The Sámi World

Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, Sigga-Marja Magga, Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, Sigga-Marja Magga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367458157
• eBook ISBN: 9781000584233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of the Sámi society and its histories and people, offering valuable insights into how they live and see the world.

The chapters examine a variety of social and cultural practices, and consideration is given to environment, legal and political conditions and power relations. The contributions by a range of experts of Sámi studies and Indigenous scholars are drawn from across the Sápmi region, which spans from central Norway and central Sweden across Finnish Lapland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sámi perspectives, concepts and ways of knowing are foregrounded throughout the volume. The material connects with wider discussions within Indigenous studies and engages with current concerns relating to globalization, environmental and cultural change, Arctic politics, multiculturalism, postcolonialism and neoliberalism.

The Sámi World will be of interest to scholars from a number of disciplines, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, history and political science.

PART I GUOÐOHIT¹ – LIVINGWITH/IN NATURE

• 1 ‘to herd’; ‘to let the reindeer graze’; ‘to supervise the grazing reindeer’

CHAPTER ONE A WINDOW INTO VANISHING SÁMI CULTURE? Visual representations of Sáminess in the shared Siida exhibition by Sámi Museum Siida and Northern Lapland’s Nature Centre¹

Áile Aikio

DOI: 10.4324/9781003025511-3

INTRODUCTION

The devastation of the Sámi homeland in the Second World War and Finland’s tightening postwar assimilation policies made the Sámi fear for the future of their people, language and cultural heritage. As a response to the threat, the Sámi association Sami Litto (Sámi Union) founded the Inari Sámi Museum in 1959. The new museum allowed the Sámi to manage, conserve, communicate and exhibit their cultural heritage; to benefit from the growing tourism; and to gain control over the Sámi representations exhibited to the public (about growth of tourism in Finnish Lapland, see Mazzullo in this volume). In the first decades, the Sámi Museum functioned as an open-air museum until the main building Siida was opened in 1998. Today, the Sámi Museum Siida is a prominent attraction and an important source of information about the Sámi for the Sámi and non-Sámi alike.

The Sámi Museum shares facilities and exhibition responsibility for the main building Siida with the Northern Lapland Nature Centre of Metsähallitus.² The most visible manifestation of the cooperation is the shared main exhibition that presents Sámi culture and northern nature as one entity. The theme of the first Siida exhibition (1998–2021) was the survival strategies of humans and other species in nature in extreme northern conditions. During its 23-year life, the Siida exhibition was visited by 1,166,295 people – approximately 50,000 visitors annually. In this chapter, I examine this first permanent Sámi exhibition of a Sámi museum in Finland and its representations of Sáminess. During its life, the Siida exhibition has been an important part of the Sámi world, and it has been widely studied both as a whole and at the level of detail from various perspectives (e.g. Thomas and Koskinen-Koivisto 2016; Kelly-Holmes and Pietikäinen 2016; Potinkara 2015; Levy 2006; Webb 2006, 2001; Olsen 2000). The exhibition was closed in April 2021, and the spatial and bodily experience it offered can no longer be relived. The new Siida exhibition – again, a cooperation between the Sámi Museum and Metsähallitus’s Nature Centre, named ‘Enâmeh láá mii párnááh – These lands are our children,’ is to be opened in May 2021. Thus, in addition to a study and an analysis, this text is also a memoir of an exhibition that now can be looked for only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered.

The Siida exhibition is divided into two rooms. The smaller introductory exhibition presents the history of nature and human activities in the area by a linear timeline. In the larger main exhibition hall, the layout is divided into two spheres: ‘the sphere of nature’ surrounds the ‘sphere of Sámi culture,’ similar to the way that nature surrounds and sets boundaries to Sámi culture. The overall look of the dark blue exhibition hall is dim, the primary light source being the backlight illumination of the showcases and photographs. The amount and colour of light varies in different parts of the room: the months of polar night are dark compared to the bright sunshine of early spring. The visual exhibition experience is complemented by lighting and a constantly changing soundscape of animal sounds and ambient sounds of nature. Human sounds, such as music or speech, are not included in the soundscape.

