Braiding Time: Sami Temporalities for Indigenous Justice

ABSTRACT

In Indigenous/settler relations, temporal rhetoric functions as an essential tool for both subjugation and resistance. Much scholarship on these temporalities focuses on Turtle Island and is thus implicitly shaped by a seminal historical event: the arrival of European colonizers. We extend this research by turning to Sweden, where the Indigenous Sami and the Scandinavians, who would later become their colonizers, have a long history of continuous interaction. We analyze a pamphlet written by Elsa Laula, the leader of the Sami civil rights movement in early twentieth-century Sweden, as well as Swedish policies and press documents from the time. While the settler Swedes employ similar techniques of temporal othering and erasure as colonizers on Turtle Island, Laula’s rhetoric differs subtly. Her rhetoric enacts resistance by highlighting how Sami temporalities are braided with Swedish temporalities, a rhetorical move that echoes their intertwined histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalist time
• Indigenous rhetoric
• politics of erasure
• Sami political mobilization
• Swedish colonization
• temporal othering

[H]istory repeats itself over and over again, they say. … When the Lapp reads about how the people of Sweden were tyrannized by Danish and German bailiffs along with Roman priests, he understands that! How these [Danish, German, and Roman] lords, who were of another nation, asked little or nothing of, or even wanted to understand, the interests and needs of the Swedish people. How the bailiff and the priest were only vampires, who sucked the blood of the Swedish people, its life force. … The heart of the Lapp is moved, as are the hearts of other Swedes—we are Swedes too—at the memory of Engelbreckt, the liberator.¹ —Laula, Aftonbladet

Elsa Laula—the Indigenous Sami activist who penned the above words on 31 August 1903—devoted her life to agitating for the rights of the Sami people who live in northern Fennoscandia. In her article, which was published in one of the larger Swedish newspapers at the time, Laula draws a parallel between the fifteenth-century oppression of the Swedes at the hands of Danes and the then-contemporary oppression of the Indigenous Sami at the hands of the Swedish settler government. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Swedish colonization of the Sami had become increasingly aggressive. The Swedish government had already confiscated hectares of Native lands, and they were on the eve of launching racially segregated boarding schools and state-funded eugenics projects. In the midst of this feverish racism, Laula reminds her Swedish settler audience of the Danish subjugation of the Swedes in the Middle Ages and the subsequent Swedish resistance that led to the formation of the Swedish kingdom centuries earlier. Using a familiar figure of liberation from Swedish history, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson, Laula urges settler Swedes to recall their own history and, in so doing, to rethink their own position toward the Sami political quest for civil rights in the Swedish state. Notably, Laula employs temporally coded language in her activism. Not only does she claim that history repeats itself, thus stitching the oppression of Swedes by Danes into a pattern that matches the subjugation of the Sami by settler Swedes, but she also contends that such foreign rule knows nothing of the present condition of the Sami and, further, that settler colonialism is sucking the life, and therefore the futures, out of Indigenous peoples. Together, Laula’s temporal rhetoric reverses the traditional temporal gaze of colonization. Rather than colonizers gazing “back” at Natives as if they occupy a “prior” historical period, she positions the colonizers in the historical past with the Natives gazing back at them. Such an inversion of colonial temporalities also contains an implicit threat to the Swedish settlers: if oppression does not end now, expect Sami rebellion.

Much of the power of Laula’s rhetoric lies in her provocative use of time. She deftly manipulates histories, presents, and futures in her advocacy for Indigenous rights. Crucially, however, Laula does not argue for an Indigenous temporality apart from Swedish colonial time. To the contrary, in the above text and in her other writings, she depicts Sami temporalities as intertwined with Swedish temporalities. For Laula, it is not only important that Swedish and Sami histories may share similar narrative arcs; it is also significant that the shape of their histories—and, by extension, of their futures—is not simply the “fated” result of the inevitable “progression” of time, but rather the direct product of centuries of Sami and Swedish settler relations. Indeed, Laula’s rhetoric seems directly tied to the multiple millennia of continuous interaction that the Sami have with the Germanic peoples to the south who would later become Swedish colonizers. Unlike the Native peoples of Turtle Island (later known as North America) and the Pacific, who have a history violently divided into pre- and postcontact periods by the arrival of colonizers, this long history of contact between the Sami and their eventual colonizers reframes the rhetorical work of Laula’s temporal rhetorics. In this context of lengthy interwoven histories, Laula’s emphasis on the deep entanglement of Swedish and Sami temporalities—their braided times—proves an essential rhetorical strategy for Sami resistance to colonization. Thus, Laula’s temporally situated strategies are uniquely situated for the contours of this particular context of Indigenous resistance.

