Repatriation, Revival and Transmission: The Politics of a Sámi Musical Heritage

Abstract

This article concerns music and the politics of indigenous cultural heritage by focusing on contemporary musical performance of the Sámi. Often drawing on the distinct unaccompanied vocal tradition of joik since the 1970s political mobilisation, contemporary Sámi music has assisted in reviving language, identity and a nature-based cosmology, whilst commenting on the processes of Nordic state assimilation, land dispossession and border creation. Sámi musical performance thus helps to imagine a transnational Sámi community Sápmi, traversing Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula, whilst furthermore articulating Sámi concerns as an indigenous people. Owing to the legacy of cultural dispossession in Sámi encounters with modernity, and the recent emergence of debates concerning cultural ownership in Sámi and indigenous contexts, Sámi cultural heritage has become a politicised field. This article explores the themes of revival, repatriation and transmission in contemporary Sámi musical performance by considering strategies of claiming authorship over a Sámi cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic research of Sámi musicians, festivals, record companies, media, musical institutions and the Internet, my article investigates: recent efforts to repatriate archived joik recordings to Sámi communities; the use of archive recordings in work by contemporary Sámi artists; and education projects that work to strengthen the transmission of a Sámi musical heritage. By drawing on Diana Taylor's model of the ‘archive’ and ‘repertoire’, I ask: how does Sámi musical performance offer alternative ways of conceiving of a Sámi musical heritage that overcome logocentric notions of ‘culture’? In conclusion, I propose that we might consider the Sámi festival as a kind of ‘indigenous museum’ in which a Sámi cultural heritage is performed, negotiated and transmitted into the future.

Keywords:

• Sámi
• Indigeneity
• Archives
• Repatriation
• Revival
• Cultural Transmission
• Cultural Heritage
• Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the musicians, cultural politicians and academics in Sápmi who have assisted me with my research. In particular, I am very grateful for the generosity of Lars Andreassen, Harald Gaski, Ola Graff, Berit Alette Mienna, Rossella Ragazzi, Tore Skoglund, Ánde Somby and Mai-Britt Utsi. I am also indebted to my former PhD colleagues in London, and especially my PhD supervisor Professor Tina K. Ramnarine. This research was funded through a doctoral scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes

¹I use the spelling ‘Sámi’ in line with contemporary Northern Sámi orthography, its international use in names of official Sámi institutions (such as the Norwegian Sámi Parliament) and its increasing use in Anglophone academic literature.

²Whilst some English literature uses the anglicised spelling yoik, I have chosen to employ the version joik, as more universally employed within Sámi and Nordic literature.

³The term Sápmi denotes the traditional Sámi area traversing Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula, as well as the people, the language and culture.

⁴I am grateful to Dr Carine Durand for informing me about this seminar.

⁵I am grateful to Professor Helen Gilbert for introducing me to this text, and for the inspiring discussions of this text and related issues with fellow participants at the workshop Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Indigeneity and Performance: Orality and Transmission, London, May 2009.

⁶Here, I am indebted to discussions with Lovisa Mienna Sjöberg, scholar of religion and teacher at the Sámi University College, Kautokeino.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas R. Hilder

Thomas Hilder completed his PhD in ethnomusicology on contemporary Sámi musical performance and the politics of indigeneity at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2010. He is currently Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Center for World Music, University of Hildesheim