Talking about violence: bloody stories and colonialism in Sápmi, ca. 1600-1900

ABSTRACT

From the seventeenth century well into the twentieth violent stories depicting ancient conflicts between the Sámi and their neighbours circulated widely in and around Sápmi. Narratives about battles and raids were produced and consumed for different purposes by diverse narrators and audiences employing various media. This article investigates how these violent narratives became embedded in Swedish and Finnish colonialism in Sápmi between 1600 and 1900. It argues that the stories offered various groups a platform for discussing issues troubling them in their own colonial present. Three themes were of pivotal importance to the storytellers and their audiences: the meaning of colonial conquest, Sámi survivance, and the boundaries separating Sámi from non-Sámi.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• storytelling
• violence
• Sámi
• Sápmi

Introduction

When working as a vicar among the Sámi in Jiellevárre in the 1740s, Pehr Högström encountered a storied landscape in which violent narratives about ancient bloodshed constituted key landmarks. Stories about battles and raids between the Sámi and their various neighbours bombarded Högström through different media. Local Sámi told him that Swedes had ‘driven them away’ from their original homelands that had ‘anciently’ covered ‘all Sweden’.¹ In the pages of Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia (1673) he read how Finns had centuries earlier expelled the Sámi from what is now southern Finland. The Gájddom Sámi, in turn, showed Högström a mountain slope where their ancestors had once destroyed a war party of enemies they identified as ‘Karjel’. Elsewhere the vicar learned about a battle between Sámi and Russians on an island in the Lule River. While Högström did not believe all these stories, he considered them important enough to include them in his Beskrifning öfwer de til Sweriges Krona lydande Lapmarker (1747), an ambitious work seeking to promote knowledge about the Sámi and their country among Swedish elites.²

Högström’s encounters with violent stories were far from unique. Stories about ancient battles between the Sámi and diverse neighbouring peoples – identified by different narrators as Čuđit, Finns, Birkarlar, Karelians, Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, and others – have for centuries been widespread among the Sámi and their neighbours in and around Sápmi, the Sámi homeland.³ The earliest surviving examples include medieval sagas describing violence between Scandinavians and Sámi.⁴ Many oral narratives recorded much later among Sámi, Finns, Swedes, and other peoples contain details likewise suggesting medieval or earlier origins, while others probably stem from the long wars between Sweden and Russia in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.⁵ Despite the considerable age of this storytelling tradition and its early textual reiterations in the sagas, most of the violent stories dealing with the Sámi and their foes only become visible to us after 1600, when a diverse set of literate individuals ranging from Crown officials to clergymen and antiquarians began recording them for various purposes. From then on until well into the twentieth century violent stories were narrated everywhere in and around Sápmi. Storytellers and their audiences included Sámi and non-Sámi alike, both commoners circulating oral narratives and elites producing and consuming written ones.

What are we to make of these stories? How should one, in particular, account for the keen interest with which many diverse groups circulated, consumed, and reworked them during the centuries after 1600, long after the bloody events they described had apparently occurred? In Sweden and Finland the violent stories disrupt national histories that developed after the Second World War and portrayed the expansion of both countries to Sámi homelands as a non-violent process of ‘state integration’.⁶ Although this historiographical tradition has been challenged in the 2000s, as scholars have increasingly placed colonialism at the centre of Sápmi’s history,⁷ the view still prevails that the resource extraction, political control, and cultural suppression connected to the expansion of Swedish and Finnish settlers, institutions, and industries into Sápmi involved comparatively little physical violence of the kind accompanying colonialism in other parts of the globe. In this context, the violent stories circulating in and around Sápmi may seem out of place and have consequently aroused wide but uneven interest. Sámi oral narratives about confrontations with violent outsiders have received most attention, especially among folklorists who have interpreted them as ‘defensive ethnic folklore’, seeing in them an Indigenous strategy for discussing the threats of colonialism.⁸ In contrast, the violent stories that circulated orally in Swedish and Finnish peasant communities have been discussed much less and seldom in the context of colonialism.⁹ Literary versions of bloody stories, created by Swedish and Finnish priests and scholars, have in turn been primarily examined in terms of their factual veracity and their impact on the evolving historiographies of northern Fennoscandia, again with few explicit linkages to colonialism.¹⁰

While previous studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of the different versions of bloody stories, there has been comparatively little effort to connect the various Indigenous and non-Indigenous traditions of storytelling and to explore what their entangled histories tell about colonialism in Sápmi. This article therefore traces the variegated ways in which various individuals and communities in and around Sápmi employed stories about ancient bloodshed to consider and debate issues crucial in their colonial present between roughly 1600 and 1900. My approach is based on the view, shared by oral historians, folklorists, and anthropologists, that storytelling must be seen as complex social interaction enmeshed in broader historical contexts.¹¹ When people tell stories about the past, they invite others into a conversation in a specific social and political setting. Addressing contemporary concerns from contemporary vantage points, the storytellers and their audiences imagine, discuss, and debate what occurred in the past and what bearing it has for the present.¹² Stories, then, tell less about the events they depict than about the meanings which narrators and audiences ascribe to those events.¹³ Furthermore, storytelling constructs not only the past but also the present: stories about the past authorize specific ways of seeing and organizing the world and this can either validate or challenge contemporary political and social arrangements.¹⁴ Both stories and their meanings are shifting, however, for when narrators and audiences face new situations they often reimagine the past and the present.¹⁵ Tracing the changing ways in which stories are created, narrated, and interpreted therefore offers an opportunity to glimpse at variously positioned individuals and communities engaged in the interlinked processes of making sense of their past and constructing their contemporary world.¹⁶

Building on these deliberations, this article argues that the circulation of violent stories in and around Sápmi from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century needs to be understood in the context of colonialism. Time and again these narratives were produced and consumed by people entangled, in divergent ways and in multiple roles, in the expansion of states, churches, settlers, and extractive industries to the Sámi homelands. The Gájddom Sámi, for example, told Högström about their battles against the Karjel when the vicar was trying to root out their traditional spirituality. Högström then circulated these and other bloody stories in a book intended to make the Sámi and their homelands legible to Swedish elites who claimed Sápmi and its people as ‘belonging’ to their Crown. Identifying such connections between Sápmi’s violent stories and colonialism is vital for apprehending the complex histories of colonialism in Sápmi. Colonialism has long been a contested concept among scholars of northern Fennoscandian history who have interpreted the term in widely differing ways.¹⁷ There is nothing new in such disagreements. When Sámi and non-Sámi, commoners and elites, produced and consumed stories about ancient confrontations between Sámi and their neighbours after 1600, they simultaneously constructed divergent understandings of the intrusion of states, churches, industries, and settlers into Sápmi in their own present. I shall contend that three themes were central in these rival visions: conquest, Indigenous survivance, and communal boundaries.

When charting the mutually constitutive histories of violent stories and colonialism, this article zooms in on the geographical area of modern Finland and Sweden, with an emphasis on the former. While such a delineation is artificial – during the three hundred or so years under scrutiny neither violent stories nor colonial processes followed today’s state borders –, it is necessary in order to keep the breadth of material and context manageable. Across this wide region, clergymen, government officials, and scholars began writing down bloody narratives heard in Sámi, Finnish, and Swedish communities after 1600, invariably as part of larger political and academic projects not primarily interested in ancient conflicts. Literate elites also crafted their own versions of violent narratives, typically while writing ethnographies or histories of Sápmi and the surrounding areas. The existing textual records of bloody stories were thus created by various people engaged in diverse antiquarian, historical, and ethnographic projects. As a result, these records are extremely dispersed and their temporal and spatial coverage is uneven; it is usually impossible, therefore, to talk about the distribution or ‘typicality’ of the stories in anything like exact quantitative terms.

There are other challenges as well. The educated individuals who penned down oral narratives heard among commoners seldom did so in verbatim. Instead, they usually recorded only short summaries, typically using Swedish or Latin even when the storytellers had spoken Sámi or Finnish. Even comparatively detailed translations were sometimes edited significantly to highlight, explain, or obscure their narrative elements according to the interests and tastes of their collectors and publishers.¹⁸ The recorders of the oral stories, moreover, seldom identified, or provided more than minimal information of, the individuals whose stories they recorded, making it difficult to assess how the narrators’ background, motivations, and creativity shaped the telling of bloody stories.¹⁹ The recorders also tended to leave out many aspects of the storytellers’ bodily performances – gestures, facial expressions –, as well as the social contexts of the storytelling events. All this seriously hampers efforts to penetrate the social meanings of oral storytelling. The written stories of the elites, too, present problems. Information on who read these narratives and how they interpreted what they read is limited, restricting our understanding of the kinds of conversations the texts inspired.

