámi from continuing
their customary land uses, the concerned states agreed to the Lap Codicil. The Lap
Codicil contains a comprehensive set of regulations. However, in this context, sec-
tions 10 and 22–27 seem most relevant to mention. While section 10 states that the
Sámi shall be able to cross the national border in accordance with old customs, sec-
tions 22–27 refer to a legal order (Lapperetten), according to which appointed Sámi
had authority, as a frst instance, to settle certain types of disputes between Sámi
(Pedersen 2008). The Lap Codicil remained unchanged until 1886, when the bilateral
Swedish-Norwegian Act with provisions on reindeer husbandry (Felleslappeloven)
came into force. In the 1900s and until 2005, border-crossing reindeer husbandry
was regulated through Swedish-Norwegian Reindeer Grazing Conventions (Ravna
2020). Moreover, nowadays, many of the regulations in the Lap Codicil are said to
be obsolete, such as sections 22–27 (Päiviö 2007).
Although the proposed Nordic Saami Convention has not been approved (and conse-
quently not ratifed either) by the concerned parties, which consist of the governments of
Finland, Norway and Sweden, it is relevant to mention it here also since, if the concerned
parties ratify the proposal in the future, it will seemingly establish another obligation for
the three states to show due respect for Sámi law. The preamble in the proposal states,
among other things, that the Sámi as a people and an Indigenous People in the three
states have their own culture, their own social life and their own languages that extend

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across the state borders (Nordisk samekonvensjon 2005). However, section 9 is of spe-
cial interest in this context, since it expresses:

The states shall show due respect for the Saami people’s conceptions of law,
legal traditions, and customs.
Pursuant to the provisions in the frst paragraph, the states shall, when elabo-
rating legislation in areas where there might exist relevant Saami legal customs,
particularly investigate whether such customs exist, and if so, consider whether
these customs should be afforded protection or in other manners be refected
in the national legislation. Due consideration shall also be paid to Saami legal
customs in the application of law.

The idea of the Convention was launched by the Saami Council in the mid-1980s,
before the three Sámi parliaments were established. The Council, which is a volun-
tary and non-governmental organization, proposed that the Sámi people and the
states that encompass Sápmi should develop and adopt a Saami Convention that
addresses the situation of the Sámi as an Indigenous People divided by nation-state
boundaries. The Nordic Council supported the Saami Council’s proposal and rec-
ommended that the concerned governments establish an expert group for this task.
The governments of Finland, Sweden and Norway did so, and, in 2005, a group
consisting of experts in Indigenous and Sámi rights and law appointed by the three
governments and the three Sámi parliaments, which at that time had been estab-
lished, released the proposed Nordic Saami Convention (Nordisk samekonvensjon
2005). The parties started negotiating the proposal in 2011 with the goal of reaching
a common agreement in 2016. The negotiations continued until 2018, but they did
not result in an agreement, seemingly since they could not agree on all sections in the
proposal. At the time this chapter was written, the three governments and the Sámi
Parliaments were still considering the proposal (www.regjeringen.no).

THE SÁMI SIIDA CUSTOM

What is the Sámi siida custom?
As mentioned previously, the content of Sámi law has only on a very limited scale
been recorded and systematized to make Sámi law easily accessible. Probably, Solem’s
book Lappiske rettsstudie, the interdisciplinary study that the Norwegian government
established in 1996 and that presented its results NOU 2001:34 Samiske sedvaner og
rettsoppfatninger represent the most prominent examples of how Sámi law has been
recorded through Norwegian legal sources. The purpose of NOU 2001:34 was to pro-
vide an account and analysis of Sámi customs and legal opinions that apply in relation
to the right to use land and waters in Sámi areas. The investigation was conducted by
independent scholars, not just legal. For instance, it contains a contribution by the two
well-recognized Sámi scholars, Nils Oskal and Mikkel Nils Sara, who describe the
Sámi siida system in reindeer husbandry and the reasoning behind it.
The term ‘siida’ is an old North Sámi term that is used in different Sámi contexts
and with different meanings. The term functions, for instance, to refer to an historic
Sámi societal institution that consisted mainly of a cohesive land area on which

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hunting and fshing were the main livelihoods for the families in the area (Solem
1970). However, in this chapter, the term refers to the siida within Sámi reindeer
husbandry that is a traditional Sámi livelihood.
In Sámi reindeer husbandry, a siida constitutes a collaboration unit normally
consisting of members belonging to one or several related families that conduct
reindeer husbandry together on certain land areas (Oskal and Sara 2001). The siida
custom is associated with a different kind of norms, and together they constitute a
system that has been called the siida system (Sara 2013; Labba 2018) or the siida
order (Nordisk samekonvensjon 2005). The system has not explicitly been approved
as Sámi law, for instance, by the national lawmakers and courts in the states that
encompass Sápmi. Only fragments of the system, such as the siida custom, have
been recognized by Norwegian legal sources. However, other relevant sources of a
national legal character indicate that the custom and the associated norms constitute
Sámi law (e.g. Oskal and Sara 2001; Nordisk samekonvensjon 2005).
To understand the structure of and the reasoning behind the custom and the
norms in the siida system, knowledge about the basics of traditional Sámi reindeer
husbandry is required. Three elements are central in traditional Sámi reindeer
husbandry: reindeer, grazing lands and reindeer owners and herders, and these
three elements are closely connected to each other (about grazing lands, see Eira
in this volume). In addition, reindeer and grazing lands are the sources of reindeer-
herding Sámi’s cultural, spiritual, social and political identity and the foundation of
their traditional knowledge systems (e.g. Oskal 1995; see also State of the World’s
Indigenous Peoples; and Magga, P. in this volume).
Reindeer are herd animals that require large areas to accommodate their biological
needs. Throughout the year, reindeer herds normally migrate between different sea-
sonally based grazing lands (which together establish a landscape) to accommodate
their biological needs (Sara 2001; Kuhmunen 2000). Each reindeer constitutes pri-
vate property, and an offcially registered traditional Sámi earmark in a reindeer’s
ear identifes the reindeer’s owner. Since a reindeer herd usually consists of rein-
deer belonging to different owners, effective practical work with a herd requires
cooperation among the owners and herders of the reindeer in a herd.
Members of a siida usually belong to one or several families or/and individuals who
are related to each other (Solem 1970; Oskal and Sara 2001) as the children usually
continue to conduct reindeer herding in the same siida as their parents or/and relatives
(Solem 1970). These norms are the basis of the nature of reindeer, in that they oppose
migration to new land areas. Consequently, a siida uses certain land areas repeatedly,
and the members of the siida build traditional knowledge about the land areas and
conditions to use them in the best possible way (Oskal and Sara 2001).
Many norms related to the siida custom are based on two values – stability and
fexibility (Labba 2018). The norms always aim to fnd a reasonable balance of
the three elements mentioned earlier. While the norms mentioned in the previous
paragraph can refect stability, an example of a norm that refects fexibility is that
membership in a siida does not have to be based on kinship or a prior connection
to the specifc land areas that the siida uses; it can also be based on other factors,
such as the spirit of cooperation among individual reindeer owners and herders
(Paine 1994; Solem 1970). However, for stability reasons, another norm means that
the consent of the individual members of a siida is preferable when new individuals

500
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or families with their reindeer seek admission to it (Oskal and Sara 2001; see also
Labba 2018). An increase of reindeer in the siida can have unfortunate ecological
consequences and lead to an overcrowding of reindeer there. Flexibility in the siida
system responds to the need to adapt the number of members and reindeer, for
example, to varied climate situations and access to vital natural resources. While
new short-term siida constellations can arise to cope in the best possible way with
unexpected conditions, for instance conditions affected by the climate or marriage,
can motivate new long-term constellations (Labba 2018).
A larger land area can accommodate several or many different siidas. Moreover,
a well-working relationship based on mutual respect between neighbouring siidas
is important. In such a relationship, the siidas exchange information when neces-
sary and consult on activities that affect them. Sometimes reindeer belonging to
individuals in one siida cross the border and mix with reindeer belonging to another
siida, especially if they are geographically very close to each other. Norms associated
with the siida custom instruct how the situation can be dealt with. The instructions
depend, however, on various practical circumstances, such as, for example, the cause
of the mix, the pasture situation for the affected siidas and the condition of the
reindeer (Labba 2018). Conficts between different siidas can arise if a siida uses a
certain land area without the consent of the siida holding the customary land area
rights (Strøm Bull 1997; Oskal and Sara 2001).

Which legal status does the siida custom have according

to state-based laws?
As the previous subsection illustrates, the siida custom has a long-standing tradition
within Sámi reindeer husbandry. Although Sámi in Norway, Sweden and Finland
conduct reindeer husbandry to which they apply the siida custom, there are signif-
cant differences in how the laws of the three states relate to it: Only Norwegian legal
sources recognize it. Moreover, in the reindeer-herding areas in Sweden and Norway
(renskötselområdet and reinbeiteområdet), Sámi have an exclusive right to own and
herd reindeer, a so-called reindeer-herding right. In Finland, anyone living within the
Finnish reindeer-herding area (poronhoitoalue) and who is a citizen of the European
Union has the right to own reindeer.
The applicable Norwegian Reindeer Husbandry Act (LOV 2007–06–15 nr 40:
Lov om reindrift), which came into force in 2007, regulates the conduct and internal
organization of Sámi reindeer husbandry in Norway. The Act contains provisions on,
among other things, the so-called reindeer-herding right, and it requires that rein-
deer herding be conducted within reindeer-grazing districts (Reinbeitedistrikter). A
reindeer-grazing district is an administrative unit which was historically introduced
by the Norwegian state to organize liability for damages caused by reindeer on other
people’s private property (NOU 2001:35). In comparison to the reindeer-grazing
district, the siida is usually a smaller entity in terms of the number of members and
reindeer and the size of land areas in use (Labba 2015). In some districts, however,
the structure in terms of the number of individuals and their social relationship is
reminiscent of only one siida. In addition, the land area that a siida customarily uses
can cross the administratively defned border of a reindeer-grazing district estab-
lished according to national law.

501
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The Law Committee, which drafted the Norwegian Act, consisted of 11 persons, of
whom 6 were Sámi reindeer owners. The Committee considered it an important aim
to draw up provisions based on the Sámi culture and traditions in reindeer husbandry
(NOU 2001:35). The Act’s frst section states, inter alia, that the Act shall promote cul-
turally sustainable reindeer husbandry based on Sámi culture, traditions and customs.
Based on the Supreme Court ruling Rt-2000–1578 (Stjernøya case), which
was issued in the same period and which contributed to conformity between
Sámi and Norwegian law, the Committee suggested that the new Act should
contain provisions about the siida as a legal subject ( NOU 2001:35 ). In its
ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged that a family group can acquire a
right to use a certain land area through long-time use. The Committee’s pro-
posals concerning the siida were approved by the Norwegian Parliament, the
Norwegian lawmaker ( Ot.prp. nr. 25 (2006–2007 )).
The provisions concerning the siida are spread out in the Norwegian Reindeer
Husbandry Act. For instance, section 51 of the Act contains a defnition of the siida,
and it establishes that it consists of a group of reindeer owners who together conduct
reindeer herding on certain land areas. As a matter of law, the siida holds certain
rights and duties according to the Act. Among other things, according to section 44,
a siida has the right to manage its own special interests, such as on land use issues.
According to section 58, a siida has the right to be involved in the development of
so-called usage rules (bruksregler) for the reindeer-grazing district (NOU 2001:35).
This study about the siida shows that the Norwegian Reindeer Husbandry Act
recognizes the Sámi siida custom. The recognition of the custom has, however, been
met with criticism for not having the intended effect, with the explanation that
the Act’s provisions are not fully based on concepts, understandings and priorities
related to the siida (Sara 2011). Sara’s well-founded criticism of the Norwegian
Act’s recognition of the siida custom means that the Act’s recognition here only
exemplifes what a ‘relatively’ fruitful relationship between Sámi law and state-based
law can look like in practice.

CONCLUSIONS
I have opened a discussion about the Sámi legal tradition and law and examined
what Sámi legal tradition and law are, what the Sámi siida custom is and which legal
status the custom has according to Norwegian legal sources.
I argue that Sámi law should not be understood only as law fxed from time
immemorial and expressed through Sámi customs. Already, Norwegian legal sources
assume that a Sámi legal opinion constitutes a source of Sámi law. A legal opinion is
an opinion about what constitutes law, but, unlike a custom, it does not need to con-
nect to the history. It is reasonable to think that it should be possible to base Sámi law
not only on legal sources that connect to the history but also on present-day under-
standings of law. However, a challenge with a legal opinion as a legal source is that it
does not constitute an authoritative legal source within the Norwegian legal system.
Askeland (2019) argues that, for a legal opinion to compensate for this, it must be
based on authoritative sources or be expressed in judicial doctrine. But, based on
what follows from the Norwegian doctrine of legal sources, not even judicial doctrine
can establish law (e.g. Sæther et al. 2017; Skoghøy 2018).

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An example of what could potentially substantiate a Sámi legal opinion is what

Sámi reindeer herders in many reindeer-herding areas increasingly state: Losses of
signifcant grazing land areas to competing interests are increasing. The Sámi practice
of reindeer husbandry is protected in various ways by state-based and international
laws in Finland, Norway and Sweden (e.g. Länsman et al. v. Finland, Communication
No. 511/1992; CERD/C/102/D/54/2013; Åhrén 2014). The situation expressed
by reindeer herders, however, illustrates that the laws seem unable to protect it
adequately. Consequently, without proper protection in state-based laws and/or
Sámi law, Sámi reindeer herders face an uncertain future.
Against this backdrop, I ask if state-based laws can acknowledge Sámi law in
a suffcient manner and implement it. I assume that Sámi law is more than what
reasonably can be addressed through Sámi customs and legal opinions. As Solem
(1970) and Funderud Skogvang (2017) suggest, I assume that Sámi law is embed-
ded in resources deeply rooted in the Sámi society, culture, traditional livelihoods,
languages and cultural expressions. However, as long as Sámi law is not found,
analyzed, systematized and expressed through legal sources that are adapted in close
connection to the aforementioned Sámi resources, it may be challenging to invoke
Sámi law outside the arenas in which it exists and prevails.
I have also examined what the Sámi siida custom is and which legal status it has
according to Norwegian legal sources. My study of the Norwegian legal sources’
recognition of the siida custom illustrates that Sámi law is subordinate to state-based
laws. This means that the impact of Sámi law outside the arenas where it prevails,
as with the siida custom, depends largely on how it is addressed by national legal
sources, such as legislation and Supreme Court case law.
That state-based laws prevail over Indigenous laws does not occur only in Sápmi.
Borrows (2010) writes:

Many Indigenous peoples believe their laws provide signifcant context and
detail for judging our relationships with the land, and with one another. Yet
Indigenous laws are often ignored, diminished, or denied as being relevant or
authoritative in answering these questions.

Henriksen (2008) states that two main factors decide whether Indigenous law is rec-
ognized and considered by national authorities in policy decisions and in the appli-
cation of national laws and regulations. Firstly, it depends on the level of general
acceptance of legal pluralism within the national judicial system. However, from the
perspective of legal pluralism, Sámi legal tradition and law are largely absent (Labba
2020b). Secondly, according to Henriksen (2008), it depends on the issue at hand and
the Indigenous law that is sought to be made applicable. As Henriksen points out,
the Norwegian state’s acceptance and application of Sámi law is, in general, selective,
pragmatic and largely determined by the overall interests of the state.
When Sámi law has no opportunity to impact as law within or in relation to the
national legal systems, or the opportunity is limited, the Sámi culture is in a vul-
nerable situation. One risk is that conficts occur between Sámi, especially if Sámi
law contradicts state-based law and some Sámi apply state-based law while others
apply Sámi law. Another risk is that Sámi livelihoods that derive support from or
are managed according to Sámi law may change in an unfavorable way or even

503
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disappear (Labba 2015). By recognizing Sámi law as law, the states encompassing
Sápmi would not only fulfl their legal obligations, but they would probably also
support a preservation and development of the Sámi culture, including, among other
things, Sámi languages and traditional livelihoods on a Sámi basis.

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 CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

C O M M E M O R AT I N G C O N T I N U I T Y
Reconciling material representations
in Sääʹm land1


Natalia Magnani

INTRODUCTION
On a bright morning, 25 August 2015, the air cool against the skin with the onset
of autumn, an audience gathered along Lake Čeʹvetjäuʹrr near the school around a
rather unusual scene: A root-sewn boat; Finnish and East African Orthodox priests
present for the boat’s blessing; Matti Semenoff and Arttu Niemenmaa, the root-boat
builders; Mika Alava, the instructor; representatives of Sámi Museum Siida; and the
Sääʹm village leader. It was the last day of the three-day Saint Tryphon Festival, the
annual Orthodox pilgrimage and processions commemorating Sääʹm resettlement
and religious heritage.
Since the 1960s, the yearly gatherings have celebrated Saint Tryphon of Peäccam
(R. Pechenga, F. Petsamo), who founded the monastery in the region associated with
fve centuries of Sääʹm Eastern Orthodoxy. Following community displacement
from Peäccam homelands ceded to the Soviet Union after the Second World War,
loss of language in Finnish boarding schools and pervasive stigmatization for
‘Russian’ difference, the Orthodox ritual of continuity has taken on new politi-
cal meaning of Sääʹm recognition and restitution in which issues of representation
also emerge as central (see also Jouste in this volume). In this process, the pilgrim-
age commemorates continuity with Peäccam while establishing resettlement areas
as environments of memory (cf. Nora 1989); diverse institutions and actors are
involved in this reweaving.
As a ‘ritualized border crossing to memorialize and mourn lost lands and ways of
life’ (Vuola 2020, 561), the St. Tryphon event re-enacts several relocation journeys
from Peäccam to new territories in Finland, following and consecrating sites from
the Russian border to church services and social gatherings in Sääʹm resettlement vil-
lages of Njeäʹllem, Keväjäuʹrr and Čeʹvetjäuʹrr to ancestral land in Njauddâm. Close
to the Russian border near Njeäʹllem in Čarmmjäuʹrr (F. Tsarmijärvi), the procession

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-35 507

 — Natalia Magnani —

passes the Travellers’ Cross, an Orthodox wooden memorial. Placed in the area
where Sääʹm lived in temporary structures while awaiting permanent settlement, the
cross calls forth prayer and remembrance for Sääʹm homelands and relatives buried
on the other side of the redrawn Russian border. Crossing into Norway in the ances-
tral Sääʹm territories of Njauddâm sijdd, a service is held outside St. George’s chapel
and another near the mass grave of those bodies taken for research to the University
of Oslo in 1915, then returned a century later. The pilgrimage culminates in sanc-
tifcation of the Njauddâm River, thus physically returning participants to Sääʹm
homelands after re-enacting the relocation journey and commemorating a larger
Sääʹm region that encompasses both the resettlement Sääʹmvuʹvdd2 and Peäccam.
The pilgrimage reinforces a sense of community for Sääʹm living hundreds of kilo-
metres apart in the resettlement areas and across Finland. It provides annual impetus
for those living farther south to travel to the northern regions their families left gen-
erations earlier, thus constituting a larger-scale pilgrimage ritually reversing decades
of outmigration across Finland.
The Saint Tryphon Festival of 2015 was unique because that year, it was not just
people, but also a ‘root boat’ (vuäʹddvõõnâs, sewn together with pine roots), taking
part in the commemoration of continuity through change. The reconstruction was
part of a workshop spanning several seasons, organized by Sámi Museum Siida and
the Sámi Education Institute (SOGSAKK) (about the Sámi Museum Siida, see Aikio
in this volume). Participants (including myself), guided by an instructor from south-
ern Finland who had frst learned to make boats in the Deatnu valley, sought not
only to recreate a boat documented in early 20th-century ethnographic texts from
Suõnnʹjel sijdd in Peäccam,3 but also to re-embody a tacit knowledge of engage-
ment with local ecologies, from material collection to root-sewn and handcrafted
production. Men across generations visited the boat site, some recalling the ways
that they had watched (and sometimes helped) their fathers build boats. Women
experienced in root work came to guide the plank sewing and material preparation.
Heini Wesslin, a renowned Sääʹm artisan, showed the men how to soak pine roots to
make them supple and the bark easy to remove. The boat builder Matti brought his
wife’s (Leila Semenoff’s) antler tool for basket weaving; Leila had shown him how
to pull roots through different-sized holes in order to strip the bark. Others stopped
by the workshop to sip coffee and pore through archive drawings and Sääʹm words
for relations of collecting and making.
In the process, acts of remembrance took on meaning as a dismantling of Finnish
assimilation histories, articulated as a cultural movement through new forms of
institutionalized and memorial production (Magnani and Magnani 2018). The mak-
ers experienced an interweaving of bodily memories of Peäccam with Čeʹvetjäuʹrr
ecologies and socialites of production in ways that reinforced community ties. At the
same time, tensions of representation emerged over months of building (Magnani,
forthcoming), which the fnal launching ceremony sought to reconcile.
On the last day of the ceremony, the same day as the Orthodox service in Njauddâm,
an audience gathered to witness the blessing of the Peäccam-era boat on the new
shores of 21st century Čeʹvetjäuʹrr, thus drawing attention to the lived history of
Sääʹm relocation. Before multiple flm cameras, priests sprinkled the boat with holy
water to consecrate the vessel before its onward journey to the Sääʹm open-air
museum and future appearances at cultural events. They splashed some of the holy

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water on the audience so that those watching also participated in the consecration
of the boat and its continuation. Matti and Arttu, as the principal root-boat builders,
entered the wobbly vessel and rowed it steadily onto the water. Applause enveloped
them, seemingly pushing the men towards the lakes of Suõnnʹjel. Then the Finnish
and Burundi priests in their wide gowns also took turns rowing, nearly tipping the
vessel to the delight of an amused audience.
The ceremony brought together more people than had participated in the actual
building – Sääʹm across generations and throughout Finland, political leaders and
cultural activists, Finnish newcomers, researchers, schoolteachers and sponsors of
the boat project from Sámi Museum Siida and SOGSAKK. Every possible news
organization was there, from Sääʹm news to wider Sámi and national Finnish media.
Through these representations, the root boat became a ‘commemorative crea-
tion’ (Lowenthal 1985, 324), making durable ancestral practices intertwined with
Peäccam environments and Sääʹm ability to adapt these skills to new lands and
waters in the maintenance of community ties and well-being. Commemorating con-
tinuity despite displacement, the public gathering incorporated skills acquired over
months of building into a collective memory shared with those who had not partici-
pated in the reconstruction.
In this chapter, I look at the potential of ceremony to negotiate uncertainties of
representation in Indigenous memory, shaped by histories of displacement, southward
migration, colonial research and settlement. Drawing on 14 months of feldwork in
Čeʹvetjäuʹrr and participation in the root boat’s making and ceremony, I focus on
embodied re-enactments of continuity between places and people and how they serve
to reconcile tensions of representation that emerge during production. After consider-
ing the possibilities and paradoxes of institutional infrastructures of continuity, I fol-
low the ceremonial incorporation of select embodied practices into collective memory
that seek to mitigate and obfuscate these tensions. Ceremony establishes the second-
ary, mediating role of institutions and non-Indigenous actors, while affrming Sääʹm
agency in shaping their own cultural memory and futures. In this way, the anxieties of
representation and practical reworkings that unfolded during production (discussed
in Magnani, forthcoming) are temporarily reconciled and forgotten in the long-term
memory of commemorated objects.

MATERIALS OF CEREMONY
Scholars have questioned to what extent ceremonies actually seek to transmit social
memory or whether there is another, ‘real’ reason behind the ceremonies, whether
historical, sociological or psychoanalytical (Connerton 1989, 48–51). Yet it is also
crucial to consider the possibility for commemorative ceremonies to serve as medi-
ums for precisely the memory work that participants intend (cf. ibid.). Connerton
(1989, 70–71) argues that commemorative ceremonies involve not only remember-
ing and recollection but also re-enactment and embodiment made possible by partic-
ipants. As a result, they combine narrative and embodied practice to commemorate
continuity with the past through re-actualization of historical events continuously
made present (Eliade 1959, 68–70).
However, the reconstruction of the Suõnnʹjel boat on the shores of Čeʹvetjäuʹrr
meant that things could not be exactly the same as they were before. In addition to

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social, political and economic transformations, the shores to which the boat had
been reconstituted had also changed – in fact, they were new shores entirely. A cen-
tury ago, there were root boats in every Sääʹm household territory. Now there was a
single boat of a particular model documented by Peäccam ethnographers on the lake
of Čeʹvetjäuʹrr. Instead of using the boat for fshing, people gathered to commemo-
rate historical events and religious and material practices as Sääʹm heritage and thus
to ‘transmit social memory’ (Connerton 1989, 52). As continuity implies constant
movement, so, too, the boat, while commemorating the past, propelled memory for-
ward to shape Sääʹm lives into the future.
The root boat ceremony and the Saint Tryphon Festival established continuity
between Čeʹvetjäuʹrr and Sääʹm homelands in Peäccam while bridging distances of
migration across Finland by bringing outmigrants north for the event. The boat’s
inclusion in an Orthodox pilgrimage commemorated continuity with the people and
places of Peäccam by re-enacting the actual relocation journey from lost homelands.
Yet it was also the material associations of the boat that served to connect multiple
places and temporalities.
The reconstruction of large charismatic objects occupies prominent roles in Indigenous
movements around the world. What does this say about how the material, temporal
and spatial dimensions of Indigenous craft establish continuity and connection to
land to cope with the uprooting and disruption of lifeways under state governance?
To answer these questions, we must consider the role of ceremony. While
relationships between boats and those who use them are mediated by emotional
attachments and obligations (Jalas 2009), the public dimensions of root-boat
construction and launch translated such individual relations to collective experience.
The spatial and temporal dimensions of making and the fnal consecration as
ceremony constituted the boat’s saliency as an idiom for continuity and a vehicle of
collective remembering.
Compared to other objects and materials of cultural memory, boats have a higher
potential for group participation during their making and use. While the scale of a
boat makes it suited as a ceremonial centrepiece, its size also creates conditions for
construction in a public space, gathering people and building a sense of collective
production. Thus, months of building constitute ‘creation as ceremony,’ a process
of material and visual production that engages land and people through everyday
performance (Zepeda 2014). Fostering intergenerational connection, rehabilitation
and Indigenous reclamation (Johansen 2012), such projects often serve as vehicles of
social engagement and memory from the collection of materials to construction and
ceremony to their continued lives through display and use.
As vehicles of transport, boats are commonly associated with movement, subsistence
and social connection between places, at once ‘rootedness and journeying’ (Tilley
2004). They have been used in burial practices to convey rebirth and renewal from
Egypt to northern Europe (Medvedev-Mead 2005), Melanesia (Tilley 2004), and First
Nations territories (Johansen 2012). In the Sámi regions, boats have been studied on
rock art as representations of liminality (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2007), serving as a
means of contact between Sámi and Nordic communities, and the transport of souls to
a spirit world during trance or boat burial (Bayliss-Smith and Mulk 1999).
Many Indigenous communities since the 1970s have used boats and similar cultural
objects to mediate international networks and relations with nation states (Herle 2005),

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as well as in contemporary revivals such as canoe journeying (Duffek and Townsend-

Gault 2008, 13). A well-known example is the reconstruction, inter-island voyage and
launching ceremony of a Polynesian canoe, which emphasized intergenerational conti-
nuity and validated historical claims concerning the key role of Polynesian navigation
skills during the settlement of islands (Finney 1994; Linnekin 1983).
In the making of the Sääʹm root boat, the age of the material (i.e. old-growth
Čeʹvetjäuʹrr pine), older techniques using hand tools, and the qualities of trees repre-
senting renewal (cf. Rival 1998), established temporal continuity with past genera-
tions who used similar methods of making. Meanwhile, the ‘roots’ of the root-sewn
boat also mediated connection and renewal, drawing on the signifcance of seams
in Sääʹm burials. For example, there are written accounts of coffns sewn together
with pine roots (Wallenius and Kännö 1994, 178) while today, the continued tearing
of seams on clothing and shoes worn by the deceased prevents prolonged entangle-
ment with the world of the living (Rantakeisu 2015; Storå 1971, 86, 168, 215). The
suturing instead of tearing of seams in the making of the root boat thus entangled
ancestral and living worlds to create a sense of continuity.
Ceremony for reconstructed objects occurs not only with boats but also with other
sizeable craft that visibly affrm continuity and Indigenous presence. On the Pacifc
West Coast, the making of totem poles involves the blessing of felled cedar trees and the
fnal raising ceremony. In such cases, blessing and ceremony reclaim relationships with
local environments suppressed by colonial governments and impacted by social and
economic transformations. A totem pole titled ‘Reconciliation’ raised at the University
of British Columbia marked efforts of postcolonial repair with the Canadian govern-
ment. For larger built structures – for example, in the repatriation of an Indian school
building in Miami – ceremony asserted Indigenous presence by establishing connec-
tion between people and the surrounding landscape (Nesper 2001).
Explaining commemoration not just as narrative but as re-enactment, Connerton
(1989, 70) argues that ‘if there is such a thing as social memory . . . we are likely to
fnd it in commemorative ceremonies.’ Considering the Saint Tryphon pilgrimage and
root-boat launch as part of a commemorative ceremony, both taking on meanings of
connection between living and deceased, the relocation emerges as central to Sääʹm
social memory. The pilgrimage leading up to the launching ceremony established
continuity through the piecing together of the relocation journey, commonly associ-
ated with uprootedness and displacement. People drove between church services in
each Sääʹm village, engaging in repetitive speech, gestures, postures and movements
characteristic of Orthodox gatherings, thus ‘ordering thoughts and suggesting feel-
ings’ through the repetition of practice and bodily disposition (Bourdieu 1990, 69).
Finally, the joining of these Orthodox rites with movement between relocation sites
collapsed temporal and spatial distance between Peäccam and resettlement territo-
ries through temporal recollection and spatial re-experiencing, albeit by a new mode
of transportation (cf. Küchler 1999, 60).
The pilgrimage of 2015 culminated in the launching and consecration of the root
boat on the lake of Čeʹvetjäuʹrr, materially reconstituting Sääʹm life on new shores.
At the same time, as relatives from southern Finland visited for the Saint Tryphon
festivities, the events negotiated outmigration from the northern Sääʹm areas, bring-
ing people back north along the same roads that they or their ancestors had travelled
for new lives in Finnish centres.

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During this journey, spiritual articulations were woven into material reconnec-
tions. Because of their approximately 500-year history with Orthodox Christianity
and associated stigma by Finns and other Sámi following resettlement, many Sääʹm
consider the Orthodox faith integral to both community belonging and distinction.
Moreover, there is an idea that the church has ‘done much more than the state’ (Vuola
2020, 579), referring to the signifcant role of Orthodoxy in cultural resurgence – not
only through the translation of church texts but also as a means of continuity and
healing amid a sense of rupture. One of the main Orthodox priests who blessed the
root boat, Father Rauno, a middle-aged man from Karelian areas of Finland, evokes
the intertwining of cultural and religious awakening. He describes religion as a criti-
cal part of reconnection for displaced populations globally. The frst generation, he
says, dwells mentally in the old homeland, the second focuses on social advancement
in the new region while the third seeks to ‘re-root’ to the homeland through practices
in new territories. In this process, religion serves as a way for people to strengthen a
sense of continuity and community in new places. The Orthodox Church is an insti-
tution that has persisted through Sääʹm histories of uprooting, making it a locus of
cultural reproduction despite assimilative histories of Christianization.
Over decades in the Sääʹmvuʹvdd, the role of religion has shifted from muting to
affrming difference in relation to a Finnish majority, as well as to other Sámi. Unlike
postwar generations who converted to Lutheranism at a time when affliations with a
‘Russian’ religion were stigmatized, today, return migrants (s. jânnmamaʹcci) and Finnish
newcomers to Sääʹm areas often convert to Orthodoxy from Lutheranism. Those
who marry into Sääʹm families build a sense of belonging through conversion, while
return migrants mend histories of stigma, loss and assimilation that led their families to
Lutheran congregations. The Orthodox chapel and accompanying services, as a space
of meeting between human and spiritual worlds and people of diverse life trajectories,
facilitates a temporal and spatial bridging to create conditions for intergenerational
repair. It follows then that, through Orthodox blessing, religious practice animated the
root boat with spiritual associations of renewal to collapse felt spatial and temporal
distance between the Peäccam homeland and Sääʹm resettlement territories.

