Episode 5: Just Decide

Episode Length: 32:08 


Focus

History of Sámi culture and the pressures to assimilate in Norway and Sweden 


Location

Norway, Sweden


Keywords

Sámi history and culture, discrimination and racism, assimilation, colonization

 
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Episode Outline

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MINUTES: 00:00 - 04:35

The two sides of Norway, a country with bold climate initiatives and a history of oppressing the Sami people:

  • Borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia cross Sámi lands and pushed Sami culture underground 


04:36 - 08:14

Vikings get a lot of attention in popular culture but the Sámi people were here long before the Vikings:

  • Sámi song tradition called joiking—everything and everyone has a joik


08:15 - 10:59

Vikings and Sámi co-existed for hundreds of years. Everything changed with the coming of Christianity:

  • Sámi faced pressure to assimilate and their traditions were banned  


11:00 - 14:32

Many Sámi were nomads and crossed state borders but they faced pressure to choose a nationality and abandon their heritage and practices

  •  Sámi are white so easy to hide in white Scandinavian culture 


14:33 - 17:50

Sámi communities fighting the expansion of industry, especially oil, on their ancestral lands

  • Sámi parliaments in all four countries 

  • Norway makes a lot of money from fossil fuels while also wanting to be a leader in climate change

BREAK

17:51 - 23:53

Sámi also faced discrimination in Sweden where a law declared the only true Sámi to be those who herded reindeer:

  • “Reindeer law” flattened the Sámi experience and took the Sami heritage away from thousands of people

  • Institute for Racial Biology set up in the 1920s to practice eugenics by measuring the heads of children


23:55 - 28:39

Sámi people internalized the racism and colonialism imposed on them:

  • This period in Swedish history is dramatized in the movie Sami Blood, set in the 1930s

  • Sámi forced to perform their otherness for white people


28:40 - 32:08

Value of joiking to the Sámi isn’t measured in money but in value to the culture.

season 2Erika JanikSami history and culture, discrimination and racism, assimilation, colonization