Fortunately, several factors help to mitigate these problems. Large numbers of oral stories were recorded over a wide geographical area and across more than three centuries. The existing sample therefore offers a relatively representative picture of the kinds of issues that were important to vernacular storytellers and their audiences. From time to time, moreover, some recorders provided information on who told oral stories about ancient violence, to whom, when, and where. Finally, elite members who wrote down bloody stories typically inserted personal comments, making it possible to follow at least some of the elite conversations sparked by the stories.

Conquest

In 1886 journalist G. A. Andersson visited the village of Pelkosenniemi in what is today northeastern Finland. Curious about the community’s history, he listened keenly when local Finnish settlers told him stories describing how their ancestors had migrated to the area from the south. In particular, ‘old folks still retained in their memory one thing and another heard from their parents’ about ‘Old Pelkonen’. These stories traced the adventures of Paavo Pelkonen, a Finnish settler who had come to the area to hunt and fish in the 1600s. According to the narratives, the local Sámi had tried to drive the intruder away. Pelkonen, ‘a stout, sturdy, and courageous woodsman’, had however defeated them and made his home in Pelkosenniemi. Consequently, in the 1880s ‘Old Pelkonen’ was remembered as the ‘first founder of Finnish settlements’ in the area.²⁰

At the heart of the stories Andersson heard was conquest, the violent taking of other people’s homeland and the expulsion, subjugation, or killing of the original inhabitants. From at least the seventeenth to the early twentieth century stories about conquering the Sámi – invariably called ‘Lapps’ by the narrators – enjoyed wide popularity in many Finnish and Swedish communities. These ‘conquest stories’, as they can be called, greatly shaped both elite and vernacular understandings of the past while also constructing authority, social order, and territorial claims in the present. What Indigenous scholars have called ‘foundational violence’ figures prominently in conquest stories.²¹ Time and again, the narrators portrayed their own contemporary society as built on ancient violence against the Sámi. Yet the meanings given to the bloody deeds of conquest varied considerably, as conquest stories were narrated by various groups in shifting political contexts for multiple purposes. The stories, as well as their links to colonialism, are thus surprisingly complex.

While conquest stories may have been produced and consumed orally long before, apart from medieval sagas they did not leave any textual traces before the late sixteenth century. It was then that some of these narratives captured the attention of Sweden’s rulers. Increasingly interested in the booming maritime commerce on the Arctic coast as well as in the lucrative economic and political opportunities offered in Sápmi by Sámi trade and taxation, the Swedish Crown was eager for territorial and commercial expansion in the North. These ambitions threw Sweden into conflict with Denmark, also seeking a foothold in Sápmi.²² As the two kingdoms argued over who held what rights on the Arctic coast and in adjacent areas, Swedish officials turned to history to find support for their claims. In the 1590s they launched an ambitious project for gathering information on northern Fennoscandian history in the Swedish and Finnish communities skirting the northern arch of the Gulf of Bothnia. The local testimonies collected there recounted a curious story. According to it, the Sámi and their country had once been dominated by men called Birkarlar who had collected tribute from the Indigenous communities. Some versions detailed that the Birkarlar had originally come from Birkala in southern Finland and had conquered the Sámi in war.²³

This story fit neatly into the needs of the Swedish Crown. Based along the northern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia and in adjacent river valleys, the Birkarlar in the sixteenth century were powerful and prosperous Swedish- and Finnish-speaking traders who travelled extensively throughout Sápmi trading with the Sámi and collecting tribute from them. Their activities on Sámi homelands had ancient roots and had been formally authorized by the kings of Sweden in the fourteenth century.²⁴ This history, coupled with the testimonies of Birkarl conquests over the Sámi, allowed Swedish diplomats negotiating with Denmark in the late 1590s and early 1600s to argue that the Birkarlar were subjects of the king of Sweden, holding trading and taxation privileges granted by him, and had therefore spread his sovereignty over the Sámi and their country when subjugating them. Such an interpretation would have given Sweden a claim to much of northern Fennoscandia, including the Arctic coast.²⁵ Revealingly, conquest stories thus make their first appearance in the written record as a part of a Crown effort to assert authority over Sápmi.

The Danes were not impressed by the Birkarl stories. Questioning the veracity of the narratives, they had by 1603 stonewalled Swedish efforts to translate the stories into sovereignty and territorial possessions.²⁶ This did not spell an end to the stories, however. Indeed, although some historians have suspected Swedish officials of fabricating the stories to bolster their Crown’s Arctic claims,²⁷ the narratives apparently had a much longer history in the Birkarl communities, and they certainly continued to flourish there long after the king’s men had stopped gathering them.²⁸ A few traces survive to suggest that conquest stories played important social roles among the early-seventeenth-century Birkarlar. Around 1600 Johannes Bureus, a Crown official interested in ancient history, penned down a narrative which he traced back to the vicar of Piteå whose father was a Birkarl trader.²⁹ Told in colourful detail, the story narrated how a peasant from Birkala ambushed and killed fifteen powerful Sámi leaders and then took ‘Lapland and all the tribute’ paid there under the control of his family.³⁰ Olaus Petri Niurenius, the vicar of Umeå, added more detail. Written sometime between 1619 and 1645, his version was apparently based on various oral accounts, at least some of which Niurenius had probably heard among the Birkarlar in Luleå. According to Niurenius, centuries ago Tavaster under a headman named Mathias had raided the Sámi until the latter had agreed to pay them an annual tribute. Mathias had later transferred his tributary rights to his Birkarl neighbours.³¹

The stories circulated by Bureus and Niurenius make no effort to support Sweden’s claims to the Arctic coast, suggesting that they followed a local narrative tradition among the Birkarlar. By 1600 the Birkarl storytellers and audiences would have infused stories like these with political meanings dramatically different from those propagated by Crown officials. As the Crown extended its influence northward, it coveted growing control over all northern communities. Consequently, through the sixteenth century the Birkarlar had increasingly lost their political and economic privileges in Sápmi to the king and his men.³² Frustrated, some Birkarl families fought back and strove to remind the Crown of their ancient rights. For them, telling stories about ancestors who had vanquished the Sámi and dominated the North would have been an important strategy for defending their old position of power.³³ Other Birkarlar, in turn, adjusted to the changing political currents by enlisting in the king’s service as bailiffs, hired to collect the king’s tribute and enforce the king’s law among the Sámi.³⁴ As they increasingly linked themselves to the Crown, these Birkarl families, too, may have found it meaningful to portray themselves as the ancient rulers of the Sámi.³⁵

Conquest stories involving Birkarlar were thus told by diverse groups pursuing conflicting goals in the complex contests among rival kingdoms and local communities in the Fennoscandian North. Common to all retellings, however, was a strong linkage between present-day political power and past acts of violence against the Sámi. Both Birkarlar and Crown officials circulated stories in which a violent conquest of the Sámi conferred to the conquerors a legitimate authority over people and territory. These stories were essentially violent genealogies of a hierarchical social order with the conquered Sámi at its bottom.