INFRASTRUCTURES OF CONTINUITY
While Sääʹm agency is at the centre of this commemorative process, religious and
cultural institutions through which state sovereignty is enacted also structure artic-
ulations of continuity through ceremony. National bodies support enactments of
continuity and land tenure by funding Indigenous-led museums and educational
programs, even as this appears to undermine state territoriality. The question then
emerges as to whether the material linking of homeland and adopted land also reaf-
frms state borders.
Given the history of Indigenous displacement globally, the Sääʹm celebration of a
aassâmprääʹzniǩ, or ‘settlement anniversary,’ at frst glance presents a paradox often
discussed in the Sääʹmvuʹvdd. Why do people celebrate a settlement that meant the
end of migratory, border-transcending lifeways? Compared to the years of Finnish
control over Peäccam, the sedentarization that accompanied resettlement incorpo-
rated Sääʹm communities more frmly into state administrative and welfare infra-
structure. Children began attending Finnish boarding schools, which took them

512
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away from their families and land-based activities for much of the year. In subse-
quent decades, the building of Čeʹvetjäuʹrr Road connected Suõnnʹjel Sääʹm to social
services farther south and enticed younger generations to urban centres of educa-
tion, jobs and economic growth. All these changes brought opportunity but also
pressures to community life that projects like root-boat building aim to reweave.
A ‘settlement anniversary’ and its materials of ceremony defy state boundaries by
affrming continuity with a homeland now in Russia, yet also celebrate a ‘settlement’
within Finnish borders.
One source of this double articulation is the existence of Sámi institutions within
Finnish cultural and educational structures that support the revival of certain objects
and skills. Part of a national and international cultural economy, SOGSAKK receives
government support for craft education, while Sámi Museum Siida is part of a
Finnish museum system that allocates funding for the commissioning and display
of Sámi objects. As the two sponsoring institutions for the root-boat project, Siida
organized a trip to the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki to visit an early
20th-century boat model, SOGSAKK sponsored two months of boat building, and
both institutions were involved in the fnal ceremony.
Finnish constitutional safeguards for the maintenance of Sámi culture and lan-
guage create space for grassroots Sámi initiatives to carve out their own cultural
institutions within national structures. These Indigenous institutions have enormous
transformative potential but may also be delimited by state economic frameworks
based on political conceptions of what constitutes culture (Magnani, forthcoming).
When funding dictates which objects are produced and how, multicultural poli-
cies risk becoming reminiscent of assimilationist agendas, this time circumscribing
‘diverse’ instead of homogenized populations within state borders. Set within these
frames, even transborder articulations may reinforce national ethos.
On the other hand, the joining of the root-boat launch and settlement anni-
versary refects a unique Sääʹm political agency and relationship with the Finnish
state. Although resettlement meant greater government control and integration, it
also led to new political opportunity as the status of residency in the ‘Sääʹmvuʹvdd’
transformed the role of the village headman from arbitrator of local territories and
resources to mediator vis-a-vis state authorities (Ingold 1976). The directness of this
relationship is generally perceived by Sääʹm as favourable compared to the advisory
role of the Sámi Parliament, allowing greater opportunity to dictate policy concern-
ing Sääʹm areas. It follows, then, that the transborder articulations of the root boat
neither undermine nor impose state sovereignty, but rather reaffrm a Sääʹm-state
relationship used to further local interests.

RECONCILING MEMORY
As the re-enactment of the relocation journey and the launching of the root boat
emphasized spatial and temporal continuity with the Sääʹm homeland, the bodily
aspect of ceremony transferred everyday experiences of boat building to collective
ceremony, from those who built the boat to the wider Sääʹm community, while estab-
lishing bodily connection between the rowers of root boats in Peäccam and those of
Čeʹvetjäuʹrr. Just as boats facilitate contact between people living in different regions
(Bayliss-Smith and Mulk 1999), and the negotiation of social and power relations

513
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(Tilley 2004), the blessing of the boat, collective witnessing of the audience and suc-
cession of people rowing onto the lake, mediated relations between diverse actors
in the commemoration of Sääʹm heritage. I shall discuss how such initiatives seek to
reconcile non-Indigenous representations and motivations, and thus elevate the role
of Sääʹm actors in collective memory.

Something of our own

Irja Jefremoff, an older ‘knowledge holder’ married into a family in Keväjäuʹrr, origi-
nally from Karelian regions in southern Finland, told of an incident that happened
with the Nellimin kansantanssi- ja perinneryhmä – the Njeäʹllem folk dance and
tradition group, which gathered villagers, Sääʹm and non-Sääʹm, to learn and per-
form Sääʹm dance. At one point, Finnish researchers contacted the Njeäʹllem group,
inquiring whether its members would be willing to teach them Sääʹm dance. This
resulted in a moral dilemma for Irja and other members, who weighed the potential
positive impacts of increasing visibility for Sääʹm culture, and the more likely extrac-
tion inherent in teaching Sääʹm practices to those who will leave the area, without
potential beneft for the people who live there. After much deliberation, the dance
group decided not to teach the researchers, explaining that Sääʹm must have some-
thing of their ‘own,’ because ‘so much has already been taken.’
Similar arguments arise in controversy surrounding the wearing of Sääʹm dress
by non-Sääʹm and the teaching of certain practices related to medicinal herbs, sto-
ries and spiritual beliefs. Newcomers and return migrants to Sääʹm land describe
things that were not told to them until they became part of the community. There
are circumstances when outside involvement acts in alliance with Sääʹm interests
and initiatives, while particular practices must remain for Sääʹm to determine access.
There are many examples of outside institutions and individuals whose actions
are woven into Sääʹm collective memory. Karl Nickul and Väinö Tanner are recognized
for their advocacy for Sääʹm rights to determine their own cultural affairs (Susiluoto
2003, 184; about Tanner, see Nyyssönen in this volume). The Swiss writer Robert
Crottet continues to be memorialized almost seven decades after he led the Skolt
Lapp Relief Fund to restore livelihoods and material possessions after the reloca-
tion from Peäccam (ibid., 179–180). In 2016, the great-granddaughter of Kaisa
Gauriloff, Katja Gauriloff, produced a nationally acclaimed flm following the
friendship between Crottet and Kaisa. It celebrated the historical events and per-
sonal exchanges that led Kaisa to recount, and Crottet to record, oral histories that
would be read by future generations.
As narrative and experience are mutually structuring (Bruner 1986), entangled
and embodied through ceremony (Connerton 1989, 43), ceremony shapes the ways
in which experiences and narratives become incorporated into collective memory.
In 2015 the Sääʹm organization Saaʹmi Nueʹtt honoured the National Archives of
Finland and Finnish Sámi Archives as ‘Skolt of the Year,’ Eeʹjj säʹmmlaž. Community
organizers worked together with researchers at the Archives to restore a set of scrolls
with decrees from Russian authorities detailing Sääʹm rights to the land and waters of
their homeland. Similar to the centring of Sääʹm leadership at the root-boat launch,
this project culminated in a ceremony and unveiling at the Čeʹvetjäuʹrr school, along
with celebration of the acceptance of the scrolls to the UNESCO Memory of the

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World Register. The event was led by village and Sääʹm project leaders and Sámi
Archives staff, and attended by a large community audience.
Similarly, at the opening of the Äʹvv Saaʹmi muʹzei in Njauddâm in the summer of
2017, there was a large ceremony attended by Sääʹm, the wider Sámi community and
media organizations. A Finnish researcher and curator worked in collaboration with
Sääʹm artisans and language workers to create the exhibits. As Sääʹm musicians,
activists and politicians led the opening ceremony, the performance shifted attention
from the multiple actors who had helped put together the museum to the community
that the museum was meant to serve.
In dialogue with assimilative histories of education in Sápmi, some teachers
from farther south in Finland also take on supporting roles in Čeʹvetjäuʹrr. Their
pedagogical approach seeks to foster self-esteem among the students so that chil-
dren will be more likely to embrace Sääʹm identity, speak the language and build
community around a shared sense of Sääʹm practice. For example, children are
encouraged to wear Sääʹm dress during dance and leuʹdd (song) performances
organized by the school, and to speak the Sääʹm language. The Sääʹm cantor
Erkki Lumisalmi (1996) considers such support for Sääʹm identity crucial to the
work of cultural and linguistic revitalization.
Within Sääʹm families, Finnish women who moved north for jobs as teachers,
nurses, administrators and even researchers have married Sääʹm men and taken
on active roles in cultural revitalization to better conditions in the northern areas.
One former schoolteacher from southern Finland worked with her Sääʹm husband
in the 1970s to create the frst Sääʹm language educational materials and orthogra-
phy, and continues work on linguistic revitalization today. Likewise, Irja Jefremoff
has organized courses on Sääʹm food traditions since the 1980s, together with
Kati, a chef from Helsinki also married to a Sääʹm man. Irja continues to teach
such workshops through SOGSAKK and the Skolt Sámi Cultural Foundation
(Magnani 2016).
In addition to organizing community cultural events, women like Irja conduct
interviews and explore textual material to maintain or revive particular Sääʹm prac-
tices. In this way, they actualize the potentiality of ethnographic texts and archives
to shape cultural memory (Assmann 1995). In his exploration of Sámi musical prac-
tice, Hilder (2014, 173) follows Taylor (2003) to show that the transformation of
archived materials of memory into embodied knowledge reverses the original inten-
tion of many ethnographic and archival texts and objects, which sought to ‘preserve’
Sámi culture by inscribing it within material forms. Thus, in the textual mediation of
collective memory (Wertsch 2002), it matters less who unleashes the potentiality of
an archival text than the purpose it serves and for whom. If communities are built
when experiences are remembered or forgotten as one’s own (cf. Anderson 1991),
then the women who marry into Sääʹm society work with materials of memory
not for themselves but for a collective remembering that becomes something of the
Sääʹm’s ‘own.’
It is also important to note that the ethnographic texts and archives from which
many current revival projects draw inspiration, while entangled with histories of
colonial extraction, were also formed in dialogue with Indigenous communities. For
example, Northwest Coast art was shaped by a ‘synergistic impulse’ through which
interactions with diverse actors, from traders to tourists to researchers, ‘suppressed

515
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certain Indigenous forms and gave rise to others’ (Berlo 1986). While Northwest
Coast art was being rapidly produced for the tourist market, ethnographers were
commissioning large, laboriously crafted objects such as totem poles and canoes
(Wyatt in Berlo 1986).
The objects that come into existence through such interactions may inform revi-
talization movements decades or even centuries later. In their interplay with bod-
ily expressions of memory (Nakata 2012; Taylor 2003) and transformation into
embodied knowledge (Hilder 2014), archives and texts are powerful mediums that
connect generations and establish continuity. Along with ceremonies and institu-
tions, they transform everyday forms of ‘communicative’ memory into cultural
memory with lasting duration (Assmann 1995). In addition to the support of textual
materials, Indigenous artisans may be trained by craftspeople outside their commu-
nities (MacNair in Davis 1990). In these ways, interactions between various institu-
tions, individual actors and Indigenous communities are reproduced in new forms
and unfold ‘synergistically’ with grassroots mobilizations.
In de-emphasizing the individual and elevating the community in a discussion
of collective memory, outside actors are subsumed within a larger actualization
of potential materials of memory as cultural narrative and experience. Assmann
(1995) describes how archives may not achieve their potential to inform collec-
tive memory until they are mobilized towards this goal. In this way, the role of
Sámi Museum Siida and the root boat builders in accessing archival models and
documents at the National Museum of Helsinki, using them to construct the boat
and revive associated ecological and embodied relations, and commemorating the
process through ceremony, become part of a wider Sääʹm agency in the making of
collective memory and futures.
An ‘everyday form of collective memory’ shaped in relation to other people and
their memories (Assmann 1995), takes on greater duration as cultural memory
when it becomes shared through texts, archives, ceremonies, representations and
institutional practices. Thus, the ceremony and its textual, institutional and material
mediators are key to transforming everyday, individual forms of memory to create
a lasting sense of shared experience and community. Negotiations of representation
involved in the formation of collective memory bring together a plurality of visions
and actions toward Sääʹm futures and link them to broader processes of Indigeneity:

[I]ndigeneity encompasses much more than identities and social movements.

It is a worldwide feld of governance, subjectivities, and knowledges involv-
ing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in their own different ways.
Indigeneity itself materializes in an intricate dynamic among converging and
competing agendas, visions, and interests that transpire at local, national, and
global levels.
(De la Cadena and Starn 2007, 12)

Such dynamics can also refect ‘converging and competing’ ideas of individuality
and community. Individuality discourse in the context of a Sääʹm cultural movement
often equates individualism with Western colonialism and globalization. Heini
Wesslin asserts that being Sääʹm means acting according to the interests of a wider

516
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community, instead of solely following individual desires. This is, of course, diffcult
because a ‘community’ often comprises diverse perspectives as to what it means to
be part of, and further the interests of, that community.
Ceremony serves as a way to reconcile individual meanings, perspectives and
motivations through shared bodily experience. The movements and collective
observance of the gathered crowd for the blessing and rowing of the root boat,
shaped a sense of togetherness in embodied and sensory practice. The vessel car-
ried Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors who had contributed to its reconstruc-
tion, forming a Sääʹm collective memory of the root boat that both incorporated
and transcended their individual acts. The rowers, their uncertain movements
and desires for renewal, were different from the people, movements and motiva-
tions of those who had used such boats in Peäccam. Yet their actions celebrated
continuity with Peäccam generations through habit memory perpetually selected
and reimagined. Meanwhile the root boat, as a multi-sensory embodiment of
mobility and connection, provided a vehicle of continuity through continuous
change.

CONCLUSION
As the pilgrimage closed in prayer on a rocky promontory with the sanctifcation of
the Njauddâm River, a confuence of memories wove around participants like the
rapids against the stones on which they stood: People moving between resettlement
villages, honouring ancestors’ graves, Orthodox priests sprinkling holy water over
the root boat, Arttu and Matti rowing out onto the lake. These shared experiences
shaped a collective memory of the root boat, along the way incorporating indi-
vidual acts and memories of its making. The audience embodied the remembering
and reimagining of jõõskâs teâtt, ‘silent knowledge,’ involved in boat building and
root sewing.
In this process, re-enactment of spatial and temporal connections to the
Peäccam homeland commemorated continuity despite pressures of displacement –
both initial relocation to new territories of Finland and continuing outmigra-
tion. Everyday practices of embodied rediscovery discussed elsewhere (Magnani,
forthcoming), in combination with formal ceremonies, recreate relationships not
only to homelands but also to the historical circumstances of displacement, mak-
ing the displacement event itself part of Sääʹm collective memory. At the same
time, transborder articulations mediate Indigenous relations within state bor-
ders, supported by cultural institutions that refect integration into a national
political economy.
The public launch became a way to navigate concerns surrounding commu-
nity representation that had emerged while making the root boat. Ceremony
incorporated select acts of remembering into cultural memory so that uncertain-
ties leading up to this event could temporarily fade in the space, time and bodily
practice of ceremony. When Arttu and Matti entered the vessel, their every step
captured by dozens of cameras, the boat became a Sääʹm boat, and the hours
they had worked crafting its contours belonged to the audience, to Sääʹm mem-
ory and to future practice.

517
 — Natalia Magnani —

NOTES
1 This chapter is adapted from a version that appears in a forthcoming book by the author
from the University of British Columbia Press. The term ‘Skolt Sámi’ is referenced in the ver-
nacular, Sääʹm, the justifcation for which is detailed in the forthcoming volume. Although
usually lower-case, the word is capitalized to cohere with the designation of Finnish,
Indigenous, etc. Thank you to Merja Fofonoff and Terhi Harju for guidance on this issue.
2 F. Koltta-alue, designated Sääʹm resettlement area according to Kolttalaki 253/1995.
3 A sijdd is a Sámi territory governed by familial and livelihood-based relations.

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 CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

S Á M I S T O RY T E L L I N G T H R O U G H
DESIGN


Britt Kramvig and Trine Kvidal-Røvik

INTRODUCTION

I consider myself as more of a storyteller – my clothes tell something impor-

tant. I am still in the process of learning what they tell. In addition, how I
work, where I work and the materials with which I work are expanding and
are creating new openings.  .  .  . These handmade collections of clothes are
more than design objects; they are becoming performative art, enacted through
dance performances, choreography – connected to other artistic articulations.
Therefore, the design collections are not about clothes. Maybe my design is a
way of communicating, telling stories through materialities. It connects where
I come from – my personal story – with the situation of this planet; it connects
to the need to rethink sustainability and be critical toward consumption. The
aesthetic and the material are woven together. For that reason, I want to start
from materiality.

This is how designer Ramona Salo Myrseth refects on her award-winning collec-
tion, ‘The Sámi half hour.’ It provides an apt introduction to this chapter in which
we examine stories and storytelling enacted in and through Sámi design and objects.
We are interested in how locally and materially embedded stories are created and
shared and how stories become embedded in material objects, in the design process
and in the future enacted by eight Sámi design companies we engage with. Through
dialogue with the designers, we have learned how many of them emphasize design
as stories and storytelling. This dialogue has also meant that the designers have
responded to drafts of the chapter. We highlight a concept of dialogue that does
not explain differences away or consider translation to be an easy task. In order
to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing, we must emphasize the possibility of
worldings, or world-making practices, that diverge from the ontological divisions,
one between nature and culture and one between the material and the stories made

520 DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-36

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into objects. In this chapter, we follow the trails of these arguments to refect on how
Sámi worldviews are embedded in Sámi design.
Knowledge and the telling of stories entangle because knowledge is embed-
ded in the ontology of stories and in the act of telling them. Stories are not just in
the design object; stories are in the material that designers such as Ramona Salo
Myrseth engage with, care for and work to release. Following Blaser (2010), we
consider storytelling a fruitful ontological, epistemological and ethical modality that
fosters Indigenous worlds and knowledge. Stories themselves are important, but so
is how and where they are told. Design as a practice constructs creative spaces in
which Sámi knowledge traditions can be connected to more contemporary crafting
and design competence. At the same time, these expressions can be part of a larger
process of social change during which Sámi claims for recognition and respect are
part of ongoing political claims that are also articulated through design.1

KNOWLEDGE AS LOCAL AND PARTIAL

Our theoretical starting point is that all types of knowledge, including scientifc
knowledge, are partly connected to cultural, social and political ways of knowing
and discourses already constituting specifc visions (Haraway 1988). Through con-
necting and reconnecting knowledge, infrastructure and institutions – which arrange
and stabilize relationships – different worlds are domesticated. This challenges the
view that the research process consists of clear-cut, separate stages of research design,
data collection, theory development, analysis and, fnally, writing and disseminat-
ing. In reality, these steps are assemblages. Aligning ourselves with Østmo and Law
(2018), we see research as a messy process, afterwards ‘arranged’ or domesticated
into known, and sometimes colonial, categories.
Several science studies scholars, such as Haraway (1988) and Verran (2002), are
critical of understanding theories as universal statements that can be imported into
local contexts without friction. One such strong critic is Ingold (2019), who argues
that Northern-ness implies a certain manner of being in the world, and of know-
ing, evinced in ways of relating to the environment, in modalities of movement and
in forms of narrative or storytelling. Together, these add up to a certain sense of
historicity – of what history is – quite different not only from the progressive his-
tory of the West but also from the exoticization associated with the East and the
resistance to colonialism associated with the South (Valkonen et al. 2019, 9–10).
Speaking from a similar perspective, Harlin (2019) is concerned with the ontologies
of Sámi collections. Inspired, as we are, by the way Indigenous people’s histories are
most often told through stories, she argues that ‘objects represent the shared history,
knowledge and wisdom of the ancestors. Objects tell a lot when people observe the
design and techniques within’ (Harlin 2019, 57).
These scholars provide an important backdrop for our chapter, in which we think
of storytelling as fostering worlds and knowledges and, as a result, as recognizing and
respecting ways of knowing and living in a world of many worlds (de la Cadena and
Blaser 2018). This not only involves ‘multiple perspectives on one world’ but also
relies on an acknowledgement of the existence of multiple, different worlds and, thus,
expands the space for different worlds and stories to exist and to be performed in
public, political and academic debate (Guttorm et al. 2019). Storytelling can become

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a tool for reworking the colonial past and thus changing the traces of it (Kramvig
and Verran 2019). Inspired by such perspectives, we see a need to expand our way of
thinking about stories so that we are not merely concerned with the stories as prod-
ucts but instead acknowledge storytelling as an exercise in reciprocity and see how it
can inform an emergent politics of memory and enact landscapes of remembrance.
Importantly, the concern need not only be with the substance of the stories but could
also focus on the very act of participating in a shared event and how this event brings
our attention to our sense of being-with-others (Kramvig and Verran 2019). In addi-
tion, we are interested in how stories become embedded in Sámi design.

SOME (IMPORTANT) POINTS ABOUT DIALOGUE AS

METHOD
Sámi research should be socially relevant in the sense that the knowledge that emerges
from it will be useful for social development and policymaking, as formulated in the
Sámi research programme of the Norwegian Research Council.2 The goal should also
be that the Sámi people become able to secure and develop their language, culture and
social life. In order to behave respectfully in relation to the Indigenous knowers that
this chapter very much depends on, we have engaged with designers as well as political
and administrative members of the Sámi Parliament at different stages of the research.
This is our way of performing a responsible entrance into Indigenous ways of know-
ing (about Sámi research ethics, see Drugge in this volume). We are two researchers
with different scholarly backgrounds, neither of whom make duodji or design or speak
Sámi fuently even though one of us acknowledges her Sámi descent. We are concerned
with academic knowledge dialogues that include that which is similar and shared while
being sensitive to the differences and untranslatable involved.
Research-based dialogue may host colonial power structures (Coulthard 2014)
because much research on ‘the others’ has been based in colonial, Western notions
that reproduce existing power relations and hegemonies. We need to ask what kind
of dialogue a more symmetrical relation between researchers and Indigenous people
would call for. De la Cadena and Blaser (2018) – who take it as an ontological start-
ing point for dialogue that we live in a world of real differences that cannot easily
be translated (even through theory) offer one possible route. According to de la
Cadena and Blaser (2018), dialogue is a methodology that recognizes and respects
that different ontologies – such as ways of knowing the land – exist. Simultaneously,
it is pivotal that in a world of difference, there are a number of conditions for par-
tial connections between different ways of knowing. The world consists of different
worlds created through partially contradictory knowledges and practices. In a world
of many worlds, in which societies and peoples have fundamentally different prac-
tices and worldviews, a concept of diversity is insuffcient. Instead, we turn to the
term ‘pluriversal,’ which offers ontological openings while acknowledging that there
are fundamental differences between, for example, Sámi and Norwegian practices
and objects, including design. These differences are not just constructions; they are
actual and real.
This perspective of the pluriversal provides new and interesting methodological
openings through which to think about what constitutes knowledge, science and
objects, as well as what research methods are and should be. Research practices

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can be thought of as genres that weave together the theoretical and the empirical.
Through conducting locally based ethnographic surveys, new concepts are created.
Specifcally, it is a dialogue in which different worlds of different actors (and also
how these partly coincide) constitute the foundation for conversation and meetings
(de la Cadena 2017).

AN INVISIBLE INVESTMENT IN KNOWLEDGE

Following our interest in stories embedded in Sámi design, we have engaged in such
ethnographic conversations. We have learned about how the designers tell stories
through objects despite being aware of their customers’ multiple backgrounds, vary-
ing degrees of insight into Sámi worldviews and varying abilities to engage with
Indigenous knowledge. Our research reveals internal differences in the knowledge
acquisition the designers relate to Sámi aesthetics and technical aspects. Thus, the
time that companies must invest in research (to ensure that they have formal and
knowledge-based content central to what they want to convey) varies. In Norwegian
parts of Sápmi, there are considerable differences between communities with regard
to the consequences of colonization and the contemporary recognition of and atten-
tion towards Sámi knowledge (see also Olsen in this volume). Some communities
have elders who can be consulted, site-specifc knowledge environments, local sto-
ries and art objects, as well as regional craft centres responsible for local training
and knowledge transfer (see, for example, Joks in this volume). Other communities
do not. Many designers must do extensive research to acquire knowledge of local
resources, previous traditions, handcraft practices and know-how.
Although the scope of and need for knowledge varies among the companies, the
designers we have engaged with share an understanding of the necessity of investing
both time and resources in their own research and development (R&D). At the same
time, this R&D work is invisible to most of the relevant policy and fnancial insti-
tutions. Some designers cater primarily to Sámi users. Others work systematically
towards understanding how they can create a profle and build a brand that will
make their products available and interesting to a larger national and international
market. Many are concerned with discovering which Sámi design products are mar-
ketable both inside and outside Sápmi.

VERDDEVUOHTA AS A METAPHOR FOR SÁMI CREATIVE

PRACTICES
The designers have something in common – they use Sámi knowledge traditions,
such as verddevuohta, to envision with which other actors, and areas of competence,
they want to connect. Verddevuohta – a traditional Sámi concept and practice – is
about creating and maintaining relationships with others. These others could be the
Norwegian, Sámi or Kven populations (who shared the same land and sea resources)
upon whom nomadic herders were dependent for moving in the traditional siida-
land. Many, including artists and designers, see it as important to continue such
alliance building and maintain closeness to others who live in the same landscape
as they do. This is one of the knowledge traditions that designers care for and foster
through their own designs and the stories they want to tell.

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We will use an example to illustrate what we mean. Anne Berit Anti, who estab-
lished the Abanti brand after graduating from the Norwegian Academy of the Arts,
explicitly uses the verddevuohta concept to emphasize that creativity amounts to
bringing together well-known Sámi practices of working together in order to come
up with new solutions. In her education, she took the practice of verdde (guest-
friend) as her point of departure to unleash her own ambitions to produce sustain-
able designs. For her, this was a way of emphasizing that the end product was a
result of many different investments on the part of people, but also the land, animals
and others that live in the Sámi landscape. In addition, she wanted to create design
objects that addressed both the Sámi and Norwegian markets and could be worn by
all while still being recognizable as part of, and celebrating, Sámi heritage. Abanti’s
design process was a collective effort that she moderated. Her work was to assess
which connections and reconnections of materiality, ideas, knowledge and relation-
ships were relevant and could be brought into the creative process.
Verddevuohta is also about relationships beyond the practicalities that a guest-
friend can offer. It is linked to something selfess that for many indicates safety and a
spiritual respect that never needs comprehensive explanation (Kramvig et al. 2017).
In a value-based relationship, you have an understanding and a basic respect for
each other, even if you do not necessarily agree on everything. Verddevuohta is a
term Anti uses to underscore that her creative process is rooted in Sámi traditions.
It also shows the importance of understanding creative processes as culture specifc.

NATURE AS AN ARCHIVE
For the designers, the start-up period of their business was characterized by tur-
bulence and uncertainty but also by courage and a willingness to take chances. In
this phase, intuition and systematics were combined. The designers spent time seek-
ing inspiration from historical archives – by examining traditional Sámi knowledge
practices, design and objects, in addition to examining old techniques and contem-
plating ways in which these techniques can be combined in new ways. Furthermore,
nature is seen as an archive to visit in order to learn from the past and present voices
from the land and to explore trends and tendencies in other Indigenous communi-
ties and in the world in general. In the North, the distinction between nature and
culture does not make sense (see also Magga, P. in this volume). Modernity, and the
theories generated by it, have diffculty accepting anything different from themselves
(Guttorm et al. 2019). Indigenous knowledge challenges such perspectives. It is based
on long-lasting participation and the experience of lives and movements. It is per-
formed and lived through practices, in addition to being translated and shared with
communities through stories, and it is often memorized and re-expressed through
arts and crafts (Guttorm et al. 2019).
The North is, as Ingold (2019, 111) argues, a place of movement and fow engag-
ing with mountains, lakes and streams, and these movements momentarily converge,
facilitating an exchange of substance, following which they diverge again, each along
its own way. Abanti designer Anne-Berit Anti describes a calling she experienced in
nature that motivated her to travel to Oslo to embark on a design education. Others
describe how their relationship to nature plays out as part of the design work itself.
The nature and landscapes in Sápmi emerge as important arenas for the innovation

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processes of the designers. The design duo Marie Louise Somby and Karine Pedersen
of Árvu explain that what they surround themselves with and the landscapes they live
in are part of what is created in their design while LilleLi founder Lill-Eli Jørgensen-
Dahl takes a long night by the sea as part of her creative process, lighting a fre and
letting the night, the moon, the stars – but also inspiration – come to her.
For these designers, inspiration and knowledge can be extracted from Sámi stories
and archive material, from the study of historical design and craft techniques and
also by actively approaching their Sámi networks (see also Nylander; and Magnani
in this volume). In addition, some of the designers calibrate this archival work by
seeing it in the context of international trends and tendencies. For example, Laš
founder Kajsa Kvernmo explains that the contacts she has in trend-forecasting agen-
cies are invaluable in the frst phase of innovation, while for Lill-Eli Jørgensen-Dahl
of LilleLi, the growing demand for her to design jewellery from the museum store in
Alta was a decisive factor in her decision to start her own jewellery brand. For these
designers, the creative process is a personal journey into local and site-specifc Sámi
cultural practices that have been invisible or considered of no value. They take an
important social position through their research and work and the objects they cre-
ate. At the same time, they all recognize the importance of linking this reclamation of
heritage and knowledge to more general trends and tendencies. This enables them to
appeal to a local Sámi market as well as markets that extend beyond Sápmi, catering
to Norwegian and international customers.
The designers build the robustness of an idea by testing it out in the face of other
techniques and knowledge. At an early stage of a design process, they seek to pro-
tect designs and ideas that are not fully developed, practising a form of knowledge
archaeology of Sámi cultural-historical objects and landscapes. Such objects contain
formal variations and various techniques that are poorly documented, and many
want to do their own research into these variations and techniques. For instance,
Jorunn Løkvoll at Sáve Design has spent much of her time as a research fellow visit-
ing museums and archives but has also travelled to meet those who uphold the craft
traditions she is interested in:

There are old Sea Sámi cardigans in Copenhagen, and there is living knowledge
in Lujavri/Lovozero on the Kola Peninsula about the importance of ornamenta-
tion and about previous use of Crow Silver. As a research fellow, I was interested
in Crow Silver used in clothing traditions. In the museum archive I got to see,
touch and study old belts myself; it gave me new knowledge and understanding.
They were different from what I thought. I studied sewing techniques, fllings,
size, material use and ornamentation. This is very educational and something I
would like to do more.

The knowledge she needs is in the archives, and it is present as remnants in the
objects’ materiality. As a skilled duojár (craftswoman), she can extract the tech-
niques from museum objects (see also Nylander in this volume). Objects reveal
something about the practices used to create them, which an experienced duojár
can identify and use in their own creative process. At the same time, it is important
for her not to make reproductions but instead to design and create her own inter-
pretations of encounters with the stories that are told by the objects she fnds in the

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archives. Indigenous academics have made particularly important contributions to

understanding the connections between place, memories and the possibility to revisit
(forgotten) stories. Jernsletten (2004) argues that wisdom is embedded in the land,
and following Basso (1996), she emphasizes that the past is buried in the features
of the landscape. The land offers advice through stories from specifc places ‘and by
the fact that through the generations before us we know how to behave in the place,
even though we have not been there before – also through knowledge conveyed
through storytelling’ (Jernsletten 2004, 99–100). She continues:

[W]e have come here: One can talk to the country as an independent subject,
give it gifts, ask for permission, even if some are worse to get along with than
others. Our stories are our story, but it is forgotten, hidden, and with it the val-
ues and morals attached to the story, to the place.
(Jernsletten 2004, 103–104)

Inspired by Jernsletten (2004), seeking out places that have been the centre for
storytelling can be understood as one of several decolonial practices that can
be used to connect with the stories and landscapes that live in and through the
designs, objects and techniques. The time the designers invest in researching a
site – their movements out on the plateau and down to the sea – generates site-
specifc meaning far beyond the value that lies in a beautifully cut or a well-
functioning visual expression.