In this study of Laula’s rhetoric, we begin by noting how this project extends existing scholarship on Indigenous rhetoric by focusing on the temporal topoi of Indigenous resistance beyond Turtle Island and the Pacific. We then describe how the history of colonization in Scandinavia differs from other colonial histories, and we emphasize the role of Swedish historical records in contemporary discourse. Next, we turn to the early twentieth century, when the Swedish Sami sought to resist colonial Swedish policy documents from 1886 and to establish equal civil rights alongside colonial Swedes. We analyze a key pamphlet that Laula wrote and publicly circulated in 1904 as well as the public debate in the Swedish press that was sparked by that pamphlet. We highlight the importance of braiding time as a central, albeit unstated, tactic in Sami resistance to Swedish colonization. Our analysis of the braided times implicit in Laula’s discourse is also reflected in our compositional method: rather than separating oppressive Swedish settler discourses into one section and Sami resistance into a subsequent section, we weave the two analytical sections together. Ultimately, we show how Laula responds to colonial rhetoric of temporal othering by articulating Sami present, historical, and future belonging as interwoven with Swedish temporalities, a strategy that mirrors their long history of continuous interaction.

Time and Indigenous Rhetoric on Turtle Island

Humanities scholars have long pointed to the ways that time has been used as an instrument for subjugation and resistance in Indigenous-settler relations. Much activist and academic effort has, for example, gone into debunking the temporal injustice embedded in what anthropologist Brewton Berry, in an early critique, calls “The Myth of the Vanishing Indian.” And in a more recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, literary scholar David Treuer challenges the narrative of the massacre at Wounded Knee as a final death blow to American Indian life and culture. In much of such discourses of disappearance, colonizers assume that Indigenous communities will perish, not because of colonial violence, but due to the developmental forces—the so-called progression—of time itself. In Time and the Other, anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls this displacement of colonized peoples to a different time a “denial of coevalness” (32), or a refusal to acknowledge the cotemporality of Natives with their colonizers in the present. Mark Rifkin, however, argues in Beyond Settler Time that the path toward Indigenous justice lies not only in the recognition of cotemporality with colonizers but also in adopting a plurality of Indigenous temporal frameworks that establish “temporal sovereignty” (3). Together, this research points to the significance of time as a tool for both settler oppression and Indigenous resistance. Building on this scholarship, we consider how additional temporal topoi may inform Indigenous resistance in colonial contexts that differ from those on Turtle Island.

When this wider humanities research about time and colonization is linked with the rich tradition of rhetorical scholarship about Indigenous rhetorics, the significance of both time and rhetoric for Indigenous-settler relations comes into focus. Rhetorical scholars have, for instance, examined (1) histories of Indigenous oppression and timely Native resistance strategies (Black; Hudson; Kelly; Pierce; Powell, “Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins”; Stromberg; Wieskamp and Smith), (2) the rhetorical implications of historical sites and museums about Native peoples (King; Lake et al.; McCue-Enser; Palczewski), and (3) the ongoing complicity of rhetorical studies, as a field, with hegemonic power structures that decenter Indigenous voices (Kelly and Black; King et al.; Na’puti; Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance”; Stromberg). In much of this research, time remains a latent thread, something implied by gestures toward historical belonging, traumatic memories, contemporary exigencies, and political futures. We build on this scholarship by bringing temporality to the forefront of Indigenous rhetorics and by focusing on the ways that Indigenous activists mobilize temporal topoi to resist subjugation. Similar to Randall A. Lake’s analysis of Red Power rhetorics, we are concerned with the ways that both settlers and Native activists employ “metaphors of time in arguments” (125). And, like Jason Edward Black, we aim to showcase how “Native voices held the possibility of challenging and threatening those in authority” (4). Crucially, we extend this research about the role of temporal rhetoric in Indigenous resistance into a context beyond Turtle Island and the Pacific.

