Norwegian Parliament Votes to Refer to the Sámi as Indigenous in the Constitution

 

On May 15, 2023, according to NRK, the Norwegian Parliament voted to amend their Constitution and refer to the Sámi people in Norway as Indigenous for the first time. 147 representatives voted for the proposal, while 22 representatives voted against, with the right-wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet) opposing the change. 

"It is of great symbolic importance," said the head of the Labor Party. "By recognizing the Sámi as an Indigenous people in the Constitution, you put a permanent end to the policy of Norwegianization."

Norwegianization was the longtime policy of the government from around 1880 to 1960 with the intention of assimilating the Sámi into the dominant society. While the change in status in the Constitution is welcome and necessary, there are those in Norway who are still ambivalent about the use of the word Indigenous or urfolk (original people) for the Sámi.

Someone I know in Norway who is currently reading my latest book From Lapland to Sápmi, wrote me to say they were enjoying it. They added something to the effect that the Sámi were not actually Indigenous, since they arrived in Scandinavia after people were already living there: “So they are not an aboriginal people as such.”

I don’t know all the ins and outs of the debates about “who came first,” and I have consciously stayed out of discussions on this topic. I do know, however, that the debate about who are the first inhabitants of Sápmi, although sometimes framed in a scientific way and buttressed by DNA data and other evidence, has been and is still employed by the dominant population in Scandinavia to prove that the Sámi claims to territory and natural resources are bogus and self-serving.

The period of Sámi history I’m most familiar with is the late 19^th century and the 20^th century, a time connected with “Lappology” and Racial Biology, but also a time of growing Sámi political resistance and cultural renaissance. During the last half of the 20^th century the term “Indigenous” was first claimed by certain Sámi groups as a means of finding connection with and support from other Indigenous people around the globe. This term spread in Sámi society and, although initially resisted by individuals and governments in the Nordic countries, it gradually was adopted in its basic outlines and is now generally accepted. The Sámi were politically recognized as an Indigenous group in Norway in 1987 with the Sámi Act, and again in 1990 when Norway signed the UN’s ILO  Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries.

For my part, when questions of indigenity come around the Sámi, I’ve often referred back to the fact sheet, “Who are indigenous peoples?” put out by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

The UN emphasizes they do not have an official definition of “Indigenous,” given the diversity of the 370 million Indigenous people spread across 70 countries worldwide. Instead they offer a modern understanding of the term, based on the following:

 

      • Self- identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member.

• Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies

• Strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources

• Distinct social, economic or political systems

• Distinct language, culture and beliefs

• Form non-dominant groups of society

• Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.

 

All of these criteria the Sámi meet. I’m especially struck by the last item in the list: “Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.”

Why waste time debating who came first and instead celebrate the Sámi for this stubborn and creative resolve in the face of centuries of territorial dispossession and cultural racism?