OLLISLAŠVUOHTA – DESIGN AS GIFTS TO THE FUTURE

Knowledge and stories are embedded in design – as are the relationships to multiple
non-humans that come together in an object. Photographer Marie Louise Somby
and graphic designer Karine Pedersen met while studying. They shared a common
insight into, and belonging to, Sámi culture, even though they grew up in different
communities and landscapes, one by the sea and the other on the tundra. A few years
ago, they founded the company Árvu, using ‘northern Norwegian and Sámi culture’
to create visual identities for organizations and companies in different industries.
Árvu articulates how their values are based in their designs, combining both modern
and more traditional aspects of Sámi culture. They are also inspired by diverse Sámi
identities connecting sea and tundra landscapes. Openness is essential in a good
design process. Openness is also something that makes Árvu especially relevant to
customers who seek to ‘expand’ their profle across Sámi and Norwegian market
segments. A client may be a Sámi company that wants to appeal to a Norwegian
customer group to a greater extent or a client who wants to fnd a way to promote
(or even discover) its own Sámi image or profle. For Árvu, the exploratory process
that underlies each individual design task is based on a Sámi approach to knowl-
edge and learning – visiting, seeing, getting to know. Learning or knowing, then,
is a practice that takes place through a relational engagement with others, with
stories and with the material, as well as with the land and its spirits. The Sámi term
ollislašvuohta (unifed whole) is particularly apt for such a process because it is a
term that describes a whole that becomes larger than the sum of the various elements
that come together to constitute it.

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National – as well as the Sámi Parliament’s – investments in creative industries

require real links between cultural, artistic and duodji practice and business activi-
ties. This means that entrepreneurs must have commercial ambitions in order to be
recognized as designers. There are a number of new companies in the creative indus-
tries, but most of them are small and thus vulnerable. The designers are aware that
it takes time to develop designs. The knowledge they must take into account and
invest in comes via the preparatory work or research they have to do to create some-
thing important for the Sámi community which they can vouch for themselves. They
acknowledge that it takes time to build a business and that there are many areas in
which they need knowledge to access the operations and fnances that enable them
to live off of their own business and offer jobs to others.
Many have employment agreements or contracts that provide a stable, predictable
income. At the same time, they continuously assess whether it will be possible to go in
fully, for instance by quitting their other jobs. Several have their workshop or produc-
tion facilities in their own homes, even though this is not an optimal arrangement for
them. Some share living or workshop facilities while making exploratory and knowl-
edge-based investments they see as necessary, not only to ensure economic sustainability
but also to enact Indigenous knowledge as belonging to and coming from communities.
It is a way to take responsibility not only for their own company but also for future
Sámi societies. Designers must take many considerations into account simultaneously,
and there are limits to the extent of the adjustments the designers are willing to make
in order to make a proft. Some elements of their relationship to the Sámi communities
are too valuable to be negotiated away for the sake of market appeal. At the same time,
the designers are aware that launching their businesses involves negotiations and adjust-
ments in light of formalized fnancial systems and institutions and the requirements and
guidelines set out in institutional procedures.
Sáve Design refects consciously around these challenges and says:

I would like to maintain a high craftsmanship standard on my products. At the

same time, it means that there are costs associated with production, for which
the market must be willing to pay. That is a dilemma. Especially in Norway,
where crafts do not have high status. It also means that you need time. Time to
build a portfolio of customers who are familiar with, and want, the quality that
is important for me to maintain. In addition, you need time to make the prod-
ucts accessible and visible. You build a name through exhibitions, and through
sewing a little differently. There are not many who can sew with Crow Silver. In
addition, the fellowships I have had are important. They make research possible.
In addition, there is a recognition in the scholarship award itself.

Ramona Salo Myrseth emphasizes that she does not want to be part of a design
industry making objects for a market; she does not engage with the needs of others
in the objects that she makes.

I price it so high that no one can afford to buy these for private use. I do not
want things to disappear from me. It has to do with the philosophy of the circu-
lar economy. That’s why I keep my things. Because I want to curate them again.
In the landscape that I have created myself, I have been determined that if I am

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to make clothes, it must be on my terms. It must be inclusive, if I am going to

sell. I look at clothes as art – as applied art. It takes time to make them, and they
are made to last for generations. If I sell – I want these objects to become avail-
able and public. There is something about having the right to produce things. Is
it my right to make things for it to be appropriate just for a specifc class or for
private collections?

Sámi past and present ways of knowing are embedded in the materiality used in
the objects made, as well as in the landscape practices that these objects engage
with and tell stories about. The objects bring together different actors and different
times, spaces and practices. The designers engage with and bring together knowledge
practices ranging from Kola Sámi ways of using mica (‘Crow Silver’) to grandmoth-
ers’ sewing techniques, plant colouring knowledge and historical objects from the
archives of the ethnographic museum in Oslo. In addition, designers need to know
the format (and language) required to apply and report to both Norwegian and Sámi
institutions’ funding bodies; they need to know how to budget, report in Altinn (the
national portal for businesses reports) and more. All these felds or ways of knowing
play a role in the making of commercial Sámi design. Even though these are domesti-
cating formats, the designers engage with them differently, still highlighting the need
to not compromise values that were important from the very beginning of the time
when their companies were established. Furthermore, there are traces of resistance
against coloniality that are recognizable to those who have knowledge about Sámi
design and Sámi ways of knowing.
Similarly, Anne Berit Anti, who graduated from the Oslo Academy of Arts in
2011, did so with a collection that brought Sámi social issues to the catwalk. She
describes an interest in researching the possibility of enlarging, reducing and distort-
ing Sámi heritage objects into a Sámi-Norwegian space and including details from
the traditional Sámi gákti, brooches or even coffee bags. She works with the goal
of establishing herself internationally as a designer with an Indigenous profle while
also producing designs that are appreciated and consumed beyond the Sámi public.
We see that several designers have this movement between the outward-oriented and
the inward-oriented as part of their creative processes.
Designer Kajsa Kvernmo travelled to Melbourne to study design. Together with
a fellow student, she started the clothing brand Apom – A Part of Me. As young
graduates, they had ambitions to sell their design products all over the world. They
did thorough research by systematically mapping what they expected to be tomor-
row’s trends. Producing their frst garments in their dormitory, they went from store to
store to present their products, seeking to establish themselves in the market they were
looking for. After Kvernmo had children, she wanted to return home. In Tromsø, she
has established the design brand Laš, which launched in December 2019 and is sold
through a pop-up and online store. She collaborates with the illustrator Laila Labba
from Karasjok, and she has also collaborated with designer Anne-Berit Anti.
For Laš founder Kvernmo, analyzing and engaging with fashion trends, and
thereby adjusting to a market that demands certain expressions and cuts, are
important starting points for all designs. Still, these fashion trends are woven into
a respectful use of Sámi patterns, images and stories that are important for her
to tell. The result can be quite concrete in terms of form, including Sámi symbols

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in the fabrics, but also more implicit through the use of, for example, traditional
sewing techniques or cuts. Kvernmo explains how beautiful she fnds the back of
the gákti: ‘it fts so well.’ So Kvernmo brings this cut into the design of a dress.
She can also be inspired by other parts of the gákti, such as the holbi. Even so, she
emphasizes that this is not about copying the gákti but about bringing elements
and knowledge from the past into her contemporary designs. The objects repre-
sent an invitation to engage differently with the knowledge and stories performed
through the design.
Šoop Šoop – Sámi Design Days, in February 2020, was the frst design fair for
buyers and the public in Tromsø/Romsa that the Sámi Parliament initiated and
fnanced. Around 20 Sámi designers participated. Several of those we spoke to in
advance of the event were interested in developing and producing new products
that could be sold in this market. The design fair was also used to investigate
how price sensitive the market is. For these companies, where many products
require handicraft elements, predictable sales numbers (combined with the pro-
spective of increased sales) are a critical point in the production line. The market
cannot support too many new contractors at once, and growth must be moder-
ated and managed. ‘You sell a part of yourself,’ as one of the designers put it,
‘and then demand and self-confdence must grow at the same time. I’m afraid of
commercial mass production.’ It is very important to these designers to ensure
their own creative autonomy and have time for research and getting to know old
techniques in order to create objects of importance for themselves. One of the
designers explains:

Sámi culture deserves public attention. Without being trapped as a ‘human zoo’
– but more my version of Indigenous philosophy. I need to get to know what
is important. All projects I engage with have an element of research in them.
Like when I coloured wool with plant colours. I do look for and want to
produce the colours from this community from nature here. When the result
is that the colour awoke a sense of the nature here having been boiled. The
essence of the nature goes into the fabric. That sense is what I’m searching for
in my own design. I hear and imagine people moving in colours, and it gives
me much more inspiration.

INDIGENOUS DESIGN AS DECOLONIZATION

Underpinning our interest in how locally and materially embedded stories are created
and shared and how stories become embedded in Sámi design is an understanding of
stories as important and of storytelling as a powerful creative practice. In the context
of colonialism, the enactment of Sámi worldviews in and through design is pivotal.
Here, we fnd valuable perspectives brought forth in other contexts. For instance,
Metcalfe (2010), who analyzes Indigenous fashion designers in North America, has
shown how Indigenous design products carry a potential to take back ‘the image of
“nativeness” in the public sphere’ (Metcalfe 2010, 358), which has implications for
‘the process of re-appropriating voice and representation, and asserting control of
identity and self’ (Metcalfe 2010, 364). Metcalfe notes how Indigenous designers

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and artists navigate a global market in a way that is relevant to our discussion of
Sámi design. They must maintain a balance between different interests:

These designers use their garments as a vital cultural link from the past to the
present, and to express social and cultural identity on three levels: within their
home community, the social world of other Native people, and in the haute
couture and broader American and global fashion worlds.
(Metcalfe 2010, 30)

Finbog (2019) has argued that duojárs engage in a symbolic repatriation wherein
both the material object and the árbediehtu (traditional knowledge) involved in the
making of these objects are re-appropriated.
This issue – how Indigenous art, culture and design can be said to deal with
cultural contradictions and illuminate ongoing and historical movements – is an
important one. Some of the Sámi designers we meet are conscious about the politics
of their design and the need for the Sámi to claim ownership of Sámi commercial
products. Sámi designers manoeuvre in a feld of tension and multiple interests in
which they must handle, stage and moderate various institutional, as well as local,
knowledges and expectations that are present in the creative and R&D processes.
National political institutions, programs and founding bodies need to acknowl-
edge the multiple responsibilities of the designers. The knowledge that they need
is not easily available due to colonialism. They work not only on behalf of their
own interests but on behalf of the future of the Sámi society. Local knowledge has
been lost, and some Sámi communities lack local knowledge holders and caretakers
whom they can learn from and consult. There is thus a need to care for a creative
space – a place where the new generation can fnd inspiration and work together
across set lines of difference in culture and art. This goes beyond the Norwegian
programme for innovation. Designers want to move into and learn more from Sámi
worldviews and ontologies. Much has been taken away. Still, many are engaged in
and are attending to a decolonial practice in which they reclaim relationship with
the landscapes, memories, stories and knowledge.
This movement is also a political one that is claiming attention to and respect
for different ontologies and worldviews in addition to being concerned with partial
connections and the possible ‘cracks in the state of things.’ As discussed by Stengers
(2019) and Stewart and Kortright (2014), such cracks can be the fertile soil for
creativity based on Sámi ontologies. Such cracks can be considered postcolonial
moments (Verran 2002), in which tension between different worldviews fertilizes
sensitivities towards the limitations of academic theories and methods; this again
nurtures creativity. This is a reminder that real differences actually exist – that, to
paraphrase de la Cadena and Blaser (2018), we live in a world of many worlds.
These gaps between different knowledge practices, which are perceived as friction
and disturbances, can be productive spaces (Verran 2002). They offer ontological
openings that create access to the instability of the academic analytical and cultural
categories. They contain a challenge to make better descriptions and support a sen-
sitivity to the existence of other worlds, and they urge us not to take translations
between these worlds for granted. Design can, in this regard, be understood as an
ontological instrument intervening in the world’s creative practices and enacting an

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everyday politics of the pluriversal. Escobar (2007) is concerned with how deco-
lonial aesthetics both breaks from coloniality’s reliance on hyper-individualism to
maintain this world and diffuses itself through shared artistic processes to imagine
‘worlds otherwise.’ It is a process of creating new radical subjectivities premised
on Indigenous survival and re-emergence, similar to processes undertaken by other
communities engaged in decolonial struggle.
The pluriversal is seen by many, including many within the design feld (Reitsma
et al. 2019; Tlostanova 2017), as a decolonizing concept. The Sámi designers sacri-
fce time and a moderate expectation of their own companies’ growth potential to
reduce standardization and to ensure that they make products maintaining quality
and authenticity they themselves can vouch for.

DESIGN AS CREATIVE SPACE

It is possible to see creativity and entrepreneurship as interventions that create
spaces in which the boundaries between them and us, between past and future and
between materiality and narratives challenge and participate in a pluriversal politics.
Such interventions contribute to the expansion of one’s own horizon and, at their
best, also those of others. The designers make connections between the knowledge,
stories, societies and materials built into their designs. Decolonizing design then
involves more than being preoccupied with expressions and interests that have pre-
viously been marginalized. It involves challenging the dominant forms, conventions
and language through which design has been articulated.
In other words, decolonizing design is a radical rather than reformist project,
organized less around a struggle for the inclusion and representation of difference
and marginality within colonial forms and more around the unsettlement and desta-
bilization of forms – diffused, naturalized and habitual – that instil colonial relations
of power (Schultz et al. 2018, 3). Sápmi, with its places and paths, could be described
as being constituted not by its boundaries but by the movements of its inhabitants as
they go about their business. As Tervaniemi and Magga (2019, 87) suggest,

Perhaps the region known as Sápmi is easier to understand as a process or net-

work, similar to Paasi as referred to in Tervaniemi and Magga (2019) suggestion
on how a home region should be understood in general. According to Paasi, the
world contains many overlapping regional ‘realities,’ and perhaps many truths
as well, regarding the nature of places. The fact that the Sámi are assimilated to
be part of the regional hierarchies created by the state but still have continued to
perceive the area based on their own traditions and history, could be seen as an
indication of the Sámi’s capacity to adjust as long as administrative decisions do
not endanger Sámi people practising their cultures, livelihoods and languages.

We have argued that Sámi design constitutes a resource that can make visible an
alliance or affliation with Sámi knowledge in the past as well as the present. Thus,
we follow our research partners and consider Sámi design to be a potential arena
for the creative application of Sámi knowledge traditions that can lay the founda-
tion for a recapture of the losses that experiences such as colonialism entail. For
many designers, materiality is the materialization of nature. For Sámi designers, this

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materialization of nature is a materialization of a Sámi nature. The Sámi nature is

created through narratives, linguistic concepts and ontological practices and move-
ments other than the nature that appears in Norwegian administrative practices,
legal regulations and governing documents. In their interconnection and application
of Sámi knowledge traditions, crafts and art, these designers materialize valuable
creative and innovative practices in the creative business feld.
While this chapter is being fnalized, we are in the midst of the biggest crisis of
our time, triggered by COVID-19. We are all affected, both socially and economically.
Although this has not been a topic in our conversations with the designers, we see that
many cannot document sales and sales failures, which means that they do not qualify
for public and national support schemes. At the same time, the designers’ cautious and
gradual pace of investment and an economy composed of different activities (such as
teaching and design) could actually prove to make them robust in the current economic
crisis. An important Sámi saying, ‘jahki ii leat jagi viellja’ (‘One year is not the second
year’s brother’), is manifested in Sámi business – in reindeer husbandry and tourism
but also in design. This perspective has long been not easily translatable into reporting
forms for either Innovation Norway or the Offce of the Auditor General. Perhaps the
current crisis will allow us to see and recognize the importance of the readiness and
fexibility that such new combination industries entail.
We will end the chapter by emphasizing the need to build institutional solutions
that safeguard the diversity that exists among designers. There is diversity in Sápmi,
both in terms of the consequences of the assimilation policy and how far the Sámi
areas have come in exploring and regaining local, historical knowledge and knowl-
edge of knowledge traditions. The diversity is also about linguistic competence, and
it is about the fact that many local communities and entrepreneurs use signifcant
resources to regain the Sámi knowledge, stories, design expressions and material
understanding that colonialism made invisible and repressed. The recapturing work
is local, collective work and, for many, also an individual investment. Design objects
are traces of memory. Knowledge and objects are then not opposed as the mental to
the material. When knowledge and object appear equivalent, it is because knowing
is doing, doing is carrying out tasks, and carrying out tasks is remembering the way
they are done (Vergunst and Ingold 2008).
The design process includes exploring what was lost; what valuable knowledge,
expressions and practices can be taken from the past; and the traces of it that exist
in fragments of design and materialities and in collections, archives and museums
around the world. This means that some spend signifcant resources on mapping
and exploration, while other parts of the site-specifc cultural heritage are more
accessible. It is important that this specifc recapturing practice is recognized and
that national programs and funding bodies facilitate the time and resources that
this work requires. It is an investment made by and in the companies, but it is also a
future that they make visible for all of us.

NOTES
1 The chapter is based on dialogues with Sámi designers on the Norwegian side of Sápmi who
are entrepreneurs building their own companies. In addition, we have been in dialogue with
both the political and administrative leadership of Sámediggi (the Sámi Parliament) because

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Sámediggi has development programmes targeting designers. We have mapped the visibility
of Sami design in media and various urban spaces in Sápmi, such as Sápmi Fashion Week
and Sámi Fašhion Bálgát in Áltá/Alta, the winter market in Jåhkåmåhke/Jokkmokk and
Šoop Šoop – Sámi Design Days in Romsa/Tromsø.
2 www.forskningsradet.no/contentassets/4f4551cf88a3486a89202e8032d439ab/program-
plan_samisk_forskningiii.pdf

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 CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

S Á M I F E M I N I S T C O N V E R S AT I O N S


Ina Knobblock

INTRODUCTION
Meeting during tjaktagiesse,1 the time of year when summer and autumn seam-
lessly intermingle, Márjá2 and I speak for two hours. Our conversation centres on
feminism from a Sámi standpoint but moves in different directions – her family’s life
with the reindeer, her duodje,3 language transmission and the loss and continuity of
Sámi culture within the structures of the Swedish settler-colonial state. Before we
conclude, I ask Márjá if she can summarize what Sámi feminism means to her. After
pausing for a moment to think, she says, ‘Feminism is the right to live, the right to be
who I am’ (Conversation with Márjá 2017).4
Although brief, Márjá’s answer encompasses complex Sámi realities, both
individually experienced and collectively shared. Her emphasis on feminism as the
right to live and to be who she is speaks from within a context in which the survival
of Sámi worlds and world-making practices are present and acute concerns (see
also Dankertsen in this volume). Feminism, for Márjá, is one part of a struggle for
Sámi survival. However, her answer also seems to be an argument for recognizing
that the survival of Sámi worlds should be an integral part of feminist thinking and
practice. Naturally, this view recognizes the historical and present power relations
that adversely affect Indigenous Peoples, structures that profoundly impact Sámi
realities today.
Feminism and issues of gender and sexuality are increasingly discussed in Sábme,
especially but not exclusively among the younger generations. Interventions from
Sámi feminist activists and intellectuals have ‘made space’ (Dankertsen 2020a; cf.
Green 2007) for Indigenous analyses in several spheres, including gender research.
These contributions have directed attention towards past and present colonial tra-
jectories and racialized regimes within the Nordic region and the intersections of
gender, sexuality and Indigeneity. Scholars have, for example, explored Indigenous
epistemes (Kuokkanen 2007b), self-determination (Kuokkanen 2019; see also
Alakorva et al. in this volume), voice and representation (Hirvonen 2008; Ledman
[Drugge] 2012) and Sámi struggles for the protection of land and water against
large-scale industrial intervention (Öhman 2016).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-37 535

 — Ina Knobblock —

Notwithstanding these valuable contributions, there is a continued need for femi-

nist analyses, especially analyses that recognize complexity and difference within
Sámi societies, a concern voiced by Astri Dankertsen:

[W]e need perspectives on gender and feminism in Sámi societies that take into
account the complexity of Sámi societies today, including differences between
groups and individuals in Sámi societies, and the varied power relations that are
entangled in these different positions.
(2020b, 51)

As Dankertsen argues, feminism in Sámi contexts is not monolithic (2020b, 50).

Sámi feminists share many starting points and analyses due to their Indigenous social
positions, but their viewpoints, like those of other feminist communities, also differ.
Following Dankertsen, I wish to underline that one individual, group or organiza-
tion cannot represent the entirety of perspectives and voices.
Márjá is one of several self-identifed Sámi feminists I met with between 2014
and 2017. Through conversations focused on learning and sharing feminist analyses
and experiences, we explored feminism as articulated, enacted and negotiated from
within Sámi locations.5 In this chapter, I aim to translate some of the learning I
have gained from these meetings. However, my intention is not to provide a fnished
answer regarding the nature of contemporary Sámi feminisms. Such a purpose would
foreclose the openness and potential of Sámi feminist thinking. By Sámi feminisms,
I do not refer to a singular or fxed idea or enactment. Rather, I conceptualize
Sámi feminisms as situated (cf. Haraway 1988) forms of feminist knowledge and
practices that simultaneously arise within and create Sámi realities. Bearing diversity
in mind, I wish to contribute to an ongoing conversation in which different people
continuously create and recreate Sámi feminisms in various contexts.

THE SÁMI FEMINIST MOVEMENT

Both continuity and change characterize Sámi feminist struggle.6 Continuity, for
example, relates to Sámi women’s engagement in an intergenerational struggle for
Indigenous land, life and rights. In this regard, Elsa Laula7 (1877–1931) and Karin
Stenberg (1884–1969), political activists and intellectuals in the early Sámi move-
ment, are predecessors and role models. Countering the eugenic discourse of the
time, Laula (2003 [1904]) argued that Sámi people’s situation was the result of
state-approved oppression as state policy had resulted in the loss of land, water and
culture and brought about destitution. For Laula, the Sámi, including women, must
organize collectively to change societal power structures and ensure Sámi survival. To
this end, in 1910, she founded the frst Sámi women’s organization – Brurskankens
samiske kvindeförening. This organization contributed to the arrangement of the
frst transnational Sámi meeting in Tråante (Trondheim) in 1917, where delegates
discussed social and political issues from a Sámi perspective (Broch Johansen 2015;
Hirvonen 2008, 70–76; Svendsen 2020). Like Laula, Stenberg was deeply concerned
about the effect of Swedish legislative and administrative measures on Sámi com-
munities. She argued that Swedish depictions fed into racist imaginaries of the Sámi,
affecting Sámi policy in Sweden (Stenberg and Lindholm 1920). Stenberg questions

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scientifc truth claims and points to the relations between knowledge production and
power, anticipating methodologies used by contemporary Indigenous and feminist
scholars (Svendsen 2020; cf. Smith 2012).
In the early 1970s, a Sámi activist movement for cultural and political revi-
talization was formed – the ČSV (see Alakorva; and Dankertsen in this volume).
Specifcally, these activists mobilized against the Norwegian government’s plan to
construct a large hydroelectric dam in the Alta River (see Nykänen in this volume).
Starting from their intersectional realities, female activists eventually came to mobi-
lize expressly as Sámi women. Jorunn Eikjok, an activist at the time, explains this
dual positioning: ‘While fghting for our people’s rights, we were also fghting for
women’s rights. Compared with our Sámi brothers and our Nordic sisters, we thus
had an extra battle to fght’ (2004, 38).
Women activists critically analyzed the ‘myth of the strong Sámi woman’ within
the Sámi movement. They argued that the myth was used symbolically to distinguish
between Indigenous and majority culture, but the myth made it diffcult to address
their lived experiences of gendered inequalities. Therefore, these women activists
argued for starting from women’s everyday lives to enable meaningful change. They
discussed Sámi women’s political participation, the conditions for women’s eco-
nomic activities, women’s roles within care work and the rights to Sámi language
and culture while challenging Nordic feminists’ suppression of difference in the
name of feminist unity (Halsaa 2020, 129–131; Eikjok 2000, 2004).
The Sáráhkká8 (Sámi Women’s Organization) and the Sámi Nisson Forum9 were
established in Girón (Kiruna) in 1988 and Kárášjohka (Karasjok) in 1993, respec-
tively. The Sáráhkká aims to promote Sámi women’s interests, and the Sámi Nisson
Forum aims to promote gender equality in Sábme. Both organizations’ activities are
highly transnational (Eriksen Lindi and Stordahl 1994; Sára 1990). Notably, they
include Russian Sámi women who have contributed to ‘the democratisation process
among the Sámi in Russia’ (Eikjok 2000, 40).
Today, a younger generation of feminists complement the efforts described here.
Some of them are active within the political systems of the Sámi parliaments, whereas
others are active in other spheres of society. In 2015, the feminist organization Niejda10
was founded in Jåhkåmåhkke (Jokkmokk). Niejda aims to provide a community for
Sámi women, girls and non-binary people that enables development and self-determi-
nation. The Sámi youth organization Sáminuorra provides another space for feminist
activism. For example, Sáminuorra collaborated on the project Queering Sápmi, which
conveyed queer Sámi life histories through text and photographs, resulting in an exhibi-
tion and a book (Bergman and Lindquist 2013; see also Kyrölä in this volume).
In recent years, Sámi queer and trans activism have proliferated. Sápmi Pride
has been held yearly since 2014. During the latest festival in Tråante (Trondheim)
in 2019, activists established Garmeres11 as an organization for and by queer Sámi,
working for queer Sámi rights, opportunities and visibility in all of Sábme. Several
of Garmeres’ members are active on social media, refecting the growing importance
of social media platforms for discussions of Indigeneity, gender, sexuality and rac-
ism. Through social media, activists spread awareness and engage in transnational
dialogues within Sábme, the international Indigenous community, and interlinked
movements involved in a shared struggle for decolonization, gender justice and
racial justice (see also Dankertsen in this volume).

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LEARNING IN CONVERSATION
I write as a Sámi-identifed woman whose family has vacillated between recognition
and denial of Sámi belonging. A central methodological issue has been how to navi-
gate my situatedness – the ‘literal and metaphorical places’ (Koobak and Thapar-
Björkert 2014, 47) from which I do research. How do I write from a Sámi location
such as my own, shaped by the Swedish colonial state’s assimilatory policies? And
how do I write with respect for other Sámi positions, shaped by intertwined yet dif-
ferent historical trajectories and contemporary patterns of struggle?
Kim TallBear argues for inquiry with the people and communities with which a
researcher engages. That is, this inquiry should be connected with the intellectual
projects and goals for social change that these communities identify, an endeavour
a researcher might already be part of and invested in. The other important aspect
of TallBear’s methodology is ‘speaking as faith’ – i.e., to speak as someone impli-
cated in the context one engages while acknowledging that perfect representation
is impossible (2017, 82). However, recognizing the incompleteness of all positions
is deeply interconnected with relationality and dialogue. Consequently, I believe,
TallBear provides an opening for inquiry to engage in ‘conversations across differ-
ences’ (Driskill et al. 2011, 8) as well as within and between differently positioned
Indigenous People (about Sámi research ethics, see Drugge in this volume).
In my research on Sámi feminisms,12 my primary way to ‘co-constitute knowl-
edge’ (TallBear 2017, 83) is through conversations focused on learning and sharing
feminist analyses and experiences. This choice was inspired by Indigenous and Sámi
feminist working methods. In the book No Beginning, No End: The Sámi Speak
Up (1998), Kaarina Kailo and Elina Helander-Renvall work with conversations to
centre Sámi positions and worldviews. Likewise, Tina Beads and Rauna Kuokkanen
(2007) engage in embodied exchange through co-authored conversations to explore
Indigenous feminist activism. The main advantage of such conversational approaches
is that they emphasize participants’ conveyance of their refections, interpretations
and experiences (cf. Kailo and Helander-Renvall 1998, 8–9). Furthermore, they pro-
vide a space for embodied interaction between researcher and participant (see, for
example, Nylander in this volume).
Between 2014 and 2017, I met with fourteen feminists who self-identify as Sámi
and as feminists – nine from the Swedish side of Sábme, four from the Norwegian
side of Sábme and one from the Finnish side of Sábme. The conversations lasted
between one hour and three hours. At the time of the conversations, the participants’
ages ranged between the early 20s to the early 60s, and they were active in various
ways – e.g. reindeer herding, social movements, politics and arts.
During these conversations, I provided the participants with written informa-
tion about my project and a consent form. Everyone was offered the opportunity
to review and comment on the unedited transcripts and a draft of the text to iden-
tify any parts they considered too sensitive for inclusion (cf. Kovach 2009, 51–52).
However, collaboration is always an offer, never a request, especially as there are
limits to participants’ time and energy (cf. Löf and Stinnerbom 2016, 141).
Central to this approach was to treat all participants as knowledgeable subjects.
I treat participants in my projects as colleagues or as intellectual peers and mentors,
softening or challenging ‘the binary . . . between knowing inquirer and those who

538
 — Sámi feminist conversations —

are considered to be the resources or grounds for knowledge production’ (TallBear

2017, 80). Accordingly, all conversations emphasize feminist views, standpoints and
engagement. I see each of these as a signifcant contribution to understanding and
engaging with feminism from Sámi locations.
Of course, the dialogues do not represent all Sámi feminists’ positions or speak
for a collective and authentic ‘we’ in my writing. Nor does my choice of illustrations
and analysis cover the full complexity of the arguments made by each participant.
I am also aware that my ‘particular and personal locations’ (Narayan 1993, 679)
enable me to see, reach and analyze some social aspects relevant to the people par-
ticipating in my research, whereas other elements and interpretations might escape
my notice. This inevitable situation does not render my analysis invalid, but it does
make it inevitably partial.
In the following, I briefy comment on the Nordic colonial context. Then I turn
to participants’ discussions of gender and gender equality in Sámi society. Finally,
I focus on the interwovenness of Sámi and feminist positionalities. All topics con-
cern the articulation and practice of Sámi feminisms. The participants are quoted
at length as I want to give ample space for their voices. In the later sections, I relate
these voices to Indigenous feminist theory.

NORDIC SETTLER COLONIALISM

MÁRJÁ: I have no trust in the Swedish state. I believe that they deliberately want to
erase us from the Swedish map.
INA: Why do think they want to erase us?
MÁRJÁ: Because then they can take the land without anyone objecting to it and
exploit whatever remains. . . . But we are in the way.
(Conversation with Márjá 2017)

Márjá’s interconnection between land acquisition and Indigenous erasure mirrors a

central argument within scholarly work about settler-colonial structures. According
to Patrick Wolfe, the centrality of land and an eliminatory logic characterize set-
tler colonialism. Using the logic of elimination, Wolfe captures the need for settler
nations to disappear Indigenous Peoples from territory and therefore erase their
historical and collective claim on the land. Such disappearance can be enacted by
settler states in different ways – for example, through direct violence or through the
gradual undermining of Indigenous Peoples’ identities and rights (Wolfe 2006).
Arguably, compared to settler-colonial states such as Canada, Australia and the
United States,‘colonial processes were typically more insidious, gradual and less physi-
cally violent in Scandinavia’ (Kuokkanen 2019, 8). There are also national differences
regarding colonial histories, current policies towards Sámi people and degrees of self-
determination (Kuokkanen 2019, 78–92; see also Mörkenstam et al. in this volume).
Nevertheless, at the centre of Nordic interventions in Sábme lies the dispossession
and exploitation of Sámi land entwined with the elimination and fragmentation of
Indigenous identities and culture (Kuokkanen 2020; Sandström 2020, 38–42; Össbo
2020).
Although colonial relations do not defne Sámi worlds and Sámi feminisms, colonial-
ism is a vital context and a foundational experience shared by the research participants,

539
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albeit not always talked about in these specifc terms. Due to the colonial context,
described as ‘death by stealth and administrative measures’ (Conversation with Rauna
Kuokkanen 2015), questions that concern survival, Sámi lifeworlds and the Sámi
people are central (see also Joks in this volume). One participant explained that her
feminist engagement and her engagement for her people ‘are impossible to separate’
(Conversation with Sire 2014). Key concerns are decolonization and self-determination,
inclusive community and nation building, social and cultural reproduction (e.g. Sámi
language learning) and protection of nature against environmental destruction and
industrial interventions. Unquestionably, these issues are all inextricably interrelated.