Different Colonial Timelines and Their Lingering Consequences for Indigenous-Settler Rhetoric

On Turtle Island and in the Pacific, European arrival separates Indigenous histories into pre- and postcontact periods. The precontact histories of these locales often function as a key argument in the Indigenous fight for sovereignty, land and water rights, and cultural flourishing. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), for example, the Indigenous Māori predate Europeans by centuries. When Europeans arrived, Māori leveraged their position as tangata whenua (people of the land) to secure sovereignty over their territory in “He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tirene” (1835) and “Te Tiriti o Waitangi” (1840), two documents signed by Māori leaders and representatives of the British Crown (Forster 64–66). Although these agreements did not stop subsequent European land grabs and cultural oppression, they continue to shape relations between Māori and the state.² Like Māori, many Indigenous communities around the world have precontact histories that position them as “First Peoples” and therefore function as vital temporal arguments in Indigenous resistance to colonization.

In northern Fennoscandia, however, the Indigenous Sami have had thousands of years of interaction with the peoples who would become their colonizers: the Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, and Russians (Wallerström). This region was occupied by a wide array of communities long before anything like a Sami or a Swedish culture had been formed. This elongated history means that the colonization of the Sami-occupied Sapmi region (previously known as Lapland) was a centuries-long, discontinuous process in which colonial oppressors, step by painful step, deprived the Sami of rights allocated to other citizens. Without an origin story of first colonial contact, the Scandinavian colonization of the Sami has become susceptible to the “whitewashing strategy” (Naum and Nordin 4) of revisionist history. Carl-Gösta Ojala and Jonas Monie Nordin explain that the “very notion of Swedish and Scandinavian colonialism in the Sami areas has been very controversial, with widespread denial and ideas about Scandinavian colonialism as exceptional and somehow ‘kinder’ and less ‘colonial’ than that of other empires” (102). Two arguments often support such misplaced claims: the fleeting Swedish rule in overseas colonies, and the centuries-long annexation of Sapmi into the Swedish kingdom with no definite point of beginning (Fur 25–26). These whitewashing rhetorical strategies are in turn buttressed by a pair of temporal topoi: Swedish colonialism was either so brief in overseas colonies or so elongated in Sapmi that many Swedes do not view it as colonization. The blatant inconsistency of these temporal topoi demonstrates precisely how colonial temporal rhetoric can divorce the histories of the colonizers from the histories of the colonized and create instead what Chakrabarty calls a “homogenous”—and silencing—historiography (73).

The popular Disney films Frozen and Frozen II have brought this temporal contention in Scandinavian colonial history to a worldwide audience. Directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, these films tell the story of protagonist Elsa coming to grips with her mysterious magical powers and her Sami family history. While Frozen falls into the trap of ambiguously sprinkling markers of Scandinavian indigeneity in the film without explicitly addressing the histories of colonial oppression, the production team for Frozen II worked with members of the Sami Parliament to ensure better representation.³ Although not perfect in its depiction of the Sami, Frozen II foregrounds the temporal injustices of Scandinavian histories.⁴ The movie initially portrays the Sami as locked outside of the present Norwegian colonial settlement and instead located in an enchanted and anachronistic land steeped in everlasting stagnation. But the movie later reveals that this cultural and temporal division of the Sami from the Norwegian settlers is due to a colonial dam that destroys the present and future existence of Sami culture. The narrative arc of Frozen II thus upends colonial temporalities and works toward braiding the Sami and Scandinavian colonial histories together, acknowledging along the way the harms done by resource extraction, colonial epistemologies, and political subjugation. Similarly, as we demonstrate in this essay, the Sami activism of Laula and her contemporaries works to rebraid the temporalities of Sami and settler Swedes in a way that acknowledges the deeply intertwined nature of their histories and, therefore, of their linked presents and futures.

Laula’s Rebraiding of Sami and Settler Temporalities

In this section, we compare the temporal topoi expressed in an important pamphlet written by Laula with the temporal frameworks espoused in colonial Swedish policy documents and the Swedish press. Similar to Aja Martinez’s articulation of “critical race counterstory as rhetorical research methodology and method” (2), we juxtapose competing colonial and Indigenous narratives in an effort to “empower the minoritized” (3). Emphasizing what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the “reciprocity” of braiding (ix), we mirror Laula’s implicit rhetorical strategy of “braiding time” by intertwining our analysis of competing Sami and settler narratives together. The story begins and ends with Elsa Laula.