The nature section is dominated by 12 gigantic nature photographs – one for each month of the year – that cover the outer walls of the room. In the middle is the Sámi culture section, presented in a square formed by glass cabinets placed slightly oblique to the outer circumference. The culture section is subdivided into 12 panels, each presenting a different theme. The first panel by the entrance is entitled Reindeer herding, the basis of traditional culture (panel VII) and, moving clockwise, is followed by Foods, a basic need (panel VIII); Clothing, a basic need (panels IX and X); Transportation, Know-how, a basic need (panel XI); Siida, the Social Background (panel XII); Traditional Dwelling Patterns (panel I); The Skolt Siida (panel II); The Artist Background (panel III); The Religious Background (panel IV); The Consolidation of Sámiland (panel V); and Fishing, Farming, the Basis of Traditional Culture (panel VI). Under these themes, Sámi culture is approached through text, objects, images, maps and some videos. A display area in the middle of the culture section presents Sámi culture in seven installations consisting of museum objects, taxidermy specimens and props.

I understand the exhibition to be stories of realities purposefully chosen for the exhibition to display the idea and theories behind it rather than a reflection of reality that passively documents or exhibits Sámi culture. In this chapter, I approach both the Sámi Museum and its exhibitions as heritage practices that constantly enact and assemble a multitude of Sámi realities and further Sámi futures (c.f. Harrison 2015). Since its opening in 1998, the Siida exhibition has taken part in assembling the Sámi realities we Sámi now live in.

In this study, I analyze the photographs of the Sámi culture section of the Siida exhibition and the Sámi representations assembled by them. I examine, interpret and evaluate the exhibition and its photographs from the dual perspective of an Indigenous Sámi and a Sámi researcher and ask how the exhibition’s representations of the Sámi appear from this perspective. What photographs – and, through them, what kinds of Sámi representations – have been selected for the exhibition? My text offers a critical reading of the exhibition and its photographs. I begin my analysis by examining what kinds of photographs have been chosen for the exhibition. Then I identify the eras and areas that are emphasized and underemphasized by dividing the photographs into groups by date and location. In addition to reflecting on the individual photographs and their representations, I also study the photographs in a more abstract sense as expressions of the theoretical idea behind the exhibition and, more comprehensively, the research traditions in Sámi studies. Finally, keeping in mind the idea of the Siida exhibition as a window into Sámi culture, I ask what kinds of views the exhibition opens to Sáminess: what kind of Sáminess is shown through the exhibition ‘window’ and what is left ‘out of its frame.’

Photographs are one element of the exhibition alongside texts, objects, sounds, videos and exhibition structures. Photographs contribute to the story of the exhibition and interact with, complement and reinforce the other elements; open up new perspectives and approaches to the topics; and combine the individual elements into a polyphonic whole. Hence, investigating the individual elements separately can do wrong to the exhibition as a whole (Potinkara 2015, 34). Then again, an exhibition can be understood as a combination of separate narratives embodied by the medium that tells them. Thus, photographs assemble their own narratives both singly and jointly with other photographs. In this regard, my analysis of photographs as independent exhibition elements opens up new ways of perceiving the Siida exhibition.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE SIIDA EXHIBITION

In the 1980s, the Sámi voiced a need for an exhibition space that would complement the information about the Sámi and Sámi history provided by the open-air museum. The process was stopped due to lack of funding for years, and in 1990, the process resumed, and a board of experts was set up to plan and construct a new Sámi Museum building and its main exhibition. Professor of anthropology Jukka Pennanen was chosen as the chair of the board, and Tarmo Jomppanen, the then-director of the Sámi Museum, was chosen as the secretary. The third main figure of the board was Professor Juhani Pallasmaa, a well-known Finnish architect, who had been chosen to design the Siida building. The other members were Sámi linguist and ethnologist Samuli Aikio, director of the Nature Centre Timo Kukko, the curator for Sámi collections at the National Museum of Finland Martti Linkola, design architect Sami Wirkkala, conservation biologist Matti Mela and – according to some sources – Klemetti Näkkäläjärvi, then a student of anthropology, who also compiled the manuscript. A year before the exhibition was opened, archaeologist Leena Hiltula joined the board and became its only female member (Pennanen 1998, 46).³