Such stories gained wider traction in Sweden as the seventeenth century wore on and the kingdom intensified its push into Sápmi. As the Crown promoted mining operations, Christian missions, and agricultural settlements on Sámi homelands, several clergymen and scholars produced ethnographic and historical studies offering northward-looking Swedish elites up-to-date information on Sápmi and its inhabitants.³⁶ Birkarl stories provided many of them with a platform for discussing Sámi origins and the place of the Indigenous people in the expanding kingdom.³⁷

The most fleshed-out of these adaptations can be found in Schefferus’s Lapponia. Published in 1673, Lapponia was designed to satisfy the curiosity of Swedish elites about the kingdom’s new possessions and subjects in the North. At the same time, it was also fashioned to bolster Sweden’s reputation as a Christian, civilized power among European readers.³⁸ To achieve the latter goal, the book carefully constructs the Sámi as Others who are culturally, spiritually, and physically distinct from the Swedes. They are portrayed as heathens immersed in witchcraft and leading a nomadic life in an inhospitable wilderness. Yet the Sámi are also presented as subjects of the Swedish Crown. A historical narrative tracing how Sweden came to rule this exotic people plays a central role in Lapponia. According to Schefferus, in the early Middle Ages the Swedish conquest of what is now southern Finland drove northward many locals opposed to the new rulers. Gradually these refugees developed a new culture, language, and identity as Sámi. With time, their former neighbours, the Finnish-speaking Tavaster and Birkarlar, began raiding them and finally the latter came to rule the Sámi and their homelands. This was not the climax of Schefferus’s story, however. In a novel twist, he portrayed the Birkarl conquerors as selfish aggrandizers out to exploit northern resources for their private benefit. Schefferus’s story reaches its culmination when King Gustav Vasa crushes the unjust Birkarl regime and brings all northern lands and peoples under Crown authority.³⁹

While ostensibly concerned with Sámi origins, Schefferus’s narrative is at least as much a creation story of a centralized Swedish kingdom. Crucially, Schefferus has the Sámi evolve from refugees abused by various Finnish groups into Crown subjects protected by the king. His vision is that of an early modern ‘conglomerate state’, a hierarchical mosaic of diverse peoples under a single sovereign.⁴⁰ Such a polity, in Schefferus’ view, had space for the Sámi, as long as they were integrated into its hierarchical order in a subordinate role. This vision has touches of what postcolonial scholars call ‘the rule of colonial difference’. The term refers to discourses about culture and race that in many colonial empires have drawn a categorical boundary between the colonizers and the colonized, portraying the latter as a fundamentally inferior group of Others who must be governed by the culturally or racially superior colonists.⁴¹ In envisioning Sweden in such terms Schefferus paralleled broader ideological currents in early modern Europe. In the seventeenth century many emerging colonial powers imagined themselves as hierarchical but inclusive empires and sought to encapsulate Indigenous peoples within their political structures as valuable but subordinate subjects.⁴²

A radically different image of conquest emerges in vernacular conquest stories that circulated orally in many Finnish and Swedish peasant communities. Again, these narratives may have had considerable age, but none were written down until the publication of Lapponia had made clergymen, scientists, and other literate individuals curious about folk stories describing ancient violence between the Sámi and the Finnish and Swedish settlers. A few conquest stories were recorded by priests among Finnish and Swedish peasants in the eighteenth century; many more were penned down in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by clergymen, antiquarians, folklorists, and journalists. In Sweden, conquest stories were recorded at least in Ångermanland, Jämtland, and Västerbotten.⁴³ They enjoyed an even wider distribution in Finland. There they were recorded almost across the whole country from Rovaniemi, Kemijärvi, and Sodankylä in the north through Kuusamo, Savo, Ostrobothnia, Central Finland, and Karelia all the way to the southwestern coast.⁴⁴ The following analysis of vernacular conquest stories focuses on the Finnish narratives due to their evident popularity across such an extensive area.

Since most Finnish conquest stories survive only as brief summaries, their histories remain far more enigmatic than those of the Birkarl stories that so fascinated literate elites. Nevertheless, they clearly formed one strand in a much larger oral genre, the ‘settler stories’ that flourished in peasant communities across Finland well into the twentieth century. As their name implies, settler stories depicted the birth of the narrators’ home village and commemorated the ancestors who had founded it.⁴⁵ Frequently, these stories recognized that the country now possessed by the village had originally been inhabited by another people, the ‘Lapps’. The ‘Lapps’ were often portrayed, especially in southern Finland, as shadowy, half-mythical heathens who had, one way or another, vanished to make way for the Finnish newcomers.⁴⁶ The disappearance of the Sámi is, then, a key element in many Finnish settler stories. This sets them apart from the various renderings of the Birkarl narratives. While the latter consistently climaxed in the integration of the Sámi into a hierarchical social order as a subject people, Finnish settler stories were built around the ‘elimination of the Native’, a central political and cultural process in settler colonialism.⁴⁷ Because settler colonialism aims at permanent, large-scale settlement of the homelands of another people, it is more interested in eradicating the original inhabitants than in integrating them into the emerging colonial society.⁴⁸ Historical narratives are among the many weapons used in this eliminatory process. Across the world, settler colonial societies have created narrative traditions in which Indigenous peoples vanish in the face of colonial expansion, either because their primitive culture cannot sustain them or because the settlers defeat them in a military confrontation. In both cases, narratives of disappearance construct the settler colonists as the rightful heirs of Indigenous homelands.⁴⁹

Finnish settler stories follow a similar pattern. Although many of them offer no explanation for the disappearance of the ‘Lapps’, others centre on violent conquest. The examples abound. In the 1760s peasants living around Lake Kemijärvi told about the massacre of a local Sámi village by Finns.⁵⁰ Some sixty years later stories about the killing of ‘many heathen Lapps’ at Lake Olkkajärvi by ‘Christian Finns’ circulated in Rovaniemi.⁵¹ When travelling in Karelia in 1839, ethnographer Mathias Castrén encountered a widespread tradition according to which ‘the Lapps had been the oldest inhabitants of the country and that they had been afterwards uprooted by the Finns’.⁵² Around the same time stories about Finns expelling ‘Lapps’ from their old homelands were told as far south as the coast near Turku.⁵³

A recurrent feature in the Finnish conquest stories is their strong focus on key economic resources. Time and again, storytellers described how Finns had gained possession of pivotal resource locations by killing or expelling ‘Lapps’. Especially lakes and rivers, important for fishing, figure prominently in the stories. Many narratives are explicitly about conflicts over fisheries.⁵⁴ Others depict battles on lakeshores and riversides,⁵⁵ suggesting a link to fishing disputes. Such stories resonated with actual practices in Finnish peasant communities. Until the late seventeenth century, it had been common among Finnish peasants to use force to wrest farmland, meadows, and fisheries from neighbours.⁵⁶ In this context, telling stories about ancestors defeating the ‘Lapps’ and gaining control of their fisheries or hunting grounds appear to have formed a culturally recognized method of making claims to important resources. In areas close to extant Sámi communities such stories fortified the claims of settler families and villages against those of the Indigenous people. It can hardly be a coincidence, for example, that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries several stories commemorated Finnish victories over Sámi around Lake Kemijärvi whose abundant fisheries had been a constant source of conflicts between Sámi and Finns throughout the 1600s.⁵⁷ But conquest stories were also employed to sort out conflicting claims among Finnish settlers themselves. For instance, in the 1820s one Kemi-based family asserted monopoly over fishing in Lake Saittajärvi, almost two hundred kilometres to the northeast, on the grounds that its ancestor had once destroyed a large Sámi village there.⁵⁸

Vernacular conquest stories about Sámi elimination and Birkarl stories about Sámi subjugation embodied rival visions of conquest and reflected radically different vantage points. From the seventeenth century on the Birkarl stories were cherished by elites envisioning the northward-stretching Sweden as a hierarchical but inclusive kingdom that needed new subjects as taxpayers, workers, and converts. In contrast, many peasant communities saw the Sámi as competitors for key resources and told stories that celebrated their disappearance. Conquest, then, could mean many things, as Swedish and Finnish settlers, officials, clergymen, traders, and industrialists intruded on Sámi homelands and contemplated their relations with the Indigenous communities.

Survivance

The Sámi, too, told stories about ancient conflicts between their ancestors and their various neighbours. Indeed, when Johan Turi wrote his seminal Muittalus samid birra (1910), the first book about the Sámi in a Sámi language by a Sámi author, he included in it several stories about Indigenous resistance against violent outsiders, contextualizing them with a laconic statement: ‘The Sámi have had many foes’.⁵⁹ Just like the Finnish and Swedish conquest stories, the Sámi narrative tradition is probably very old,⁶⁰ but it did not surface in the written records until the seventeenth and eighteenth century, when several clergymen working in Sápmi referenced violent Sámi stories, usually briefly, in their ethnographic and historical writings.⁶¹ A far greater number of narratives were recorded in the 1800s and early 1900s by priests, folklorists, ethnographers, and other travellers.⁶² Stories about bloody encounters with various invaders remained well-known in many Sámi communities well into the twentieth century.⁶³

Sámi stories about battles, raids, and massacres have been characterized as ‘the folklore of a colonized people’,⁶⁴ as well as ‘defensive folklore’.⁶⁵ Both expressions aptly highlight important linkages between the stories and colonialism. On the one hand, the narratives depict the harsh realities the Sámi had to adjust to when their homelands turned into zones of contestation and expansion for the neighbouring polities. On the other hand, the bloody stories were not merely, or even primarily, tragic accounts about how the Sámi became colonized. In fact, Sámi storytellers systematically employed violent stories to challenge colonialism and to refuse a status as conquered and colonized subjects. Unlike the Finnish and Swedish conquest stories that represented the Sámi as a subjugated or vanished people, Indigenous storytellers portrayed their communities as actively and successfully confronting aggressive outsiders.