DECOLONIZING GENDER
Indigenous feminists theorize colonial structures of domination and envision deco-
lonial alternatives and futures in an attempt to critically re-imagine the world. The
intervention foregrounds the Indigenous women, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit13 people’s
perspectives and lived experiences, emphasizing difference, diversity, and intersecting
power relations (Green 2007; Suzack et al. 2010; Nickel and Fehr 2020). Because dis-
possession and settler colonialism are gendered, argues the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg
scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, we must ‘critically interrogate the hierarchies
of heteropatriarchy in all its forms in order to stop replicating it in our nation and
movement building’ (2017, 51). Simpson understands gender as co-constitutive with
race. Therefore, challenging colonial gender/race binaries is vital for creating viable
decolonial and resurgence processes,14 challenges integral to feminism.
Gender and gender equality were central topics in the conversations. A vital ques-
tion at issue was the degree of infuence from majority society on Sámi gender rela-
tions and its implications for the conceptualization of Sámi feminisms. Sagka, a
political activist, makes this observation:

[I]t becomes such a complex discussion in the Sámi context. And the question
is – what is Sámi in it? What was ours before we got forced into something else?
In the form of life lived, family members have been so desperately dependent on
each other so that the ability to oppress someone to succeed yourself, the need
to do so, cannot have been considerable.
(Conversation with Sagka 2014)

The fusion of gendered and colonial relations of power makes it hard to discern
Sámi gender relations from colonial heteropatriarchy. However, by asking the ques-
tion (‘What was ours before we got forced into something else?’), Sagka opens up
a decolonial exploration of Sámi history, expressing a belief in a more considerable
potential for more egalitarian relations of gender within pre-colonial Sámi subsist-
ence economies. For Sagka, Sámi history and culture are sources of strength and
inspiration, especially in terms of spaces for individuals to contribute to the com-
munity based on their aptitude rather than their ascribed gender roles. At the same
time, she does not romanticize or idealize the past:

I don’t buy into the idea that we have done different things, but we have been
valued equally or that each has done what they did best. I think it has given rise

540
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to greater possibilities to do whatever one did best. But . . . it’s hard to tell. . . .
I want to believe that we have been the people without kings where men and
women have hunted side by side but, then again, I know that in past generations
things have been very different. . . . I’ve heard my mother’s stories . . . how my
grandmother’s mother grew when she received her frst money of her own and
what that purse with her own money meant to her. And in such a situation, I
can’t say that there was gender equality, at least not in that generation – no, not
in the least in that generation. It was defnitively a patriarchal situation.
(Conversation with Sagka 2014)

Sagka states that ‘we have been affected’ and relates to the circumstances of life of
earlier generations of women in her own family, especially her mother’s stories about
women’s economic self-determination.
Njenna, another participant, also nuanced the image of a gender-equal Sámi soci-
ety. Discussing the ‘strong Sámi woman’ trope, she makes the following observations:

I believe the Sámi woman has had to get by herself, looking at the traditional
Sámi environment such as within reindeer husbandry. . . . It has been a condi-
tion to survive under harsh living conditions. . . . But I don’t believe that Sámi
women have had the economic power.  .  .  . And if you look at the reindeer
husbandry legislation, it hasn’t been benefcial for women. A lot of people say
then that Swedes have written it. Still, from the part of Sámi society, we have
adopted it. But if we had had a gender-equal community, then indeed, we would
have found ways to bypass it. But we haven’t done that. So, for sure, I think, the
Sámi woman has managed very well – has had to cope very well – I mean you
haven’t been able to split the tasks. Yet, still, I don’t believe that you have been
equal. No. . . . Yes, the Sámi woman has managed, like managed to drive a snow
mobile and catch reindeer and earmark calves and whatever. She does all that,
but it doesn’t mean that you’re equal.
(Conversation with Njenna 2014)

Sámi women are strong in the sense that they are capable in all areas of their lives,
Njenna argues, including their management of heavy physical tasks in traditional
environments. However, in her view, the profciency of women is not the same as
gender equality. Like Sagka, she draws attention to a lack of economic equality.
She also mentions the discriminatory effects of state legislation surrounding rein-
deer husbandry, pointing out that Sámi society should have been able to bypass its
gender discriminatory elements had it been egalitarian. Both Eikjok (2000, 39) and
Dankertsen (2020b, 55) have pointed out similar problems – i.e. the image of the
‘strong Sámi woman’ can function as a trope through which lived experiences of
gendered inequalities are sidestepped or overshadowed.
Other participants, however, placed more emphasis on the majority society’s
devaluation of women’s labour and its consequences: ‘Why do you disregard some-
thing because, traditionally, a woman is doing it? To me, that is Swedish feminism.
Why do you turn it into something less valuable?’ (Conversation with Márjá 2017).
Márjá refers to Swedish society’s disregard of women’s contributions. Her critique
concerns a lack of knowledge regarding Indigenous social structures on the part of

541
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the majority society as demonstrated by its gender-equality interventions in Sámi

society, a misunderstanding noted by Rauna Kuokkanen: ‘[W]omen in Sámi soci-
ety historically had a form of equality with men, characterised by a symmetrical
complementarity of domains, roles, and tasks’ (2007a, 74). Kuokkanen claims this
equality ensured women’s independence and power, at least in specifc domains
(2007a, 74). As Márjá’s comment refects, ignoring or even misinterpreting con-
temporary expressions of gender complementarity as mere structures of subordina-
tion or reactionary binarism may devalue women rather than contribute to their
empowerment.
Similarly, Biret argues for a conceptualization of Sámi feminism anchored in Sámi
culture and Sámi women’s roles and knowledge:

BIRET: There’s a risk of diluting our culture now that we have been made some-
what Swedish. In some ways. And that is connected to feminism, the Sámi femi-
nism. . . . I think we need a more hardcore-core in Sápmi that, linguistically and
culturally, is more radical. . . . Where we choose to speak Sámi, where, perhaps,
we dress more in gákti. . . . I want it in contexts where we start from us, where
speaking Sámi is a starting point, where we don’t adapt to others because we
have adapted ourselves so bloody much! . . . I want to stop the adaptation and
let others adapt to us.
INA: Yes, to not compromise and adapt to majority-society?
BIRET: Yes. And Sámi feminism, I believe the women have been the carriers – it’s the
women who have been the carriers of the language. The men are in the forest with
the reindeer. So, language is feminism – the women who have chosen to reproduce
their language. The women are real carriers of culture in Sápmi. They know every-
thing. So that is feminism. . . . They are real banks of knowledge, and it is from gen-
eration to generation that you have passed on this knowledge. . . . All the women
that I know that are hardcore are real feminists. But it’s not in an intellectual way.
Instead, they are living it.
INA: So, if I understand you correctly, a form of feminism that exists within or starts
from the Sámi way of life without compromises?
BIRET: Exactly. . . . And I believe – in this decolonisation process that we are in and
is happening worldwide among Indigenous people.
(Conversation with Biret 2014)

Here, Biret foregrounds Sámi women’s reproduction of Sámi culture: To carry and
reproduce culture and language is feminism. She elaborates that this responsibility
is lived, not intellectual. Biret’s critique seems to be directed at forms of majority
feminism that overlook the importance of decolonization and cultural survival for
Indigenous People and Indigenous women. She further describes its basis as lived
realities – feminism as being and doing. It is also possible to interpret her statement
as an argument for the inclusion of women’s concerns, language and social repro-
duction into a male-dominated agenda. In her feminist analysis of Indigenous politi-
cal institutions, Kuokkanen contends that ‘land rights and resource management are
considered the key self-determination questions (dominated by men) while the social
issues are considered “soft” women’s issues’ (2019, 176). Importantly, however, the
land is equally vital for Biret:

542
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Decolonisation implies a return to our language and our interrelationship with

life and with the land. . . . It means to awaken the heart . . . doing it our way,
in the ways that we are strengthened, allowing us to be the people we are and
within our whole culture.
(Conversation with Biret 2014)

Feminism, then, is one aspect of Indigenous decolonization – a radical and uncom-

promising stance and ways of life grounded in Sámi values and culture.

DECOLONIZING FEMINISM
By redefning feminism in Indigenous terms, Indigenous feminism questions whether
feminism is a non-Indigenous concept or whether it is even a detrimental phenom-
enon due to its association with whiteness and majority positions (Green 2017, 3;
Eikjok 2000, 40). Instead, recognition and remediation of external and internal
power differences are considered integral to inclusive and transformative decolo-
nial thinking and practice. A core value is ‘relational responsibility’ (Nickel 2020,
15) – i.e. the (re)creation of good relations within interlinked human and natural
lifeworlds (see also Herranen-Tabibi; and Joks in this volume).
Along these lines of argumentation, Dankertsen suggests that ‘feminist interven-
tions can be analysed as part of the healing and transformation of Sámi society’
(Dankertsen 2020b, 104). Next, three participants from different generations illus-
trate this reasoning. Feminism for these women is integral to their contributions
towards the well-being and development of Sámi society. Inga, a woman in her 60s,
explains Sámi feminism as follows:

Sámi feminism today is, for me, the struggle for Sámi rights; the fght for the
survival of the Sámi language; the struggle for the care of nature and the Sámi
forms and ways of life; the anchorage in the natural foundation of things; and
human dignity – the Sámi aspect of being a fellow human and upholding the
respect for other human beings.  . . . I’m almost a kind of ‘grandmother’ in a
similar way as it’s talked about among Indigenous women in other parts of the
world, especially in North America; that is, the knowledge, the respect and the
place of a grandmother. Sámi feminism is to care for fellow humans from the
perspective of our cultural heritage, but also to encourage the coming genera-
tions. Like I have been encouraged by older women when I grew up. . . . I think
it’s a very beautiful role and way of doing things. Therefore, I am engaged in
reproducing it. In Sámi, we have the concept áhkku. . . . It means ‘grandmother.’
But it carries additional meaning. It’s the older woman’s experience and her
having the self-confdence to articulate it – as one of the many voices in modern
society. . . . I wish to be an áhkku for the coming generations – not only in rela-
tion to the cultural heritage but as a role model in Sámi society.
(Conversation with Inga 2014)

Inga’s refections are based on decades of experiences from the transnational Sámi
and Indigenous women’s movements. Her conceptualization of Sámi feminism is
profoundly relational as it expresses a responsibility towards others, interweaving

543
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the struggles for survival of the Sámi people, culture, values, land and life. By com-
paring the Sámi conceptualization of the role of the áhkku with the Indigenous
grandmother in other parts of the world, she connects Sámi cultural practices with
Indigenous feminisms across time and space. However, her conceptualization is nei-
ther prescriptive nor static. Although inspired by the practice of earlier generations
of women, she flls áhkku with her individual meaning through her reproduction
of the role. She wants to encourage younger generations, especially, although not
exclusively, younger generations of Sámi feminists.
Sire, a younger woman, also spoke about her feminist engagement in terms of
being a role model for others. She described her role in a Sámi feminist project as a
way to contribute to the wholeness of the Sámi people:

I see my role as being a role model for young people, not only but especially
Sámi young women and girls. . . . I think it’s essential to be whole as a people or
that we become whole as a group. That is that the people are whole, well, and
thriving.
(Conversation with Sire 2014)

In the original quotation, Sire uses the Swedish phrase ‘helt folk,’ which carries the
dual meaning of a people who are undivided and a people who have recovered from
injury or trauma. In a sense, the project in which she was engaged aimed at con-
tributing to these interrelated things – healing and unity. For Sire, strengthening the
individual would contribute positively to the group as a whole:

We thought that . . . if you, yourself are okay, then you can contribute so that
the group is well. But if you suffer and are in a bad place, then it won’t work.
That group will still be – it becomes false in some way. So, to be whole persons
and to have the courage to be whole persons. And to be given the conditions to
be so. And to be able to contribute to a group that is positive and strengthens
each other collectively and affrms each other . . . notwithstanding all the focus
on poor social health among Sámi people. So that it’s something powerful, sup-
porting and positive to belong to the group – and not only negative.
(Conversation with Sire 2014)

A vital context is Sire’s personal knowledge of mental illness among Sámi people,
especially the prevalence of suicide among young reindeer herders and its conse-
quences for the individual and the community (cf. Jacobsson et al. 2020). Another
critical aspect is exposure to the majority society’s ignorance and preconceived
notions. Next, Sire talks about consequences of preconceived notions:

When you are a representative, and you see yourself as a representative, it entails
. . . limitations for yourself. Then you cannot tell the whole truth. And it can be
diffcult to share things that I don’t want you to think of all Sámi people. There’s
no room to open up about that. So, to give or to create a space where I don’t
have to represent the Sámi group opens up a space in which you can talk about
all that isn’t general. Or it opens up a space to feel those things that aren’t the

544
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most obvious things without having to defend myself. . . . When you’re a teenage
girl, maybe the most important thing is just to be allowed to be.
(Conversation with Sire 2014)

Feeling the need to represent your people makes it hard to convey the whole truth
or complexity or even to be free from pressure to be understandable to outsiders.
Therefore, Sire wants to contribute to a space where a diverse group of young Sámi
women and girls can exist together, share experiences and support each other with-
out explaining or defending themselves:

INA: And were you able to create such a space for these young women and girls?
SIRE: Yes, that’s what we wanted .  .  ., and then we were humble about that we
couldn’t – I mean people were North Sámi and Lule Sámi and South Sámi,
and they came from Jokkmokk and Arjeplog and Stockholm.15 They were rein-
deer herders and non-reindeer herders, and some could speak the language and
some couldn’t speak the language. Some people had recently begun identifying
as Sámi. . . . Inside this spectrum, there were so many, and we were humbled
in the sense that we didn’t try to eliminate differences. . . . Still, when we were
together, it was about this positive thing, affrming each other and letting each
other be who we are.
(Conversation with Sire 2014)

As Sire explains, the focus is on acceptance and affrmation of one another, including
being able to focus on positivity and experience happiness despite a shared knowl-
edge of the negative things happening to the community (see also Dankertsen in
this volume). Thus, the ‘wholeness’ of the group and people does not depend on the
eradication of diversity but on supporting each other across both commonalities and
differences as variously positioned Sámi people.
Elle explicitly discusses the issue of exclusion. She had experienced explicit resist-
ance to feminist analyses and interventions in the sphere of politics. Feminist per-
spectives and engagement, according to their critics, create division when unity is
needed, diverting attention from the central struggle for Sámi rights to land and
water. However, Elle argues that such discourse also poses a danger to the Sámi
community and its future:

I understand why you want to disregard it. But it is also perilous to think that we
have to solve, as many argue, the confict between Sámi people and non-Sámi peo-
ple, the vulnerability of Indigenous people, frst and then we can deal with possible
internal conficts. There won’t be anything left then, I believe. For me, it is so much
about that everyone needs to feel included in Sámi society, adding both this dimen-
sion of reindeer-herder, non-reindeer-herder, know the language or does not know
the language, women or man, sexuality, anything. I think that we’re so few. . . . You
will exclude people who will not feel at home in the Sámi society because it’s about
power and subordination, and then we will lose more people! And that’s a huge
threat to our culture. But people think that it creates a dimension of confict within
the Sámi society and that it is a form of cultural threat. But the large threat, really, is

545
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if people don’t feel included. . . . That you choose to disengage and you cannot really
afford it as an Indigenous people.
(Conversation with Elle 2014)

Gender, sexuality and the lack of language profciency and a location within reindeer
husbandry, Elle explains, can imply exclusion, leading to individual disengagement
or, put differently, to group alienation and estrangement from the Sámi heritage,
observations that must be contextualized in light of the Nordic states’ racialized
state policies towards Indigenous Peoples.
In Sweden, a paternalist discourse of difference, the so-called ‘Lapp shall remain
Lapp’ policy, differentiates nomadic reindeer herders and Sami in other occupa-
tions. With some exceptions, the frst group was the target of segregation policies
and ‘preservation,’ whereas the latter group suffered assimilation (Lantto 2014;
Lindmark 2013, 144; see also Drugge; and Hansen in this volume). Christina Åhrén
explains that the Swedish dualist policy against the Sámi has placed different values
on different Sámi, based on, for example, linguistic and cultural competencies, occu-
pations, inheritance, relations and one’s position in the group. Åhrén analyzes these
mechanisms as strategies for survival through which people uphold symbolic and
social boundaries to protect Sami culture and language (Åhrén 2008, 39). Refecting
this reality, Elle continues her line of reasoning:

Then you must remember that . . . it’s been very hard to grow up as Sámi in
Swedish society. There’s been a lot of racism, and that does something with peo-
ple when you’re exposed to that in some way. . . . I mean I understand that it
becomes so diffcult because when you’re threatened you want to preserve what
you have in some way.
(Conversation with Elle 2014)

Elle’s contribution includes an awareness of the intersecting relations of power that

affect Sámi communities, which infuence the possibilities for decolonial and femi-
nist articulation and practice. She rightly observes that these are challenging issues to
resolve. Nonetheless, her critical awareness of the consequences of colonial fragmen-
tation for the Sámi people, including its bearing on the reception of feminist analy-
sis and interventions, is vital. Refecting a central feature of Indigenous feminisms,
Elle foregrounds the colonial impact on Sámi society, including the ongoing racism
directed at Sámi individuals and groups while arguing for the need for inclusivity
and equality along the lines of gender and sexuality. Feminism, for Elle, is not a
threat to Sámi survival; rather, it is essential for creating Sámi presents and futures
or, in Kuokkanen’s words, for ‘restructuring all relations of domination’ (2019, 234).

CONCLUDING REMARKS
To conclude, I wish to revisit the concept of interrelatedness. Essentially, this chap-
ter is about various forms of interconnections. Some of these interconnections
manifest within the entwined structures of inequalities and relations of domina-
tion (Kuokkanen 2019, 217) that bear on the lives and social realities of the Sámi
people. Here, I have focused on participants’ refections about gendered inequalities

546
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and their embeddedness within colonial relations of power. As is refected in their

contributions, this interplay necessitates further analysis of colonial histories and
their infuence on Sámi society, historically and presently. However, interrelatedness
also manifests in a profoundly different sense. It refects in the ways participants
negotiate, redefne, and shape feminism, theoretically and practically, according to
Sámi needs and realities, such as the healing from colonial trauma. Therefore, this
interplay takes the form of (re)constructing relations between individuals, the col-
lectivity, cultural and social spheres and the land. The participants endeavour to
create and recreate connections in various ways – for example, across generations
and differences. Contrary to being a divisive force in the struggle against settler-
colonial dispossession, Sámi feminism contributes to the making of ‘good relations’
(cf. Nickel 2020, 15) within interlinked spheres. As a result, it is integral to processes
of self-determination and decolonization.

NOTES
1 With the exception of quotes, I use Lule Sami orthography in my writing.
2 After deliberation, all participants are given assumed names, except Rauna Kuokkanen.
See Knobblock and Kuokkanen (2015) for a published version of our conversation. Dis-
identifcation may appear inconsistent with my desire to treat participants as knowledge-
able subjects (cf. Svalastog and Eriksson 2010, 5). However, it is done in order to protect
participants’ stories of a sensitive nature.
3 ‘Duodji is a customary practice of creation, involving aesthetics, knowledge[s] of materi-
als, place, and season as well as a Sámi holistic worldview that touch upon spirituality,
ethics and the interrelational qualities embedded in the multiple world[s] of creation’
(Finbog 2020, 1, see also Magga, S.-M. in this volume).
4 Excerpts from the conversations are translated from Swedish and Norwegian and slightly
edited for the sake of clarity.
5 A limitation of my research is a focus on Scandinavia.
6 A clear example of change across time and space is in people’s choice of terminology.
For earlier generations, the word ‘feminism’ may have been unknown. Notwithstanding,
their thinking and actions have made formative contributions to the Indigenous feminist
project (cf. Nickel 2020, 7). I use ‘feminism’ and ‘feminists’ as general terms but with an
awareness of historical and contemporary diversity in terms of identifcation.
7 Also known by her married name, Laula Renberg.
8 Sáráhkká is the name of a Sámi female deity; about Sáráhkká, see Nylander in this volume.
9 Translates to Sámi Women’s Forum.
10 The project Niejda – Chicks in Sápmi began in 2011. It aimed to promote the well-being
of young Sámi women and girls.
11 Garmeres means proud in South Sámi.
12 The chapter is written within the context of a larger doctoral research project.
13 ‘Two-Spirit was proposed in Indigenous organizing in Canada and the United States to
be inclusive of Indigenous people who identify as GLBTQ or through nationally specifc
terms from Indigenous languages’ (Driskill et al. 2011, 3).
14 At the core of the terms ‘decolonization’ and ‘resurgence’ lies a critical examination, (re)
imagination and (re)creation of the world grounded in Indigenous experiences and world-
making practices (Smith 2012, 204; Simpson 2017, 191–198).
15 North, Lule and South Sámi refer to linguistic, cultural and geographic areas of belonging.
Arjeplog (Árjepluovve) and Jokkmokk (Jåhkåmåhkke) are municipalities on the Swedish
side of Sábme.

547
 — Ina Knobblock —

REFERENCES
Conversations
Conversation with Biret [assumed name], 2014.
Conversation with Elle [assumed name], 2014.
Conversation with Inga [assumed name], 2014.
Conversation with Márjá [assumed name], 2017.
Conversation with Njenna [assumed name], 2014.
Conversation with Rauna Kuokkanen, 2015.
Conversation with Sagka [assumed name], 2014.
Conversation with Sire [assumed name], 2014.

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 CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

QU E E R I N D I G E N O U S WO R L D -
MAKING IN THE SÁMI TV
C O M E DY N J U O S K A B I T T U T


Kata Kyrölä

INTRODUCTION
How can laughter unravel gendered, sexual and settler-colonial power dynamics
and help imagine other ways of being? In this chapter, I examine the Sámi TV com-
edy show Njuoska bittut (in Finnish, Märät säpikkäät; produced by Tarinatalo,
broadcast by the Finnish public service broadcasting company Yle 2012–2013) by
Sámi creatives Suvi West and Anne Kirste Aikio as a project of queer Indigenous
world-making. I suggest that Njuoska bittut offers an alternative vision of a world
of Indigenous laughter, erotics and audiovisuality, in which settler understandings
of gender, sexuality and the workings of the world are made strange and ridiculous.
Aimed at Sámi and non-Sámi audiences alike, the show navigates between making
its humour legible for a settler audience and creatively imagining queer Indigenous
worlds, disinterested in such legibility.
‘Njuoska bittut’ is North Sámi language and refers to leg warmers made of reindeer
skin that have gotten wet. West and Aikio explain in an interview that they picked
up the phrase from a hundreds-of-years-old yoik song which refers to a treacher-
ous woman with unruly sexual appetites (Huru 2012). The humour in Njuoska bit-
tut does indeed center sex and sexuality, playing with the stereotype of the exotic
Native with voracious sexual appetites (Green 2007; Anderson 2016, 80–85; Lehtola
2000, 138–141) – but the laughter is also geared at the Sámi themselves and ten-
sions and prejudices within Sámi communities. Every episode introduces a broad
theme, such as tourism, Helsinki, homosexuality, boobs, babies or animals. Across the
episodes, there are also recurring characters and sketch types – for example, mock-
ethnographic documentaries about the Helsinki tribe of people whose habits include
living in concrete bunkers and banishing people who cross to the other side of the
beltway. In every episode, West and Aikio introduce a Finnish or Sámi human type
in nature documentary style. These types include the white meat-eating hetero man;
the wilderness tourist who feels a deep connection to Arctic nature; the ‘Sámophile,’

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-38 551

 — K a t a Ky r ö l ä —

a non-Native who is obsessively interested in anything Sámi; and the super Sámi, a
Sámi person who eagerly polices the identity expression of other Sámi folks. Every
episode includes a music video spoof of a popular Finnish pop song, with new lyrics
in North Sámi. Most of the music videos address sex in one way or another.
Drawing on queer Indigenous studies, queer of colour critique and Indigenous
media studies, this chapter interrogates how Njuoska bittut challenges settler-colo-
nial and heteronormative views of gender and sexuality but also (re-)imagines what
queer world-making could mean in an Indigenous context. José Esteban Muñoz
(1999, 2009) suggests, in his work on queer utopia and queer of colour performance,
that queer world-making practices are about reordering, decomposing and reshap-
ing, imagining what could be outside of the hegemonic order while using the domi-
nant social order as raw material. Queer world-making practices, for Muñoz, entail
a utopian longing for, picturing of and insistence on the possibility of other kinds of
worlds, whether they exist within or outside hegemonic culture. Such worlds carve
out realms of pleasure even in the most suppressive conditions. Qwo-Li Driskill
(2010, 74–79) proposes further that queer of colour critique and queer Indigenous
studies could share ground in their insistence on seeing gender, sexuality, race and
national belonging as intertwined, as well as in their imaginative work for decolonial
alternatives.
Njuoska bittut can be seen to conjure up Sámi worlds both within and outside
mainstream settler culture – but it also diffuses and de-dramatizes settler-Indigenous
binaries by laughing at Sámi as well as Finnish culture. The series portrays everyday
Sámi practices as normal while making fun of them and the way they might seem
incomprehensible to non-Sámi viewers. Finnish settler practices are equally laughed
at as they are depicted as strange from a Sámi perspective. In the process, settler
understandings of Indigeneity, gender, heteronormative desire and human-animal
binaries start appearing ridiculously arbitrary and rigid. Since Njuoska bittut is a
comedy show that was sold to and broadcast on a national TV channel in Finland,
it has to speak to and be customized for Finnish settler audience members, but there
are glimpses, echoes, moments of something that escapes – worlds that are not easily
accessible for non-Indigenous viewers.
In the following, I explore not only the strategies of humour in Native comedy and
Njuoska bittut but also my own viewing experiences as a non-Native queer media
scholar. In particular, I set out to explore moments in Njuoska bittut that do not
intuitively make sense to me, moments that stop me in my tracks, puzzle me. Could
these moments point out the boundaries of the settler-colonial imagination, where the
embodied knowledge accumulated as a non-Native just does not suffce? Could these
moments signal the moments when the series moves into territories unknown, per-
haps unknowable, to me – in other words, into the realm of queer Indigenous world-
making? How could such moments nevertheless function as lessons as they offer an
opportunity to stop, explore and fnd ways to learn about Sámi worlds through pleas-
ure, laughter and curiosity? First, I briefy discuss queer Indigenous studies and what
it means to look for queer Indigenous sensibilities, even if they are not named explic-
itly as ‘queer.’ Then I outline the role of comedy and laughter as means of oppression
as well as survival and pleasure for marginalized people overall and Indigenous and
Sámi people in particular, before moving on to examining moments in Njuoska bittut
that offer glimpses into queer Indigenous worlds.

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QUEER INDIGENOUS SENSIBILITIES

In Njuoska bittut, West and Aikio regularly play male, female and other Sámi and
Finnish characters as well as various non-human animal characters. The queer sen-
sibilities of the show are not necessarily underlined as such, but they are not hidden
either, surfacing here and there and always existing as an undercurrent. In queer
media studies, it is, indeed, commonplace to explore queer dimensions beyond explic-
itly queer or gender-diverse characters or narratives, focusing on queer hints, aesthet-
ics, sensibilities and readings (e.g. Benshoff and Griffn 2004, 10). Njuoska bittut’s
queer Indigenous sensibilities remind viewers of what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
(2017) and Alex Wilson (1996) have called Indigenous grounded queer normativ-
ity – a utopian vision of a world where all genders and sexualities just are, without
being named queer or deviant: ‘They also come from the land – the land that provides
endless examples of queerness and diverse sexualities and genders’ (Simpson 2017,
122). The show can thus be seen to speak to queer Indigenous cosmologies, where
the human-like and the non-human, gender and sexuality are just some of nature’s
many forces (e.g. TallBear 2015; Byrd 2017; TallBear and Willey 2019) – sometimes
articulating an explicit reference to sexual and gender diversity, sometimes not.
However, the show’s queer sensibilities are not exceedingly diffcult to see or
extract, nor can they be understood as arbitrary. In particular, Suvi West – later bet-
ter known as a documentary flmmaker – has been outspoken in public about sexual
and gender diversity among the Sámi and directed the frst-ever feature-length queer
Sámi flm Sparrooabbán (Me and My Little Sister, 2016). Sparrooabbán follows
Suvi West and her lesbian sister Kaisa’s journey in search of a queer Sámi past and
present. The documentary carefully depicts loss and trauma as well as re-imagines
what queer Sáminess could be since, for the Sámi, histories of non-heteronormative
relations and genders remain largely undocumented (Kyrölä and Huuki 2021).
Accounts from oral tradition suggest that some Sámi communities neverthe-
less accepted and revered non-heterosexual and gender-diverse people, much like
many other Indigenous people around the world (Kuokkanen 2019, 6; Løvold
2014, 22–28). In the Nordic scholarly context, Sámi feminist scholarship is gaining
more footing and mainstream recognition (for an overview, see Dankertsen 2020
and Knobblock in this volume), but queer Indigenous studies perspectives are still
largely missing, save for some reports and master’s theses (Giertsen 2002; Løvold
2014; Mattanen 2016; Olsén et al. 2017). Queer Sámi activism started to become
more widely visible in the 2010s through the yearly Sápmi Pride events, organized
in various parts of Sápmi since 2014, and the groundbreaking photograph and life
story collection about LGBTQ2 Sámi, Queering Sápmi (Bergman et al. 2013; see
also Knobblock in this volume).
Exploring the existence, persistence and fourishing of queer Sámi people as
well as sensibilities – even when they are not tied to explicit queer identities or
openly articulated – is, overall, a necessary political project. Explorations of queer
Indigeneity break the silence around it and (re)imagine not only what it can be but
also how to think through and live diverse genders and sexualities beyond settler-
colonial, heteronormative structures (Driskill et al. 2011, 10–18). Such a goal reso-
nates with Rauna Kuokkanen’s call – alongside those of many other Native feminist
theorists – that struggles for Indigenous self-determination must center questions of

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gender, sexuality and their multiplicity in order to be meaningful (Kuokkanen 2019;

Simpson 2017; Arvin et al. 2013; see also Alakorva et al. in this volume). In its own
way, Njuoska bittut can be seen to forward these goals through a politics of radical
laughter and pleasure.

