Ghosts Haunting the Norwegian House: Racialization in Norway and The Kautokeino Rebellion

In 2011, for the ninth year in a row, Norway topped the United Nation’s Human Development Index composite that measures life standard in terms of life expectancy, educational attainment, and income.¹ Numbers released by the Norwegian Ministry of Finance in May 2012 further show that Norway has managed to successfully surf the wave of global recession reporting economic growth and low unemployment also in 2011.² It comes as no surprise then that people around the world look at Norway as an attractive place to which to move. Most recent counts made by Norway Statistics indicate historically high migration: 14 percent of Norway’s total population has an immigrant background, either immigrants themselves or children born to immigrant parents; Oslo is the county with the highest concentration of immigrants, 30 percent; the largest immigrant group in Norway is the Poles, the majority of whom have come as guest workers after Poland joined the European Union (EU) in 2004; the Pakistani started migrating into Norway in the late 1960s and represent the largest non-European ethnic community living in Norway, third in size after Poles and Swedes; in comparison to the 1970s, when the largest proportion of immigrants was from Western Europe and North America, in 2012, 48.5 percent of all the immigrants come from Asia, Africa, and South and Central America.³

If Asians, Africans, or Eastern Europeans are newer additions to the national community, the indigenous Sami, as well as other national minorities, such as tatere (the Romani), the Kvens, or the Jews, have long cohabited with the Norwegian majority.⁴ This cohabitation has not been without frictions. The case of the Sami is a well-documented example of how the Norwegian nation-state has backed up oppressive assimilation policies meant to discipline this indigenous group.⁵

Figure 1.

An unrepentant Sami rebel on the scaffold in Nils Gaup’s film Kautokeino-opprøret/The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008).

Figure 2.

About to witness something not meant for a child’s eyes in Nils Gaup’s film Kautokeinoopprøret/The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008).

One of the most recent commentaries on the relationship between the Sami minority and the Norwegian majority is Nils Gaup’s film Kautokeino-opprøret/The Kautokeino Rebellion (DK/NO/SE, 2008). Gaup is an acclaimed Norwegian director of Sami descent and his film is based on a true event in 1852 when the Sami of Kautokeino turned to violence against representatives of the Norwegian authorities. The reception of the film focused on the revisionist attempt to explain history from the Sami point of view, with many welcoming Gaup’s insider perspective and some accusing him of light treatment of Sami religious extremism and terror. But how does the Sami experience as conveyed by Gaup in 2008 pertain to the current moment of accelerated migration into Norway? What is the film’s relevance to current debates on integration and discrimination? This paper analyzes Gaup’s film against the background of changing demographics and heated immigration debates in Norway. In addition, it looks at the cinematic context from which The Kautokeino Rebellion emerges, to be precise, Gaup’s epic in comparison to other cinematic representations of Sami and immigrant others in Norwegian features.

Race and Racism in Norway

Analyzing notions of Norwegian nationalism and nationhood, anthropologist Marianne Gullestad underscores that Norway, in comparison to other nation-states, does not have a well-organized extremist and racist movement.⁶ Instead, there are more subtle forms of everyday discrimination that are institutionalized by state and everyday practices, in structured economic inequalities or in discursive resources available to a wide range of people.⁷ For example, take the use of the term innvandrer (immigrant). Quoting an earlier study conducted by Hernes and Knudsen that shows nine out of ten ethnic Norwegians use innvandrer to refer to people with dark skin, Gullestad contends that the term “immigrant” is racially coded.⁸ “Immigrant” does not simply denote anyone who has permanently moved to Norway...