The multiple ways in which Sámi narrators engaged colonialism can be explored with the help of the concept of ‘survivance’. This term, a compound of ‘survival’ and ‘resistance’, was coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor to refer to a wide range of Indigenous practices that maintain a vigorous and autonomous Indigenous presence in the context of colonialism. Unlike mere survival, survivance actively contests colonial domination, often through storytelling. ‘Survivance stories’, Vizenor argues, fight the colonial subjugation and erasure of Indigenous peoples and cultures by deconstructing colonial narratives, imaginaries, and discourses and by creating and maintaining Indigenous alternatives to them. Storytelling, then, energizes ‘an active sense of [Indigenous] presence’ in the middle of the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual pressures of colonialism.⁶⁶

Analysing the violent Sámi narratives recorded after 1600 as a survivance strategy is not to suggest that they were deliberately invented as a response to the accelerating invasion of states, churches, industrial enterprises, and settlers to Sápmi from the seventeenth century on. The details of many Sámi narratives point to far earlier origins, and most stories clearly depict events in the more distant past. By the twentieth century many North Sámi narrators in fact classified the violent stories as dološmáinnas or ‘ancient stories’.⁶⁷ Even earlier, a sense of temporal distance was evidenced by how Sámi storytellers identified the enemies of their people in the narratives. Even though some narrators used such clearly recognizable contemporary ethnonyms as Swedes, Finns, Karelians, Russians, or Norwegians, most called the foes ‘Čuđit’. An old word with a complex history and an uncertain etymology, Čuđit may have originally referred to a specific ethnic group, but by the time the Sámi stories began to be recorded it had come to mean ancient enemies more generally without pinpointing their identity.⁶⁸ Rather than invent new stories about contemporary colonists, then, the Sámi storytellers did something more complex: they recycled old stories about aggressive outsiders to discuss the concerns that troubled them in the present, as new sets of intruders became an increasingly powerful and disruptive presence in Sápmi.

Sámi may have found ancient stories about hostile outsiders a meaningful medium for addressing present-day concerns precisely because these stories had been around for a long time and had already become a key element in Sámi understandings of the past. Just how deeply such stories were embedded in the Sámi world is best illustrated by the fact that throughout Sápmi they were intimately inscribed into the landscape.⁶⁹ Placenames like Giebosduoddar,⁷⁰ Tjudewaare,⁷¹ and Mielikon pahta⁷² referenced entire stories about violent confrontations. Even where no placename remained to commemorate past violence, most Sámi storytellers situated their bloody narratives at specific sites familiar to their audiences: at a bend in a local river, on an island near an important fishery, on a cliff overlooking an oft-used pass.⁷³ Storytelling itself seems to have been connected to such places, too, for some Swedish and Finnish travellers remarked that they had been told about ancient battles at or near the very place where the events were believed to have occurred.⁷⁴ In many ways, then, the Sámi lived in ‘memoryscapes’ in which recollections of past bloodshed constantly infiltrated the here and now, giving the stories considerable social meaning and emotional force.⁷⁵

The new meanings Sámi storytelling gained in the context of colonialism after 1600 are best explored by charting themes recurring in the narratives. Such an analysis, while far from conclusive, allows us to glimpse into how the Sámi made ancient stories a vehicle of survivance in a rapidly changing world. The most crucial element of the Sámi stories in this regard is their systematic juxtaposition of images of Indigenous loss and suffering with those of Indigenous agency and power. Many stories feature harrowing spectacles of pain, fear, and injustice. In the mid-1700s, for instance, a priest named Johan Ervast recorded a Sámi narrative describing a Russian massacre of an entire Indigenous village in Sodankylä where ‘blood [had] run in streams’.⁷⁶ Almost a century later Anders Nilsson Ruonga, the guardian of the traditions of a prominent Sámi family in Árjapluovve, told to the missionary Petrus Læstadius of Birkarlar burning a large number of Sámi in the Árjapluovve church.⁷⁷ In the early 1900s storytellers in Suõ´nn’jel, in turn, circulated a narrative in which the Čuđit destroy the local Sámi community and spare only two pregnant women whom they force to wash their blood-soaked clothes.⁷⁸

Details like these must have moved, even shocked, audiences. But Sámi storytellers almost never stopped there. Unlike the Finnish and Swedish conquest stories that typically ended in Sámi subjugation, expulsion, or death, Indigenous narrators practically always employed descriptions of Indigenous suffering and loss only as one element in a longer narrative that climaxed in Indigenous victory. Neither Ervast’s interlocutors, Ruonga, nor the Suõ´nn’jel storytellers, for example, finished their stories with the shocking images of entire Sámi communities cruelly destroyed. Instead, all of them went on to tell how a few fortunate survivors rallied to strike back and killed the murderers of their loved ones. Perhaps most powerfully, the Suõ´nn’jel narrators described how the two pregnant women cunningly defeated the Čuđit and then, with their children, laid the foundation for the rebirth of their village.⁷⁹

Sámi storytellers, then, portrayed their ancestors as active and powerful agents who, despite horrendous sufferings, were time and again able to beat back their tormentors. The very act of telling such stories amid the pressures of colonialism must be seen as an important and empowering assertion of Indigenous agency that colonialism sought to suppress.⁸⁰ Moreover, narratives climaxing in Sámi victories provided the Sámi with ‘aspirational figures’⁸¹ whose triumphs over horrible adversities reminded the audiences that the future remained open-ended in even the bleakest of situations. This set the Sámi stories in direct opposition to the conquest stories. The latter, with their heavy stress on the submission, retreat, or death of the Sámi, located the colonization of Sápmi into a closed past. These narratives portrayed an event that, right or wrong, had already occurred and was now part of the fixed order of things. Sámi storytellers questioned such a notion. By telling stories about Indigenous individuals, families, and communities that survived painful losses and emerged as victors against all odds, they suggested that the colonization of Sápmi remained an ongoing and open-ended process whose contours could still be influenced by Indigenous agency.

Retelling ancient stories about violent conflicts opened also other ways for Sámi narrators to comment critically on present-day colonialism. One of the key methods they employed was to invite audiences to consider the kinds of power and strategies that had allowed the Sámi to defeat their enemies time and again. Almost all Sámi narrators focused on an Indigenous community outnumbered by a large and well-armed foe. For some storytellers, it was Sámi military prowess that saved the day. More commonly, however, the Sámi heroes use cunning, shamanistic skills, or both to beat a militarily superior foe.⁸² For instance, in a widespread story told to Högström in Gájddom in the 1740s a Sámi community lures a band of Karjel raiders to an icy mountain side and crushes them under a cascade of heavy tree trunks pushed down from the summit.⁸³ Other storytellers focused on the ability of a single, often physically vulnerable individual to destroy powerful enemies.⁸⁴ The Lavrukaš stories offer the most widespread example of such a plot. Though differing in detail, they typically follow a young man named Lavrukaš as he is captured by enemy warriors and forced to guide them to his village. Ostensibly acquiescing, Lavrukaš, sometimes with the help of shamanistic noaidi skills, leads his captors to their deaths, for example by guiding them off a mountain cliff or leaving them on an uninhabited island to starve.⁸⁵ In a similar vein, several narratives included by Turi in Muittalus samid birra follow an old, unnamed female noaidi who uses her powers to set a lethal trap to foes seeking to destroy her community.⁸⁶

Portraying cunning and shamanism as the basis of the victories and survival of small communities clearly resonated with Sámi storytellers and audiences. For them, coping with powerful and sometimes threatening outsiders like bailiffs, judges, and missionaries was an everyday reality, and the bloody stories seem to have offered a venue for reflecting on the strategies to be employed in these uneasy encounters. On the one hand, quick-witted heroes with a knack for playing submissive while acting subversively became important role models for many Sámi, who relied increasingly on evasion and silence, rather than open defiance, in their dealings with Crown officials and priests, as the power of the state and the church grew stronger in Sápmi after the seventeenth century.⁸⁷ Shamanism, on the other hand, became a dangerous bone of contention in Sápmi in the 1600s, when both Sweden and Denmark-Norway launched aggressive missionary offensives among the Sámi and outlawed traditional Indigenous rituals. Most Sámi converted, at least nominally, to Christianity, but many were punished by Crown and church officials for maintaining traditional spiritual practices.⁸⁸ In this context the decision of many storytellers to cast individuals with noaidi power as the protectors of their communities took on a heightened significance. Most importantly, it pushed Indigenous listeners to consider the fundamental source of the power that had enabled their people to survive through harsh times on the margins of the very states that were now converting them to Christianity.

