Current Challenges
By the time that the two skulls from 1854 were recovered and buried by descendents, “fourth-world” (Graburn 1981) ethnicity had been surging for several decades among indigenous ethnic minorities around the world and in Lapland, where it was fueled by Saami reactions to and occasional protests about incursions on pasturage by settlement, extractive industries (mostly forestry and mining), military, roads, tourism, and finally, hydroelectric power plants.
The title of a book by ethnographer Robert Paine, Dam a River, Damn a People? (1992), sums up very well the serious consequences of unbridled hydroelectric development, focusing upon the largest and most recent project in northern Norway.While some of the protests to encroachments have been passive resistance (most noteworthy, a hunger strike outside the national parliament), or were intended to be passive resistance (such as occupying the dam development site), other incidents have been violent, as were the developmental incursions themselves. Oddly enough, outside the political arena, one doesn't hear any stories about these protests, or about “the” eventual dam, or other dams. Nor do they recall Chernobyl, unless maybe when asked. Instead, on the ground, Saami, particularly the nomads, busily take advantage of whatever situation that's come to pass with or without their input, protest, or ratification. Again, their pragmatism both serves and undermines their short-term and longer-term interests, respectively, although there has always been a minority of politically engaged, and enraged, Saami. These will include very few persons involved in primary subsistence activities; instead, they are members of a diffuse bureaucracy, able to speak freely while enjoying salaries from some organization or governmental department.
Reflecting over the past thirty and 300 years, cultural violence gradually merges with structural violence and, in turn, subsumes direct violence.
No reversals in levels or rates of violence can be expected. Perhaps cultural violence reverberates through the emerging family structure as well, affecting child-rearing practices. If so, the influence is subtle to my eye; yet the current problems of Saami children in school have more in common with those found far away than they do with the local situation of mere decades ago. Many Saami do voice concerns about school practices, lax child-rearing, family breakdowns, deteriorating subsistence economies, addictive media, and increasing autonomy of children when nature itself plays less of a role in educating them. The occupational sectors of the society used to be more distinct: the seasonally nomadic reindeer-breeders vis-a-vis the sedentary farmers, entrepreneurs, and civil servants. These sectors have their own parallel occupational organizations but their concerns increasingly overlap. Now villages have become towns, and most Saami live in towns and small cities. A few have relocated to their national capitals, where various subsidies and conveniences have become prominent in their lives.Addressing issues of education, public affairs, environment, language, and culture generally, since 1989, is the Saami Assembly in Norway (also called the Saami Parliament), corresponding to those founded in Sweden (1993) and in Finland (1973) (but absent in the Kola peninsula of Russia). The Saami Assembly and its relationship to the Norwegian government align with Convention #169 of the International Labor Organization, specifically its requirement that fourth-world peoples—indigenous ethnic minorities—be guaranteed self-determination and the protection of their indigenous culture. Nowadays Saami concerns can theoretically be resolved through their own political institutions, locally and nationally within the nation-state. In fact, in 1974 the Nordic Saami Institute was established to facilitate regional communication about issues shared between Saami in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and, in 1975, the Saami were represented when fourth-world peoples met for the first time as the World Council of Indigenous Peoples in Port Alberni, British Columbia.
Fifteen years later, the Saami, residing in the arctic of all four nation-states of the Pan North, adopted a flag which one sees more and more frequently—even (or especially, perhaps) when Saami descendents gather in North America, as they now regularly do. North American Saami have discovered their roots at the same time as many Saami in their Fennoscandian homelands.Nowadays, ethnic identity is assumed to be a matter of voluntary self-ascription, although it may arise on the scene first as a non-voluntary construct of “othering” by outsiders, or through a collaborative co-construction. For several centuries, some Saami had been absorbed into their overarching dominant societies, with or without intermarriage, and with or without the violence of an assimilationist policy by their colonial states. The flow reverses today. When there is incentive plus inclination, a person or a family may declare itself Saami—the motivation may be economic subsidy or voting rights in the elections for the Saami Assembly; some even learn the language of their ancestors. The consequence, in many cases, is that siblings may be in different political and bureaucratic camps, whereas earlier, when the distinction was largely traditional and occupational, it would be, at most, distant cousins who would be holding competing or contradictory interests in policy promulgations. There was a tendency for Saami and outsiders to assume that the typical Saami would be a reindeer-breeder; this led to local resentment against the colorful nomads with their plentiful meat and adventures, not only on the tundra but with tourists and ethnographers (Anderson 1991). Today, some of these “authentic” Saami choose not even to register as Saami, and hence distance themselves from the political scene.
