Transforming Historical Shame and Imposing Colonial Guilt
I am comfortable referring to irreversible damage to machines, built environment, material artifacts, and landscape as violence. But, as far as I can tell, my Saami friends would either disagree or not understand at all.
To find an instance of violence they would agree on would take us back to 1852, when a small group of Saami—inspired by Laestadius, an activist part-Saami preacher in Sweden, and acting out against perceived colonial evils such as alcohol—terrorized an entire village, injuring both Saami and non-Saami, and killing two non-Saami: the sheriff and the trading-post manager. Saami arriving from a nearby smaller settlement were able to apprehend the score of perpetrators. There was no precedent for this tragedy, and no violent incidents to follow.That event in 1852 is now called the Guovdageaidnu massacre. For generations hardly anyone mentioned it, neither the Saami nor the Norwegians. It was almost as though everyone agreed the massacre was so out of character for the Saami that in a spirit of fairness or due to shared embarrassment, it need not be recalled. To find out more, one had to seek out particular historical treatments of this unique happening. With the rise of ethnic identity about thirty years ago, this event was dusted off and reinter- preted—as a Saami revolution of sorts. It is now the topic of refreshed oral lore, written stories, performances, and films, as well as scholarship (Bjorklund 1992, Zorgdrager 1989/1997).
However, the contemporary indigenous interpretation of the violent encounter doesn't settle so much on the Saami perpetrators of the 1852 massacre, who can even be portrayed as culture heroes, but on the Norwegians and some Saami whose behavior— particularly centered on the place of alcohol in the colonizing mission—precipitated the conditions prior to the massacre. In the recently re-emerging narrative, the violence foregrounded is not that of the Saami perpetrators of the massacre, but that of the Norwegian colonizers in general, and to the particular Norwegians who sought justice afterwards, and to the dominant Norwegian culture which took possession of the bodies of the perpetrators thereafter, and which participated in the (partial) erasure of this discursive event.
The Norwegian authorities arranged for a trial, in a larger town, resulting in shortterm incarcerations, life sentences, and five death sentences—of these all but two commuted to life imprisonment (one of the five died). In 1854, two men were guillotined (or hanged), their heads (and perhaps bodies) sent to the nearest (not very near) university for “scientific” study. They were, after all, criminals and their skulls might hold some clues for science; they were also considered to be from a different “race,” so the skulls might somehow confirm the significance of that distinction! In an ironic twist, it now has been revealed that the preacher, Laestadius, was known to disinter bodies in order to obtain skulls to sell to museum procurers.
Whatever the rendition, I had always assumed that those two sets of osteological materials, whether skulls and/or skeletons, were “properly catalogued” in the university museum in Trondheim, laundered for science as it were. But 140 years later, in 1997, it took kin quite an effort to locate them—one skull in Oslo, one in Copenhagen—and these were only then properly reclaimed by relatives to be buried in the same county as the Guovdageaidnu event of 1852, in caskets that looked very much like traditional cradles in the online photographs.