Sámi storytelling, historicity, and memory are intimately connected to kinship and locality. Local communities can have quite divergent understandings of the past, and even within a single village families tell their own stories, connected to their ancestors and constructing the past from a specific kin-centric vantage point.⁸⁹ Given this background, it is highly interesting that bloody stories about ancestors who resisted powerful foes enjoyed a wide distribution across Sápmi. Even though most storytellers weaved the violent events they described into the histories of specific villages, families, and localities, many narratives and details spread over vast areas. Tales about Lavrukaš and similar cunning heroes had perhaps the widest circulation,⁹⁰ but other stories, too, spread from community to community. For example, about 150 years after Högström had heard about an invading army crushed under rolling logs in Gájddom, a Sámi narrator named Ole Jonsen recounted a very similar story several hundred kilometres to the northwest on the Arctic Coast.⁹¹ Enemies planning to burn a group of Sámi in a church, in turn, featured not only in Ruonga’s repertoire in Árjapluovve but also in contemporaneous narratives in Ochejohka.⁹² Similarly, just as Ruonga told a story about a Sámi man who shoots an enemy spy through the smoke hole of his lodge, in the 1880s an unidentified storyteller in Unari, some five hundred kilometres to the northeast, recounted a narrative in which the same feat is performed by a local Sámi woman.⁹³

Similarities like these imply the existence of spatially extensive ‘networks of storytelling’ in Sápmi.⁹⁴ Sámi moved widely through their homelands on trading, fishing, and hunting expeditions, herding reindeer, visiting relatives, and fleeing from tax-collectors and poverty. This fostered the emergence of widespread webs of kinship, friendship, and communication, and made encounters between people hailing far from one another a routine part of everyday life. Storytelling was an important part of these encounters.⁹⁵ The broad geographical distribution of many violent stories and their details indicate that when Sámi from distant communities met, they frequently shared stories about ancient conflicts against aggressive outsiders. The topic interested people from different corners of Sápmi and pulled them together. That bloody stories and their details were actively borrowed and re-told to new audiences in new places shows that they resonated with the experiences and concerns of many communities. This is also suggested by the apparent ease with which storytellers re-situated stories originating elsewhere to the familiar surroundings and histories of their own community and family. Clearly, people across Sápmi could identify with stories about ancient bloodshed, recognizing in them some fundamental truths about their own past.

Scholars studying storytelling in other colonial settings have argued that sharing stories about ancestors who struggled against oppressive outsiders can encourage disparate colonized communities to view those struggles as a foundation for a collective identity.⁹⁶ The regularity with which Sámi shared violent stories with one another and borrowed their elements from one another suggests that many of them were interested in comparing the pasts of different families and communities and keen to identify conflicts with violent outsiders as a common thread in those pasts. Narratives about evil outsiders thus helped to foster a sense of cohesion and solidarity among various Sámi groups and to define moral boundaries between those regarded as ‘us’ and those considered ‘Others’.⁹⁷ Some storytellers seem to have even fashioned narratives that explicitly described a collective Sámi experience of violence. Both Niurenius in the early seventeenth century and Högström about a century later recorded stories about the expulsion of the Sámi from their original homelands by Finns and Swedes. In both cases the storytellers apparently spoke about the Sámi in general,⁹⁸ although the failure of both Niurenius and Högström to record the Indigenous terminology used by their interlocutors must leave this interpretation tentative.⁹⁹ Nevertheless, circulating and exchanging violent stories over wide distances certainly connected Sámi communities and created emotional and social ties among them. With expanding states seeking to assimilate the Sámi within their political hierarchies, such stories fostered Indigenous survivance by nurturing a separate Sámi identity.

Sámi did not tell bloody stories only to one another, however. On the contrary, Sámi narratives from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries survive in textual format today precisely because many Indigenous storytellers shared them with Swedish and Finnish priests, scholars, and other visitors. Some Sámi narrators may have done so for pedagogical purposes. Their apparent eagerness to share narratives about long-ago bloodshed with their colonial guests suggests that they sought to instruct the newcomers entering their lands about the ability of the Sámi to contain aggressive outsiders. Bloody stories may also have been told to invite clergymen, state officials, and other visitors to reflect critically on the violence intruding outsiders had deployed in Sápmi in the past. Narratives about battles, raids, and massacres certainly disturbed some Finnish and Swedish audiences. Many clergymen were particularly disconcerted by the violent images of massacred villagers and refugees driven from their homelands. When Niurenius heard about the expulsion of the Sámi from Finland by the Tavaster, he regarded it a ‘terrible mischief’.¹⁰⁰ Petrus Læstadius, in turn, likened the church-burning Birkarlar to Spanish conquistadores in South America, a comparison intended as unflattering.¹⁰¹

Other colonial audiences, in contrast, struggled to distance their ancestors from unsavoury acts of violence. In the 1740s, for example, Högström dismissed Sámi storytellers who claimed that the Swedes had forced their ancestors to abandon their original homelands. Importantly, his dismissal did not stem from any general distrust of oral histories, for he believed other Sámi narratives describing battles against Karjel and Russians.¹⁰² In a similar vein, Johan Ervast, writing about eastern Sápmi a few years before Högström, made only brief references to stories about violent confrontations between Sámi and Finns and focused instead on weaving Sámi stories about Russian raids into a broader narrative of what he saw as the ‘inborn hatred’ between Sweden and Russia.¹⁰³ Even audiences who might criticize their own ancestors for mistreating the Sámi were unlikely to connect such ancient misdeeds to present-day colonialism. For instance, despite their dislike of ancient Birkarlar and Tavaster neither Niurenius nor Læstadius saw in the Sámi stories any reason to question contemporary Swedish activities in Sápmi. Even when Læstadius judged that the spread of Christianity, agriculture, and Finnish and Swedish settlers would erode Sámi cultures and communities, he drew no parallels between such a development and the bloody events of the past.¹⁰⁴

Finnish and Swedish audiences, then, interpreted and engaged the Sámi stories in different ways. Common to all these listeners, however, was a reluctance to consider whether the contemporary presence of their state in Sápmi – even their own presence there as priests, state officials, or scholars – rested ultimately on a history of violence.

Boundaries

Violence is fundamentally about drawing social boundaries. Inflicting physical harm on other human beings effectively pushes the victims outside the moral community of the perpetrators.¹⁰⁵ So does ‘moral violence’, the symbolic assaults against the dignity of others.¹⁰⁶ In and around Sápmi, ‘mediated violence’ – narratives and images of bloodshed – became equally enmeshed in boundary-making.¹⁰⁷ Storytellers circulating violent narratives were keenly interested in defining clearcut boundaries between the Sámi and their neighbours and assigning moral significance to those boundaries. In doing so, they both contributed to and commented on the colonial social order emerging in Sápmi.

The Finnish and Swedish narrators who told stories about the conquest of the Sámi carefully distinguished the conquerors from the ‘Lapps’. Among the seventeenth-century authors who recycled narratives about Birkarl conquests, Johannes Tornæus considered the Sámi ‘a loose flock’ of ‘Scythians’ who exhibited only cowardice when attacked by the culturally superior Birkarlar and Finns,¹⁰⁸ while Schefferus embedded his narrative about Sámi subjugation in Lapponia within a broader discussion of Sámi Otherness. In the 1820s, in turn, ethnographer Anders Sjögren drew what was then a fashionable cultural evolutionary boundary between the Sámi hunter-harvesters and their conquerors, the Finnish agriculturalists, and called the conflict between the two ‘necessary’.¹⁰⁹ Boundary-making was equally important to vernacular storytellers. By the nineteenth century, Finnish peasants depicted the ancient ‘Lapps’ their ancestors had killed or expelled as ‘heathens’ and often fused them together with mythical pre-Christian beings like giants.¹¹⁰ They also saw a sharp moral distinction between their own people and the ‘Lapps’. Few Finnish storytellers seem to have questioned the legitimacy of displacing or killing the Sámi, implying that they situated the ‘Lapps’ entirely outside their own moral community.

