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ABSTRACT
This article examines the work of the anonymous Sámi artist and activist group Suohpanterror as an example of Indigenous culture jamming, which uses global visual archives and the social media to articulate a contemporary Sámi subjectivity politically. In a short time, Suohpanterror has gained national and international recognition as a new Sámi voice, which is challenging earlier representations and conceptions of the Sámi. However, instead of focusing upon Suohpanterror’s efforts to address the dominant society, this study is concerned mainly with Suohpanterror’s operation within, and at the fringes of, the Sámi community itself. To this end, I examine Suohpanterror’s entanglements in the small Sámi “uprising” that took place in the social media in spring 2013 around the interconnected issues of Sámi definition, identity and the potential ratification of the ILO convention 169 in Finland. I argue that in the context of a highly politicized national public sphere which is considered insensitive to Sámi perspectives, “liking”, consuming and sharing Suohpanterror’s work online has offered an easy, effective and unmistakably trendy way to publicly identify with a certain set of (Sámi) political views, and to perform a political “us” which feeds, in particular, on experiences of a shared community of knowledge, and of collective laughter.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. am grateful for a number of people who have offered their support. In particular, I would like to thank the artist-mastermind behind Suohpanterror’s poster art, who still prefers to remain anonymous, for comments and for granting me the right to use the pictures included in this article: Thank you also to Antti Aikio, Saara Tervaniemi, Veli-Pekka Lehtola, Pekka Sammallahti and Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, each of whom has contributed to this article through private exchanges and comments to earlier versions of this article. Finally, thank you for the editors of this special issue, Sigrid Lien and Hilde Nielssen, as well as for the two anoymous reviewers for their brilliant comments and revision suggestions.
2. The discourse of the Sámi as a “peace-loving people” coexists with an equally persistent discourse of “quarrelling natives”, always envious of one another. Although this might seem contradictory, the pattern is familiar to colonial discourses in general, where mutually opposing characteristics—such as depicting the oriental other as both aggressive and barbarian and passive and childlike—are frequently combined (Bhabha Citation1994; Said Citation2003).
3. Personal email communication with the artist-mastermind, 23 March 2017.
4. More recently, the group has also published a website, found at http://suohpanterror.com.
5. The documentary is available for download with English subtitles via Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Bzjw7CLw0 [accessed 10 March 2017].
6. I thank Saara Tervaniemi for highlighting this point.
7. John Pilger, “The War You Don’t See” (2010).
8. All translations from Finnish or Northern Sámi to English are my own.
10. For instance, in 2014, Suohpanterror’s posters were showcased as part of the Finnish Artist Association’s Viimeinen taiteilijat -annual exhibition in Helsinki and toured around Scandinavia and Germany as part of the Sámi Contemporary,10 an international curated exhibition showcasing the work of contemporary Sámi artists. In 2015, Suohpanterror took part in Demonstrating Minds, an international exhibition at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, and their work was bought in the Museum’s permanent art collection. An updated list of exhibition appearances is available on Suohapnterror’s recently opened website, http://suohpanterror.com/?page_id=22.
11. http://www.france.fi/uncategorized/lapland-tracing-the-sami-of-finland-in-paris-32017/?lang=en .
12. The debate took place in Facebook in March 2017.
15. The finished piece (in Finnish), “Muistio saamelaismääritelmästä”, (Sammallahti Citation2013) is downloadable at the Sámi Parliament’s website, http://www.samediggi.fi/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=224&Itemid=10&mosmsg=Yrit%E4t+p%E4%E4st%E4+sis%E4%E4n+ei+hyv%E4ksytyst%E4+verkko-osoitteesta.+%28www.google.fi%29.
16. Also I followed (and sometimes participated in) these debates, largely along the lines present in Junka-Aikio (Citation2016). While I am not Sámi myself, the issues in question have become familiar to me after I met my husband who is a Sámi and a legal scholar specialised in Sámi rights.
