Making Indigenous Futures: Land, Memory, and 'Silent Knowledge' in a Skolt Sámi Community

• Main Author: Magnani, Natalia
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Peterhouse College 2018
• Subjects: memory; Sami; practical knowledge; Finland; Indigenous articulations; materiality; Arctic; Sevettijärvi; Northern Finland; sami; Sámi; Skolt Sámi
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.30980; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283612

This dissertation considers experiences of embodied memory and indigenous connection to land by which people reconstitute social life in Skolt Sámi resettlement areas of Arctic Finland. After their Petsamo homeland was ceded to the Soviet Union following the Second World War, Skolt relocation to new areas of northern Finland radically transformed social, political, and subsistence lifeways, including through education in Finnish boarding schools. Continuing out-migration to Finnish cities has contributed to the suppression of identity and threats to community wellbeing, felt in ruptures of practice associated with material culture, language, and relationships with local ecologies. Though most studies in the region still focus on the reindeer herding and fishing commonly associated with Sámi populations, there is actually resurgence of Skolt craft (boats, tools, dress), as well as collection and processing of wild foods, which form the core of a vibrant cultural revival. Through participant observation and life history methods, I follow the making of things using local materials as a means by which people remake relationships with the land and with each other. The thesis focuses on the first 14 months of fieldwork in Čeʹvetjäuʹrr (F. Sevettijärvi) 2014-2015, out of a total of 26 months of multi-sited research in the Sámi regions. Scholarship on memory, practice, and displacement examines how memory becomes embodied, reworked, and reconciled across generations, and how material objects and the creation of home in new places create connections to original homelands. Meanwhile, studies among indigenous communities highlight how people use craft and art to establish connections to land despite, and through, displacement and movement. However, to understand the tangible mechanisms of these attachments and interventions, I inquire into the material practices by which people form relationships to resettlement environments. The thesis follows the concept of practical knowledge as transformed and mobilised through revival ...