Hege Nilsen, Sámi duojár from Kåfjord, Norway

 

 

Vesterheim Musuem in Decorah, Iowa, recently posted this online presentation by Hege Nilsen, an engaging and eloquent Sámi duojár from Kåfjord, Norway. Hege Nilsen is a paramedic in Tromsø and a skilled craftswoman. Her descriptions and photos of how she skins, tans, and softens reindeer hide takes place against a background of chilly mountains and fjords in Western Finnmark.

But even more memorable are Nilsen's remarks about the years of language loss and Norwegianization in that part of Norway. Duodji is one important way of re-engaging with Sámi history and making community. I really enjoyed watching this!

 

Truth and Reconciliation Report Released in Norway

Det flyr en sorgfugl over Jernaknjarga, 2023
© Gerd Elen Lorås. Foto: Stortinget

 

Last week, on June 1, 2023, Norway’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission handed over their long-awaited report on injustices against the Sámi people (also the Kvens, Norwegian Finns and Forest Finns) to the Norwegian Storting (parliament). It has taken the twelve-person expert group five years to complete the report that was commissioned by the parliament in 2018. The legislators wanted a historical mapping of the government policy towards these groups, and particularly the policy of forced Norwegianization beginning in the mid 19^th century. It also wanted proposals on how to move forward with measures of reconciliation.

The report is based on interviews with 760 people and runs to about that length in page numbers, with summaries in half a dozen Indigenous Sámi and Finnish-Kven languages, as well as in English. I look forward to reading the summary as well as the Norwegian historical text. There's also some artwork included.

One thing is immediately obvious from the Table of Contents: The long period of almost a thousand years of contact and colonization (900-1852) is given far less space than the period from 1852-1963, which is broken into different eras of Norwegianization. I assume 1852 was chosen because that was the year of the Kautokeino Rebellion.

The Norwegian TRC took its cues from similar commissions in the past in Canada and South Africa, as well as parallel commissions continuing now in Finland and Sweden. There have been numerous criticisms and worries about the Nordic TRCs for the last years, most of them from the Sámi who fear that the commission’s findings will be watered down or not implemented. Some object to the inclusion of the Kvens and Finns as not Indigenous, but settlers. Others see the focus on the Norwegianization period as ignoring the earlier centuries of colonization.

When I was writing my recent book, From Lapland to Sápmi, I mentioned the Nordic TRCs in connect with repatriation of objects and Sámi political organizing. Here is an excerpt from the chapter “Returning: Norway” towards the end of the book, which captures a small sense of the critiques and contradictions the commissions have engendered in the three Nordic countries:

There is also distrust and fear among the Sámi that there will be no real follow-up to traumatic disclosures that Sámi people might make. “Of course we want the truth to come out. We want the Norwegian and Sámi society to know what happened in Norway and in Sweden, and in Finland, but in many ways we already know that. So, truth is great . . . but what is the point if it’s just another report put into the drawer?” says Christina Henriksen, president of the Sámi Council, a pan-Sápmi organization. [i] Rauna Kuokkanen, a Finnish-Sámi scholar, also has taken a more skeptical view, asking whether such commissions will result in meaningful structural chance: “Settler states often define reconciliation as the venting of individual psychological traumas, rather than the eradication of structural causes of injustice.”[ii] She noted that Finland’s TRC process was taking place at the same time that Finland was considering plans for an Arctic Corridor railway without soliciting input from the Sámi herders and residents whose traditional territories it would impact (the plan for the railway was cancelled in May, 2021. She quotes a Sámi participant in Finland: “It’s totally crazy to seek a railway through our lands and at the same time we need to start reconciling. I do not know what is the biggest threat at the moment, is it that the state seeks reconciliation? So that in the future, if something goes wrong with the Sámi, they can say, ‘but we have reconciled and apologized?’”[iii]

 

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[i] John Last, “Canadian-style reconciliation commissions draw mixed reaction across Arctic Europe.” CBC News, July 20, 2020. www.cbc.ca/canada/north/Sámi-truth-commissions

[ii] Rauna Kauokkanen, quoted in John Last, ibid.

[iii] Rauna Kauokkanen, “Reconciliation as a Threat or Structural Change? The Truth and Reconciliation Process and Settler Colonial Policy Making in Finland,” Human Rights Review 21, no.4 (2020): 303.