Sámi storytellers were equally determined to draw morally charged boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘Others’. Their violent narratives have been described as ‘an enduring native discourse on the danger from the outsider’ and ‘a warning against the Other’.¹¹¹ The Indigenous stories systematically divided the world into the Sámi and their foes, usually lumping the latter together into one faceless mass known simply as Čuđit. This moniker implied ultimate otherness: the Čuđit were consistently portrayed as dangerous, cruel, stupid, and less than fully human creatures who could be killed without scruples.¹¹²

The emphasis on boundary-making was connected to the many political and economic conflicts engendered by colonialism in Sápmi. Many narrators told stories about ancient bloodshed to solidify the rights of their community to authority, land, and resources. The conquest stories that circulated among Birkarlar, Crown officials, and Finnish peasants staked claims to territory and power. Equally firmly, Sámi stories depicting Indigenous victories over invaders strengthened Sámi rights to land and autonomy.¹¹³

Clearcut boundaries were not the whole story, however. As growing numbers of Swedes and Finns settled in Sápmi as priests, traders, farmers, and miners, many were pulled into complex social relationships with the Sámi by commerce, intermarriage, shared rituals, and quotidian socializing. In these contexts, violent narratives offered some storytellers the opportunity to downplay the differences between the Sámi and the newcomers and to underline the importance of their collaboration. Perhaps most notably, in Kemi Lappmark, an administrative region that covered much of today’s northeastern Finland, the bloody guerrilla warfare that accompanied the Russo-Swedish wars in the late 1500s and early 1600s gave rise to violent stories that build bridges between local Sámi and Finns. For example, in the nineteenth century people across Kemi Lappmark recounted stories about ‘Christoffer’ who had led a combined force of Finns and Sámi to attack Russian bases in the Kola Peninsula.¹¹⁴ Finnish communities in Kuusamo and Sodankylä, in turn, gave the wartime experiences of the Sámi a pivotal place in their historical narratives, telling stories about Sámi heroes defeating Russian foes and Sámi communities suffering in the hands of Russian raiders.¹¹⁵ Violent conflicts against a common enemy could thus render selected elements of a Sámi past meaningful and valuable to Finnish settler communities and blur the boundaries between Sámi and Finns.

When storytellers employed violent stories to blur the boundaries between Sámi and non-Sámi, they engaged in complex negotiations over identity and belonging. In some cases the narrators and audiences most interested in boundary-blurring had hybrid roots mixing Indigenous and colonial ancestry. In Kemi Lappmark, for instance, many Sámi families intermarried with Finnish settlers, established farms like their Finnish neighbours, and increasingly used Finnish language, so that by the early 1800s many Sámi communities were considered, at least by outsiders, to have become entirely Finnish.¹¹⁶ Yet the inhabitants of these communities continued to tell stories in which ancestors with non-Christian Sámi names like Mielikko and Akimelek fought Russian enemies.¹¹⁷ In the middle of profound social, cultural, and economic transformations, stories about Sámi heroes helped some families to maintain a connection to Sámi ancestors and heritage.

On the other hand, bloody stories about Sámi heroes could be appropriated by colonial newcomers eager to make claims to Sámi resources and identity. This is well illustrated by the Peivas stories that enjoyed wide popularity in Kárášjohka, Gihttel, and Bealdovuopmi, as well as adjacent areas, during the nineteenth century. According to these stories, Peivas, known as Päiviö among Finnish-speakers, had been a powerful Sámi noaidi who had defended his community against intruding outsiders. His sons, Vuolab and Isak, had also fought against Karelian and Russian raiders. Interestingly, many stories had Peivas eventually converting to Christianity, while others described Vuolab fighting against traditional Sámi religion.¹¹⁸

In the nineteenth century numerous people claimed descent from Peivas, especially in Gihttel and Bealdovuopmi. According to the Finnish clergyman Jacob Fellman, these people included not only Sámi but also people he classified as ‘former’ Sámi, ‘blends’, and Finns – in other words individuals and families with what Fellman understood as varying degrees of Sámi ancestry and customs.¹¹⁹ When travelling in Sápmi in the 1830s the Finnish ethnographer Mathias Castrén, too, met both Finns and Sámi who counted Peivas among their ancestors; some Finns, in fact, argued that Päiviö had himself been a Finnish settler from Karelia.¹²⁰

It is easy to understand the widespread appeal of Peivas. For Sámi, narratives about a noaidi who became Christian but remained a staunch protector of his community provided a model for adapting to the profound cultural and social changes brought about by colonialism without losing one’s identity or community. Finnish settlers, in turn, could identify with the Christian conversion of Peivas and the religious zeal of Vuolab. The Christianity of these characters made it possible to imagine them as blazing the way for the Finns and their culture in Sápmi. Stories about Peivas’s conversion and Vuolab’s campaign against traditional Indigenous spirituality resemble narratives common in settler colonial contexts around the world about Native heroes who embrace the settler culture and welcome the newcomers to their homelands. Colonial settlers have often adopted such Indigenous figures as their own ancestors, creating imagined genealogies that provide them with seemingly Indigenous roots in, and thus a legitimate claim to, the lands on which they are actually recent arrivals.¹²¹ Claiming descent from Peivas similarly validated the presence of Finnish settlers in Sápmi and made their claims to territory and resources appear as authentic as those of the Sámi.

As narratives about Peivas show, the boundaries drawn by violent stories could be complex, situational, and contested. Yet even when colonial settlers adopted Sámi heroes as their ancestors, boundaries remained important. Fundamentally, storytellers were concerned about them because they explained who held which rights to resources and authority in a contested land in the process of transforming from Sámi country into a territory divided among rival states.

Conclusions

For centuries, diverse communities in and around Sápmi circulated stories about ancient bloodshed between the Sámi and their neighbours, attaching to the narratives multiple meanings in shifting contexts. This storytelling was thoroughly entangled with colonial projects, processes, and relationships in the here and now of the storytellers and their audiences. When telling, listening to, reading, and reacting to narratives about violent confrontations, the narrators and audiences debated the meaning of conquest and Indigenous survivance, made claims to authority and resources, and both drew and blurred social boundaries. In doing so, they constructed broader interpretations of the processes we today call colonialism.

This interpretative work was profoundly multivocal. The expansion of states, churches, settlers, and industries to Sápmi meant radically different things to different storytellers and audiences: the incorporation of the Sámi into colonial hierarchies or their disappearance in the face of colonial settlers; Indigenous survival and resistance or the erosion of Indigenous culture; rigid boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ or cultural and ethnic mixing. It is hardly surprising that Sámi and non-Sámi storytellers crafted contrasting interpretations of colonialism. Making things more complex, neither Sámi nor non-Sámi stories were uniform or static. Elite and vernacular conquest stories painted contrasting visions of the post-conquest fate of the Sámi, just as many Sámi stories portrayed shamanism as the foundation of Sámi survivance while others had the defenders of Indigenous communities turning from shamanism to Christianity. Moreover, some stories are impossible to classify categorically as either Sámi or non-Sámi, because they were produced and consumed by individuals, families, and communities with diverse, often mixed, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, sometimes in order to negotiate the identity of their narrators and audiences.

The multivocality of this storytelling suggests that contemporary disagreements concerning colonialism in Sápmi’s past and present are underlain by a much longer history of clashing memories, interpretations, and narratives. A careful scrutiny of Sápmi’s violent stories makes three important contributions to the ongoing debates. First, it underlines the multiplicity and contingency of colonial ideologies among the various groups penetrating Sámi homelands after 1600. Since colonial narratives could celebrate both Indigenous disappearance and asymmetrical state-Sámi coexistence, it behoves scholars to elucidate the genealogies of several divergent colonial imaginations and the ways in which they intertwined with each other through time. Second, analysing storytelling throws into sharp relief the agency of the Sámi in challenging and shaping colonialism. The multiple, often critical, views voiced by Sámi storytellers push historians to seek also other Sámi discourses about colonialism, whether in Indigenous contexts like art, oral literature, and ritual or in colonial archives like court records and maps, and to examine them not as reactions to the inevitable but as active participants in ongoing political and cultural processes. Third, an investigation of the narratives, narrators, and audiences reveals both the importance and the complexity of the boundaries which people in and around Sápmi drew among themselves. The storytellers’ interest in boundaries highlights the necessity of exploring both elite and vernacular articulations of difference and belonging in an era during which new political borders dissected Sápmi and new ideas of nationhood and race produced novel ways of categorizing people. Taken together, these findings underline the significance of increasingly multifaceted and nuanced inquiries into the histories of colonialism in Sápmi.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Gunlög Fur, Janne Lahti, Sigga-Marja Magga, Isis Herrero López, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, criticisms, suggestions, and help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sami Lakomäki

Sami Lakomäki (PhD in cultural anthropology, 2009) is University Lecturer of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research focuses on the histories of Indigenous peoples and colonialisms in northern Fennoscandia and eastern North America. In particular, he is interested in politics, storytelling, violence, community-building, and diasporas in colonial contexts. Lakomäki’s publications include Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870 (Yale University Press, 2014) and various book chapters and articles in journals like Ethnohistory, History and Anthropology, Historiallinen aikakauskirja, NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Journal of Social Archaeology, and Journal of the Early Republic.