SÁMI MEDIA AND INDIGENOUS COMEDY

Njuoska bittut is one of the very few Indigenous-made TV series in Europe out-
side of news and children’s programming and thus a trailblazer. Broadcast on the
national public service television channel in Finland, Yle, the show uses Finnish,
English and North Sámi (with Finnish subtitles). Some of the materials, such as the
spoofs of popular Finnish music videos and cut-out sketches, are available on the
show’s YouTube channel MaratSapikkaat.1 Yle, like the other Nordic public service
media companies, SVT in Sweden and NRK in Norway, has a section for the Sámi,
Yle Sápmi (Sara et al.; Rasmussen et al. in this volume). Yle Sápmi has offered
Ođđasat, a regular news program in three different Sámi languages, since 2013, and
Unna Junná, a children’s program also in three Sámi languages, since 2007 (Dlaske
and Jäntti 2016; Sand 2019, 3–4; Cocq and DuBois 2020, 23). NRK in Norway
broadcast a Sámi TV show for young people called Kakaos-TV (Kákáos tv-sovv)
that ran from 1995 to 1999 and included sketch characters who can be considered
predecessors to Njuoska bittut. Additionally, NRK produced and broadcast a Sámi
drama series for young people called Skáidi in 1995. Sámi-created documentary and
fction cinema has been burgeoning since the 2000s (Sand 2019, 4; Lehtola 2015,
252–256), spurred by the global success of flms such as Sámi director Amanda
Kernell’s award-winning Sami Blood (originally in Swedish Sameblod) from 2016
(see Cocq and DuBois 2020, 177–192), but the relative lack of Sámi content on tel-
evision makes Njuoska bittut all the more signifcant.
It is perhaps not very surprising that comedy is somewhat overrepresented in
Sámi television. Marginalized groups have often received their frst breaks into
mainstream media through comedy. Comedy has been one of the frst areas in which
women have been able to say and do things that would otherwise be deemed out-
rageous – comedy enables the normative world ‘as we know it’ to be shaken since
transgressions are allowed, even expected (Rowe 1995). Some of the frst Black
actors to make it big in Hollywood were or started out as comedians. However, as
Bambi Haggins points out, today’s Black comedians may use humour as a survival
strategy, a political weapon and a way to show the truth about race relations – but
they must do so against the backdrop of racist comic depictions of Black people as
ridiculous and childlike (Haggins 2007). Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai propose,
accordingly, that comedy has a ‘propensity to get into trouble.’ In the world of com-
edy, confusion, anger, humiliation and pleasure are always close to each other, and
‘the funny is always tripping over the not-funny, sometimes appearing identical to it’
(Berlant and Ngai 2017, 234).
Humour has meant both survival and fghting back for Indigenous people also.
Mohawk actor Gary Farmer has noted that Native communities ‘had to have the
ability to laugh. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be existing today. So humour has been a
means of survival, the only means’ (quoted in Ryan 1999, 72). Comedy has been one
of the frst cultural arenas where Indigenous performers have been able to reach wide,

554
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multifaceted audiences and thus engage in ‘comedic activism’ (Berglund 2016). One of
the earliest and best-known fgures was Charlie Hill, an Oneida comedian who rose to
fame in the US in the 1970s, and whose ‘act would absolutely slap white people in the
face’ (Ree quoted in Nesteroff 2021, 153). The punchline of one of Hill’s jokes ended
up as the title of a book of interviews with Native American comedians, We Had
a Little Real Estate Problem (Nesteroff 2021). In the mid-2000s, a Native comedy
group called the 1491s – named after the last year before the arrival of Christopher
Columbus – also gained a wide following both for their live shows and on YouTube,
appealing to Native and non-Native audiences alike (Berglund 2016).
Signifcantly, one of Njuoska bittut’s key strategies of comedy is role reversal: redi-
recting the exoticizing, ridiculing gaze towards the dominant Finnish settler popula-
tion from an Indigenous perspective, holding up a mirror to us, providing a ‘slap in the
face’ – but the slap does not feel quite as painful as it is delivered with laughter. This
strategy has been used in earlier Indigenous television comedy, too – for instance, in
the Australian TV show Babakiueria (1988), named after a sketch in which Aboriginal
explorers arrive in a white people’s barbeque area, conquer it and name it by spelling
the ‘Native’ name in their own way (Shohat and Stam 1994, 328). Previous academic
analyses of Njuoska bittut (Dlaske and Jäntti 2016; Pietikäinen and Dlaske 2013;
Kallioniemi and Siivikko 2020) have focused particularly on the show’s role-reversal
strategies, analyzing the sketch characters ‘Leila’ and ‘Laila.’ Leila and Laila are two
alcoholic, lewd, openly racist white Finnish women played by West and Aikio in the
second season of the show. The characters are a parody of the stereotype of white
working-class Finnish femininity as well as a parodic play on another pair of sketch
characters, well known in Finnish television history – the ‘nunnuka’ men.
The ‘nunnuka’ men were two drunken, lewd Sámi male characters, dressed in cos-
tume-shop versions of the Sámi traditional dress gákti, with blackened teeth, smudged
faces and hay straws for hair, who talked about reindeer herding, drinking, getting laid
and doing shady business. They got their nickname from a chant they would repeat,
‘nunnuka-nunnuka-lailaa-lailaa,’ a mocking imitation of yoik. They also popularized a
certain ‘nunnuka’ walk, in which they would walk by jumping from one leg to the other
and tilting their bodies from side to side, doing their chant, a mock version of some
kind of generic ‘Native’ dance. The characters were played by two prominent Finnish
comedians, Aake Kalliala and Pirkka-Pekka Petelius, in sketch comedy shows in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, Hymyhuulet (Smiling Lips, Yleisradio, 1987–1989) and
Pulttibois (1989–1991). The sketches raised heated debate at the time of their broad-
casting and then again in 2019, when Petelius publicly apologized to the Sámi commu-
nity for the stereotypical and harmful characterization (Kallioniemi and Siivikko 2020,
44). Many Sámi people found the characters offensive, and a complaint was made to
the board of public broadcasting in Finland. The complaint was dismissed, however, as
the characters were seen to be satire of ethnic stereotypes, not promoting stereotypes
themselves. But even if the purpose was to be satirical, the experiences of Sámi people
who regularly faced ‘nunnuka’ yells and ridicule referencing the sketches told a differ-
ent story (Kallioniemi and Siivikko 2020, 49–51).
Indeed, although laughter is most often associated with pleasure, the case of the
‘nunnuka’ men shows how forceful comedy can be as a tool of subordination, turning
a whole rich culture into a chant, a funny walk and a dirty joke. With Leila and Laila,
however, West and Aikio turned the tables around as Sámi actors playing Finnish

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characters, talking even dirtier than the ‘nunnuka’ men and chanting their own non-
sensical chant: ‘Leila löi Lailaa, Laila löi Leilaa, römpsät pesuun’ (‘Leila hit Laila,
Laila hit Leila, time for a cunt wash’). Leila and Laila also have hay for hair and
blackened teeth, and they wear ‘normal’ Finnish women’s clothes, tank tops and jeans.
They carnivalize a certain white working-class heterosexual femininity that has to do
with the stereotype of Finnish people as boozy or alcoholics (Dlaske and Jäntti 2016,
12–13), a stereotype most Finns probably recognize and fnd easy to laugh at.
As settler colonialism’s aim is to make itself invisible, a natural and innocent
state of affairs at the cost of making Indigenous people and land symbolically and
concretely disappear (Kauanui 2016; Veracini 2011), one of my aims in this chapter
is to make the settler gaze visible as a power-laden construction – using my own
baffement and ‘getting’ or ‘not getting’ Indigenous jokes as an example. Michelle
H. Raheja (2011) argues in her exploration of Native American representation in
Hollywood history that Indigeneity has been a hypervisible and invisible locus in
Western settler media, although Indigenous representations’ impact on all viewers,
including settler audiences, has been under-examined. The ‘nunnuka’ men domi-
nated the hegemonic public imagination about the Sámi in Finland for a long time
with extraordinary force. In my childhood and early teens in small-town Finland,
the ‘nunnuka’ chant and the ‘nunnuka’ walk were something kids did regularly for
laughs. When I have given talks in Finland about Sámi media, these sketch charac-
ters are what people roughly in my age group remember most. Finland’s participa-
tion in settler colonialism and the systematic mistreatment of Sámi people across the
Nordic countries was something we did not learn about at school or at home – an
omission necessary for maintaining Nordic exceptionalism, the persistent and inac-
curate self-perception of Nordic countries being outside settler-colonial processes
and racist ideologies (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012). Comedy functioned as a settler-
colonial pedagogy of privilege through ridicule for those of us who were non-Native.
The image of the ‘nunnuka’ men was so pervasive that against its background,
Njuoska bittut seems even more radical as a ‘slap in the face’ – as well as in terms of
its politics of representation. Indigenous people playing non-Indigenous characters
almost never happens in the media, although non-Indigenous actors habitually play
Indigenous characters. When there are only few mainstream media representations
of a marginalized group available, as is the case with the Sámi, single ones gain
considerable defnitive power, which can be said to ring true of both the ‘nunnuka’
men and Leila and Laila, two decades apart. Role reversals such as the characters
Leila and Laila are never simply reversals, but they force that which is normative
and invisible into a sharp focus, revealing its utter dependence on perspective. They
point out the white settler gaze for what it is, expose its disguise as a view from
‘everywhere and nowhere’ (cf. Dyer 1997, 45), just having a bit of fun. As an adult,
the Leila and Laila sketches make me laugh perhaps a little too hard and a little too
enthusiastically – yes, because they are incredibly rude, but also because the laughter
offers a way to face and diffuse the embarrassment I feel about the other kind of
laughter of my youth.
Sketch characters like Leila and Laila are, however, easy to ‘get’ for anyone who
has seen the ‘nunnuka’ men. Next, I want to zoom in on some moments in Njuoska
bittut that I did not get at frst viewing, that required effort, but might just therefore
offer entrance points to queer Indigenous world-making.

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THE SÁMI AS QUEER AND THE (IM)POSSIBILITY

OF A SOVEREIGN EROTIC
Although various plays with gender and non-heteronormative sexuality abound
in Njuoska bittut overall, episode 2 of season 2 tackles intersections of Sáminess
and queerness explicitly with the title ‘Mortal Sin: The Price of Being Gay’
(‘Kuolemansynti: homostelun hinta’).2 In the episode, Aikio and West visit the
Helsinki Pride event. They begin the episode by stating matter-of-factly that they are
now coming out of the closet as lesbians, even though the series has, up until then,
focused on them as very eager and active heterosexuals. During the episode, they
joke about homophobia within Sámi communities (‘we should recruit preachers to
tell that heterosexuals will go to hell and have their drums burned’); they interview
queer participants of the Pride parade and, notably, march in the parade, holding
signs saying (in Finnish) ‘Homo without status’ and ‘We are gays too.’ The signs
seem to mostly baffe folks in the parade. When I frst watched the show, these signs
baffed me as well – they simply made no sense. What could a homo without status
possibly mean? In reference to queer Indigenous world-making, it seemed rather like
West and Aikio really did create a little absurd world of their own, as straight but
maybe newly lesbian Sámi carrying inexplicable signs.
Status, in the sense meant on the sign, is something that non-Indigenous peo-
ple rarely have to think about but which is a central point of debate in relation to
Indigenous sovereignty and settler-colonial nation-states. Status as Sámi in Finland is
the equivalent of being an enrolled member of an Indigenous nation in the US and
Canada, and debates over who belongs to Indigenous groups are common globally.
This refects the fraught settler-colonial cultural terrain where Indigenous belonging
can signal both being a target of stark state regulation and a desired identity – for
example, to gain access to Indigenous rights (Valkonen et al. 2017). Similar slogans
concerning ‘self-Indigenization,’ claims of Sámi identity without recognition by Sámi
governing bodies, have appeared in public discussion, sometimes simultaneously
expressing a sense of belonging and anti-Sámi sentiment (see Junka-Aikio in this
volume). By carrying the signs, Aikio and West make fun of self-Indigenization, the
absurdity of the simultaneous appropriation and dismissal of Sáminess, by appropri-
ating homosexuality, claiming that they are ‘gays too’ and ‘homo without status,’ pre-
sumably because they decided to become lesbians for this one episode and purpose
only. By carrying the signs, they happily disregard the histories and lived realities of
homo-, queer- and transphobic subordination, just like the markers of a Sámi identity,
such as gákti, have been appropriated over and over again in Finnish culture, happily
disregarding the history of Indigenous oppression and the deep cultural signifcance
of gákti (see Magga, S.-M. in this volume). To be recognized as homosexual or queer,
of course, does not require offcial ‘status,’ and belonging to these categories is not
regulated in any state-sanctioned way, although gender identity is. The ‘We are gays
too’ sign can be seen to point out the continued forgetting of Native people and non-
Western genders and sexualities from queer activism and theory (Driskill 2010), as
well as the queering of Native peoples overall in colonial heteropatriarchy through
accounts of ‘deviant’ genders and sexualities (Finley 2010).
In the same episode, there is a music video spoof in North Sámi called ‘Dán ija.’3
The spoof is based on a popular pop song by Finnish singer Jenni Vartiainen called

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‘Mä en haluu kuolla tänä yönä’ (2010) – in English, ‘I Don’t Want to Die Tonight’
– but the spoof version’s lyrics exclaim instead in North Sámi, ‘I don’t want to lick
tonight.’ In it, West and Aikio are dressed in white, writhe and sing on a bed, occa-
sionally lie on it next to each other very still with their hands crossed and stroke a
cross and a bible in close-up. In the beginning of the video, the lyrics state: ‘Even
though you come close and stroke me, I have no desire tonight, so I have to tell you,
I don’t want to lick tonight.’ At the frst glance, I took this music video spoof to be
about (the alleged phenomenon of) ‘lesbian bed death,’ not really seeing the point,
even somewhat annoyed by it. But as the video progresses, West and Aikio stroke
the cross and the bible ever more frantically, exclaiming that instead of licking, they
are going to read the bible and become whole again. The writhing and stroking and
longing facial expressions are in stark contrast with the exclamation that there is
‘no desire tonight.’ The video ends with the lyrics: ‘Leaving women and lesbianism
behind, I am able to live alone – at least for tonight.’ This gave me pause and made
me reconsider my original lesbian bed death interpretation against the history of set-
tler colonialism in Finland. What was it that I could not see?
Christian missionary work was a key part of settler colonization of the Sámi
in Finland from the 17th century onward, and knowledge of earlier Sámi under-
standings of gender and sexuality exist only fltered through Christian missionary
notes, non-Native anthropology and generations of assimilation policies. Indeed,
many contemporary queer Sámi believe that current homophobic and transphobic
attitudes in some Sámi communities are not a part of traditional Sámi nature-based
spirituality but a product of settler-colonial conservative Christianity (Mattanen
2016, 48, 90). Laestadianism, a conservative Lutheran revival movement, was par-
ticularly strong in Sápmi (see Harlin; and Olsen in this volume). One of the key
themes of Suvi West’s later documentary flm Sparrooabbán is the oppressive silence
around queerness in Sápmi which her sister Kaisa fnds heavy to bear – a deeply felt
confict between the love of her land, her family, her people, her deep Lutheran faith
and being queer (see Kyrölä and Huuki 2021, 94–97). Against this background, the
video, seemingly about lack of sexual desire, becomes about the suffocation of non-
heteronormative desire, traced back to settler colonialism.
In thinking more carefully through the ‘I don’t wanna lick tonight’ video, my
attention is drawn to a prominently featured mirror on a wall through which the
viewer sees the two women writhing on the bed. Is this the inescapable mirror of
settler colonialism that twists the vision of queer Sámi people about themselves, not
allowing them to see themselves as fully themselves and sovereign in their sexuality?
The video begins to seem rather more like a playful attempt to laugh at the trauma
of the loss of knowledge of pre-colonial notions of gender and sexuality – to tackle
the incredible diffculty, even impossibility, of imagining full self-determination in
terms of genders and sexualities beyond settler colonialism.
Queer Indigenous thinkers, artists and activists have tackled this diffculty by
carving out spaces of queer Indigenous world-making through poetry, performance
and art. Driskill (2004) has conceptualized the goal of such world-making as a sov-
ereign erotic which ties together pre-colonial understandings of gender and sexual-
ity as fuid, multiple and connected to land and history, and Indigenous political
struggles for self-determination. A sovereign erotic sees the realm of the sexual as
broader than sex and the sexual as a powerful healing force that does not forget but

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embraces trauma as a part of that healing (Driskill 2004, 51–52). In Driskill’s (2004,
56–57) words: ‘A sovereign erotic is a return to and/or continuance of the complex
realities of gender and sexuality that are ever-present in both the human and more-
than-human world, but erased and hidden by colonial cultures.’ As a result, the
sovereign erotic speaks to Muñoz’s (1999) understanding of queer of colour world-
making as both aim to create spaces for pleasure, healing, desire and sovereignty on
terms not dictated by the surrounding white settler-colonial heteronormative society
but simultaneously being embedded in it. In the ‘I don’t want to lick tonight’ music
video, West and Aikio are addressing and diffusing this tension through laughter
and playfulness, but with a tragic undertone. There are hints of a sovereign erotic
in the frantic strokes of the bible and in the erotic writhing, but the erotic remains
suffocated, even if just barely.

BEARS, LEMMINGS AND QUEER NON-HUMAN

INDIGENOUS WORLDS
If the episode on homosexuality hints at queer Indigenous worlds to come but not yet
fully realized, there are other, brief moments in Njuoska bittut when those worlds do
seem to fully exist, even if briefy. The moments when my comprehension as a non-
Native viewer really collapses – and which I therefore take to signal queer Indigenous
world-making – relate to one particular feature of the show that was never acknowl-
edged or even mentioned in its public reception or scholarly analyzes. Throughout the
two seasons, there were seemingly random, abruptly appearing, recurring inserts, only
a few seconds long, featuring a bear character during the frst season and a lemming
character during the second season. The bear inserts included the bear rowing a boat
on an Arctic lake, hitch-hiking by a roadside in Sápmi, having sex with a woman in the
woods, sniffng a car’s gas tank and walking away high and slow dancing with someone
by a pool table in a bar. The lemming, on the other hand, had bloodier adventures: The
inserts end with the lemming’s head exploding every time – for example, for getting
on an escalator and failing to get off, for driving a car in a traffc jam, for trying on a
too-small top in a department store’s ftting room and for walking into a flthy public
bathroom. When I frst watched the show, I barely noticed these inserts, since they
were so short and seemingly so absurd – strange little glimpses into another world, as
if parodying the idea of sending subliminal messages through a screen. However, as I
rewatched, the inserts started captivating me for exactly these reasons.
The bear (guovža) features prominently in Sámi culture as the holiest and most
powerful of animals – in the Sámi worldview, bears have souls just like all living
beings. Bear hunting was a ritual event, and in Sámi mythology, there are stories of
an erotic relationship between a bear and a woman, as well as bear-human mergers
and transformations (Rydving 2010; Heith 2016). The bear in the inserts is pre-
sented, however, in present-day situations, as if it was just some youth looking to get
away, get high and have sex.
The lemming (goddesáhpán), on the other hand, is known for its mass migrations,
and such migrations – repeated every few years – were seen as premonitions in Sámi
mythology. In the Sámi worldview, the lemming is also known for its persistence and
even recklessness in dangerous situations. The idea of the lemming as suicidal, how-
ever, has come about from a Disney documentary White Wilderness (1958), which

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portrayed Norwegian lemmings throwing themselves off a cliff into the Arctic Sea dur-
ing migration. In fact, the documentary crew had thrown the lemmings off a cliff into
the sea to make the flm more dramatic (Nicholls 2014). In a study on suicide in Sámi
communities (Stoor et al. 2015), the lemming was nevertheless a point of reference and
identifcation for the interviewed Sámi people who felt like lemmings, their existence
threatened by settler colonialism. They did not identify with the lemming because it is
suicidal, but because it will fght for its survival until the very end and die for its inabil-
ity to fee, even in the face of annihilation. The lemming in the Njuoska bittut inserts
not only explodes inadvertently and extravagantly bloodily, but it explodes in contact
with settler-colonial urban environments that are as mundane as they are frustrating.
Kuokkanen (2007, xix) has pointed out that in Sámi worldviews, just as in many
other Indigenous philosophies, the human is seen as just one of the many forces of
nature instead of its center. Sexuality is one such force and cannot, therefore, be
understood as exclusively centering on the human either. Kim TallBear (2015) simi-
larly underlines that stories and understandings of sexual fuidity, desire and cou-
plings between human, non-human and spiritual entities are common in Indigenous
mythologies and traditions, even though not necessarily framed in terms of what
Western thought considers sex or sexuality. The bear and the lemming of the inserts
do not seem to have any obvious gender, and the bear especially seems to seek pleas-
ure, whether in couplings with humans or otherwise. Could these little inserts of
the bear and the lemming, then, offer glimpses into queer non-human Indigenous
world-making, creating momentary escapes when the erotic is not defned by settler
heteropatriarchy or human-centrism, even if the fip side is the danger of exploding?
The inserts can perhaps be seen to momentarily actualize a sovereign erotic (Driskill
2004) which merges trauma with healing and pleasure and does so through connec-
tion to land and non-human animals as equal actors. The glimpses of the bear and
the lemming do not care about ‘making sense’ or giving pleasure to a non-Native
viewer like myself – not even when they eventually do.
The bear and the lemming inserts also defy the usual audiovisual aesthetics of
Western television, as they are incredibly short, lack any so-called introduction and
appear and disappear suddenly at seemingly random moments. They do not have back-
ground music – sometimes they do not have sound at all – and when they do, the sound
is brief and diegetic, coming from the world depicted, such as the lemming’s scream
before its head explodes. In this sense, not only do the inserts create glimpses of queer
non-human Indigenous worlds, but they also forge into existence a vision of visual
sovereignty. Visual sovereignty, a notion coined by Raheja (2011), occupies a paradoxi-
cal space between the need for creative Indigenous self-determination and what that
can mean within a cultural context in which representations of Indigeneity have for
so long been defned from the outside. Visual sovereignty aims to capture audiovisual
moments, created by Indigenous artists, that envision Indigenous aesthetics and defy
Western audiovisual logic – for example, by creating their own pace and temporality
and underlining entanglements of land, humans, non-human animals and geographical
place (Raheja 2011, 17–18). The bear and the lemming inserts do just that, barely even
registering for a viewer who is not sensitized to such visuals but creating spaces of
outrageous pleasure while gathering force for their funniness from trauma.

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CONCLUSION: GOOD RELATIONS AND TINY ISLANDS

Following Muñoz (1999, 2009) and Driskill (2004, 2010), the glimpses of queer
Indigenous world-making in Njuoska bittut unravel distinctions between the
human and the non-human, sex and seriousness, trauma and laughter, settler
representations and Indigenous visual sovereignty. The series does this not through
direct confrontation but by inviting Sámi and non-Sámi viewers alike to laugh with
West and Aikio, laugh together at themselves and each other – while it also offers
potentially pedagogical moments when viewers unfamiliar with Sámi worlds might
choose to educate themselves. However, the series itself does not explain, preach or
educate; it leaves cues which are there to be followed but also possible to ignore.
This strategy of invitation can be seen to refect the Indigenous notion of ‘good
relations’: collaboration, respect and mutuality (e.g. Kuokkanen 2019). Notably,
however, this also means that it is entirely possible to watch the series as a non-
Native viewer and ignore many if not all such cues, enjoy the bits that are easily
digestible and let others pass by.
As Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck and Angie Morrill (2013) argue, thinking through the
production of gender and sexual categories as colonial and settler-colonial con-
structs, and imagining alternatives, are projects worthy of interest for all scholars
who seek to unravel injustices. This project cannot be left as the responsibility of
Indigenous, Black and Brown individuals and communities; it also requires work
and listening by white and settler actors. Njuoska bittut offers possibilities to do
so both by creating glimpses of queer Indigenous worlds and by refusing to strictly
distinguish between Sámi and settler worldviews and spaces. As a result, the show
can be seen to follow Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017, 196) as she urges us
to ponder ‘our own relationships to place and to each other outside of the spatial
constructs of settler colonialism.’ For Simpson, Indigenous and settler spaces cannot
be understood as strictly separate, since Indigenous people have long been mov-
ing between spaces and living outside their ancestral lands. This is what West and
Aikio, and the bear and the lemming, do in Njuoska bittut: They move between
urban settler-dominated spaces and Sápmi landscapes, they adapt and defy, laugh
and clash, sometimes pay the price of an exploding head. But while seeking common
ground, Simpson (2017, 197) also insists on ‘tiny islands of Indigeneity, in spite of
these settler colonial spatialities’ which are a form of ‘survivance,’ ‘an active sense of
presence, the continuance of native stories.’ Njuoska bittut offers such tiny islands –
which, in the end, are not that tiny, as on these islands, it is possible to laugh in the
face of the immense force of settler-colonial heteronormativity, persist in absurdity
and pleasure and see glimpses of other kinds of worlds.

NOTES
1 YouTube: MaratSapikkaat, www.youtube.com/user/MaratSapikkaat (accessed 16 August
2021).
2 During season 2, every episode is named after a made-up mock mortal sin.
3 Available on YouTube as ‘Märät säpikkäät: Dán ija (Mä en haluu nuolla tänä yönä),’ www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ptRIVxhU008 (accessed 24 August 2021).

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 CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

T H E A C T I V I S M O F H AV I N G F U N
Young Sámi in urban areas of Norway
and Sweden


Astri Dankertsen

INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores the act of having fun as a part of Sámi activism and resistance
in urban areas of Norway and Sweden. Drawing on the work of Eve Tuck (2009)
and desire-based research, I argue that there is a need for research about the posi-
tive forces in Sámi society. Studying fun as a part of Sámi resistance can give us new
insights into how young Sámi negotiate ways of interacting and claiming Sámi space
in a society dominated by non-Sámi lifestyles. They are fnding ways of gathering
young Sámi that give them the opportunity to defne for themselves how they want
to be Sámi. Sámi young people having fun can therefore also be a way of resisting
the settler-colonial elimination (cf. Wolfe 2006) of Sámi communities.
This chapter is based on qualitative data1 from the project ‘An Urban Future for
Sápmi? The Infuence of Sámi Youth Organising and Political Networking on the
Sámi Policies of Nordic Cities (NUORGÁV),’2 with data from cities in Norway,
Sweden, Finland and Russia. Several of the researchers on the project, including
me, are Sámi themselves and actively engaged in different Sámi organizations. We
conducted semi-structured interviews with young Sámi, representatives from Sámi
youth organizations, representatives from other Sámi organizations and institutions,
politicians and representatives from the municipalities. In this chapter, I have chosen
to base my text on the data from Norway and Sweden, where we conducted 73
interviews, including interviews with 25 young people.
Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen and Monica Rudberg (2007) argue that having fun has
been the central element of youth cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries, when ris-
ing standards of living have given increasing numbers of young people the oppor-
tunity to engage in more than the thrift and toil of their parents’ lives. The growing
importance of education, in addition to young people marrying and having children
later in life, also contribute to a lifestyle in which young people can focus on having

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-39 565

 — Astri Dankertsen —

fun (Nielsen and Rudberg 2007, 101). This is also true of Sámi society. One can
therefore analyze young Sámi having fun as a form of activism in their everyday
lives and a way of claiming space within the space of youth culture in general. These
young people are now visible in spaces where Sámi culture used to be more or less
invisible.
From the Arctic to Australia, from the Americas to Asia, we also see a demo-
graphic shift among Indigenous Peoples towards increased urbanization, with
Indigenous People moving to cities that are often culturally and politically domi-
nated by non-Indigenous groups. The same is happening in Sápmi today (Pedersen
and Nyseth 2015; Dankertsen and Åhrén 2018). However, one can also argue that
the Sámi people have been written out of the history of cities, since the Sámi have
always been present in cities, especially those that are close to the areas that are now
often referred to as ‘the traditional Sámi areas’ (see also Eriksson in this volume).
The urbanization of Sápmi is also of a conceptual character, relating to stereo-
types and false notions of authenticity. From the perspective of the historical disci-
pline of Lappology3 studies, the idea of urban Sáminess was an oxymoron, because
Sáminess was strongly bound to ideas of northern, peripheral and rural areas, as
well as being strongly bound to nature (see also Aikio in this volume). Urban land-
scapes were seen as unnatural and unsuitable for the Sámi. In addition, urbanization
in the north often involved a process by which the Sámi were written out of history
in the new northern urban areas. Urban areas such as Umeå, Tromsø and Bodø are
all situated in areas where a substantial number of Sámi individuals have always
lived and still do so today (Berg-Nordlie [forthcoming]).
Urbanization also involves a change in how Indigenous People mobilize socially,
culturally and politically to survive as peoples and how they defne what it is to be
Indigenous (Peters and Andersen 2013). Sámi young people today have had the oppor-
tunity of taking back and preserving their language and culture. In many areas, previous
generations grew up in an environment where expressions of being Sámi were the target
of forced assimilation policies imposed by the government (Minde 2010), stigmatized
(Eidheim 1969) and something of which people were ashamed (Høgmo 1986).

THE NEED FOR FUN AND DESIRE IN INDIGENOUS

RESEARCH
The turn to theories on affect and emotions in the social sciences and humanities
focuses not only on how people make and shape the world they inhabit but also how
they feel it (Ahmed 2004; Wetherell 2012). Sara Ahmed (2004) shows how affect
circulates and ‘sticks’ to certain bodies and how affects circulate culturally, creating
differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that are deeply connected to our bodily experi-
ences and interactions with the worlds that we inhabit. She argues that ‘emotions
do things, and they align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social
space – through the very intensity of their attachments’ (Ahmed 2004, 119). Affect
and emotions as objects for social analysis are therefore useful for analyzing power
and resistance because they say something about how individuals are connected to
communities through bodily and social space.
This chapter can be seen as a critique of the dominance of negativity in theories
of affect, including my own work on Sámi melancholia (Dankertsen 2014). While

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it is important to acknowledge the ways in which colonization continues to shape

Sámi lives, we as researchers also need to develop perspectives that can help people
imagine a future. Tuck (2009) calls for what she defnes as desire-based research
frameworks. Because Indigenous people have often been described as damaged as
a result of the aftereffects of colonization, there is an urgent need for desire-based
research because stereotypical images of damaged Indigenous people also shape how
they understand themselves (see also Lehtola in this volume). Tuck warns us against
fetishizing damage since this may lead to paralysis, ignorance and lack of responsi-
bility. In a similar way, the Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen (2000) points out that
there is a tendency in the understanding of traditional knowledge to draw on stereo-
typical images of Indigenous people as belonging to cultures that were once whole
and pure in the past but are now forever damaged by colonization.
In focusing on ‘having fun’ as a mobilizing affect for positive change in Sámi socie-
ties, I argue that there is a need to analyze how society can move beyond the stereotypi-
cal images of Sámi culture as forever damaged. Through desire-based research, we as
researchers can focus on a present that is enriched by both the past and the future as
an integrated part of our lives. In this way, we can integrate the dynamic whole into
our analysis in a way that grasps both the affective and social complexity of everyday
Indigenous lives. This opens up space for new ways of including young people in poli-
tics and decision making, through fnding common ground related to the joys, pains,
dreams and desires of Indigenous youth today (Gahman et al. 2019). This is therefore
a research perspective that aims to look beyond what is broken, conquered and colo-
nized and, instead, to make space for envisioning and mobilizing for a better future.
Sámi young people are the actors of our Sámi future. The research that we do today is a
practice that shapes and constructs futures. As Annemarie Mol (2014) argues, the mun-
dane practices in which we interact with ontologies and politics play a crucial role in
shaping the real, the conditions of possibilities that are available to us, and the political.
Through the concept of ‘ontological politics,’ she underlines the active mode, the pro-
cess of shaping our political realities through open and contested processes. A relevant
concept in this context is survivance, often used in critical Native American studies. The
Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor defnes survivance as:

an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction,
or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance,
tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of
an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy.
(Vizenor 1999, vii)

In this way, survivance is more than just survival; it is also a way of nourishing
Indigenous ways of knowing. We need to celebrate our survivance (Vizenor 1999) in
a way that considers the complexity, contradictions and self-determination of lived
Indigenous lives because damage cannot be the only way, or even the main way, in
which Indigenous People talk about themselves and are described in research. This
can also be seen as a turn towards Indigenizing research. It is a turn away from
colonialism and the harm it has done and towards Indigenous individuals and socie-
ties. It is a way of searching for new Indigenous perspectives, foundations and theo-
ries, in which Indigenous individuals refuse to remain stuck in the settler-colonialist

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approach and the position of victimized and damaged cultures. Instead, they take
back the life forces and experiences of Indigenous people themselves and put these
at the centre of research.

