The Decolonial Labour and the Gift of Contemporary Sámi Performance

Abstract

In February 2017, Sweden’s oldest and largest professional Sámi ensemble, Giron Sámi Teáhter, produced the politically outspoken production CO₂lonialNATION – A Theatrical Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a collective documentary theatre project that assembled anonymized witness testimonies from all over Sápmi. Using CO₂lonialNATION as a highly representative example of Giron Sámi Teáhter’s repertoire, this essay highlights the decolonial labour of contemporary Sámi performance. It teases out the dramaturgical implications of mounting a theatrical truth and reconciliation commission by exploring the preparation and research process, the embodied performance onstage including the script, spatial arrangement, and relationship between performers and audiences, as well as the production’s roots in Sámi visual, material, and musical culture. Indebted to the work of political sciences and Indigenous studies scholar Rauna Kuokkanen, the essay’s core argument suggests that Sámi performance constitutes a gift that foregrounds Indigenous knowledges, rehearses and enacts political change and social justice, and engenders relationships that are characterized by respect, responsibility, and reciprocity. Finally, the essay ponders some of the ethical responsibilities and methodological challenges that a non-Sámi spectator faces when witnessing a performance that outlines the manifold legacies of settler colonialism.

Keywords:

• Indigenous performance
• Giron Sámi Teáhter
• Truth Commission in Sweden
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
• circumpolar
• witness testimony
• documentary theatre
• colonial gaze
• Swedish colonialism

Acknowledgments

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and astute suggestions, as well as Dr Sarah Thomasson for careful editorial guidance. I am indebted to the generosity of Åsa Simma, who continuously shares her rich knowledge and contact network, in addition to offering ethical advice. My gratitude goes to all the artists and staff at Giron Sámi Teáhter for their hospitality and trust. I thank Anna-Stina Svakko for kindly granting me an interview and permission to reproduce one of her images. I am also grateful to Anders Sunna for allowing me to reproduce his artwork for CO₂lonialNATION. Finally, I express my appreciation for John Potvin’s and Linda Morra’s intellectual encouragement and editorial skills.

Notes on Contributor

Dirk Gindt is a Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University. He is the co-editor of the volume Viral Dramaturgies: HIV and AIDS in Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and the author of the monograph Tennessee Williams in Sweden and France, 1945-1965: Cultural Translations, Sexual Anxieties and Racial Fantasies (Bloomsbury, 2019). Gindt’s current research, financed by a four-year grant from the Swedish Research Council, analyses Indigenous performance in the Swedish part of Sápmi.

Notes

1. Pauliina Feodoroff, ‘Look Around’, CO₂lonialNATION playbill, Giron Sámi Teáhter, 2017, 33-35 (33). Archived at Giron Sámi Teáhter.

2. The opening of CO₂lonialNATION took place on 10 and 11 February 2017 in conjunction with the twenty-first Saami Conference that was held in Trondheim/Tråante in the Norwegian part of Sápmi. The conference celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the first Sámi National Assembly organized by the activist Elsa Laula Renberg, which marked a key event in the political organization of the Sámi people across national borders.

3. In 2022, Feodoroff, along with the visual artist Anders Sunna and the sculptor and author Máret Ánne Sara, was invited to the Venice Biennale to design the Nordic Pavilion as a specifically Sámi Pavilion.

4. Established in 2008, the TRC’s primary mandate was to investigate and document the manifold crimes and long-term traumas endured by the children of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, who were forced to attend the residential schools that had been instigated by the federal government in 1879 and were administered by the Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, and United Churches until 1996. The final report of the TRC also included a list of ninety-four concrete ‘Calls to Action’ with recommendations to increase the rights of Indigenous peoples, promote their welfare, and implement compensations for the colonial crimes committed. All documents, recordings, and reports pertaining to the TRC are housed by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba: https://nctr.ca/map.php (accessed January 16, 2023).

5. Giron Sámi Teáhter, https://www.samiteahter.org/en/ (accessed July 9, 2022).

6. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 119.