With greater autonomy, no longer is it so logical for Saami to point a finger exclusively at violations of the dominant society, but this fact does not mean that either new problems or old habits of attribution disappear.
In daily life, both nomadic and sedentary Saami frequently question the good judgment of others, their responsibility, their accountability for actions and nonactions, but seldom come to solutions.Bureaucracies, in a systems model, are by nature rigid, post-mature, overdetermined, and therefore every bit as pathological as they have rendered themselves necessary (Salthe 1993, Salthe and Anderson 1989). For Saami, the local, regional, national, and occupational bureaucracies which have proliferated in their lifetimes protect them, frustrate them, and perplex them, as already these bureaucracies have set deep and adventitious roots—a constraint entailing violence imposed through the boredom of the bureaucrats, the arbitrariness of their actions, and the frustration of the citizen-victims.
This no doubt sounds familiar to people outside of the fourth world!
References
Anderson, Myrdene. (1978). Saami Ethnoecology: Resource Management in Norwegian Lapland. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University. (University Microfilms, 1979.)
———. (1991). Reindeer and magic numbers: The making and maintenance of the Saami stereotype. In Self and Society, Stereotype and Ethnicity, edited by Myrdene Anderson and Karen Larson. Special issue, Ethnos 56.3-4: 200-209.
-----. (1994). Trashing and hoarding in words, deeds, and memory: A sampler from the fourth world Saami. In Refiguring Debris—Becoming Unbecoming, Unbecoming Becoming, edited by Myrdene Anderson and Walter R. Adams. Special issue, The American Journal of Semiotics 11.1-2: 257-249.
-----. (2000). Saami children and traditional knowledge. In Ecological Knowledge in the North: Studies in Ethnobiology, edited by Invar Svanberg and Hakan Tunon (StudiaEthnobiologica, 9), pp. 55-65. Uppsala: Swedish Biodiversity Centre.
Bjorklund, Ivar. (1992). The anatomy of a millenarian movement: Some organizational conditions for the Sami revolt in Guovdageaidnu in 1852. Acta Borealia 9.2: 3746.
Graburn, Nelson H.H. (1981).
1, 2, 3, 4: Anthropology and the Fourth World. Cul- tur/Culture 1.1: 66-70.Paine, Robert. (1984). Norwegians and Saami. In Minorities and Mother Country Imagery, edited by Gerald L. Gold. St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada: Institute of Social and Economic Research.
-----. (1992). Dam a River, Damn a People? Saami (Lapp) Livelihood and the Alta- Kautokeino Hydro-Electric Project and the Norwegian Parliament. IWGIIA Document 45.
Salthe, Stanley N. (1993). Development and Evolution: Complexity and Change in Biological Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Salthe, Stanley N., and Myrdene Anderson. (1989). Modeling self-organizing. In Semiotics 1988, edited by Terry J. Prewitt, John Deely, and Karen Haworth, pp. 14-23. Lanham and New York: University Press of America.
Zorgdrager, Nelllejet. (1989/1997). De rettferdiges strid, Kautokeino 1852: Samisk motstand mot norsk kolonialism. Translated from the Dutch (De strijd der rechtvaardigen Kautokeino 1852; religieus verzet van Samen tegen intern Noors kolonialism) by Trond Kirkeby Garstad. Nesbru: Vett & Viten. Samiske Samlinger, 18. Oslo.