17. According to Sammallahti, he received more than 200 new Facebook friendship invitations during the most intensive period, primarily from young Sámi people. Although most did not want to participate in the debate publicly and with their own face, many sent Sammallahti messages of support in private. Personal e-mail communication with Pekka Sammallahti, 30 February 2017.
18. Today, the same group is known as the North American Sami Searvi. https://www.facebook.com/groups/206865919326820/.
19. See, for instance, “Sammallahti: Vearrolappalaštearbma muitala ealáhusain ii etnisitehtas” Yle Sápmi (online) 25 April 2013, available at: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/sapmi/sammallahti_vearrolappalastearbma_muitala_ealahusain_ii_etnisitehtas/6622177; Saijets (2013) “Emeritusprofessor: Buot gávtteláganat eai leat sápmelaččaid čeárdabiktasat”. Yle Sápmi (online), 20 June 2013, available at: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/sapmi/emeritusprofessor_buot_gavttelaganat_eai_leat_sapmelaccaid_ceardabiktasat/6696652 [accessed 20 March 2017]; Guttorm and Länsman (2013) “Saarikivi: Soađegili jápmán sámegiela sáhtášii váldit atnui”. Yle Sápmi (online), 3 July 2013. Available at: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/sapmi/saarikivi_soaegili_japman_samegiela_sahtasii_valdit_atnui/6698759.
20. According to the artist behind the image, he removed it because he didn’t consider it a proper poster. E-mail communication with the artist, 1 March 2017.
22. As an example, one might look at “Inarin kansalaiskanava” (“Inari citizens’ channel”) a community page where highly tedious speech on the Sámi is used frequently. https://www.facebook.com/groups/139277979453532/.
23. The article built, for instance, on the populist idea that instead of being Indigenous, many reindeer herding Sámi in Finland are immigrants who have arrived from Sweden and Norway superseding the “Lapps”, the actual Indigenous people of Northern Finland. Antti Aikio deconstructs this claim from the perspective of Nordic legal history in Aikio (Citation2009, Citation2010).
24. The document was developed largely through the collective debates in Facebook, and encouraged by them. Available in Northern Sámi, at http://www.ssn.fi/se/2013/05/suoma-sami-nuoraid-cealkamus-sapmelasmerostallamis/ and in Finnish, at http://www.ssn.fi/2013/05/suomen-saamelaisnuorten-lausunto-saamelaismaaritelmasta/ [Accessed 23 March 2017].
25. This was the case, for instance, in 2015 when, following the active campaigns on behalf of the “non-status Sámi”, the Finnish Supreme Court ruled that nearly a hundred persons, whom the Sámi Parliament’s electoral committee considered as ethnic Finns, would be included in the Sámi Parliament’s electoral roll against the will of the Sámi Parliament in a gross violation of the Sámi right for self-determination; Or, when the new Forest Law, from which earlier references to Sámi rights had been removed, was accepted by the Parliament in 2016; or when the Parliament accepted the new agreement concerning fishing rights at the Tana River in March 2017, cancelling, in practice, the rights of the local people—largely Sámi—in favour of holiday makers fishing for entertainment.
26. Personal email conversation with the artist-mastermind, 1 March 2017.
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Laura Junka-Aikio
Laura Junka-Aikio is a researcher at the Giellagas Institute for Sámi Studies, University of Oulu, Finland. Her work, which has spanned from Palestine and the Middle East to the Indigenous Sámi in Northern Scandinavia, is concerned mainly with the politics of knowledge, the relationships between knowledge and social change, and with questions of subalternity in colonial and Indigenous contexts. Junka-Aikio is the author of Late Modern Palestine: The subject and representation of the second intifada (Routledge, 2016), a co-editor of the Cultural Studies special issue “Cultural Studies of Extraction” (2017). She is currently working as part of research project “The Societal Dimensions of Sámi Research”, which is based at the UiT Arctic University of Norway.