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In 1904, Laula wrote and circulated a prominent pamphlet titled “Facing Life or Death? Words of Truth on the Lappish Conditions” (Inför lif eller död?) in response to the Sami loss of land, resources, and political rights at the hands of the settler Swedish government. In this manifesto for Sami civil rights, Laula opens by telling a history of Sami and settler Swede encounters that differs from colonial accounts of that past:

Our tribe has lived far up among the mountainous tundra, in high Norrland, since time immemorial. However, the history of a vanished past relates that we Lapps have not always been required to seek our daily bread amongst the cold mountain tops. Indeed, fragments left behind from a distant era show that the Lapps once possessed spacious grazing land in favourable climes. Over the centuries, however, the Lapp has constantly had to make way for the farming Germanic race. Peaceable, calm, reserved and always content with his lot, the Lapp has left what he had thought was his birth right without protest, and inch by inch the Swedish settlers have taken over the grazing land that once was used by the Lapps. (1)

According to Laula’s depiction of this past, the Sami did not lose their land due to the mystical force of progressive time or the inevitable development of “cultural stages.” Rather, the Sami land was “taken over” by the “agricultural German race” and the “Swedish settlers.” That is, Laula rejects the racist temporal myth of the vanishing Indian and instead links the struggles of the Sami to a colonial Swedish land-grab that unfolded “[o]ver the centuries.” Resisting this colonial history, she uses her historical narrative to allocate blame, discuss political rights, and pry open the chains of temporal othering. Laula’s writing here echoes Na’puti’s call for a genealogy of Native American and Indigenous knowledge that articulates the processes of racialization and Indigenization in colonial knowledge (497–98). In other words, as a response to the colonial severing of an intertwined history, Laula rebraids these histories in a way that narrates—rather than glosses over—injustices and unequal power relations.

Laula’s account of Swedish history aligns with contemporary scholarship on early encounters between the Sami and the Swedes. During the Middle Ages, the Sami and their Scandinavian neighbors had a relatively reciprocal relationship, but those power dynamics began to slowly shift during early Scandinavian capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Ojala and Nordin 103–06). Frontier modernization began to take form, with incentives for Swedish settlers to move to Sapmi for agricultural production (Ojala and Nordin 107–08). Alongside aggressive missionary Christianity in Sapmi (Lindmark and Sundström), the Swedish kingdom shifted from asserting territorial dominance to developing revenue streams and accumulating future wealth. With this change, the Swedish state began to prioritize those who were considered to have the knowledge, culture, and/or racial characteristics that could best supply tax revenue to the state. In the early phases of this shift, the Sami could maintain relative political autonomy because they provided the international market with luxury furs as well as knowledge of sites for pearl fishing and mining precious minerals (Lundmark; Ojala and Nordin). In fact, a border agreement between Norway and Sweden in 1751 even asserted the Sami rights to the Sapmi region, implying a degree of Sami autonomy and their power to self-organize relative to the Swedish Crown (Lantto 37). The Swedish construction of racial hierarchies during this period was therefore largely based on binding the Sami to capitalist and nation-building notions of futurity. And although the Sami did not necessarily control these racialized “temporal regimes” (Bjork and Buhre 177), they nonetheless allowed the Sami to occupy a shared present and a tentative capitalist future with the Swedish settler government.

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But this period of relative reciprocity between the Sami and settler Swedes shifted again with the onslaught of modernity. In the eighteenth century, tensions over land intensified when resource extraction capitalism in the form of forestry and mining—later also hydropower, wind power, and tourism—became the dominant economic framework (Lundmark; Ojala and Nordin; Össbo). In 1886, the first Reindeer Grazing Act explicitly disenfranchised the Sami from their well-documented rights to Sapmi and conferred the ownership of these lands to the new Swedish settlers (Mörkenstam 79–98). The Swedes justified this land-grab through a racial-temporal coding of different uses of the land: Swedish agriculture and resource extraction were understood as productive for a prosperous future, whereas Sami nomadism was coded as backward and at a lower stage of cultural development (Buhre). In Out of Joint, Nomi Claire Lazar calls this kind of temporal repositioning “a primitivist lament,” in which Indigenous communities are relocated from the political present into an ahistorical past with a faux nostalgia (131–33). For the Sami who herded reindeer, such a primitivist lament meant they were denied the possibility to posit themselves as productive, tax-paying citizens. This social Darwinist and linear European view of cultural progression was then codified in what came to be known as the “Lapp-shall-remain-Lapp” ideology (Lantto 40–47). Ultimately, the “Lapp-shall-remain-Lapp” ideology of the Swedish authorities denied the “coevalness” (Fabian 32) with settler Swedes by presenting reindeer herding as existing outside an attenuated view of Swedish history of land ownership and also beyond their ambitious capitalist futures.

