Troy Storfjell

... Rio Tinto and Se og Hor, Norwegian Weekly Journal and National Geographic. ... narratives will also lead us into discussion of immigration and multiculturalism and ultimately to a deconstruction of the Scandinavian national myths. ... Newspapers, Encyclopedia, Research Topics. ...

ABSTRACT Looking back at Johan Turi's book from the perspective of a century after its creation, we often tend to note its historic role as the beginning of Sámi literature, which is to say that we view Muitalus sámiid birra as marking the beginning of creative writing by Sámi authors in the Sámi languages, a creative production that has blossomed over the past century producing a vibrant array of memoirs, short stories, novels, poems, plays, and screenplays, and achieving international acclaim with the awarding of the Nordic Council Literature Prize to Nils-Aslak Valkeapää in 1991 for Beaivi, áhčážan (The Sun, My Father). Indeed, one thing that strikes anyone who explores Sámi literature is how much of it there is for something that is so young and is produced by such a small cultural and linguistic community. As noteworthy as Turi's book may be for its place in literary history, though, it is also quite a remarkable text in its own right, representing an epistemologically hybrid vehicle for communicating Sámi perspectives and Sámi orders of knowledge to the ruottelaš and dáža reader in the colonizing metropoles of the south. Indeed, while the originary status of Turi's work is complicated by the contemporaneous and slightly early Norwegian-language novel writing of fellow Sámi author Matti Aikio, the two writers complement each other in the ways that they wrestle with the problems of producing Sámi art out of aesthetic forms inherited from the colonizers. Both early twentieth-century authors can be read as collaborating, perhaps unintentionally, to chart Sámi literary space and abrogate the forms of the colonizers. In his opening paragraph Turi sets down the purpose for his writing and establishes his own authority to speak as a Sámi—and for the Sámi. As Turi's opening frames the situation, representation of the Sámi has to this point been dominated by non-Sámi perspectives, by a southern, colonial discourse from which the voices of the Sámi themselves have been excluded and in which their space has been superinscribed with colonizing significations. Tellingly, Turi links discursive power to place in a way that not only highlights the inequitable power relationships of Sámi-Swedish relations, but that also argues for a counter-discourse grounded in Sámi space and Sámi premises. The Swedish government does not understand the Sámi because it controls the space (and thus the discourse) in which the Sámi are interrogated and from which the colonizing truths about the Sámi are pronounced. This is because, despite the good intentions of the state authorities, "go sápmelaš boahtá moskkus gámmárii, de son ii ipmir ii báljo maidege, go ii biegga beasta bossut njuni vuostá" (11) ["when a Sámi becomes closed up in a room, then he does not understand much of anything, because he cannot put his nose to the wind"]. Turi continues: Su jurdagat eai golgga, go leat seainnit ja moskkus oaivvi alde. Ja ii leat ge buorre sutnje orrut suhkkes vuvddiid siste, go lea liegga ilbmi. Muhto go sápmelaš lea alla váriid alde, de sus lea oba čielggas jierbmi. Ja jos doppe livččii čoakkánbáiki soames alla vári alde, de veajášii sápmelaš čilget oba bures su iežas áššiid. His thoughts don't flow because there are walls and his mind is closed in. And it is also not good at all for him to live in dense forest when the air is warm. But when a Sámi is on the high mountains, then he has quite a clear mind. And if there were a meeting place on some high mountain, then a Sámi could make his own affairs quite plain. In other words, in order for the Swedes to understand the Sámi, they must first come to the Sámi and communicate with them on Sámi terms and in Sámi space "soames alla vári alde" ["on some high mountain"]. Colonial discursive treatment of the Sámi is based on colonial premises. It is a discourse that...

This chapter offers a critical and ground-breaking approach to Norwegian Nobel-Prize laureate Knut Hamsun, with a special focus on his 1917 novel Markens grode (Growth of the Soil). Grounded in indigenous methodologies, including an indigenist Sami approach to place and narrative, the authors discuss not only how Hamsun’s novel reinforces the rhetoric of colonial discourse, but also how the multicultural, multilingual context of Habmer (Hamaroy), where the author grew up, informs his narrative and linguistic style. As the relationship of text to place and the Sami to Hamsun is discussed, the authors develop a collaborative, place-based methodology grounded in Sami knowledge practices and explore new ways of conducting research in an indigenized academy. They also conclude that Hamsun’s alleged modernistic style was partially, and more substantially than has been acknowledged, due to the Sami presence in his home region.

This chapter engages with the short film Bihttoš (Rebel, Canada and Norway, 2014), by the Sámi and Kainai Blackfoot filmmaker Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers, as a cinematic invocation of multiple elsewheres. Set in the three settler states of Norway, the United States, and Canada, this film is not about those states. Instead, it narrates an Indigenous story situated elsewhere from the spheres of mainstream, settler culture that are often the presumed standards. In this sense, Bihttoš is not so much Canadian and Norwegian as it is Sámi and Kainai/First Nations–or, indeed, trans-Indigenous. The film’s vision is divided between one colonized Indigenous space (the Blood Reserve) and a parallel but distinct experience of colonialism elsewhere (Sápmi), and the experimental documentary traces the ways that these geographically disparate experiences inscribe themselves on the same individual: the Sámi/Blackfoot “Elle-Máijá”.

In this paper I take a second look at colonial discourse analysis in the context of Sámi studies, examining several types of criticism directed against it. Drawing particularly on the work of several contemporary indigenous scholars working with indigenous methodologies, I discuss the beginnings of a new approach, "after postcolonialism".

This article examines three different levels of the presence of America in Knut Hamsun's 1917 novel Markens grøde (Growth of the Soil). First, America is invoked (along with "the Jew") as the source of alienating capitalist speculation that transforms and ruins the landscape of Nordland. Second, America is present in the text's echoing of Mark Twain's 1872 autobiographical Roughing It, a work that is echoed in terms of both style and subject matter, with passages on prospecting, speculating, and the obsurdities of courtroom justice showing particular resemblance. Hamsun's treatment of the indigenous Sámi is also strikingly similar to Twain's treatment of Native Americans, particularly in Roughing It's passage on the (fictitious) Goshoot tribe. Finally, America is present in the form of the settler narrative whose patterns and tropes transform Sellanraa into a northern Norwegian version of the American homestead and Isak into an appropriation of the heroic American settler.