Engineering indigenous identity: the construction of an authentic Sámi

ABSTRACT

This article wishes to contribute to the study of indigenous identity by focusing on the role of the modern industrial state of the nineteenth century as a powerful and enduring agent that ‘makes, owns, and uses’ indigenous identity through the application of targeted artificial ascriptions. These ascriptions are the result of processes of legal reclassification and mechanisms of legal othering and legal authentication, which remaps indigenous belonging and sense of self. To this end, the article steps away from the typologies of indigenous identity as being exclusively a product of ancestral ties, territoriality, group belonging, and self-identification – and thus indigenous agency. The essay problematizes these conceptualizations and looks at the indigenous Sámi people of Sweden as an illustration. A number of key legislations and documents are used to expose how the state in Sweden reconstructed the local indigenous population into a de jure bona fide, or authentic, Sámi. These legal reclassifications progressively transformed the Sámi people's customary rights to fit the state's narrative within a discourse of nineteenth century modern industrial state consolidation, resulting in the control, reduction, legal dissimilation and assimilation of the Sámi into the greater society and state project.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous identity
• legal assimilation and dissimilation
• construction of indigenous identity
• authenticity
• the modern state
• the Sámi
• the Swedish Sámi
• social identity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ‘Sami in Sweden.’ 2019. Sweden.se. 22 February 2019. https://sweden.se/life/people/sami-in-sweden.

2 Beckman adds ‘Leaving aside the very difficult question of the original Lapp population one may say that since the Lapps in all probability have existed for a long time in North Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula, they should have intermixed to some degree with North Asiatic people. Consequently, we may expect evidence for the existence of Asiatic influence in the Lapps, but this would not allow the conclusion that the Lapps are mainly of Mongolian descent’ (Beckman, 1964, p. 43).

3 These narratives were often based on secondhand accounts and fictitious writing: ‘Schefferus's Lapland monograph is the first comprehensive depiction of the Sámi people. But in contrast to many other topographic and ethnographic descriptions of the early modern era, the 35 chapters of Lapponia are built upon a number of contemporary reports, which were forwarded to the author by clergymen living in Swedish Lapland. These letters were known as ‘clergy correspondence’. The chapters cover topics as various as Sámi extraction, language, dwelling-places, clothing, handiwork, gender roles, hunting, child raising, pagan religion and additional chapters on metals, flora and animal life in northern Sweden’ Northern Lights Routes, an organization sponsored by the Council of Europe Cultural Routes and the University of Tromsø, in Norway, http://www.ub.uit.no/northernlights/eng/schefferus.htm (accessed 19 July 2014).

4 SFS 2010-1408. In effect as of 1 January 2011 (SFS 2011:109, § 2:5). It is also important to point out that to date Sweden has not ratified ILO C-169: Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989.

5 Boucher and Russell continue, ‘Elizabeth Elbourne suggests that around the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘liberalism resolved the paradox of colonialism’ by creating a grammar of racial difference through which certain subjects could have their rights suspended’ (Boucher & Russell, 2015, pp. 92–93).

6 Poelzer adds, ‘aboriginal peoples largely remained self-determining. In fact, during the century prior to modern state-building … indigenous peoples in Canada were entirely self-determining: "in the period in which the British imperial government was responsible for Indian Affairs, from 1763 to 1860 when that responsibility was transferred to the government of the United Canadas, Indian tribes were de facto, self-[determining]" (Poelzer, 1995, pp. 94–96).

7 On the topic of Sámi relocation, or expropriation, the following authors provide a valuable insight: Ingwar Åhrén. 1976/1977, Johannes Marainen. 1996, Kristina Karppi. 2001.

8 The seite is the cult of sacred stones.

9 There are countless degrading accounts as this one found in Wikström, ‘My grandmother was hit when she spoke Sámi at school. She never taught her child Sámi, and this is the reason why I am without my native Sámi and as a consequence I was robbed of 99 percent of my Sámi identity. I am only 37 years old, but have awful memories of my childhood. I was really bullied in elementary and middle school in the south of Sweden, where we lived then – “lapp bastard (lappdjävel) and wog (svartskalle) go home and chew on reindeer balls” (renpung) etc. Now, I’m without language, without reindeer and without land.’