These colonial tactics were also efficient tools in what Na’puti calls the “politics of erasure” of indigeneity (496). Because the 1886 Act incorrectly assumed that all Sami were reindeer herders, the Sami who did not herd reindeer were stripped of their rights as Sami to use, inhabit, and own their territory, which severed them from their identity and their political agency (Lantto and Mörkenstam, “Sami Rights and Sami Challenges” 30–31). Over the next few decades, reindeer-herding policies and regulations continued, further narrowing the definition of who was considered Sami. This process culminated in the Reindeer Grazing Act of 1928, which stated that only members of a Sami Village (a collective of reindeer herders) were Sami, and that Sami women who married nonreindeer-herding men lost their reindeer herding rights (Amft 75–79). Together, the Reindeer Grazing Acts and the Lapp-shall-remain-Lapp ideology severed Sami temporalities—past, present, and future—from settler Swedish times and thus became the backdrop against which many violent colonial politics of erasure could unfold. At the hands of Swedish colonizers, the Sami suffered forced displacement (Labba), the upheaval of Indigenous social organization (Lantto and Mörkenstam, “Action, Organisation and Confrontation”), and racially segregated boarding schools informed by eugenics (Dankertsen; Huuva and Blind; Pusch). The harms done by the boarding schools is depicted in the award-winning film Sami Blood, directed by South Sami Amanda Kernell, which portrays the complex ways in which a young Sami woman is pushed away from her Sami identity. Such politics of erasure continue to haunt contemporary Sami life, culture, and politics.

The rhetorical separation of Sami from settler Swede histories and the material separation of the Sami from their land was therefore an elongated unraveling that began with settler occupation of Sapmi and advanced through multiple decades of racist legislation. Such an extended process of land confiscation aligns with what Rifkin identifies as the gradual, rather than abrupt, process of disenfranchising Native American peoples from their land (95–97). But for the settler Swedes, this land grab also required a blatant disavowal of a long and intertwined history with their Sami neighbors. The state policies thus performed a kind of temporal double-speak: they professed to safeguard the historical practices of a Native culture, but at the same time, that past was dismembered to fit the racial stereotypes of the present time. Put differently, these policies claimed to protect for the future what the settler Swedes perceived as a traditional Sami livelihood but, in the same breath, they erased the present possibility for the Sami to sustain that livelihood for future generations.

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Beginning in 1903, a group of South Sami organized a nationwide protest movement against the 1886 Reindeer Grazing Act. Laula, the group’s elected representative, traveled to Stockholm to speak before the parliament and later embarked on a national tour of Sweden and parts of Norway to build support for Sami civil rights. In her circulated pamphlet, Laula explicitly resists the divisive temporalities articulated by the Swedish government. Early in this document, she criticizes the Swedes who see the Sami way of life only in “the shimmering light of fairytales,” and she denounces those who view Sami culture “as if it was an outdated, gaudy picture next to the Swede’s higher cultural stage” (Inför lif eller död? 4–5). Laula rejects, in other words, the Swedish primitivist lament that unjustly places the Sami people in a fictionalized past divorced from political agency in the Swedish present. She insists that Sami histories not be severed from Swedish histories through the cultural assumptions expressed in the Reindeer Grazing Acts.

But rather than proposing radically different temporalities that might align more with Sami social and political organization, Laula engages in the difficult rhetorical work of rebraiding Sami and settler temporalities in a more just pattern. Against the colonial perception that the Sami lacked capacity for cultural development, Laula argues that any so-called backwardness (Inför lif eller död? 25) is due to the Swedish introduction of alcohol in the Sami communities (6–7), the economic strain for reindeer herders under Swedish legislation (7–12), a loss of land ownership to Swedish settlers (13–22), a lack of voting rights in Swedish elections (22–25), and an equal Swedish education (25–26). Speaking specifically on education, Laula argues that if the Sami were “allowed to acquire the teaching that the Swedish children enjoy, then culture and intelligence would likely also gain entry into Lapland” (26). For Laula, the present condition of the Sami is inseparable from Swedish colonial politics and settler prejudices. This process of revising hegemonic temporalities within existing settler discourses resonates with Powell’s discussion of the need to pay close attention to the exigencies to which Indigenous rhetors respond (“Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins” 80). For Laula, such an exigency involves not overthrowing the temporalities of Swedish colonization but rather underscoring how Indigenous temporalities have long been intertwined with settler temporalities.