Notes

1. Högström, Beskrifning, 39. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Following Valkonen, Alakorva, Aikio, and Magga, ‘Introduction’, 3, I use the word ‘Sámi’, derived from North Sámi, to refer to Sámi individuals (in both singular and plural) and communities. Other Sámi languages have different self-designations, and various English renderings of these also exist.

2. Högström, Beskrifning, 40–42, 59–61. For Schefferus’s narrative, see Schefferus, Lapponia, 93–105.

3. For overviews, see Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 200–24; Fjellström, Samernas samhälle, 384; Itkonen, “Lappalainen kansanrunous,” 563–5; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus”; Kylli, “Hävitetyn maan muistot”; Lakomäki, “Tuhottuja kyliä, verisiä puita”; Saressalo, “Threat from Without”. Sápmi is the contemporary North Sámi word for the land of the Sámi (Ojala and Nordin, “Mapping Land and People,”, 98; Valkonen, Alakorva, Aikio, and Magga, “Introduction,” 3).

4. DuBois, “Ethnomemory,” 312, 317.

5. Fjellström, Samernas samhälle, 387–90; Itkonen, “Lappalainen kansanrunous,” 563; Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset vuoteen 1945, 537, 541; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 133–136, 148, 156; Kylli, “Hävitetyn maan muistot”.

6. Lindmark, “Colonial Encounter”, 132; Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History,” 21, 25–6; Lakomäki, Aalto, and Kylli, “Näkymättömissä ja kuulumattomissa,” 438.

7. See Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History”; Kuokkanen, “All I See Is White”; Kuokkanen, “Deatnu Agreement”; Lakomäki, Aalto, and Kylli, “Näkymättömissä ja kuulumattomissa”; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset; Lehtola, “Sámi Histories”; Lindmark, “Colonial Encounter”; Lundmark, Stulet land; Nordin, Scandinavian Early Modern World; Nyyssönen, “Väinö Tanner”; Nyyssönen and Kortekangas, “Siirtomaapolitiikkaa Saamenmaalla”; Ojala and Nordin, “Mapping Land and People”; Össbo, “Från Lappmarksplakat till anläggarsamhället”; Össbo and Lantto, “Colonial Tutelage and Industrial”.

8. Saressalo, “Threat from Without” (quotation from 251); Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 200–24; DuBois, “Insider and Outsider,” 68–70; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 136, 147, 172–3; Kylli, “Hävitetyn maan muistot”; Stoor, “Balhållet vid Lappskottbacken”.

9. For partial exceptions, see Klintberg, Trolldom, mord och mirakel, 53–66; Klintberg, “Sägner bär vittnesbörd”; Kukkonen, “Lappalaiset suomalaisissa kansantarinoissa,” 47–9.

10. e.g. Hiltunen, Norjan ja Norrlannin välissä, 16–7; Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 62–103.

11. Cruikshank, “Oral History,” 3.

12. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 6–7; Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 10; Cruikshank, “Oral History”; Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, 50–2.

13. Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli, 50; Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 202; DuBois, “Ethnomemory,” 307.

14. Cruikshank, “Oral History,” 3.

15. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 164; DuBois, “Ethnomemory,” 308.

16. Cruikshank, Social Life of Stories.

17. The role of colonialism in Sámi histories has been extensively debated. See e.g. Enbuske, Vanhan Lapin valtamailla; Fur, “Colonialism and Swedish History”; Junka-Aikio, “Jäämeren rata”; Kuokkanen, “Deatnu Agreement”; Kuokkanen, “Pohjoismainen asuttajakolonialismi”; Lakomäki, Aalto, and Kylli, “Näkymättömissä ja kuulumattomissa”; Lehtola, Saamelaiset suomalaiset; Lehtola, “Sámi Histories”; Lindmark, “Colonial Encounters”; Lähteenmäki, Kalotin kansaa; Nyyssönen, “Väinö Tanner”; Nyyssönen and Kortekangas, “Siirtomaapolitiikkaa Saamenmaalla”; Ojala and Nordin, “Mapping Land and People”; Össbo, “Från Lappmarksplakat till anläggarsamhället”; Össbo and Lantto, “Colonial Tutelage and Industrial”.

18. See e.g. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 64, 68–9.

19. See e.g. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 10, 42–3, 50–67.

20. Andersson, Tietoja Sodankylän ja Kittilän, 9–10.

21. For foundational violence, see Sleeper-Smith, Ostler, and Reid, “Introduction,” 2.

22. Hansen and Olsen, Samenes historie, 261–2; Ojala and Nordin, “Mapping Land and People,” 105–6; Kylli, Saamelaisten kaksi kääntymystä, 34–5; Enbuske, Vanhan Lapin valtamailla, 158–9.

23. Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 67–93; Favorin, “Birkarletraditionen,” 71–86.

24. Bergman and Edlund, “Birkarlar and Sámi,” 53–56, 73; Vahtola, “Birkarlit “pirkkalaiset”,” 220–4; Miettinen, “Fordell Family”.

25. Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 67–96; Favorin, “Birkarletraditionen,” 75–81, 83–86.

26. Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 86–8, 93–6.

27. Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 74–6, 93.

28. Favorin “Birkarletraditionen,” 91–8; Vahtola, “Birkarlit “pirkkalaiset”,” 220–1.

29. Steckzén Birkarlar och lappar, 71, 82–4.

30. Bureus, Sumlen, 32.

31. Niurenius, “Lappland,” 7–9. For the timing of Niurenius’s text, see Fjellström, “Företal,” IX.

32. Bergman and Edlund, “Birkarlar and Sámi,” 67–71; Enbuske, Vanhan Lapin valtamailla, 154, 159; Miettinen, “Fordell Family,” 234–6.

33. Vahtola, “Birkarlit “pirkkalaiset”,” 221.

34. Bergman and Edlund, “Birkarlar and Sámi,” 74; Miettinen, “Fordell Family,” 231.

35. See Steckzén, Birkarlar och lappar, 70.

36. Graan, “Relation”; Lundii Lappi, “Descriptio Lapponiae”; Niurenius, “Lappland”; Rheen, “En kortt Relation”; Tornæus, “Berättelse om Lappmarckerna”; Tuderus, “En kort underrättelse”.

37. Niurenius, “Lappland,” 7–9; Tornæus, “Berättelse om Lappmarckerna,” 16–8, 25.

38. Klein, Early Modern Knowledge, 123–5, 132–3; Andersson Burnett, “Translating Swedish Colonialism,” 135–8.

39. Schefferus, Lapponia, 85–105, 221–32.

40. Gustafsson, “Conglomerate State”.

41. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 16–27.

42. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, 85; Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 74.

43. Drake, Västerbottenslapparna, 322–5; Klintberg, Trolldom, mord och mirakel, 55–6, 58–62; Klintberg, Svenska folksägner, 255–6; Lindström-Saxon, Saga, sägen och sång, 75–6, 78–80; Modin, Gamla Tåsjö, 89–90, 124, 131, 152–3, 169.

44. Andersson, Tietoja Sodankylän ja Kittilän, 10, 32; Aspelin, “Kokoelmia muinaistutkinnan alalta,” 222, 224; Ervast, Descriptio Lapponiae Kiemiensis, 57; Castrén, Nordiska resor och forskningar, 84–5, 94; Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 126, 129–30, 167; Junnila, “Eräkaudesta isonvihan loppuun,” 183–4; Kukkonen, “Lappalaiset suomalaisissa kansantarinoissa,” 47–49; Lagus, Kuvausyritys, 32; Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom,” 48, 51, 54–5.

