During the past week, the discussion around Finland’s Sámi Parliament Act and especially the legal definition of who is Sámi has caught fire. The time to amend Finland’s existing Sámi Parliament Act under this government is quickly running out (check out for instance the President of Saami Council Aslak Holmberg’s illuminative blog text). While the prime minister Sanna Marin has now expressed a clear commitment to make the necessary amendments, representatives of the Centre Party, which participates in the otherwise green and left-leaning government, have strongly opposed these changes and thus the faith of the proposal still remains unsure.
The main purpose of the amendments is to answer to the UN Human Rights Committee’s decision in 2019, which slammed Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) for violating Sámi self-determination and human rights in its decisions regarding the Sámi Parliament’s electoral register. According to the UN, SAC succumbed to an arbitrary interpretation of the legal definition of a Sámi person when it decided to include in the electoral registers individuals who do not fulfil any of the objective criteria that are stated in the law, and who according to the Sámi Parliament are not Sámi. The new, amended Sámi Parliament Act would address the problem in accordance with the UN’s demands and thereby safeguard Sámi self-determination in Finland from such encroachments in future.
Although the fate of the Sámi Parliament Act still has not been resolved, these past days have brought a clear change in tone of the public discussion regarding Sámi rights in Finland. I have followed Sámi issues in social and traditional media intensively for the past 13 years and never before has there been so much public support and genuine understanding for Sámi rights and especially for the particular political issues relating to the question “who is Sámi” and the electoral register. Before, perspectives which upheld Sámi right to determine over their own peoplehood, were predominantly ran over by discourses which portrayed such views and the Sámi or anyone else who defended them in this matter as somehow racist, intolerant and stuck in essentializing conceptions of authenticity and identity (for more on this, see Junka-Aikio 2016).
Today, this seems to have changed: the serious discussion around the need to amend the Sámi Parliament Act has helped many in Finland to understand better the nature of the debate and the political and social context in which it has emerged. In Finland, self-indigenization, and all forms of disinformation campaigns that have supported it, has become a serious political problem which has even affected the SAC’s decisions on matters relating to issues that are fundamental to Sámi self-determination.
It is understandable that the debate around Sámi identity can appear highly complicated, especially if one lacks knowledge of local history as experienced and lived by the Sámi. However, if one looks critically at the ways in which the issue has been discussed for years publicly in Northern Finland’s various media environments, it is much easier to connect the many dots between the context and discourse, and to understand the actual political issues that underline the conflict over Sámi identity. In recent days, the politics behind self-Indigenization and the related efforts to prevent planned changes to the existing Sámi Parliament Act have been articulated more clearly also on the level of high politics. For instance, on Thursday 10.11, the Centre Party’s Markus Lohi admitted that the Party objects to the proposal also because it would grant the Sámi “too much power to stop planned land use and other projects in the Sámi homeland region”. Meanwhile, public support for the Sámi, in social media but also in the established traditional media, has become overwhelming especially if compared to the past.
With these thoughts, I’m making openly accessible a book chapter on Toxic speech ad political self-Indigenization that I published last spring in a remarkable anthology The Sámi World edited by four Sámi colleagues, Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva and Sigga-Marja Magga. The text will be soon available open access also via Routledge page. I hope the text can create some further understanding of the socio-political context in which the increasingly toxic conflict over Sámi identity has been in the making, since the early 1990s.
One note: after the research for the article (2010-2020), the Facebook group Inari Citizen’s Channel where I withdrew the materials has significantly changed. Perhaps in part due to increased moderation, today it is no longer home for uncontrolled toxic speech. This is good, but the problem remains: since then new groups where similar speech proceeds rather freely have been established.
Cover image at the beginning of this text is by Suohpanterror.