The composition of the board of experts can be scrutinized from different perspectives. First, until its last year, the board was an all-male panel. Second, only three of its members were Sámi, and the majority and all the key positions were held by Finns. Third, considering that the exhibition was to exhibit Sámi culture and northern nature equally, natural scientists were under-represented: only two of the members were natural scientists. The board’s membership reflected the situation and atmosphere in Finland at the time the exhibition was planned and constructed. Then, Western education was considered superior when producing objective information about cultural heritage, and the Sámi were seen as objects, rather than actors, of museum activity. Thus, it was normal and acceptable to implement a Sámi exhibition project practically entirely by non-Sámi men. Until today, the number of Sámi with university degrees has been relatively small. In the 1990s there were only three Sámi who held degrees in so-called Finnish museum subjects: i.e. archaeology, ethnology, history or art history. Two of them, Aikio and Näkkäläjärvi, were members of the board of experts, and the third, Aslak Outakoski, long-time director of the Oulu County Archive, was in his 80s at the time of the exhibition process.

Quite early in the planning process, it was decided that the process would be implemented in cooperation with the state-owned enterprise Metsähallitus. The new Siida construction was to unite the responsibility areas – the northern nature of the administrative area Northern Lapland and the Sámi culture – of two different organizations and build an exhibition entity in which ‘the cultural-historical and ethnographic content are put in proportion to the natural historic content’ (Pennanen and Näkkäläjärvi 200 3, 9). To unite exhibitions of a nature centre and a cultural-historical museum was a unique idea in Finland, and the union was not without challenges. The relationship of the Sámi with Metsähallitus is burdened by several historical and ongoing disputes as Metsähallitus manages the Sámi lands in Finland and its land use competes with – and sometimes threatens – the livelihoods and cultural survival of the Sámi (see also Puuronen in this volume). For Metsähallitus, the collaboration was challenging for different reasons: exhibiting culture and nature together and aligning perspectives with a cultural institute was very different from what had been done in Metsähallitus’s nature centres, and the new approach required rethinking.

The Siida exhibition and its design were based on the anthropological theory of human ecology and its ecosystem approach. Drawing from these, the exhibition has three focus areas: the natural environment surrounding the culture, the community as an interactive system surrounding the individual and the relationship of the individual to the dominant culture. The exhibition focuses on survival strategies of nature and culture in the extreme conditions of the north, and its central idea is the interaction between nature, people and culture. The exhibition design distinguishes human ecosystems from natural ecosystems. For example, the large nature photographs in the nature section show the changing seasons and bear no trace of human presence. Likewise, in the inner cultural sphere, the essential cultural practices are portrayed by month of their occurrence for the visitor to link the natural events to cultural practices and vice versa (Pennanen 2003a, 208, 210–211, 2003b, 215). The aim of the exhibition is to ‘provide the Sámi with an insight into their own ethnicity and thus strengthen their self-esteem. For non-Sámi the exhibitions should provide an understanding of the essence of what it means to be Sámi’ (Pennanen 2003b, 215).

Since its inauguration, the exhibition entity has been kept mostly intact. In general, the design of the exhibition – print on glass structures – makes it practically impossible to make changes or even to correct errors. Nevertheless, there have been some changes. Originally, there were video interviews with five Sámi individuals, four men and one woman, from different regions. These were removed shortly after the opening because – according of the board of experts – the sound of the videos disturbed the exhibition soundscape. The decision to remove the disturbing videos – both literally and figuratively – silenced ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Introduction to the Sámi world
• Part I Guođohit – Living with/in Nature
• Part II Gierdat – Living through/in Societal Ruptures
• Part III Duostat – Envisioning Sámi Futures
• Epilogue: Ways of being in the world
• Index