Challenging and Negotiating National Borders Sámi and Tornedalian Alternative Literary History
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Challenging and Negotiating National Borders Sámi and Tornedalian AlterNative Literary History ANNE HEITH HE NORDIC COUNTRIES are frequently thought of as democratic and equal states with welfare systems whose benefits are evenly spread T among the citizens. In part, this is related to national self-images cherished and actively promoted in brandings of the Nordic states. These images portray the nations as modern, progressive, and expert on democracy and human rights.1 This essay will examine how these narratives are being fractured through performative challenges of national homogeneity narratives which have excluded the voices of ethnic minorities. Historically, ethnic Swedes have been constructed as the racial ideal in state-supported race bio- logy which operated with racial hierarchies that place the indigenous Sámi people and the Tornedalian Finns in the border area between Sweden and Fin- land on a lower level than the Nordic racial character. The Sámi in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and north-western Russia and the Tornedalians (previously called ‘Tornedalian Finns’) in Sweden constitute ethnic and linguistic minorities within the nation-states. Both groups illustrate the fact that the Nordic nation-states were multi-ethnic spaces long before the present-day borders were established. The Sámi constitute an indigenous peo- ple, marginalized through the arrival of settlers who took over lands which had been used since ancient times for reindeer-herding, fishing, and hunting. The present-day status of the Tornedalians in Sweden is directly related to the 1 Suvi Keskinen, Salla Tuori, Sari Irni & Diana Mulinari, “Introduction: Post- colonialism and the Nordic Models of Welfare and Gender,” in Complying with Colo- nialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. Keskinen, Tuori, Irni & Mulinari (Farnham & Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009): 1–16. 76 A NNE HEITH a establishment of the 1809 border which divided the Tornedalian population on both sides of the Könkämä, Muonio, and Torne Rivers when Sweden lost Finland at the conclusion of the 1808–1809 war with Russia. During the age of imperialism, there was a fear among the Swedish security elite of Russian expansionism. In this historical context, the northern border became strate- 2 gically important for defending Sweden against a perceived ‘Russian threat’. F IGURE 3: “Lapp Prototype, relatively pure,” illustration in The Racial Characters of the Swedish Nation, ed. Herman B. Lundborg & F.J. Linders (1926). The photographs were taken by Gunhild Sandgren in 1925 Lundborg, one of the leading race biologists of the 1920s and 1930s, used several series of photographs to illustrate racial differentiation within the Swedish nation. His work exemplifies how ideal whiteness was socially con- structed in Sweden through the use of didactic images which taught viewers the existence of racial differences. From the perspective of Nordic critical whiteness studies, Lundborg’s arrangement of photographs exemplify the creation of a racial hierarchy with the Nordic racial character as the ideal. While ethnic Swedes, ‘the Nordic racial character’, were constructed as the superior racial character, other categories of people were constructed as in- 2 Gunnar Åselius, The ”Russian Menace” to Sweden: The Belief System of a Small Power Security Élite in the Age of Imperialism (Stockholm: Akademitryck AB, 1994); Magnus Rodell, “Fortifications in the Wilderness: The Making of Swedish–Russian Borderlands around 1900,” Journal of Northern Studies 1 (2009): 69–89. .