Visions of Sápmi ed. by Anna Lydia Svalastog and Gunlög Fur (review)

With their new collection of essays, Visions of Sápmi, editors Anna Lydia Svalastog and Gunlög Fur bring together a number of preeminent scholars of Sámi studies to produce a valuable and important contribution to a growing body of English-language Sámi scholarship. The collection is born from the Umeå-based Sámi studies working group, Riekkis (“circle” in Sámi), and the informal dinner conversations they hosted in the early 2000s, which produced inspiration and content for the present text. In addition to contributions from Svalastog and Fur, the collection includes essays from Mikael Svonni, Runar Enberg, Jan-Erik Lundström, Ingrid Dokka, and Harald Gaski. The work features an introduction by Svalastog and Fur (also translated into North Sámi by Svonni), which serves as a concise and eloquent overview of indigenous studies, outlining how the discipline “critically discusses Western philosophy and concepts, and develops alternatives from indigenous philosophies and methodologies” (p. 12). It further illuminates the problems of the historical domination of Sámi representations and academic studies by non-Sámi people—a recurrent theme in the collection.

Collectively, Visions of Sápmi embodies the best of contemporary indigenous studies, putting forth a diversity of voices; establishing relational patterns between author, community, and content; and cutting across a wide range of interdisciplinary content that includes art, literature, archaeology, medieval and early modern studies, political science, and expressive culture. Beyond this, the work internalizes indigenous production and presentation practice, as it unapologetically presents Sámi content in Sámi ways. The text includes numerous color images; its layout recalls the four winds design of Arnberg, Ruong, and Unsgaard’s classic work Jojk/Yoik (Sveriges Radio, 1969); and the writing beautifully engages traditional Sámi discursive methods, rhetoric, and argumentation. The writing flows with ease from indigenous studies and decolonization theory to personal recollections, from elite indigenous chic to the weary stories of an elderly reindeer herder, from Sámi activists to the implacable force of mosquitoes, from biting postcolonial critiques to introspective looks at the history of the discipline.

One of the many challenges in indigenous studies is that scholars are not afforded the privilege to spend a career researching the work of a handful of canonical writers, and are instead expected to produce works that at once serve as primers to Sámi culture and subsequently survey the vast array of experiences and perspectives of 100,000 individuals spread across four nations. Visions of Sápmi makes no pretension to be a comprehensive work, nor should it. Its focus is nearly exclusively on Norwegian- and Swedish-side Sámi, excluding important and somewhat distinct Sámi political and social issues, artistic movements, and intercultural relations in Finland and Russia. The work also reflects the clustering of Sámi scholars around the disciplines of literature and arts in Norway and Sweden—a reminder that these fields were among the first to welcome indigenous methodologies in the Nordic states. To pay respect to the great diversity of voices and the wealth of interdisciplinary content present in this work, I summarize the contents of each chapter below.

Svalastog’s chapter “Mapping Sami Life and Culture” looks at historical and contemporary maps and mapmaking as it pertains to defining—and containing—Sápmi and Sámi people. Svalastog shows that the areas of historical Sámi land-use poorly correspond with maps that attempt to define a Sámi homeland region. She explores the rationales that figure into this cartographic projection. In short, Sámi people are subject to the Western imagination of their other-ness: Sámi habitation along the Swedish coast is dismissed, their historical connections to other Nordic peoples are forgotten, and their purported relations to other Arctic peoples to the east are fetishized. Svalastog shows that newer Sámi-produced maps, however, use mapping methods that better reflect Sámi perspectives of place, mapping in ways that illustrate cross-cultural habitation...