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The attempts by Laula to rebraid Sami and settler Swede histories, however, sparked a national debate called the “Lapp question.” This debate peaked in the mainstream press between 1904 and 1909 and augmented the temporal divide between the settler Swedes and the Sami. Similar to the so-called Indian problem in North America (Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance” 401), many of the Swedish journalists framed the “Lapp question” as if the Sami activists were a problem needing resolution. The Swedish writers who debated this issue—almost all of whom were Swedish men writing anonymously—often employ temporal sleights of hand to disconnect the Sami from the Swedish present. Whether indifferent to the Sami or vehemently against them, many writers infantilize the Sami by calling them “the children of the tundra” (Nordin) or the “sons and daughters of the wilderness” (Lindhagen). Others describe Laula as a “Lapp girl” (“En lappflicka”) or as a “fairy princess” (“Elsa Laula och lapparna”). Collectively, this terminology locates Sami culture in a prior stage of arrested human development relative to the presumed “adulthood” of the Swedish agrarian settlers and, in so doing, disenfranchises the “childish” Sami from their political agency in the present. Other news articles display a misplaced nostalgia for what Paige Raibmon calls the “authentic Indian” (3) by complaining that Laula’s clothes do not look authentic enough and that she “speaks too loudly” to be Sami (“Elsa Laula. Lapparnas regent”) or by incorrectly assuming that all Sami are reindeer herders and have a racial predisposition to care for reindeer (“Lappfrågan”; “De populärvetenskapliga”). Together, these news articles deploy temporally coded racial assumptions about the Sami in an effort to strip them of agency in the present Swedish polity.

These Swedish writers also worked to sever the Sami from a collective Swedish future by echoing the myth of the vanishing Indian in what they believed to be the inevitable disappearance of the Sami. Journalist Salle Samson encapsulates this deplorable viewpoint when he writes, “The Lapp is doomed to downfall and death. This cannot be helped. However, it is the duty of the Swedish authorities to ease his death throes as far as possible. And hitherto, this they have done” (Inför lif eller död?). Samson’s indifference to cultural genocide is unequivocally appalling, but his racist assumptions about the inevitable lack of a Sami future were pervasive in the Swedish press, even if other writers expressed their racism in more indirect ways. For instance, while one sympathetic voice mourns the unavoidable loss of the Sami (Bromé), another more repugnant account views their disappearance through the racist lens of a progressive cultural narrative that sees the Sami as backward and lazy—in contrast to Swedish productivity—and therefore unable to survive if they abandon reindeer herding for farming (“Den gamla visan”). Thus, whether explicitly racist or naively sorrowful, this national press debate invoked a collection of temporal tropes that relocated the Sami to a temporal existence that was at once behind Swedish history, outside the contemporary colonial moment, and disappearing in the Swedish future.

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While the Swedish press sought to lock the Sami in a future of nonbecoming, Laula responded by providing alternative—and linked—futures for the Sami and Swedish settlers. In the same pamphlet, Inför lif eller död?, Laula contends that if the Sami were to be guaranteed equal voting rights in the Swedish state in questions that concerned them, then “grand and important questions for the future” of the Sami could have a “joyous” outcome (24). At the time, Sweden had a number of voting restrictions, including race, gender, and income (Berg and Ericsson), so Laula’s suggestion is a radical reimagination of political subjectivity. Further, Laula counters the racist view that the Sami are lazy by claiming futurist positions; she insists that the Sami are “hard-working” and “assiduous” and that they would have a “prosperous” outlook if they were only given land rights in Sweden (14). Here, Laula links Sami land ownership with tax revenue for the Swedish state and a flourishing capitalist future. She suggests that if the Sami were included in Swedish capitalist discourses that center on generating future profit, then they too could become economically valuable subjects and gain a political voice in the state alongside Swedish settlers. Laula’s claim here is more than an assertion of coevalness, or cotemporality, with Swedish settlers; it is a call to acknowledge the deep interweaving of Sami and Swedish futures that also reflects their interwoven histories. Rather than seeking a separate temporal frame that ensures Sami emancipation, Laula engages in the difficult task of braiding Sami and settler futures in a way that acknowledges their temporal interconnectedness. Thus, while Laula’s insistence on participating in this capitalist discourse may not appear revolutionary, her emphasis on linked temporalities nonetheless plays an essential role in fighting for Indigenous rights in a context in which colonizers effaced centuries of continuous interaction with their Indigenous neighbors and threatened to do the same to their shared future.

