Valkeapää's Use of Photographs in Beaivi áhčážan: Indigenous Counter-History versus Documentation in the Age of Photography

Abstract

This article examines the photographic material of the Sámi cultural mobilizer Nils-Aslak Valkeapää's Beaivi áhčážan (The Sun, My Father), published in 1988, with theoretical perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies. The analysis focuses on how Valkeapää's use of photographs involves that the colonial past is examined from the vantage point of the anti-colonial present of the 1980s. Valkeapää's re-contextualization of photographs from ethnographic collections assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a book he called a family album of the Sámi is discussed as an example of Sámi counter-history that is part of the decolonization process. When analysed with perspectives from anti- and postcolonial studies, the documentation of the way of life of the Sámi people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplifies a practice which has constructed the Sámi as the others of modern society. The article discusses how the construction of the Sámi as the others of modernity is deconstructed and challenged in present-day indigenous identity politics.

Key Words:

• Beaivi áhčážan
• Ethnographic collections
• Age of photography
• Sámi literature
• Indigenous counter-history
• Decolonization
• Collective identity

Notes

₁ In a Swedish study about the modernization of Sweden, Mebius discusses the othering of Sámi people: “Föreställningen om samerna som de Andra” [The Idea of the Sámi as the Others] (Mebius, 1999: 105–118).

₂ The connection between national landscapes and monuments, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, is discussed in a Swedish study by Hettne et al., “Nationallandskapet och naturens monument” [The National Landscape and the Monuments of Nature] (Hettne et al., 2006: 330–352).

₃ When I contacted the museum in order to ask for permission to use photographs as illustrations, I was informed that the collection has been moved.

₄ The concept of “strategic essentialism” is contested. Spivak herself has criticized what she sees as a misuse of it (see Morris, 2010). Nevertheless, it is useful for describing a strategy whereby groups of people mobilize in order to challenge histories of marginalization.