45. Simonsuuri, “Historialliset ja paikallistarinat”.

46. Kukkonen, “Lappalaiset suomalaisissa kansantarinoissa,” 28–9, 38, 45–60; Simonsuuri, “Historialliset ja paikallistarinat,” 499; Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom,” 48, 54, 59.

47. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism”.

48. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism,” 387–8; Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies”.

49. Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

50. Lagus, Kuvausyritys, 32.

51. Fellman, Anteckingar under min vistelse, II, 129.

52. Castrén, Nordiska resor och forskningar, 84–5.

53. Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom,” 48.

54. Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 130; Kukkonen, “Lappalaiset suomalaisissa kansantarinoissa,” 48.

55. Ervast, Descriptio Lapponiae Kiemiensis, 57; Fellmann, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 126, 129, 167; Junnila, “Eräkaudesta isovihan loppuun,” 183–4; Kukkonen, “Lappalaiset suomalaisissa kansantarinoissa,” 49; Lagus Kuvausyritys, 32; Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom,” 51, 55.

56. Ylikangas, Aikansa rikos, 51–61.

57. Enbuske, Vanhan Lapin valtamailla, 95–6, 106; Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 167; Lagus, Kuvausyritys, 32.

58. Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 130.

59. Turi, Muittalus samid birra, 206.

60. Fjellström, Samernas samhälle, 388–90; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 148, 152.

61. The earliest reference to violent Sámi stories that identifies a Sámi source may be Niurenius’s relation, written between 1619 and 1645 (Niurenius, “Lappland,” 7–8). For eighteenth-century references, see Ervast, Descriptio Lapponiae Kiemiensis, 57–8; Högström, Beskrifning, 39–40, 59–60; Lagus, Kuvausyritys, 33–5.

62. e.g. Andelin, “Kertomus Utsjoen pitäjästä,” 197–9; Andersson, Tietoja Sodankylän ja Kittilän, 19, 23–5, 41–3, 71, 82–5; Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 78, 114–6, 123, 136, 142; Laestadius, Lappalaisten mytologian katkelmia, 325–9, 333, 337–9, 342–3; Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 482–6, 498–502; Qvigstad, Lappiske eventyr og sagn, I; Qvigstad, Lappiske eventyr og sagn, II; Sjögren, Anteckningar, 7, 113–4.

63. As late as 1967–1970 a folklore project in Talvadas produced dozens of violent stories. See Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 137–8; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 36.

64. Kylli, “Hävitetyn maan muistot,” 59.

65. Cocq, Revoicing Sàmi Narratives, 200; Saressalo, “Threat from Without,” 251.

66. Vizenor, Native Liberty, 1 (quotation), 24, 85, 88. See also DeLucia, Memory Lands, xvii.

67. Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 137–8.

68. Koponen, “Čuhti”. Stories about the non-human Stállu have also been interpreted as a Sámi discourse on colonialism and dangerous outsiders (e.g. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 200–4; DuBois, “Insider and Outsider,” 69–70; Saressalo, “Threat from Without”). However, unlike the Čuđit stories set in the distant past, many Stállu narratives describe recent events, even personal experiences. They also have profound spiritual meanings in addition to the historical and political ones. (Enges, Minä melkein uskon, 136–9; Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 136–8). Because of these differences, Stállu stories would deserve a separate treatment not possible within the confines of this article.

69. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 231; Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 137; Saressalo, “Threat from Without,” 255.

70. Turi, Muittalus samid birra, 208–9.

71. Sjögren, Anteckningar, 7.

72. Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 123.

73. For examples, see Drake, Västerbottens-lapparna, 322; Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 123, 142.

74. Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 482; Högström, Beskrifning, 60.

75. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 231. How storytelling and place together make the past alive in Sámi communities is discussed more broadly by Enges, Minä melkein uskon, 269; Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 178; Lehtola, Entiset elävät meissä, 45–8. Insyllabation: memory-scapes, see DeLucia, Memory Lands, xv.

76. Ervast, Descriptio Lapponiae Kiemiensis, 57–8.

77. Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 498, 502.

78. Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset vuoteen 1945, 539–40; Qvigstad, Lappiske eventyr og sagn, I, 476–81.

79. Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset vuoteen 1945, 540; Qvigstad, Lappiske eventyr og sagn, I, 476–81.

80. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 223, 228.

81. Günay, “In War and Peace,” 554.

82. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 207–8, 216.

83. Högström, Beskrifning, 59–60.

84. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 207, 215–6.

85. Fellman, Antackningar under min vistelse, II, 114–6; Kylli, “Hävitetyn maan muistot,” 51–3.

86. Turi, Muittalus samid birra, 206–8.

87. Lehtola, “Evasive Strategies of Defiance”; Rydving, End of Drum-Time, 1.

88. Kylli, Saamelaisten kaksi kääntymystä, 70–1, 82–3, 88–9; Rydving, End of Drum-Time, 54–61.

89. Enges, Minä melkein uskon, 247–8; Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 178; Lehtola, Entiset elävät meissä, 20, 43, 68.

90. Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 146, 177.

91. Qvigstad, Lappiske eventyr og sagn, II, 594–7.

92. Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 498–500; Andelin, “Kertomus Utsjoen pitäjästä,” 198–9.

93. Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 483, 502; Andersson, Tietoja Sodankylän ja Kittilän, 85.

94. For the term, see Mattila, “Modernisaatiota, mystiikkaa ja mielipiteitä,” 16.

95. For a twentieth-century example, see Huuskonen, Stuorra-Jovnnan ladut, 152, 164, 249.

96. Günay, “In War and Peace”.

97. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 200, 221; DuBois, “Insider and Outsider,” 69–70; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 136, 172; Saressalo, “Threat from Without,” 255.

98. Högström, Beskrifning, 39; Niurenius, “Lappland,” 7–8.

99. For the complexity of ‘us’ groups in Sámi oral narratives, see Jouste et al., “Jääkk Sverloff,” 107.

100. Niurenius, “Lappland,” 8.

101. Læstadius, Fortsättning af journalen, 498.

102. Högström, Beskrifning, 40, 61.

103. Ervast, Descriptio Lapponiae Kiemiensis, 54–8 (quotation from 54).

104. For example, see Læstadius, Journal, 110–1, 147, 184, 194–5, 208 for Petrus Læstadius’s views.

105. Schröder and Schmidt, “Introduction,” 14.

106. Fassin, Enforcing Order, 129–34.

107. Dwyer and Damousi, “Theorizing Histories of Violence,” 4.

108. Tornæus, “Berättelse om Lappmarckerna,” 11–12, 16–8, 25.

109. Sjögren, Anteckningar, 1–2.

110. Fellmann, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 129 (‘heathens’); Aspelin, “Kokoelmia Muinaistutkinnon alalta,” 224; Warelius, “Bidrag till Finlands kännedom,” 48, 59.

111. DuBois, “Insider and Outsider,” 69; Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 222.

112. Cocq, Revoicing Sámi Narratives, 204–14; Kanerva, “Motiivianalyyttinen tutkimus,” 41, 43; Kyyrö-Harju, “Suurnoita Päiviö,” 79.

113. Saressalo, “Threat from Without,” 256.

114. Fellmann, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 90.

115. Andersson, Tietoja Sodankylän ja Kittilän, 23–5; Lagus, Kuvausyritys, 32–5.

116. Lähteenmäki, Kalotin kansaa, 304–5, 309–12; Enbuske, Vanhan Lapin valtamailla, 360–5; Castrén, Nordiska resor och forskningar, 70–2; Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, I, 249–50; Sjögren, Anteckningar, 28.

117. Fellman, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 78, 123. For the names, see Itkonen, Suomen lappalaiset vuoteen 1945, 494, 498.

118. Castrén, Nordiska resor och forskningar, 14–20; Fellmann, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 135–8, 187–8; Itkonen, Päiviö ja Vuolab; Kyyrö-Harju, “Suurnoita Päiviö”.

119. Fellmann, Anteckningar under min vistelse, II, 136, 138–9.

120. Castrén, Nordiska resor och forskningar, 14–5.

121. For a U.S. example, see Paul, Myths That Made America, 105–10, 114–8. See also Lahti, “Rajaseudusta kotiseuduksi,” for settler efforts to turn newly acquired lands into old homelands.