In addition to molding future discourses toward a sense of belonging within a Swedish democratic and capitalist state, Laula also insists in her pamphlet on the Sami right to belong in the present as a political agent. She concludes by urging collective Sami action and self-organization: “Brothers and sisters, I end these words with a call to action. May forceful actions follow these words of mine, spoken at a time in which the future of the Lapp appears threatened on all sides and his right to the soil to which we were all born to seek our livelihood disputed” (30). Like before, Laula rewrites the idea of a vanishing Sami future by pointing out that it is “threatened” by Swedish settlers, not just magically disappearing on its own. She also links the past of their birth directly to the soil and the land that Swedish colonizers are trying to steal. But in this passage, Laula’s invocation of the past and the future primarily serves her aims in the present. With her present tense verbs, Laula mobilizes their histories and futures to demand political action now. She calls for a kairotic response to the present exigency of this shared political moment. In so doing, Laula upends colonial discourses that position the Sami as existing outside of the political present and therefore without political agency in the Swedish state. In fact, these declarations are more than just a representation of the Sami in the Swedish present. They actualize Sami political agency in the Swedish present. They are a manifestation of the Sami power to act, to speak, to be with their Swedish neighbors in past, present, and future times.

Conclusion: Braided Times for Sami Justice

The colonization of Sapmi shows that the Swedish settlers, like their colonial counterparts on Turtle Island and in the Pacific, engaged in a “denial of coevalness” (Fabian 32). Such discourse divorced the Sami from settler histories, political presents, and capitalist futures and, instead, relocated their Indigenous neighbors to an isolated and “earlier” stage in European-centric notions of “human progress.” But in this colonial context marked by long histories of continuous interaction, the Sami activists led by Elsa Laula mirrored this entangled history by arguing for acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of Sami time and colonial Swedish time. This aspiration for plaited temporalities is something more than a desire for Sami coevalness, or cotemporality, with Swedish settlers in the modern present. It is, instead, a call for braided times, a cry to honor not only their linked presents but also their long-connected histories and their interwoven futures.

Like Rifkin, then, we hesitate to position cotemporality as the primary way to achieve Indigenous justice because doing so problematically asks Native peoples to assimilate to the hegemony of settler time (viii). And although working toward “temporal sovereignty” (Rifkin 3) may support Indigenous justice on Turtle Island and perhaps other locations, we also recognize the difficulties of separating Native and settler temporalities in a context, like Scandinavia, where they have long-standing relations. Thus, for Indigenous communities who have long periods of interaction with their eventual colonizers, Laula’s implicit appeal to braiding time demonstrates another key rhetorical strategy for Native resistance to the racialized temporalities that sever Indigenous communities from their land, rights, and political agency. In contexts like these, continuing to work for Indigenous justice can mean recognizing how settler histories are inseparably linked to Native histories and, in turn, weaving stronger collective ties in the present to create more bountiful—and braided—futures.

When juxtaposed with narratives of colonization on Turtle Island and in the Pacific, these interwoven temporalities of the Sami and Swedish settlers provide an additional perspective that further demonstrates the flexibility of temporal rhetoric during colonization and its resistance. Rhetorical studies, therefore, has much to learn from studying the rhetorical practices of Indigenous communities in Scandinavia and other less examined, but no less important, colonial contexts. Even if such research reveals that Indigenous communities with different colonization narratives share similar rhetorical strategies for resisting imperial violence, rhetorical studies still gains a valuable perspective from beyond Turtle Island and, crucially, continues the work of centering Native voices in the field.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the blind reviewers and Robin Jensen for their generous feedback.

Notes

¹ During this time period, the word “Lapp” was used by both Sami activists and the Swedish state to describe the Indigenous Sami people. This word is no longer used in public or academic discourse. Here, we follow contemporary Sami scholarship and only include the term in quotes from original sources.

² For more information about these historical documents and Māori self-determination, see Durie.

³ For example, Frozen does not address why a character like Kristoff wears Sami snowshoes, is best friends with a reindeer, and lives outside the Norwegian colonial settlement of Arendelle.

⁴ Critics of settler colonialism might, for instance, wonder why all of the lead Sami characters appear white, while the minor Sami characters look more like stereotyped Native Americans.