HAVING FUN IN EVERYDAY LIFE

There is a long political tradition of making everyday life a political arena in Sámi
societies. An example of this is the slogan ČSV, a Sámi political slogan that appeared
in the autumn of 1970 during the Sámi political event in Máze. The event was linked
to the Alta controversy concerning the construction of a hydroelectric power plant
on the Alta River in Finnmark in Northern Norway, in the middle of an area with a
strong and vital Sámi reindeer-herding district and community. Soon it became a slo-
gan that attracted young Sámi activists, artists and people engaged in Sámi culture
as a process of awakening the formation of a visible Sámi identity (see Alakorva in
this volume). It soon spread to other Sámi areas (Kalstad 2013). While the letters
ČSV do not stand for anything in themselves, they are common letters in the Sámi
language and can stand for a variety of phrases. The most common meaning is Čájet
Sámi Vuoiŋŋa! (Show Sámi Spirit).
While this concept is particularly associated with the activists of the 1970s and 80s, we
have found in our material that several of the young people refer to it in the interviews,
especially on the Norwegian side. While these young people often focus on distanc-
ing themselves from previous generations, they are also concerned with how they can
continue the work of these earlier generations of Sámi activists. Through both changes
in and continuation of the concept of ČSV, they use it as a way of demonstrating Sámi
spirit in an urban context in a fun way, including the use of social media.
An example of this mobilizing force of having fun is Marius’s experiences while
he lived in Trondheim. Marius, a 22-year-old man interviewed in Oslo, has lived in
several cities and has a broad network of young Sámi friends and acquaintances. In
the interview, he describes the process of developing a Sámi network in Trondheim
when he lived there:

I had a network there from before. A Sámi milieu was established. A little bit
from before, but it grew bigger when I moved there. Several [Sámi people moved
there] . . . at the same time as me. It became a network with some ad hoc meet-
ing places. It became a ‘gang,’ we had coffee on Saturday afternoons. People
were studying different topics [at the university]. I felt that it was very nice to
have a Sámi meeting place, even though we didn’t have an organisation. This
was the frst time I’d experienced having a Sámi meeting place. Or a meeting
place where the thing that we had in common was that we were Sámi.
(Marius, 22)

This quote illustrates the importance of having a social life in which one can get to
know other young Sámi people. Even though, at that time, Marius and his friends
did not have an organization, the fact that they could get together and have fun,
just hanging out together as Sámi, became a sort of ‘activism’ of everyday life. He
shows how this early, casual, ‘having fun’ activism in everyday life transformed into

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a more formalized activism through organizations. Through his network, he gradu-

ally became an important person in Noereh.4

It was [name] who suggested having the gákti day for the board. She took the
initiative to have a gákti day in [her hometown], in 2013 when she was a high-
school student. A lot of people participated. Then she came up with the idea
that it should be national. And then it became international. The idea sparked
an interest among many people. They thought it was cool. A reason to wear the
gákti on a normal working day.
(Marius 22)

The use of Sámi language and culture in everyday life is also on the agenda of the
Sámi youth organizations. In 2014, the Sámi youth organization Noereh took the
initiative to instigate a day to celebrate the gákti,5 the traditional Sámi clothing.
Through the campaign, they encouraged people to wear their gákti or other Sámi
clothes in their everyday lives, take pictures and share them on social media with the
hashtag #gáktebeaivi. Other versions in other Sámi languages, such as #gápptebie-
jvve and #gaptanbiejjie, and even Norwegian and English – #koftedag and #gákti-
day – were used to signal that this day celebrated the inclusion and tolerance of all
Sámi. They called it Intergalactic Gákti Day to really stress the transgressive motiva-
tion and potential of the day.
Another aspect of youth activism is its active use of social media as a way of con-
necting with and engaging young people. This is something that is highly relevant
among Young Sámi as well. Vincent Raynauld et al. (2018) show how social media
plays a crucial role in the Canada-based Indigenous grassroots movement and their
national and international allies in the Indigenous protest movement known as Idle
No More (INM). Social media functions as mass information dissemination, opin-
ion sharing and criticism, as well as a way of mobilizing activists both online and
offine. It blurs the boundaries between the traditional and the more informal paths
of political engagement since social media engagement is also a way of mobilizing
and making visible Indigenous cultures.
From its being something that was stigmatized and considered shameful in the
past, young people are demonstrating that wearing a gákti on a normal weekday to
school, to work, at the shops or anywhere one wants to go can be ‘cool.’ While tradi-
tionally, the gákti was used both for ceremonial purposes and in everyday life, both
the costume and its meaning have been transformed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
And from the Sámi movement in the 1970s and onwards, it has transformed into a
political symbol as well. An example is the use of the gákti at demonstrations, where
activists turn it inside out as a protest (Magga 2018). This was done, for example, in
the demonstrations in Tromsø in 2011, when the city council decided not to become
part of the Sámi language preservation area in Norway (Hætta and Utsi 2011).
In addition to being ‘cool,’ it normalizes the wearing of the gákti and broadens
the unwritten rules about where one can wear gákti and in what context, as well as
challenging the stereotypical image of the Sámi as only belonging in rural areas and
the mountains. The gákti day also includes people who are not members of any Sámi
organizations or who live in places where there are not many Sámi people to see
in everyday life, through sharing pictures on social media celebrating the everyday

569
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wearing of the gákti. The gákti has gone through a transformation, from being prac-
tical clothing worn in everyday life to becoming a political statement and back again
to something that people wear in their everyday lives ‘to show Sámi spirit’ (see also
Magga, S.-M. in this volume). This act thus becomes a continuation of both the
traditional wearing of the gákti in everyday life and the ČSV-inspired political state-
ment. The campaign therefore connects the past and the present through links to
traditional use, Sámi political history and the everyday lives of young Sámi today.
Márjá, a young Sámi woman in Oslo, comes from a Sámi area where the lan-
guage and traditional knowledge have been severely threatened in the past by forced
assimilation and marginalization. For her, living in Oslo is also a way of engaging in
Sámi activities, using the language and expressing herself as a Sámi in ways that she
did not have the same opportunities to do in her home village:

It’s fun. In Oslo you meet new Sámi all the time. I always wear something Sámi
like this [shows her shawl] so other Sámi can fnd me. Some of us wear that
when we go out [to bars]. I often see people with Sámi stuff. Then I say hi and
join them.
(Márjá, 20)

She expresses a lot of joy about taking part in the Sámi activities in Oslo since she
can meet young Sámi from different parts of Sápmi. Through retelling the story
about her use of Sámi symbols in everyday life, she also articulates the hope, visions
and wisdom of a lived Sámi life (cf. Tuck 2009) in the city, where the use of the Sámi
language has transformed from something that is stigmatized to something useful,
sociable and fun.
However, Márjá also expresses frustration about the community where she grew
up, where a lot of Sámi are still hiding the fact that they are of Sámi heritage. She is
therefore enjoying the freedom of being able to express herself in the way she wants
to through the Sámi organizations and activities in Oslo. The use of symbols that are
often not recognizable as Sámi to many non-Sámi, such as T-shirts, shawls and jewel-
lery, is a way for her to send signals out in the world to fellow young Sámi who may
recognize them and contact her in public. Sámi young people give their Sámi cloth-
ing and accessories new functions in the urban and often anonymous environment.
Traditional Sámi communities were small; everybody knew everybody else and their
ethnicity. In an urban context, it is possible to strategically hide one’s ethnicity and,
at the same time, to use both the language and the symbols as a ‘secret code’ to rec-
ognize and contact another Sámi. This demonstrates the Sámi cultural fexibility and
the capacity to use old objects and symbols in new ways.
The siblings Christina (13) and Robert (16) live in Tromsø. They talk about hav-
ing fun as a part of their engagement with Sámi culture in their everyday lives. While
they said that in their everyday lives, they are mostly occupied with activities that
are normal for young people, such as schoolwork and sports, they also expressed a
lot of joy about listening to Sámi music:

We often listen to Sámi music in the car. Mari Boine. Sámi Grand Prix. And Sámi
rap [laughs]. That’s fun! The musicians do a great job!
(Christina, 13)

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In this quote, we see Christina explaining how the whole family is having fun in the
car, listening to Sámi music. The siblings talk about different Sámi pop artists and
how they mix traditional elements with pop music elements. Having fun as a part of
being Sámi can therefore be a way of articulating Sámi belonging in their everyday
lives. We see here how these young people do not articulate being Sámi through
negative emotions, such as shame or melancholia, but rather through positive expe-
riences and having fun with their family.

FUN AS ACTIVISM IN SÁMI ORGANIZATIONS

For some young Sámi, being Sámi in an urban area can be quite lonely, especially if they
go to school in a place where there are not many young people who are Sámi or who
show that they are Sámi. During the project period, however, we found that there were
more and more youth activities in the cities. While there might be Sámi organizations
and activities, there might not be many arenas that are open and attractive to young
people. For Inga, a high school student in Alta, this is an issue that she discusses quite a
lot in the interview. She really wants to get to know more Sámi people in the city where
she lives. At the same time, she does not know how to start:

INGA (17): Maybe I should start taking part in the Sámi milieus?
INTERVIEWER: How does one do that?
INGA (17): Well, draw a sign and walk around with that, where it says: ‘I am Sámi,
are you?’ I really don’t know. We have no arenas to meet each other.

In this quote, Inga illustrates her struggles to fnd other young Sámi in Alta, when
there is no youth organization and no meeting places where young people like her
can get to know others. While there are Sámi organizations in Alta, most of the
activities are not aimed directly at young people. This is something that is reported
by young people in all the cities where we have interviewed people. They want to be
engaged but feel that the activities are mostly for older adults or for kids.
In his interview, Marius discusses how they have focused explicitly on this in
Noereh:

The biggest activity that we have is the national congress. Here, we always have
a part that is a very professional programme about culture and politics, and
a cultural part. We think it’s important to have a Sámi meeting place. A place
where you don’t have to be in a minority. A place where you don’t have to
explain. Just hang out together. There’s a survey about this, I don’t know who
did it. But they discovered that young Sámi who have a social milieu where it’s
okay to be Sámi have a greater chance of not developing mental problems. We
want to strengthen the identities, the language, the Sámi.
(Marius, 22)

In this quote, we see how organizations like Noereh explicitly focus on the links
between the political, the social and the cultural. They want to be an organiza-
tion that unites young Sámi and strengthens their identities through providing a
safe space to be Sámi. While these youth organizations often involve an element of

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activism, they also organize activities that are intended to be merely recreational.
Some of these activities do not necessarily focus on explicit Sámi expressions but
tend to involve activities whose main purpose is to give young Sámi a space where
they can meet other young Sámi and have fun, such as playing football (soccer),
having pizza nights or throwing informal parties. Often, they recruit people through
friends and family. Maria, a 16-year-old Sámi girl living in Stockholm, was asked
in the interview why she had chosen to become a member of a Sámi organization:

I just went because my mum said that one must engage. I would have been
happy with just being sociable.
(Maria, 16)

Maria states that being sociable is the most important reason she joined the
organization. However, since her mother has motivated her to become politically
interested as well, she is conscious of her responsibility as a young Sámi to be active
and engaged. However, there is a blurred line between the social and the political in
several of these organizations and events, something that Kristina illustrates:

I’ve taken part in a demonstration against mining, but I wouldn’t call myself
politically active. I’m against the brutal attack on Sámi land, but I also attended
because I want to hang out with friends.
(Kristina, 16)

This quote shows that demonstrations can also be a social arena for getting to know
other Sámi young people. However, fun can also be a way of coping with the more
diffcult sides of being Sámi and fnding strength. Kristin, a Sámi student and member
of a Sámi youth organization, explains it like this:

It’s diffcult to run an organisation when you’re a student. You become aware
of that when you take on the responsibilities. It’s easier when there are more
people. It’s important to have somebody to share the positive experiences with.
(Kristin, 20)

Here we can see that positive experiences are a way for Kristin and her fellow Sámi
students to cope with the struggles of everyday life as a student. For young students
moving to a city, taking part in activities through the Sámi youth or student organiza-
tions can be a way of giving each other support. When Kristin talks about how dif-
fcult it is to run the Sámi organization, this can be analyzed as a way of expressing
the responsibility that she feels she has, not only for the organization itself but also for
the Sámi people, through her activism. For her, sharing positive experiences with other
Sámi students is a way of coping with the urge that she feels to be more politically
active. This is also something that Simon, a young man living in Bodø, stresses in his
interview. For him, the social aspect of being in Noereh is his main motivation:

It’s fun to be in Noereh and go to Sámi happenings and meetings. I do it mostly

for the social [aspect]. I’m not that interested in politics. I like to meet other

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Sámi. I often travel for a while if there’s something happening somewhere. It’s
worth it if it’s a Sámi party.
(Simon, 21)

In this quote, we see that Simon is expressing how he enjoys being part of the organi-
zation and that his motivation is mostly having fun. For him, meeting other Sámi
young people and having fun is the most important part of being a member of
Noereh. However, from talking to him in the interviews and observing him at Sámi
events all around Sápmi, I argue that his participation can clearly be defned as
activism, even though he does not articulate an explicitly political agenda. I have
often observed him at events in Sámi clothes, yoiking6 and speaking Sámi as a way of
claiming Sámi space in public. I ask Simon what he thinks is important for engaging
more young people, and he answers:

I think it’s easier to attract young people if there are some parties. I think it
would be great to have a Sámi house, a meeting place. That would have been
great for the whole region.
(Simon, 22)

The way in which Simon talks about Sámi organizations, festivals and meetings
reveals the potential aspect of having fun as part of recruiting young people into
organizations. In the interviews, he mentions a few names of young Sámi politicians
and says they show that Sámi politics is important. When they see that other young
people are engaged in politics, it is an eye opener for its importance. During the last
few years, I have also observed that Simon has clearly moved from attending ‘just
for the fun of it’ to explicitly engaging in political activities with a clear political
motivation. Through his engagement in organizations, meetings and festivals, he
has learned a lot about these organizations and Sámi politics through activities that,
while aimed at creating space for fun activities for young Sámi, still have an underly-
ing political motivation. Stina, who lives in Stockholm, says something similar when
she talks about the importance of the Sámi association there:

It’s a place where you go to see other Sámi, but it’s not always that one dares
to strike up [conversations]. One goes with those Sámi whom one already
knows. It’s not easy to create a bigger network here. Even if one knows almost
everybody.  .  .  . I often show up to meet other Sámi. That’s what it’s all about.
Social togetherness.
(Stina 23)

This link between ‘the social,’ ‘having fun’ and activism is not coincidental, but
something that several of the youth activists focus on in the interviews.
The phrase ‘you don’t have to explain’ is something that we fnd in several of
the interviews, a quote that shows how being Sámi often involves being different
and therefore entails explaining to other people who you are, why you do things
in certain ways and what Sámi culture is. Daniel talks about his positive memories
from when he was a student in Tromsø:

573
 — Astri Dankertsen —

This is why I had such a great time in Tromsø. It was so natural, it was easy to
make acquaintances, there was always an event. It was easy to be Sámi in Tromsø.
(Daniel, 29)

In this quote, Daniel explains how having fun, or ‘having a great time,’ is linked to
the feeling of being at ease with oneself and others. Being a student in Tromsø was
great for Daniel because he got to know other young Sámi in a fun and inclusive
environment. While most of the young people whom we have interviewed say that
they are proud to be Sámi, they also talk about the stress of being a minority and
having to cope with the stress of being different. For them, having a place where
they can be Sámi without having ‘to explain’ things is something that is important.
However, they also want to hang out with other young people and have fun.

CREATING SPACE FOR A NEW GENERATION OF SÁMI

ACTIVISTS
In the interviews, several of the participants discuss earlier generations of Sámi activists
and how they infuence their work today. The Alta controversy and all the activities
related to that during the 1970s and 80s are things that several of the participants dis-
cuss, among them Káre (about the Alta controversy, see Nykänen in this volume).

I wish that young Sámi today could be even more engaged. I sometimes think
that I would have loved to live under the Alta controversy. But it’s a little bit
the same thing with Kallak.7 There’s a fghting spirit among young people today
too. I know a lot of people who are politically active, both in Kamp Kallak [the
activist group], language revitalisation or Norwegian organisations. I have a
lot of friends who are members of Nature and Youth [Natur og ungdom – a
Norwegian environmental organisation].
(Káre, 23)

In this quote, we see that, on one hand, Káre is inspired by the earlier generations of
Sámi activists and wishes that young people in Sápmi could be a bit more like them.
On the other hand, Káre and many of her friends are, in fact, active in many different
issues that are relevant to young Sámi today, but on their own terms. Káre says that
most of her friends are members of Noereh. As young people in the city, they want to
create something new and fnd their own ways of articulating Sáminess. Kristina in
Stockholm demonstrates something similar in the ways in which she talks about Sámi
organizations and their activities. She often travels to attend Sámi events in other places.
However, she is not always content with the Sámi events and activities in Stockholm:

I try to attend the Sámi events in the city, but often they have over-18 age restric-
tions, and that excludes the youngest. For example, concerts. But even when
there isn’t an over-18 age restriction, one sometimes feels excluded. It could be
that they serve alcohol, or that most people are kind of 100 years old. But it’s
diffcult to fnd activities that are only for young people. . . . I go to most events,
even though it feels like it ‘grows moss’ on the event of the Sámi organisation.
(Kristina, 16)

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 — The activism of having fun —

In this quote, we see that Kristina is trying to distance herself from the other people
in the Sámi organization in Stockholm. She feels that she is excluded because she is
much younger than most of the others who attend these events. This is something
that other young people talk about as well – for example, Márjá, who lives in Oslo:

The Sámi House, it doesn’t work as a meeting place for young people. There are
a lot of old, grumpy people there. If we go there, we end up sitting in the cor-
ner, talking with them about all the problems they have at the Sámi House. It’s
diffcult to say. To be honest, if the ambience had been a little bit better. There
are a lot of conficts there. Especially if there are a lot of NSR [Norgga Sámiid
Riikkasearvi/Norwegian Sámi Association] and non-NSR people there. If we as
young people come, it’s a lot. One has to sit and listen to people saying: ‘you,
who are young, have to do this and that.’
(Márjá, 21)

Both Kristina and Márjá describe a kind of alienation in the ordinary Sámi meet-
ing places because they feel that there are too many ‘old’ people there. Márjá’s
quote describes a situation in which she feels that there are a lot of conficts. The
description of the Sámi House in Oslo as a place with ‘a lot of old, grumpy peo-
ple’ can be analyzed as a way of distancing herself from the conficts that arise
there, which can be linked to more general disagreements and conficts within
Sámi society in general, due to political divisions, and personal conficts specifc
to the Sámi House in Oslo.
While this description might be motivated by a specifc discontent with the situa-
tion at the Sámi House, it can also be analyzed as a way of making space for youth
organizations. Through a process of distancing herself from ‘the old, grumpy people’
at the Sámi House, Márjá also motivates herself and other young people to engage
in the youth organizations and youth activities. In the interview, she continues by
explaining that Noereh, the youth organization, has started having gatherings at
the Sámi House so that young people can feel at home there, too. In this way, she is
continuing the work of the older generation, while at the same time making space
for young Sámi to defne their own activities and activism.
Anna is active in the Sámi queer movement in Sweden. She talks about the impor-
tance of the Queering Sápmi project8 and says the project has united Sámi people,
enabling them to get in touch and establish networks. The project has also made this
issue visible to other Sámi people and reveals a more nuanced picture of Sámi people
to outsiders:

At least in Umeå, I think people have an understanding that there is more than
one type of Sámi. We’re a whole society. . . . A performance that was based on
colonialism, heterosexuality and our dreams about something better. The book
and performance from the Queering Sápmi project .  .  . had the intention of
showing what unites the minorities rather than what divides them.
(Anna, 20)

Initiatives like the Queering Sápmi project are ways of opening up opportunities for
new conversations about what Sápmi should be in the future (see also Kyrölä in this

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 — Astri Dankertsen —

volume). Several of the participants talk about similar issues: That it is important to
open up space for a more inclusive Sámi society and focus on the diversity within
Sámi society as something that can unite people, rather than dividing them. Several
of the participants are active in various organizations, including non-Sámi organiza-
tions, and issues like feminism, LGBT+ issues, climate change and environmental
issues are topics that young people and the youth organizations are interested in.
However, the young activists and organizations are also using these issues to
change Sámi society from within, through participating in organizations, events and
conversations from a young Sámi point of view. Through their activities, they cre-
ate space for new conversations about Sápmi, about rights to land and water, about
language and culture and about who is included in Sámi society.

CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, I have explored how young Sámi perform resistance through activi-
ties in their everyday lives and through organizations and how their personal, social
and political lives are often interconnected through stages of activism. While some
do not see this as activism, I argue that it is important to analyze the act of having
fun and showing Sámi spirit in everyday life as a different way of resisting the often
taken-for-granted silencing of Sámi perspectives in the majority-dominated society.
Their acts of resistance are not only resistance against this majority-dominated soci-
ety, but they are also a way of creating space for being Sámi and distancing them-
selves from the older generations.
Through the three sections ‘Having fun in everyday life,’ ‘Fun as activism in Sámi
organizations,’ and ‘Creating space for a new generation of Sámi activists,’ I have
analyzed three different aspects of having fun as a form of activism for young Sámi
today. In the frst section, I have shown how having fun through Sámi everyday life
activities and networks is not only done for entertainment but is also a political act
by which they are breaking through the taken-for-granted silencing of Sámi lan-
guages and culture in everyday life situations in an urban context.
In the second section, I drew attention to how, by creating a fun and inclusive envi-
ronment, youth organizations are bridging the chasm between everyday life activities
and the political sphere, whereby fun activities aimed at young Sámi function as a
way of recruiting them to Sámi activism. In the last section, I analyzed how youth
organizations are actively building on the work of earlier generations of Sámi activists
through their active use of symbols and events that serve as a way of strengthening
Sámi society and fghting the effects of the assimilation policies and marginalization
that took place in the past. However, they are also actively trying to achieve this on
their own terms, often in opposition to the Sámi organizations ‘for adults.’
Through analyzing the links between activism and having fun, and inspired
by Tuck’s (2009) desire-based research perspective, I argue that there is an
urgent need for further research that focuses on the positive sides of Indigenous
societies and the potential for growth and positive development. I argue that,
through fun activities both within organizations and in their everyday lives,
young Sámi are making space for new and positive ways of being Sámi and are
thus breaking through the silencing of Sámi voices in the majority-dominated
societies in which they live. Rather than repeating the stereotypical images of

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 — The activism of having fun —

Sámi culture as something that is forever damaged or that only existed in the
past, having fun as Sámi generates a mobilizing affect for positive change in
Sápmi. From an ontological perspective, these young people are constructing
new Sámi realities as well as new understandings of what it means to be a Sámi
and what is included in Sámi life today.

NOTES
1 For more information about the project, see https://blogg.hioa.no/urbansami/. Also check
out the forthcoming book An Urban Future for Sápmi? Indigenous Urbanization in
the Nordic States and Russia (Berghahn Books), edited by Mikkel Berg-Nordlie, Marte
Winsvold and Astri Dankertsen.
2 Other researchers who have been involved in the project: Mikkel Berg-Nordlie, Anna
Afanasyeva, Marte Winsvold, Tanja Joona, Christina Åhrén and Jørn Holm-Hansen. For
more information about the project, see https://blogg.hioa.no/urbansami/.
3 Lapp is the old name attributed to the Sámi by outsiders and is now considered derogatory.
4 Noereh was established as a Sámi youth organization in 2009 in Romssa/Tromsø. The
group has been active in several different forms of Sámi activism, such as Sápmi Pride, the
fght for rights to land and water, festivals, meetings and other events. It defnes itself as a
politically independent organization that has as its main focus the creation of safe spaces
for Sámi young people to meet. During our project period, it developed from being a mainly
national organization to also having local branches, such as Oslove Noereh (Oslo), Romssa
Noereh and Ávjovarri Noereh (Karasjok and Kautokeino).
5 Gákti is the North Sámi term for traditional Sámi clothing. Other terms are used in other
Sámi areas, such as gaeptie/gåptoe in South Sámi, gáppte in Lule Sámi, mááccuh in Inari
Sámi and määccak in Skolt Sámi. The cut, colours, patterns and decorations can signify a
person’s gender, geographical origin, family and marital status. They have developed his-
torically, from being made of reindeer skin and wool to cotton, silk and synthetic fabrics in
modern times. There are also numerous different accessories that are often used in a specifc
way in different regions, such as belts, jewellery, footwear, silk scarfs and shawls. Today,
these clothes are mostly worn in ceremonial contexts, but traditionally, they have also been
worn in everyday life and while working, something that is still normal, especially among
elders in areas such as Kautokeino in Norway. It is called kofte in Norwegian and kolt in
Swedish. (For more about gákti, see Magga, S.-M. in this volume.)
6 Joik is traditional Sámi way of singing.
7 The Kallak-Gállok controversy concerns a mine in Kallak/Gállok in Jokkmokk/Johkamohki in
Sweden, where one of Scandinavia’s largest known iron ore deposits is located. Beowulf Mining
acquired the Kallak north licence in 2006, and since then, there have been Sámi protests, includ-
ing cultural events that have mobilized many people, including young people, in Sápmi.
8 Queering Sápmi was an equality project that ran from 2011 to 2015 about Sámi people
who challenge norms concerning gender, sexuality and identities. It focused on photogra-
phy and storytelling.

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578
 EPILOGUE
Ways of being in the world


Thomas Hylland Eriksen

It has been an unmitigated pleasure and an adventure to delve into this treasure of
a book. Although it is an academic publication with all the appropriate trappings
in place, and even if the topic is sometimes grim, it is as if the authors cannot quite
conceal their passion for the Sámi world, generously spiking their chapters with
anecdotes and stories, details from domestic life and vivid descriptions of nature
imagery from Sápmi. A good read it is, and an enlightening one.
This book is not the frst edited volume about the Sámi world, but it may well be
the most comprehensive and authoritative one. It covers a very broad range of themes,
from the legal to the ontological, from the ecological to the economic, with compari-
sons and chapters from all four countries within Sápmi, as well as emphasizing diver-
sity within the Sámi people, thereby moving questions of culture and identity beyond
what Gayatri Spivak once spoke of, somewhat defensively, as ‘strategic essentialism.’
Several themes connect the chapters, the most complex of which may be the desire to
draw on Indigenous knowledge in a bid to enrich and improve the quality of academic
research. This approach is neither uncontroversial in theory nor straightforward in
practice. It may, therefore, be useful at the outset to distinguish between a postcolonial
and a decolonial project. Postcolonialism – the tradition from Fanon to Said, Ngugi
and beyond – argues for the inclusion of more voices, representing a broader spectrum
of experiences and lifeworlds, in academic research and discourse, in order to com-
bat the inadequate representations of others typical of the colonial perspective. The
desired outcome is a democratization of the means of communication and the end of
ignorant ethnocentrism in the academic centres.
The decolonial project goes a step further and criticizes standard scientifc theory
and method as such for having an ethnocentric bias – in other words, question-
ing the epistemological foundations for science and not just its biased applications.
Decolonizing initiatives in this realm are typically perceived either as an enriching
expansion of the scientifc gaze or as an unacceptable form of relativism leading to
the trivialization of the context-independent kind of knowledge purportedly repre-
sented by science. The balancing act is tricky, but the problem has to be addressed in

579
 — Thomas Hylland Eriksen —

specifc and concrete ways: Criticizing colonial vestiges in the humanities is different
from criticizing natural sciences for being ethnocentric since the methodologies and
forms of validation differ between the felds. The humanities, here including anthro-
pology, rely on hermeneutic methods, and there is therefore a need to refect criti-
cally on the subject position of the researcher as it shapes the analytical perspective,
conceptual toolbox and empirical gaze.
Another potential problem arising from representing an Indigenous outlook as an
alternative to hegemonic knowledge is the threat of essentialism. This book, along
with much recent writing on indigeneity, criticizes the view, which is misguided but
often benevolent in intent, that there exists one Indigenous perspective on the world.
A consequence of this view would be the imprisonment of Indigenous Peoples in
a romanticizing straitjacket, their cultures as frozen images of a world that could
have been – or the world as it was until yesterday, to paraphrase a popular writer
(Diamond 2013). For example, as shown by Puuronen, Sámi in Finland vote pretty
much along the same lines as other Finns. Since some Sámi are engineers, while oth-
ers are academics, artists or farmers, it cannot be taken for granted that they share
values and a common cosmology. Being an engineer does not prevent a person from
being Sámi. In fact, Indigenous movements such as those of the Sámi demand mate-
rial rights to land and water and insist on the right to defne themselves, rather than
being identifed and defned from the outside.
At the same time, there exist Sámi worlds which are distinct from the surround-
ing society. It has its semantic core in the cold landscape of the north and the liveli-
hoods that were feasible there, from reindeer herding to fshing, and where human
survival required a very close and attentive reading of the surroundings. This out-
look emerges from ways of engaging with the environment and in relationships with
others, in cultural traditions and knowledge which is experienced and embodied
rather than verbalized.
Disregarding the value of these worlds in the name of anti-essentialism would
produce a baby-and-bathwater problem since criticism of essentialism does not
automatically lead to the conclusion that no cultural differences exist. All forms of
knowledge and awareness are positioned and based in experience, and experiences
differ. All knowledge is simplifying, and there are always alternative ways of simpli-
fying the world. The scholarly gaze is always directed at something, at the expense
of missing out on something else. When we speak of enlightenment, we implicitly
also speak of darkening: When something is subjected to the foodlight of human
attention, something else is necessarily left in the dark. One of the achievements
of this book consists in showing, in myriad ways, how Sámi worlds are diverse
internally, distinct from those of the dominant society and integrated with it. The
future of cultural diversity in the contemporary era, the Homogenocene or the age
of homogenization (Mann 2011), depends on the ability to accept this kind of plu-
rality, which does not entail sharp boundaries to the outside world but an ongoing
interrelationship with it. Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik write about the practice of
verdde, a Sámi institution denoting reciprocity, guest-host relationships and mutu-
ally benefcial communication and exchange across cultural divides. This tradition,
an expression of interculturalism (rather than mere multiculturalism), needs to be
nurtured and developed, but for it to function, the participants must take part on
an equal footing.

580
 — Epilogue —

In what follows, I will concentrate on three broad themes which are intercon-
nected, which keep returning throughout the book and which may therefore help
show the fundamental unity of the thematic sprawl of this book, which ranges from
handicrafts to state schools, from political demonstrations to language transmission.
Briefy, then, I will discuss the relationship between Sámi and the state, the problem
of identity and the relationship between group and individual, and the physical and
cosmological engagement with the environment.
These issues are central topics and challenges not only in Sápmi but also for
Indigenous Peoples everywhere. They address the right to defne yourself rather than
being defned from the outside; to retain autonomy in a situation of encompassment
by a state; and the specifc, often nonverbal relationship to the physical surroundings
which exists among stateless peoples with a history of non-urban settlement and a
non-industrial mode of production.

RELATIONSHIP TO THE STATE

Everything that exists is relational, and minorities can only exist in relation to
majorities. They were never asked for their views before being encompassed – to use
Dumont’s (1980) term – by states. As regards the Sámi, the comparative perspective
offered in this book is especially fruitful as a starting point for a refection on the
ways in which Indigenous groups can be dominated by states, but also for identify-
ing their options for asserting their rights. In Sápmi, exit has not been an option for a
very long time, unlike in the mountainous, forested areas of Southeast Asia described
in Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (Scott 2009). In these frontier areas, dif-
fcult to access and impossible to govern by states, people have been able to keep the
state at arm’s length until the present, retaining their autonomy more successfully
than Indigenous Peoples elsewhere.
In Sápmi, state policies have differed, as have the available options for Sámi
groups in the four relevant countries. When Allemann speaks of the enforced reloca-
tion of Sámi in the Soviet Union, there are both resonances and contrasts with the
situation for Sámi in the Nordic countries, where coercion existed, but where there
was more fexibility in the absence of a totalitarian regime. When Andersen describes
how four generations of Sámi children were subjected to the Soviet residential school
system in Lovozero, this gives an indication of the extent of enforced assimilation
under the Soviet system. The ethnopolitical movements emerging in Sweden, Finland
and Norway from the 1950s onwards would not have been possible in the USSR.
However, as Hansen shows, the boarding schools in the Nordic countries also con-
tributed to the marginalization of Sámi culture and negative stereotyping of Sámi.
He also indicates that discrimination remains a serious problem today.
Contrary to a widespread perception, the main demands of the Sámi movements
in the frst decades concerned the right to land and water. This remains an impor-
tant question, and a protracted court case has pitted reindeer herders against the
Norwegian state recently in a confict over land use and grazing practices (Lien
2021). A Finnish confict over a planned railway from Rovaniemi to Kirkenes (the
Arctic Railway), dealt with in several of the chapters, which in some ways echoes the
Alta controversy from the late 1970s and early 80s, similarly concerns rights to own-
ership or stewardship of the land. It should be noted, however, that territorial issues

581
 — Thomas Hylland Eriksen —

are less straightforward today than they were 40 years ago. For one thing, as noted
by Nykänen, belonging to place is now ambiguous in new ways; when fshing rights
are given only to people who live in the area for at least seven months a year, stu-
dents returning home on holiday fnd themselves excluded. More fundamentally, ter-
ritorial claims now have a cultural dimension which was less overtly communicated
during the Alta demonstrations, and as Nykänen suggests, more recent environ-
mental protests have been strengthened by alliances with other Indigenous groups,
relying less on support from environmental groups in the centre. However, the recent
alliance with environmentalists comes across in the chapter by Sara, Rasmussen
and Krøvel, where it is shown how the campaign against the Arctic Railroad has
mobilized Sámi actors, together with Greenpeace. Moreover, land rights are now
demanded not merely as a legal provision but also on ontological grounds. Protesters
against the projected railway to Kirkenes, which would intersect Finnish Lapland,
connect territorial rights and stewardship to a spiritual, holistic relationship with the
environment and the continued viability of a particular way of life, which a major
infrastructural development would disrupt.
Although Sara, Rasmussen and Krøvel show that media coverage by Yle and
NRK were somewhat one sided, there are differences in nuance between the main
channels and their Sámi programming. Clearly, there has been progress, at least at
the level of public discourse, since the onset of the Alta confict in 1978. Drugge
outlines the dark history of race biology in Sápmi (but it should be kept in mind
that majorities were also classifed according to skull shapes, sometimes in deroga-
tory ways) and shows how the power of defnition has shifted, at least to some
extent: It is no longer self-evident who has the right to say what about whom and
on whose behalf.
Nyyssönen, similarly, traces a historical development showing that stereotyping –
which could be racist, romanticizing, patronizing or social evolutionist – was
more widespread a century ago than it is today. In the last few decades, Sámi have
increasingly spoken for themselves, and with different voices, frequently disagreeing
among themselves. The dilemma identifed in this and other chapters was described
historically as

an unresolved tension between the idea of the inevitability of modernization,

with the loss of the traditional subsistence form, and [the Finnish geologist
Väinö] Tanner’s purist advice regarding the blessings of semi-nomadic reindeer-
herding as the original, most suitable and ‘correct’ form of herding.
(Nyyssönen, infra)

But this is no longer seen as an adequate framing of the relationship between Sámi
and the state. This dichotomy presupposes a dated view of culture as being static
and bounded. In reality, cultural meanings fow freely while group identities tend to
be less fexible: Culture is continuous while identities tend to be discontinuous. Yet
people can belong to more than one group, and they do. Multiple identities can be a
gift since they enable a broadening of the horizon, but they can also raise problems,
as when the Sámi identity, usually reconciled with the national identity of citizen-
ship, comes into confict with the demands of the state. Perhaps a majority of the
chapters in this book touch upon some of these frictions, which can be visible in the

582
 — Epilogue —

domestic sphere (as when Sámi foods cannot be bought in southern Sweden) or at
the national level (as the railway project suggests).
In many cases, conficts between Sámi and the state can be framed through a com-
mon legal language, making opposing claims directly comparable. Yet opposition to
state interventions is increasingly expressed through a philosophical, cosmological
language, as in Herranen-Tabibi’s discussion of caring seen through the lens of the
state as opposed to that of local communities. The threatened connection to the eco-
logical Umwelt is, as she puts it, ‘indicative of the pervasive disquiet, the absence of
peace, that trailed the stark societal transformations of the post-war decades.’ The
analysis of care suggests that communities can provide a qualitatively different kind
of care from what the state can offer. In this respect, it may be useful to ask whether
this difference is generic and has to do with the scale and logic of the state versus
that of society or local communities or, rather, peculiar to certain kinds of communi-
ties which have been marginalized owing to the intrusion of state power. Again, the
question is, in what ways and to what extent are Sámi communities different from
local communities populated by members of the majorities? Sometimes, the differ-
ences are less pronounced than they might seem. And sometimes more.
In many of the chapters in this book, the political and the personal, the methodologi-
cal and the ontological are not separated but allowed to form a unifed whole. This is
quite unlike the standard procedure in objectivist science, in which the aim is to isolate
segments of reality for the sake of testing hypotheses. While analytical reason consists
in taking entities apart into their constituent parts in order to isolate variables and
causal chains, the totalizing reason represented in most of this book aims, by contrast,
to bring disparate parts together to form a whole in which each part relies on and is
shaped by the totality. Thus, in the former case, the problem consists in disentangling
essential parts from the mess of reality while the challenge in the latter case, by contrast,
consists in bringing the parts together in order to show how they co-produce each other
and the totality, human society plus Umwelt or wider environment.
Notwithstanding the suffering of the past and the continued marginalization of
the present, the intricacies of culture, identity and belonging can also be treated –
and treated well – satirically. When Kyrölä discusses the Sámi comedy show Njuoska
bittut, she describes how the show depicts an ‘alternative vision of a world of
Indigenous laughter, erotics and audiovisuality, in which settler understandings of
gender, sexuality and the workings of the world are made strange and ridiculous.’

CRITERIA OF MEMBERSHIP AND IDENTITY

Biological criteria for dividing people into peoples were commonly used worldwide
during colonialism. Although usually abandoned, at least in theory, such criteria are
still operating offcially, for example, in the USA, where categories such as ‘Caucasian’
continue to appear on passports. The perennial problem encountered with such clas-
sifcations concerns where to draw the boundary if the people in question have mixed
ancestry or if there is a mismatch between culture and ‘race,’ as with transnational
adoptees who look East Asian but are, for all intents and purposes, Nordic.
Indigenous Peoples, historically classifed by the colonial or settler state but today,
increasingly, by their own organizations, are faced with similar issues of inclusion
and exclusion. In the case of the Sámi, an informal hierarchy has existed between

583
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reindeer-herding Sámi and other Sámi groups, who were, to a greater extent, assimi-
lated culturally and who, in many cases, lost their language and/or their traditional
livelihood and have been obliged to revive half-forgotten traditions to reclaim their
Sámi identity.
Should language or descent be the main criterion for inclusion? And, supposing a
language shift has taken place in a large segment of the group, should the linguistic
criterion apply one, two or three generations back? Descent has been applied in the
Canadian setting, leading, among other things, to the establishment of a permanent
ethnic group, les Métis, created as a result of mixed European-First Nation ori-
gins. The United Nations recommends an emphasis on identity rather than objective
defnition but provides a list of possible criteria for the existence of an Indigenous
group (United Nations n.d.). They include a historical continuity with pre-colonial
or pre-settler society, a strong link to nature, a distinct language and culture and a
non-dominant position in society, among other criteria. These criteria are vaguely
formulated in the UN factsheet on indigeneity, probably deliberately so.
Criteria for inclusion in a Sámi group are fairly similar in Norway and Sweden,
following a language criterion, but differ in Finland, as indicated in Mörkenstam,
Selle and Valkonen’s comparison between electoral rolls for the Sámedikkit (Sámi
parliaments) in the three countries. Since 1995, Finnish citizens have been eligible
to register if they are descendants of ‘tax-lapps’ –that is, persons who paid tax as
a Sámi (Lapp) historically. Even if one’s other ancestors were not ‘tax-lapps,’ one
such ancestor is suffcient, almost echoing the racist one-drop principle practised
in the USA. As shown in the chapter, however, although this law could conceivably
have led to a massive increase in the number of people registered as voters for the
Sámediggi, this did not happen since only the language criterion has been applied by
the Sámediggi. As a result, there has been a heated debate concerning who should
be considered Sámi in Finland. Perhaps the ethnic boundary is less visible in Finland
than in Norway, where Sámi have an ethnic monopoly on reindeer herding, unlike
in Finland, where ethnic Finns also have reindeer herds. The greater linguistic prox-
imity between Sámi languages and Finnish may also be a factor, both belonging
to the Finno-Ugric language family, unlike the Scandinavian languages, which are
Germanic (and Russian, being Slavic).
Discussions about criteria for inclusion indicate that being a member of an
Indigenous group need not just be a personal liability but could also be an asset:
In some cases, would-be members of Indigenous groups are refused. Membership
becomes a scarce resource. The opposite strategy – namely, to leave membership
open to almost anyone who wants to join – may result in a situation in which
the offcial spokespersons for the group have little if any direct experience with
the lifeworld they are defending. This, it might be argued, is sometimes the case in
Australia, where some highly articulate and educated spokespersons for Aborigines
have never lived in the outback or on a reservation and were, in fact, raised in mid-
dle-class suburbs in one of the coastal cities. In Sápmi, this problem is less evident,
and many Sámi academics and politicians have retained strong connections to their
home region, and many of them speak a Sámi language.
The need for a degree of openness regarding criteria of membership – mainly
descent and language – is perhaps especially evident when considering the lives of
people identifying as Indigenous but leading their lives in cities as fully paid-up

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 — Epilogue —

members of a complex, industrial, capitalist state society. The term asfaltsame (‘tar-
mac Sámi’) is sometimes used in Norwegian, by Sámi as well as outsiders. It carries
no pejorative connotations but humourously describes Sámi whose primary home is
in a city. From an essentialist point of view, the very notion of an urban Sámi may
come across as an oxymoron, but as a matter of fact, a rather large proportion of
the Sámi in Finland, Sweden and Norway are urban while maintaining Sámi cultural
practices and social identities. As noted in Eriksson’s chapter on Sámi in Stockholm,
they often play a crucial part as intermediaries or ethnic brokers, hubs in networks
and key persons in organizational life. There are no sharp boundaries and no single
recipe as to how to go about in order to be considered a ‘proper Sámi.’ This does not
mean that urbanized Sámi have been swallowed and digested by the surrounding
majority culture but that they – like all Sámi – live in a sociocultural universe made
up of cultural streams of different origins.
As Dankertsen points out, there still exist ‘stereotypical images of Indigenous
People as belonging to cultures that were once whole and pure in the past, but are now
forever damaged by colonisation.’ These notions are diffcult to eradicate, although
they have long been criticized. As shown in great detail by Vigdis Stordahl (1996),
Indigenous identity and modernity are not necessarily contradictory, but reconciling
them is nevertheless not unproblematic since every group or category of people needs
to have criteria of inclusion. Nilsson’s description of the struggle to keep Sámi food
culture alive in southern Sweden is an excellent example of this problem in everyday
life, but the boundary problem has political implications as well. The question here
concerns the actual possibility of maintaining cultural practices in a distant place.
It cannot be concluded that anything goes. On my father’s side, we were Sámi until
three generations ago, and my great-grandmother, whose frst language was North
Sámi, is legendary in family lore for having cooked reindeer soup during the Second
World War to feed starving Russian prisoners of war in a fjord in Troms County.
However, with urbanization and Norwegianization, the connection was lost, and
the subsequent generations were swept up by the modernizing spirit of postwar
Norway. Our Sámi heritage was barely ever mentioned when I grew up down south,
and it would not feel appropriate for me to claim this identity, although I am proud
to acknowledge my paternal origins. To my dad, his Sámi roots were irrelevant. He
was an Anglophile, a journalist and a socialist who yearned for a larger world than
that afforded by his native Tromsø and its adjacent fjords and mountains. He moved
to Oslo, married a local girl and never looked back.
A few decades later, the situation was different. Nancy Fraser, cited in this book,
spoke years ago about the shift from redistribution to recognition as a focus of poli-
tics. One may put it even more starkly by stating that class politics have given way to
identity politics in the last few decades, beginning in the 1970s but taking off around
the turn of the millennium. As a result, leftist politics in countries like the USA and
South Africa sometimes seem to be more concerned with words and semantics than
with property and inequality. Words are important, but so are material rights to
land, water and a way of life. So if my father had come of age in the 1970s instead
of the 1950s, he might well have gone to some length in order to heal the wound,
recuperate and revive his half-forgotten family history, possibly claiming Sámi iden-
tity. My mother, whose family came from southern Norway, incidentally bought a
folk dress (bunad, the ethnic Norwegian equivalent of the gákti) in the 1980s, when

585
 — Thomas Hylland Eriksen —

she was in her 50s. Quite clearly, there were contextual factors, not personal whims,
which determined this decision at that particular time and not 10, 30 or 40 years
earlier. The argument about the shift from class to identity as a dominant focus
for politics, and the heightened interest in cultural identity in general, thus do not
merely or even mainly concern Indigenous People.
There is an observation in Aikio’s chapter about the Sámi Museum Siida which
sheds light on this shift. The museum, she notes, represents Sámi culture through the
ethnographic present as timeless, somehow outside the fow of history, in the way
20th-century anthropology tended to depict stateless peoples. There are few if any
indications of hybridization or cultural change in the exhibits, and Aikio remarks
that a photo from 1997 depicts people wearing a gákti at work, although at that
time, most people actually wore ‘Western’ (ethnically unmarked) clothes during eve-
ryday activities. There seems to be an overcommunication of difference at play here.
At the same time, keep in mind that dress is polysemic; it can carry different mean-
ings. People wearing the gákti on festive occasions in public run a risk of being ostra-
cized, and one occasionally hears about young people in Nordic cities who have been
threatened and, in some cases, beaten up for wearing Sámi clothes when out on the
town at night. There is a double bind at work here: Whether you wear Sámi clothes
or not, some will object. Some opt for a hybrid solution mixing Sámi and non-Sámi
(‘Western’) elements. Many learn to ‘live in two furs,’ as Huss and Lindgren put it.
While this symptom of subordination may result in a challenging balancing act, the
dual competence is a resource rather than a handicap: The majority needs only to
learn one language and set of skills while, to the minority, the world becomes wider
and richer because they are obliged to learn two or more and compare them.
A misconception which may be as common as essentialist views of Sámi culture
and identity is the assumption that, owing to the power discrepancies, assimilation or
cultural infuence tended to move from the hegemonic group to the subalterns. That is
an empirical question. In the case of North America, Charles Mann (2006) has argued
that the backbone of the political ideology leading settlers in the British colonies to
demand independence in the 1760s was informed by the Iroquois Confederacy and
related models of decentralized, democratic decision making in pre-Columbian North
America. Regarding the Sámi, we are reminded by Alakorva, Kylli and Jarno Valkonen
that the assimilation of outsiders into a Sámi identity and way of life has not been
uncommon in culturally and linguistically strong Sámi areas. In the case of Norway,
cultural impulses have travelled in at least three directions – between Sámi, ethnic
Norwegians and Kvens (from Finland). Just as geographical boundaries were porous
and gradual, so were those of culture and identity. The red lines of the map, correspond-
ing to national census statistics, have to be imposed onto the territory by force.
Politics of identity are contagious. For Sámi to pursue their political goals eff-
ciently, they are obliged to learn and apply rules and principles sanctioned by the
state and, accordingly, the majority. In other words, in order to defend your right
to be different, you frst have to become similar. However, as Alakorva shows in
her historical account of the development of the Sámi fag, symbols of collective
identity are never developed independently of the symbols of other collectives. The
need for a Sámi fag was simply a result of the Nordic countries having theirs and
thus a requirement for being recognized as an independent people. In politics of
identity, one has to engage in matching (Eriksen 2010), which amounts to producing

586
 — Epilogue —

comparability by showing that your own group has the same resources as the other,
competing groups: They have myths; we have myths. They have national dress; we
have national dress. They have their language; we have ours, and so on. In the case of
fags, matching is less problematic than, for example, cosmology and social organi-
zation, in which serious disagreements with practical consequences may arise, as
witnessed in the conficting views over the projected new railway line. As regards
the Sámi fag, there are two immediately relevant facts – one, that it does not have a
cross, and two, that it represents a transnational people and not a bounded state. The
lack of a cross, not uncontroversial among Sámi since many are faithful Christians,
marks cultural distance from the dominant Nordic groups, while the transnational
dimension is a reminder of a past without clear borders. For centuries, the far north
of the Nordic region was a frontier area, which suited Sámi well since many were
nomadic pastoralists and others, perhaps a majority, had relatives in one or several
of the neighbouring countries. Today, the issues around fshing rights in the Deatnu/
Tana/Teno River, which marks the political border, serve as a reminder of a time
when borders were less absolute and more porous and vague.
Having a fag is a powerful symbol of a shared collective identity, and public cere-
monies like the ones described by Magnani in the case of Orthodox Christian Russian
Sámi can be an effective way of retaining cultural memory. Yet it cannot be denied
that the reproduction of core elements in a cultural identity can be hard work in a
situation in which one is engulfed and encompassed by a majority which controls a
state. Linguists estimate that one of the world’s languages loses its last native speaker
every two weeks, and at the current rate, 90% of the world’s languages will be extinct
by 2050. Some of the Sámi languages are seriously endangered, as Huss and Lindgren
show, while others, notably North Sámi, are in a healthier state. Bilingualism – having
to ‘live in two furs’ – is nevertheless a challenge when there are clear power asym-
metries. A language has been defned as ‘a dialect backed by an army and a navy,’
and without a state, Sámi have neither. On the other hand, the revitalization of Sámi
languages, sometimes with the active support of governments, suggests a possible
reversal of the downward trend, as Pasanen indicates. Were this to be successful, the
Sámi experience could be inspirational for other stateless Indigenous Peoples.
There are various ways of expressing distinctiveness and collective identity, and
I have mentioned fags, food, ceremonies and language. Dress is another. As Sigga-
Marja Magga shows in her chapter, it is both private and public, both standardized
and intimate. Like other features of culture, it is neither homogeneous nor static,
and Olsen describes how Laestadianism infuenced the gákti in certain areas, mak-
ing it compatible with puritan Christianity. Addressing the problem of identity more
explicitly, Nylander shows how the ládjogahpir, a Sámi hat worn by women, has
become a condensed symbol of decolonization. She builds an argument with a point
of departure in the term ‘rematriation’ (a nice corrective to the more common term
‘repatriation’), emphasizing the reclaiming of ancestral remains, spirituality and the
knowledge of the hands (notably duodji) as belonging to an essentially female domain.
When the right to self-defnition is asserted, be it by an ethnic, sexual, religious or
other minority, it is often criticized, and sometimes caricatured, as ‘identity politics.’
We should look more closely at that term.
First, there is a difference between identity politics from above and from below:
Typically, state politics of identity represent attempts to produce cultural similarity

587
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where there is diversity. The general tendency in the history of nationalism and
modernity is standardization, in a bid to make the territory ft the map, and the
outcome has often been the replacement of a world consisting of many small differ-
ences with a world consisting of just a few major ones. With identity politics from
below, the project is different – indeed, in some respects, the opposite – since these
movements attempt to stem the tide of homogenization, insisting on the continued
legitimacy of a world of many small differences in spite of the onslaught of the forces
of modernity.
Secondly, the shift from class politics to identity politics mentioned earlier has
infuenced all kinds of political movements, not just those representing minority or
Indigenous interests. Even class politics is infuenced by identity, in the sense that
gender, race and religion have to be taken into account by socialist parties and trade
unions. It is indeed diffcult to imagine a politics which is divorced from and totally
independent of identity – a context-free, disinterested, impersonal political position.
The most entrenched form of identity politics, it may well be argued, is represented
in many of those who most staunchly oppose it – that is, middle-class, urban white
men whose positions are shaped by their positionality.
Contemporary Sámi politics forms part of such a pluralistic community of disa-
greement, witnessed by the fact that there are several legitimate views and value ori-
entations among Sámi, unlike in more authoritarian settings where the discourse is
being patrolled diligently. An example of the plurality of perspectives within Sápmi
is provided in Knobblock’s chapter about feminism. In this case, the demand is for
equality without similarity, and as she indicates, there exist gender inequalities which
are not being addressed properly since Indigenous rights have been given priority.

WAYS OF KNOWING
Intangible cultural heritage does not just include knowledge about food, handicrafts,
joik and tales, but also a way of being in the world, often nonverbalized, not shared
by all, but distinctive and localized to the northern landscape (see also Eriksen et
al. 2019). Just as it is diffcult to imagine politics entirely devoid of identity, no gaze
upon the world comes from nowhere. What you see does not just depend on what
you are looking at, but also what you are looking with, and people’s use of their
senses is shaped by their biography, history and broader lifeworld. When Eira writes
about reindeer herding, there is an emphasis on embodied knowledge about weather
conditions and seasons, detailed but usually nonverbal awareness of the different
qualities of snow and ice and an interpretation of reindeer behaviour which has been
accumulated over a long period.
Several of the chapters evoke not only a physical landscape but also a cognitive
and cultural one. One of the clearest elaborations of a Sámi ontology is articulated
in Päivi Magga’s chapter, in which the ideal of using nature without leaving a trace
brings it in direct confict with the modern view, according to which nature simply
consists in resources to be harvested or otherwise exploited by human society. This
confict becomes visible in Joks’s depiction of the engagement with the environment
by coastal Sámi through berry picking and related activities, which have been regu-
lated strictly by governments with a limited understanding of land stewardship as
practised by Sámi. And again, it must be emphasized that nobody claims that there

588
 — Epilogue —

is one Sámi worldview or lifeworld. Regardless of the accelerating social changes

of the last century, there is, as noted, great diversity within Sápmi as well. To this
reader, the chapters on Sámi in Russia/the USSR especially have been a reminder of
the internal diversity, some of which must be put down to the differences in state
policy and practice, and the relationships engaged in with different majorities. There
are nevertheless some very perceptible differences, as described not least in Jouste’s
chapter on the Skolt Sámi, whose oral narratives (the leu′dd tradition), handicrafts
and general aesthetics signal a marked difference to the other Sámi groups.
One thing shared throughout Sámi culture, though, is the emphasis on story-
telling. Although there is by now a rich written Sámi literature, the tradition has
chiefy been oral, knowledge transmission (and modifcation) from person to person.
Emphasizing the embodiment of knowledge, Kramvig and Kvidal-Røvik read made
objects and design as semiotic entities, much as one would read nature not as a
repository of resources, but as a system of meaning and communication.
Just as the boundary between fact and value is basic to the modern constitution (even
if subjected to much criticism), so is the difference between fact and fction essential in
the dominant knowledge regimes. In Helander and Lehtola’s chapter about the highly
regarded author Jovnna-Ánde Vest, it is pointed out that the boundaries between fact
and fction are less absolute, more blurred, in the oral storytelling tradition than in a
culture of writing. A lack of such a distinction is problematic in science and technology,
and the invention of writing is often cited as a decisive step towards social complexity,
the state and eventually modernity. On the other hand, it may be an asset in creative
writing exploring the interstices between the oral and the written. In another chapter,
Lehtola discusses the epistemological status of different histories – the personal and oral
versus the offcial and written. The connections with several of the other chapters is
clear. Knowledge can be personal, incorporated into the body and the sensory apparatus.
However, the problem runs deeper here than in explorations of design or fction since
scientifc research relies on verifable facts. No solution to the problem can be complete
without a critical dialogue involving both or all parties. One may ask, as some decolo-
nial theorists do, whether an amalgam of the perspectives would be possible since we
live in a pluriverse and not a universe. My short response is that as long as we work in
universities and not pluriversities, the answer is usually yes.
In this day and age, there are strong reasons for a greater openness to Indigenous
worldviews and value systems among the dominant peoples of the world. The eco-
logical destruction, already destabilizing the global climate system in noticeably
disastrous ways, is threatening to undermine global civilization as we know it.
Inequality is rising, both domestically and internationally, and politics of hate and
exclusion are fanned and encouraged by ideologies of group boundedness and state
borders. The problem of scale, whereby decisions affecting our lives are taken far
away, is exacerbated in the present era owing to upscaling.
All these problems, which make humanity the victim of its own success, could
be addressed knowledgeably and in politically useful ways through taking lessons
from Indigenous Peoples such as Sámi (see Hendry 2014). This does not mean that
humanity, all eight billion of us, ought to shift towards a small-scale, sustainable
way of life. Reverting to small scale in all domains is neither desirable nor possible.
Yet there are cues and hints in the way Sámi engage with their environment without
destroying it, their fexible practices of inclusion and acceptance of pluralism, that

589
 — Thomas Hylland Eriksen —

could be inspirational. Even if there had been nothing else, these insights would have
been suffcient to make this book worthwhile.
The Sámi are in a unique position to make a difference. Compared to other
Indigenous People, they are doing rather well in terms of social stability, prosperity
and democratic rights. This book, which is interdisciplinary, representative of many
viewpoints and research priorities, with contributions by both Sámi and non-Sámi
scholars, could become a sourcebook not only to people interested in the Indigenous
and Sámi world but also to some of those who are looking for ways out of the corner
into which global modernity has painted itself.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank the editors for thorough and relevant comments on the
frst draft.

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Eriksen, T. H. 2010. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, 3rd ed.
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Eriksen, T. H., Valkonen, S. and Valkonen, J., eds. 2019. Knowing from the Indigenous North,
Sámi Approaches to History, Politics and Belonging. London and New York: Routledge.
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Mann, C. 2006. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Vintage.
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Stordahl, V. 1996. Same i den moderne verden: Endring og kontinuitet i et samisk lokalsam-
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 INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate a fgure and page numbers in bold indicate a map on the
corresponding page.
Aanaar / Anár / Inari 14, 33–34, 53, 104, 106,
110; and Sámi futures 422, 423–424, 430–435,
450, 487–488; and societal ruptures 225–226,
312–322, 350–351, 354–360, 390
academic research ethics see research ethics
activism 565–566, 576–577; creating space for a
new generation of 574–576; fun as 571–574;
having fun in everyday life 568–571; the need
for fun and desire in Indigenous research
566–568
áddjá, grandfather 44
agency: historical agency 266–267; political
agency 265, 277, 348, 513; Sámi agency
200–201, 265–267, 512–513
agriculture 105–108, 151–152
áhkku, grandmother 39, 44, 128, 543–544
Aikio, Áile xii, 7
Aikio, Maria-Sofa 119–120, 120, 122–129
Alakorva, Saara xii, 11, 586
alcohol 250–258, 350, 574
alcoholism 251–256
Allemann, Lukas xii, 10–11, 581
alliances 406–407
Áltá controversy 32, 283, 288, 397–401, 568,
574, 581; alliances and articulations of nature
406–407
ancestors 402–406
Andersen, Anna xii–xiii, 10, 581
animals 102–106, 143–145, 156–160, 174–175;
and the articulation of nature 404–405; and
knowledge system of snow and ice 182–187,
191–193; and Sámi futures 551–553, 559–560
anthropology: cultural anthropology 54; non-
Native anthropology 558
591
Anti, Anne Berit 524, 528
anticolonial ethos 277–280, 283–285
appropriation: identity appropriation 315, 324;
misappropriation 211; reappropriation 210
archaeology 23–24, 134–138, 143–145
archival: data 101–102; material 106, 111, 458;
method 484; models 516; studies xiii
archive 514–516, 525–526; nature as 524–526;
oral tradition as 480–481
Arctic 8–12, 102–104, 166–167; and societal
ruptures 248–250, 339–343; and tourism
199–203, 207–211; and TV comedy 559–560
Arctic Railway 382–383, 386–393; and
Indigenous news media 385–386; and the
power of the media 383–385
army 56–59
Aslaksen, Nils Viktor 277–281
assimilation 220–222
Áššu 421
authenticity 210–211; the everchanging authentic
Sámi 207–210; and the growth of tourism
197–203; and identity 203–205; and tradition
205–207
Ávvir 157, 282, 421, 424
Bååstede 455
Baer, Lars-Anders 284–285
Båhl, Astrid 276, 287
bears 559–560
berries 168; see also cloudberry pickers; plant
food
Bible 86, 91, 94–96, 349, 558–559
bilingualism 220, 223, 244, 587
biology see race biology research
 — Index —
birch tree sap 176–177, 176
birgen, birget 9, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 128, 161
boarding schools 233, 234–237, 329–332;
see also residential schooling
boats 14–15, 79, 507–514, 517–518; boat
building 513, 517
Bolsheviks 59–67
borders 4, 42–44, 87–89, 123; and Sámi futures
423, 498–499, 512–513, 587; and societal
ruptures 266–267, 289–290, 295–296
boundary problem 295–296, 302–304
broadcasting 421–424
bunad 44, 48, 585
care see caretakers; ecologies of care
caretakers 150–152; cloudberries and eggs
151–164; dialogue with surroundings 159–160;
different ways of acting in the world(s) 156–158;
frustrated caring 161–162; holms 158–159;
protocols in gathering practices 153–154;
traditional knowing in practices 154–156
cattle 105, 152, 165, 168, 268, 271, 304
ceremony 509–512
Čeʹvetjäuʹrr / Sevettijärvi 432, 507–511, 513–515,
517
children, childhood 10; and nature 31, 41, 44–47,
72–83, 103–107, 117–119, 123–125; and Sámi
futures 415–419, 430–432, 435–442, 479,
483–485, 515, 554; and societal ruptures
217–224, 232–244, 250–252, 328–332, 352,
373–377
Christianity 64–65, 86–96, 103–107, 587; and
municipal politics 349–351; and Sámi futures
419–422, 425–426, 451–453, 456–457, 512, 558
Christian meetings 95–97
cities 220–222
citizenship 4, 11–12, 108, 272, 310
City Sámi, urban Sámi 221–223
cloudberries and cloudberry pickers 150–152;
dialogue with surroundings 159–160; different
ways of acting in the world(s) 156–158;
frustrated caring 161–162; holms 158–159;
important livelihoods 152–153; protocols
in gathering practices 153–154; traditional
knowing in practices 154–156
coffee 154, 166, 168, 174, 177
coffee cheese 172, 175, 177
Cold War 11, 249, 278, 289
collective remembrance see remembrance
colonialism 349–353, 539–540
colonization 264–266, 328–332, 349–352,
356–360; see also decolonization
comedy 551–552, 561; and non-human
Indigenous worlds 559–560; queer Indigenous
sensibilities 553–554; Sámi media and
Indigenous comedy 554–556; the Sámi as queer
592
and the (im)possibility of a sovereign erotic
557–559
commemoration 507–509; infrastructures of
continuity 512–513; materials of ceremony
509–512; reconciling memory 513–517
communication 236–239, 243–244, 579–580;
non-verbal communication 40, 581, 588
community 72–74, 83–84; displacement of Sámi
communities 249–250; and father 78–80; and
the frame of remembrance 74–76; and mother
76–78; and son 80–83
conceptualization 129
conficts see Áltá confict; Deatnu confict
consciousness, historical 479–480, 489–490; our
interpretations 483–485; the past lives in us
480–482; traditions and history 485–489
continuity 507–509; infrastructures of 512–513;
materials of ceremony 509–512; reconciling
memory 513–517
control of land and natural resources 357–359
COVID-19 4, 165, 178, 488, 532
creative practices 523–524
creative space 531–532
criteria of membership and identity 583–588
critique, ethics and politics of 310–312,
322–324; and hate speech 312–314; and Inari
Citizen Channel 316–322; and political self-
Indigenization 314–316
ČSV 277–284, 568
Čuä ’lmm / Salmijärvi 54, 59–67
cultural autonomy 311–318, 322
cultural environment 134–135, 138, 145–146;
different approaches to 135–140; exploring
Lapland’s 140–142; nationally valuable
landscapes 142–143; traditional Sámi
worldview 143–145
culture and cultures 21–23, 34–36, 155; analysis
of photographs 25–34; the life cycle of the
Siida exhibition 23–25; see also cultural
environment; food culture; tradition
dairy 168, 175
Dankertsen, Astri xiii, 15, 47, 374, 536, 541, 543
dating 27–32
Deanuleahki 115–116, 130; narratives 119–129;
process, methods and language 116–119
Deatnu / Deanuleahki / Tana / Teno 115–116,
130, 357–359, 402; narratives 119–129;
process, methods and language 116–119
Deatnu confict 397–398, 402–406; alliances and
articulations of nature 406–407
decolonization 446–449; of feminism 543–546;
of gender 540–543; Indigenous design as
529–531; and ládjogahpir 449–456, 458–460;
and rematriation 458–460; and workshops
456–458
 — Index —
democracy 385–386
democratic processes 382–383, 391–393; and
the Arctic Railway project 386–391; and
Indigenous news media 385–386; and the
power of the media 383–385
demos, political 297–299
design 520–521; as creative space 531–532; as
decolonization 529–531; dialogue as method
522–523; invisible investment in knowledge
523; knowledge as local and partial 521–522;
nature as an archive 524–526; ollislašvuohta
526–529; verddevuohta as a metaphor for Sámi
creative practices 523–524
desire 566–568
dialogue: as method 522–523; with surroundings
159–160
diet 168; see also food culture
discrimination 328–329, 333, 335–337, 339, 341;
and the history of boarding schools in Sápmi
329–332; in Norway and Sweden 332–341;
and resilience and health 342–343
displacement 249–250
distress, social 251–253
domain aspect of the boundary problem 302–304
double perspective 41, 50; double communication
47, 50
dress 39–41; jollegahpir 452–453, 459; see also
gákti; ládjogahpir
Drugge, Anna-Lill xiii, 14, 582
drum 144, 208–211, 276, 287, 350, 454, 557
duodji, duodje 14–15, 25, 40, 47–52; and
ecologies of care 127–128; and Sámi futures
448, 452–458, 481, 535
Eanodat / Enontekiö 29, 32–33, 40–49, 43,
313–314, 348–459, 450
East Sámi 88
ecologies of care 115–116, 130; narratives
119–129; process, methods and language
116–119
economic impacts of food items 167, 168
education 218–219; see also residential schooling
egg gatherers 150–152, 168; dialogue with
surroundings 159–160; different ways of acting
in the world(s) 156–158; frustrated caring
161–162; holms 158–159; important
livelihoods 152–153; luomemeahcci
160–161; protocols in gathering practices
153–154; traditional knowing in practices
154–156
Eira, Inger Marie Gaup xiii, 8, 187, 588
elders 222
elections 299–303, 354–355
electoral rolls 294–295, 305; and the boundary
problem 295–296, 302–304; the criteria to
register 297–301
593
Ellos Deatnu 402–406
Enontekiö gákti 29, 40–44, 43, 46–49
environmental impact 170–171
environmentalism, enviromentalist 399–400,
404–406, 582
epistemology, epistemologies 29, 155, 182, 193,
521, 579, 589
Eriksen, Thomas Hylland xiii, 17, 489
Eriksson, Karin xiii–xiv, 12, 585
erotic, sovereign 557–559
ethics of critique 310–312, 322–324; and hate
speech 312–314; and Inari Citizen Channel
316–322; and political self-Indigenization
314–316; see also research ethics
ethnic groups and ethnicity 328–329, 331–343;
negative societal treatment due to 340; self-
reported discrimination 333, 336–337, 341
ethnography 129
ethnomusicology 54, 199, 484
everyday life 568–571
exchange 172–175
expectations 72–74, 83–84; and father 78–80;
and the frame of remembrance 74–76; and
mother 76–78; and son 80–83
Facebook 157, 315–316, 321–322, 404, 446
family: family lines 108–110; interethnic families
223
Fanon, Franz 279, 579
fashion 47–49, 528–530
fat 174
father 78–80
feminism 100–102, 110–111, 535–536, 546–547;
decolonizing feminism 543–546; decolonizing
gender 540–543; the invisibility of Sámi women
106–108; learning in conversation 538–539;
Nordic settler colonialism 539–540; the Sámi
feminist movement 536–537; Sáminess of
family lines 108–110; settlers in the Ohcejohka
region 102–106
feldwork 134–135, 145–146; different
approaches to the cultural environment
135–140; exploring Lapland’s cultural
environment 140–142; nationally valuable
landscapes 142–143; traditional Sámi
worldview 143–145
Finland 263–264, 271–273, 294–295, 310–312,
322–324, 348–349, 359–360; and the
boundary problem 295–296, 302–304; colonial
past 349–351; colonial present 351–353; the
criteria to register in electoral rolls 297–301;
and hate speech 312–314; and Inari Citizen
Channel 316–322; municipal policies 356–357;
municipal politics 353–356; and political
self-Indigenization 314–316; pre-war studies
265–267; research after the Second World
 — Index —
War 267–271; the use and control of land and
natural resources 357–359
Finnmark Commission 304
Finnmárku / Finnmark 218, 264–268, 282–283,
302–304, 388–389, 392, 450
fsh 168–171, 168
fshing 81, 151–153, 156–158, 580–582; and
ecologies of care 116–117, 121–123; and
feminism 104–106; and food culture 166–168,
170–171; and legal tradition and law 497–500;
and societal ruptures 237–240, 270–271,
313–314, 348–350, 357–359, 401–404; and
tourism 200–204
fag(s) 276–277, 289–290, 288; adoption of
285–288; and anticolonial ethos 277–280,
283–285
food culture 165–167, 168, 178; fsh 168–171;
meat and dairy 170–175; plant food 175–177
food pyramid 167–168, 168
fun 565–566, 576–577; as activism 571–574;
creating space for a new generation of activists
574–576; having fun in everyday life 568–571;
the need for fun and desire in Indigenous
research 566–568
future 105–107, 110–111; and activism
565–567; design as gifts to 526–529; and
historical consciousness 482–483; and material
representations 508–510; and research ethics
469–473; and societal ruptures 223–225,
301–305, 375–377, 390–393; and storytelling
530–532
gákti 39–41; choosing 42–45; on the pulse of time
47–50; two worlds of 45–47
game 152, 168, 172, 200
gapta 49
gathering practices 153–154; see also cloudberry
pickers; egg gatherers
gender: decolonizing 540–543; in Laestadianism
90–91; self-reported ethnic discrimination 341;
see also feminism; women
Gjessing, Gutorm 267–271
global Indigenous rights discourse 370–371
goat 168, 175; goat cheese 175
god 64–65, 91–96
good relations 543, 547, 561
grains 168, 177
Gremikha 232–233, 233
gulahallat 74
Guovdageaidnu / Kautokeino 42–44, 88–89,
103–105, 182–183, 398–400, 421–422, 450–453
Guttorm, Gunvor 40
Hætta, Odd Mathis 280, 422–423
Handicraft; see also duodji 32–33, 206–207,
268–269, 588–589
594
Hansen, Ketil Lenert xiv, 12, 342, 581
hate speech 312–314; see also toxic speech
hats see jollegahpir; ládjogahpir
health 168–171, 342–343
Helander, Hanna xiv, 7, 455, 589
Helander, Marja 403
Helander-Renvall, Elina 16, 538
Helsset / Helsinki 202, 219–223, 365, 448, 466,
513–515, 551
herbs 168, 175–177, 514
herding see reindeer herding
Herranen-Tabibi, Annikki xiv, 8, 583
herstory 100–102, 110–111; the invisibility of
Sámi women 106–108; Sáminess of family
lines 108–110; settlers in the Ohcejohka region
102–106
Hirvonen, Vuokko 73, 101, 107
historical consciousness 479–480, 489–490; our
interpretations 483–485; the past lives in us
480–482; traditions and history 485–489
history 100–102, 110–111, 263–264, 271–273,
328–329, 415–417, 425–426; of boarding
schools in Sápmi 329–332; colonial past
349–351; and discrimination against the
Sámi in Norway and Sweden 332–341; the
invisibility of Sámi women 106–108; media
systems and Indigenous media 417–418; new
Sámi media system 424–425; pre-war studies
265–267; research after the Second World
War 267–271; Sámi media history 418–424;
Sáminess of family lines 108–110; settlers in
the Ohcejohka region 102–106; and traditions
485–489
holms 158–159
house sermons 95–97
hunting 6, 102, 151–152, 158–159, 166–168,
268–271, 497
Huss, Leena xiv, 10, 224, 375, 586–587
Huuva, Rosa Marie 286–288
hybrid Sámi media system 415–417, 425–426;
media systems and Indigenous media 417–418;
new Sámi media system 424–425; Sámi media
history 418–424
identity 203–205; criteria of 583–588; loss of
218–219
Idle No More (INM) 569
ILO Convention No. 169 101, 332, 497
images see photographs
Inari Citizen Channel 316–317
Inari Sámi 225
indigeneity 365–367
Indigenization see political self-Indigenization
Indigenous art 530
Indigenous comedy 554–556; see also comedy
Indigenous design 529–531; see also design
 — Index —
Indigenous media 417–418; see also hybrid Sámi
media system
Indigenous news media 385–386; see also media
Indigenous research 469–473, 566–568; see also
research ethics
Indigenous resurgence 364–365, 377–378;
global Indigenous rights discourse 370–371;
Indigenous self-determination of the
administrative area 369–370; Sámi language
revitalization 374–377; Sámi society 371–372;
Sámi space in Stockholm 372–374; serving the
Sámi as an Indigenous people 367–368; and
Swedish national minority policies 365–367
Indigenous rights 370–371
Indigenous sensibilities, queer 553–554
Indigenous world-making see queer Indigenous
world-making
Indigenous worlds, non-human 559–560
individualizing 251–253
individual remembrance see remembrance
infrastructures of continuity 512–513; see also
continuity
Institute of Racial Biology 468
institutionalization 49, 97, 277
institutions 283–285
intangible cultural heritage 588
interethnic families 223
interpretation 482–485
invisibility 106–108
islands 157–158
Johnsen, O. A. 265–267
Joks, Solveig xv, 8, 588
jollegahpir 452–453, 459
Jørgensen-Dahl, Lill-Eli 525
Jouste, Marko xvii, 7, 60, 589
joy 458–460
Junka-Aikio, Laura xv, 11
juoiggus see also luohti; yoik 206
Kalaallit Nunaat / Greenland 285
Kalinin, Mekk 60, 63, 66
Kárášjohka / Karasjok 81, 104; and Sámi futures
422, 448, 479, 488, 490, 528, 537; and societal
ruptures 269, 283, 387
Kemi Lappmark 264, 270, 454
Keskitalo, Alf Isak 282, 286–287, 471
kinship 44, 77, 121–123, 128, 204, 484
Kitti, Kaaren 286
Knobblock, Ina xv, 15, 588
knowing: traditional knowing in practices
154–156; ways of 588–590
knowledge 521–522
Kola Peninsula 3–4, 232–235, 233, 249–250
Kramvig, Britt xv, 15, 580, 589
Krøvel, Roy xv, 12–13, 582
595
Kuokkanen, Rauna 101, 205; and Sámi futures
449, 538–542, 560, 567; and societal ruptures
352–353, 370, 375–377
Kven 88, 329–330
Kvernmo, Kajsa 525, 528–529
Kvidal-Røvik, Trine xv, 15, 580, 589
Kylli, Ritva xv–xvi, 7, 586
Kyrölä, Kata xvi, 15, 583
Labba, Kristina xvi, 14
ládjogahpir 446–449, 447, 455, 459; bond with
foremothers 454–456; rematriation of
458–460; resembling a devil’s horn 451–454;
tall, beautiful, and proud 449–451; and
workshops 456–458
Laestadianism 86–90; Christian meetings 95–97;
extraordinary women 94–95; gender and
organization in 90–91; spiritual mothers
91–94
Laestadius, Lars Levi 26, 87–88, 91–95, 453
land 357–359
land and water rights: land rights 101–103,
302–305, 312–314; water rights 101–103,
110–111, 468
landscapes 142–143
language and languages 116–119, 430–431;
futures of 217–227; at home 435–441;
intergenerational transmission of 441–443;
losing and taking back 431–433; researching
new speakers 433; revitalization 374–377; Sámi
language 218, 221–235; for whom and why
434–435
Lapin Kansa 403, 421
Lapland 100–102, 110–111, 140–142; the
invisibility of Sámi women 106–108; Sáminess
of family lines 108–110; settlers in the
Ohcejohka region 102–106
Lapp 3, 92–93, 102–106, 207–208; and societal
ruptures 297–299, 313–314, 319–320,
329–330
Lap(p) Codicil 267, 494, 498
Lapp skal(l) vara lapp 207, 329–330
Lappology 28–29, 34–35, 264–265, 272–273
lávvu, lavvo, Sámi tent 29, 137, 145, 205, 400
law see legal tradition and law
learning 538–539
legal tradition and law 494–499, 502–504; the
Sámi siida custom 499–502
Lehtola, Veli-Pekka xvi, 5–7, 14, 73, 198–199,
205–208, 226, 422, 589
lemmings 559–560
leu'dd 53–56, 67–68; and Jääkk Sverloff 56–59;
and Skolt Saami oral history 59–67
LGBTQ, LGBT+ 355, 553, 576
life, everyday 568–571
lihkku 143
 — Index —

Lindgren, Anna-Riitta xvi, 10, 221, 223, moose, elk 172–174, 178
586–587 moratorium 398, 403–405
linguistic: assimilation 225, 4334; competence Mörkenstam, Ulf xvii, 11, 368, 584
532; domains 217–218; surroundings 217–220; mother 76–78; spiritual 91–94
repertoire 221; rights 220–221, 226–227, 364 muittašangirjjalašvuohta (reminiscence literature)
livđe 482, 484 72–74, 83–84; and father 78–80; and the frame
livelihoods 152–153 of remembrance 74–76; and mother 76–78;
local knowledge 521–522; see also knowledge and son 80–83
location 32–34, 32 multilingualism 218–223
Lokka 33 municipalities 351–353
Løkvoll, Jorunn 525 municipal policies 356–357
loss 129; of language and identity 218–219, 223, municipal politics see politics, municipal
431–433 Murmansk region 60–61, 233, 234–235
Lovozero 232–233, 233, 238–242, 249–258, 331, museum see Sámi Museum Siida; Siida exhibition
525, 581 music 375–376, 481–484, 552–554, 557–560,
Lukkari, Pekka 278 570–571
Lule Sámi 224 mutton 168, 172
Myrseth, Ramona Salo 520
Magga, Ole Henrik (Ole Heandarat) 1, 278, 399
Magga, Päivi xvii, 8, 45, 454, 481, 531 nation-building 28, 330, 374
Magga, Sigga-Marja xvi, 7, 587 nationalism 218–219, 270–271
Magnani, Natalia xvii, 14, 587 nationally valuable landscapes 142–143
maps 134, 233 national minority policies 365–367
Martinsen, John Reier 399 National Museum of Finland 23, 513, 516
material practices 155, 510 natural resources 357–359
material representations 507–509; infrastructures nature 155, 397–398; alliances and articulations
of continuity 512–513; materials of ceremony of 406–407; and the Áltá controversy 398–401;
509–512; reconciling memory 513–517; as an archive 524–526; and Ellos Deatnu
see also representation 402–406; see also guođohit
Mathisen, Hans-Ragnar (Keviselie) 280–281, 284, negative social developments 248–249, 257–258;
286 displacement of Sámi communities 249–250;
Máze / Masi 279–280, 398, 400, 568 individualizing post-relocation social distress
Máze Group 279 251–253; punishing and curing ‘the drunkards’
meahcci / forest 137, 153, 156, 160–161 253–257
Meänkieli 222, 364–365, 370 negative societal treatment 329, 340; see also
meat 168, 172–174 discrimination
media 382–383, 391–393, 554–556; and the news media 385–391; see also media
Arctic Railway project 386–391; Indigenous newspaper 250–253, 415–421, 424–426
news media 385–386; the power of 383–385; Nilsson, Lena Maria xvii, 8, 585
see also TV Nirpi, Karen 93–94
media systems 417–418; see also hybrid Sámi Njuoska bittut 551–552, 561; and non-human
media system Indigenous worlds 559–560; and queer
meeting houses 95–97 Indigenous sensibilities 553–554; Sámi media
membership 294–296, 303–305, 314–316; criteria and Indigenous comedy 554–556; the Sámi
of 583–588 as queer and the (im)possibility of a sovereign
memory 513–517 erotic 557–559
metaphor 523–524 noaidi 93
methods 116–119; dialogue as 522–523 Noereh 569, 571–575
Métis 314, 318, 584 non-human Indigenous worlds 559–560
Metsähallitus 21–24, 388 non-state actor 11, 272
military 56–59 Nordic countries 4, 11, 581; and Sámi futures
Min Áigi 421 415–416, 471–473, 556; and societal ruptures
mines, mining 359–360, 387–388, 390 217–222, 225–227, 285–286, 404–406
Ministry of Transport and Communications 388–389 Nordic Saami Convention 472, 498–499
minority policies 365–367 Nordic settler colonialism 539–540
mission 419–420 Norgga Boazosámiid Riikkasearvi (NBR) 399

596
 — Index —
Northern Lapland Nature Centre 21–23, 34–36;
analysis of the photographs 25–34; the life
cycle of the Siida exhibition 23–25
North Sámi 122, 217, 222, 225
Norway 263–264, 271–273, 294–295, 305,
565–566, 576–577; and the boundary
problem 295–296, 302–304; creating space
for a new generation of activists 574–576; the
criteria to register in electoral rolls 297–301;
discrimination against the Sámi in 332–341;
fun as activism 571–574; having fun in
everyday life 568–571; the need for fun and
desire in Indigenous research 566–568; pre-
war studies 265–267; research after the Second
World War 267–271
Norwegianization 90, 267–269, 329–332,
417–419
NRK Sápmi 382–383, 385, 387–393
NSR, Norgga Sámiid Riikkasearvi 281, 283–284,
399, 575
nutrition: fsh 168–170, 169; meat 172–174, 173
Nykänen, Tapio xvii–xviii, 12, 582
Nylander, Eeva-Kristiina xviii, 14, 587
Nyyssönen, Jukka xviii, 11, 582
offal 174
Ohcejohka / Utsjoki 102–111, 348–350,
354–358
ollislašvuohta 526–529
Olsen, Torjer A. xviii, 7, 587
ontology (sámi ontology), ontologies 2–3, 17,
520–522, 530–532, 567, 582–583
oral history 53–59, 62, 66–67
orphanages 240–242
Oskal, Nils 143–144, 499–501
Oslo 280–282, 398–400, 568–570, 575
Paččjokk 60, 63
partial knowledge 521–522; see also knowledge
Pasanen, Annika xviii, 14, 225, 587
Pechenga / Petsamo / Peäccam 33–34, 53–54,
59–61, 65–66, 199–200, 264–265, 507–514
Pedersen, Karine 525–526
Persen, Synnøve 277, 280–284, 287
photographs 25–27, 26, 28; dating 27–32;
location 32–34, 32
Pieski, Outi 446–448, 447, 455, 456;
Kolonialisttalaš metamorfosa 1852/Colonialist
Metamorphosis 1852 459
Pirttijärvi-Länsman, Ulla 451
place names, toponyms 87, 102–103, 138, 160,
259, 482–484
planning 388–390
plant food 168, 175–177
policies: municipal 356–357; national minorities
365–367
597
political demos 297–299
political self-Indigenization 310–312, 314–316,
322–324; and hate speech 312–314; Inari
Citizen Channel 316–322
politics, municipal 348–349, 353–356, 359–360,
355; colonial past 349–351; colonial present
351–353; and municipal policies 356–357; the
use and control of land and natural resources
357–359
politics of critique 310–312, 322–324; and hate
speech 312–314; and Inari Citizen Channel
316–322; and political self-Indigenization
314–316
Porsáŋgu / Porsanger 40, 151–154, 158, 280
Porttipahta 33
post-relocation social distress 251–253
postwar era 45, 122
poultry 166, 168
power structures 100–102, 426
practices 143–145, 165–167, 178; fsh 168–171;
meat and dairy 170–175; plant food 175–177;
the Sámi food pyramid 167–168; traditional
knowing in 154–156
precipitation 185
prehistory 141, 266
press history 418–421
primitive 54, 198–199, 218–219, 270–271
process 116–119
protocols in gathering practices 153–154
public debate 387–388
Puuronen, Vesa xviii, 12, 580
queer Indigenous world-making 551–552, 561;
non-human Indigenous worlds 559–560; queer
Indigenous sensibilities 553–554; Sámi media
and Indigenous comedy 554–556; the Sámi
as queer and the (im)possibility of a sovereign
erotic 557–559
race biology 14, 467–468, 582
racism 323–324, 332–334, 341–343, 554–556,
582–584
Rasmussen, Torkel xviii–xix, 12, 13, 582
reindeer herding 30, 168, 172–175, 181–183,
184, 193–194; and Sámi snow and ice
knowledge systems 183–193
religious movement 108
relocation 248–258, 507–513
rematriation 446–449; and ládjogahpir 449–456,
458–460; and workshops 456–458
remembrance 53–54, 67–68; frame of 74–76; and
Jääkk Sverloff 56–59; leu’dd tradition 54–67;
and Skolt Saami oral history 59–67
reminiscence literature see
muittašangirjjalašvuohta
Renberg, Elsa Laula 536
 — Index —
representation 21–23, 34–36, 210–211,
507–509; analysis of photographs 25–34; the
everchanging authentic Sámi 207–210; and
the growth of tourism 197–203; and identity
203–205; infrastructures of continuity
512–513; the life cycle of the Siida exhibition
23–25; materials of ceremony 509–512;
reconciling memory 513–517; and tradition
205–207
research see Indigenous research; research ethics
research ethics 465–474
residential schooling 232–237, 242–244; history of
boarding schools in Sápmi 329–332; orphanages
240–242; and Russifcation 237–240
resilience 342–343
resistance 389–390
resurgence 129
revitalization 220–227, 321–322, 374–377; and
Sámi futures 425–426, 430–434, 438–441,
446–448, 495–497
rights, Indigenous 370–371
right to register 294–295, 305; and the boundary
problem 295–296, 302–304; and the criteria to
register 297–301
Roavvenjárga / Rovaniemi 210, 382, 386, 486,
581
rock art 415, 510
roots 168
Russia 3–4, 10–11, 53–67, 166–16, 584–589;
and Sámi futures 507–508, 512–514; societal
ruptures 232–244, 251–253, 256–258,
266–271, 328–331, 349–352, 384–38
Russian army 56–59
Russifcation 237–240
Saami Conference, The 276, 278, 281, 286–288,
290
Sää’m land 507–509; infrastructures of continuity
512–513; materials of ceremony 509–512;
reconciling memory 513–517
Sábme 535–539; see also Sápmi
Ságat 280, 282, 420–421, 424
salmon 79–81, 357–358, 401–404
salt 168, 168
sameby / čearru / Lapp village 303, 313
Sámediggi, Sámi Parliament 210, 295–305, 314,
471–473, 584
Samenes Landsforbund (SLF) / Sámi Country
Alliance 399–400
Sámi Action Group 398–400, 406
Sámi Áigi 420–421
Sámi Delegation 297–298, 351
Sámi Education Institute (SOGSAKK) 432, 508
Sámi homeland 348–349, 359–360; historical
context 349–351; land and natural resources
357–359; municipalities 351–353; municipal
598
policies 356–357; municipal politics
353–356
Sámi House 575
Sámi identity 222–223, 315; see also identity
Sámiid Riikkasearvi / SSR 313, 366, 371, 473
Sámi Museum Siida 21–23, 34–36; analysis of the
photographs 25–34; the life cycle of the Siida
exhibition 23–25
Sáminess 21–23, 34–36; analysis of photographs
25–34; of family lines in Ohcejohka 108–110;
the life cycle of the Siida exhibition 23–25
Sámi Parliament Act 298–299, 313, 321
Sámiráđđi / the Saami Council 4, 277, 284–289, 499
Sámi snow and ice knowledge systems (SSIKS)
181–183, 184, 185, 187–189, 190, 193–194;
content of 184–185; knowing how snow
is affected by and affects reindeer herding
186–188; reindeer herder knowledge systems
183; traditional knowledge on precipitation
and weather processes 185–186; two ways of
knowing snow and ice 188–193
Sámi studies/research 23, 35, 273
Sámi youth organizations 389, 537, 569,
571–572, 575
sap 176–177, 176
Sápmi 115–116, 130; development of Indigenous
research ethics in 471–473; history of boarding
schools in 329–332; Laestadianism in 87–90;
narratives 119–129; process, methods and
language 116–119; see also Sää’m land
Sara, Inker-Anne xix, 12, 13, 582
Sara, Máret 286
Sáráhkká (deity) 166
Sáráhkká (Sámi Women’s Organization) 537
school 218–219; see also residential schooling
scope aspect of the boundary problem 302–304
seaŋáš/depth hoar 190, 190–191, 194n3
Sea Sámi 86–90, 94–97, 138, 266–268
Second World War 53–54, 232–233, 263–264
self-determination 369–370
self-governance 4, 11, 296
self-Indigenization see political self-Indigenization
self-suffciency 177
Selle, Per xix, 11, 584
sensibilities, queer Indigenous 553–554
sermons 95–97
settlement history 100–102, 110–111; the
invisibility of Sámi women 106–108; Sáminess
of family lines 108–110; settlers in the
Ohcejohka region 102–106
settler 102–106, 110–111, 124–126; and societal
ruptures 270–271, 352–353, 358–359,
365–368; and TV comedy 551–561
settler colonialism 539–540
sieidi 33, 105, 141, 145
siida custom 499–502
 — Index —
Siida exhibition 21–23, 34–36; analysis of the
photographs 25–34; the life cycle of 23–25
Siidsååbbar / Skolt Sámi Village Administration
3, 350
Skolt Sámi 3, 7, 14–15, 33–35, 200, 208; and
Sámi futures 430–433, 452, 481–482, 513–515;
and societal ruptures 232, 265–267, 316,
350–351, 360, 390–391
snow see Sámi snow and ice knowledge systems
(SSIKS)
Soađegilli / Sodankylä 32, 33, 42, 218, 217
social developments 248–249, 257–258;
displacement of Sámi communities 249–250;
individualizing post-relocation social distress
251–253; punishing and curing ‘the drunkards’
253–257
social distress 251–253
social practices 49, 66, 115, 155
societal treatment 329, 340
society 371–372
sociology 441
Somby, Ánde 125, 127–129, 281–282, 289
Somby, Marie Louise 525–526
Somby, Niillas Aslaksen 399–400
son 80–83
South Sámi 217
sovereignty: fsh 171; meat 174–175; plant food
177; sovereign erotic 557–559
Soviet North 248–249, 257–258; displacement
of Sámi communities 249–250; individualizing
post-relocation social distress 251–253;
punishing and curing ‘the drunkards’ 253–257
Soviet period 232–235, 233
Soviet Union 232–234, 242–244; boarding
schools 234–237; orphanages 240–242;
Russifcation 237–240
space 372–374
spiritual mothers 91–94
Spivak, Gayatri 579
state, the 115–116, 130, 263–264, 271–273;
narratives 119–129; pre-war studies 265–267;
process, methods and language 116–119;
relationship to 581–583; research after the
Second World War 267–271
state-based laws 501–502; see also legal status
and law
status 34–35, 48–50, 100–101, 134–136,
167; and the electoral roll 300–302; and
Indigenous resurgence 365–368; and municipal
politics 350–351, 356–358; and negative
social developments 249–250, 255–258; and
residential schooling 241–242; and Sámi
futures 416–417, 470–472, 501–503; and self-
Indigenization 320–322; and the state 266–268,
271–272
Stenberg, Karin 536
599
Stockholm 282, 572–575, 585
Stockholm Sámi administrative area 364–365,
377–378; and global Indigenous rights
discourse 370–371; Indigenous self-
determination of 369–370; and Sámi language
revitalization 374–377; and Sámi society
371–372; and Sámi space in Stockholm
372–374; serving the Sámi as an Indigenous
people 367–368; and Swedish national minority
policies 365–367
Stockholm Sámi Association 365–367
Stordahl, Vigdis 585
storytelling 520–521; design as creative space
531–532; dialogue as method 522–523;
Indigenous design as decolonization 529–531;
invisible investment in knowledge 523;
knowledge as local and partial 521–522; nature
as an archive 524–526; ollislašvuohta 526–529;
verddevuohta as a metaphor for Sámi creative
practices 523–524
sugar 168, 168, 177
Suõ'nn’jel / Suonikylä 55–57, 59, 66
Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) 299–300
survival 168–171
survivance 5, 15–16, 561, 567
Svakko, Anna Stina 460
Sverloff, Jääkk 53–59, 57
Sweden 294–295, 305, 364–365, 377–378,
466–467, 565–566, 576–577; and the
boundary problem 295–296, 302–304; creating
space for a new generation of activists
574–576; the criteria to register in electoral
rolls 297–301; discrimination against the
Sámi in 332–341; fun as activism 571–574;
and global Indigenous rights discourse
370–371; having fun in everyday life 568–571;
Indigenous self-determination of the
administrative area 369–370; national minority
policies 365–367; the need for fun and desire
in Indigenous research 566–568; and Sámi
language revitalization 374–377; and Sámi
society 371–372; Sámi space in Stockholm
372–374; serving the Sámi as an Indigenous
people 367–368
Swedish Sámi Association (SSR) 473
TallBear, Kim 324, 538, 560
Tanner, Väinö 265–267
tapping 176–177, 176
tax records 100, 106, 109, 298
Tegengren, Helmer 267–271
Torne Lappmark 271
tourism 210–211; and the everchanging
authentic Sámi 207–210; growth of
197–203; and identity 203–205; and tradition
205–207
 — Index —
toxic speech 310–314, 322–324; and Inari
Citizen Channel 316–322; and political self-
Indigenization 314–316
trade 168, 177
tradition 53–54, 67–68, 165–167, 178, 205–207;
fsh 168–171; and history 485–489; and Jääkk
Sverloff 56–59; leu’dd tradition 54–67; meat
and dairy 170–175; mother as guardian of
76–78; plant food 175–177; the Sámi food
pyramid 167–168; traditional knowing in
practices 154–156; traditional Sámi worldview
143–145; see also dress; Sámi snow and ice
knowledge systems
transition 479–480, 489–490; our interpretations
483–485; the past lives in us 480–482;
traditions and history 485–489
traditional knowledge 49–50, 138–141, 145–146,
186–188; food 8, 170, 17; and Sámi futures
481–483, 487–500; and societal ruptures 402–404
transmission of language 438–439, 441–443;
see also languages
transnationality, transnational 377; agency 11;
corporations 353; dialogues 537
trauma 126–128, 222–223, 239–244, 331–332,
432–433, 558–561
tree sap 176–177, 176
Trickster 72–74, 83–84; and father 78–80; and
the frame of remembrance 74–76; and mother
76–78; and son 80–83
Tromsø 87, 90, 226, 528–529, 569–570, 573–574
Trondheim 455, 536–537, 568
truth and reconciliation: commissions 210, 219;
processes 469
Tuck, Eve 129, 569, 565, 567
Turi, Johan 26, 160, 199, 481–482
TV 551–552, 561; and non-human Indigenous
worlds 559–560; and queer Indigenous
sensibilities 553–554; Sámi media and Indigenous
comedy 554–556; the Sámi as queer and the
(im)possibility of a sovereign erotic 557–559
Ume Sámi 166–167
UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (UNDRIP) 294, 304–305, 351, 370,
497
UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) 300
university 366–368, 424, 432–435
urban areas 565–566, 576–577; creating space
for a new generation of activists 574–576; fun
as activism 571–574; having fun in everyday
life 568–571; the need for fun and desire in
Indigenous research 566–568
use of land and natural resources 357–359
Utsi, Per Mikael 282
600
Valkeapää, Nils-Aslak (Áillohaš) 47–50, 206–209,
226, 280, 400, 405, 482
Valkonen, Jarno xiv–xv, 7, 586
Valkonen, Sanna 11, 89, 108, 485
Valle, Ailu 1–2, 5, 13, 15–16
values 72–74, 83–84; and father 78–80; and the
frame of remembrance 74–76; and mother
76–78; and son 80–83
vegetables 175–177
Vest, Jovnna-Ánde 72–74, 83–84; and father
78–80; and the frame of remembrance 74–76;
and mother 76–78; and son 80–83
visual representations 21–23, 34–36; analysis of
the photographs 25–34; the life cycle of the
Siida exhibition 23–25; see also representation
vocabulary 182–184, 184
Vuohčču / Vuotso 42, 134, 218, 432
water reservoirs 12, 390
ways of acting 156–158
ways of being 579–581; criteria of membership
and identity 583–588; relationship to the state
581–583; ways of knowing 588–590
ways of knowing 588–590
wealth 158–159
weather 2, 6, 154–159, 181–190, 193–194
weather processes 185–186
welfare state 4, 115, 126, 353, 384
winter village 60, 271
women 86–90, 446–449, 447; and Christian
meetings 95–97; extraordinary women 94–95;
gender and organization in Laestadianism
90–91; invisibility of 106–108; and ládjogahpir
449–456, 458–460; and rematriation 458–460;
and workshops 456–458; see also feminism
workshops 456–458
World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP)
219, 400
world-making see queer Indigenous
world-making
worldview 143–145
World War I 67
World War II 153, 170, 278, 283, 416, 421–422
Yle Sápmi 382–383, 385, 387–393
yoik 7, 76, 209–210, 451, 481–484, 551, 555;
see also luohti; juoiggus
youths and young adults 220–222, 334,
565–566, 576–577; creating space for a
new generation of activists 574–576; fun as
activism 571–574; having fun in everyday
life 568–571; the need for fun and desire in
Indigenous research 566–568; negative societal
treatment 340