7. Harald Gaski, ‘Indigenism and Cosmopolitanism: A Pan-Sami View of the Indigenous Perspective in Sami Culture and Research’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 9, no. 2 (2013): 113–24 (114–15); original emphases.

8. Ranjan Datta, ‘Decolonizing both Researcher and Research and its Effectiveness in Indigenous Research’, Research Ethics 14, no. 2 (2018): 1–24 (2).

9. Ibid., 3.

10. See for example: Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber, Kathleen Irwin, and Moira J. Day, eds., Performing Turtle Island: Indigenous Theatre on the World Stage (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019); Yvette Nolan, Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2015); Yvette Nolan and Ric Knowles, eds., Performing Indigeneity (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2016).

11. Two influential scholarly volumes on Swedish theatre history ignore the topic entirely: Tomas Forser, ed., Ny svensk teaterhistoria (3 vols) (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2007); Lena Hammergren, Karin Helander, Tiina Rosenberg, and Willmar Sauter, eds., Teater i Sverige (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2004).

12. Rauna Johanna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).

13. Ibid., 2-3.

14. Ibid., 49-73.

15. Ibid., 2.

16. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 175–76.

17. Ibid., 125.

18. Gaski, ‘Indigenism and Cosmopolitanism’, 123; see also: Harald Gaski, ‘Indigenous Aesthetics: Add Context to Context’, in Sámi Art and Aesthetics: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Svein Aamold, Elin Kristine Haugdal, and Ulla Angkær Jørgensen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017), 179-93; Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Pigga Keskitalo, and Torjer Olsen, eds., Indigenous Research Methodologies in Sámi and Global Contexts (Leiden: Brill, 2021).

19. This is not meant to suggest that TRC’s in other countries, such as South Africa, would not have had an effect on the performing arts. See for example: Geoffrey Davis, ‘Addressing the Silences of the Past: Truth and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid Theatre’, South African Theatre Journal 13, no. 1 (1999): 59–72.

20. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 5.

21. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, 52.

22. All quotations from CO₂lonialNATION are based on a video recording of performances from Kiruna/Giron (February 6–7, 2017) and Helsinki (April 28, 2017) which Giron Sámi Teáhter graciously shared with me. All translations are my own.

23. David Gaertner, ‘“Aboriginal Principles of Witnessing” and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’, in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, eds. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 135–55 (142).

24. Sam McKegney, ‘“pain, pleasure, shame. Shame.”: Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization’, in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, eds. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 193–214 (196).

25. David Garneau, ‘Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation’, in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, eds. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 21–41 (23).

26. Marie Enoksson, ‘Preparations before a truth commission on the violations of the Sami people by the Swedish State’, Sámediggi, 2021, https://www.sametinget.se/160524 (accessed January 19, 2022).

27. Rauna Kuokkanen, ‘Borders Crossings, Pathfinders and New Visions: The Role of Sámi Literature in Contemporary Society’, Nordlit 15 (2004): 91-103; Elin Anna Labba, Herrarna satte oss hit: Om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2020); Patrik Lantto, ‘The Consequences of State Intervention: Forced Relocations and Sámi Rights in Sweden, 1919-2012’, The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics 8, no. 2 (2014): 53-73; Veli-Pekka Lehtola, ‘“The Soul Should Have Been Brought along”: The Settlement of Skolt Sami to Inari in 1945–1949’, Journal of Northern Studies 12, no. 1 (2018): 53–72; Lynette McGuire, ‘The Fragmentation of Sápmi: A Nordic Model of Settler Colonialism’, Scandinavian-Canadian Studies Journal/Études scandinaves au Canada 29 (2022): 1–12.

28. Gabriel Kuhn, Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North (Oakland: PM Press, 2020), 20-63; Roger Kvist, ‘The Racist Legacy in Modern Swedish Saami Policy’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 14, no. 2 (1994): 203-20; Veli-Pekka Lehtola, The Sámi People: Traditions in Transition (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004); Teemu Ryymin, ‘The Rise and Development of Nationalism in Northern Norway’, in The North Calotte: Perspectives on the Histories and Cultures of Northernmost Europe, eds. Maria Lähteenmäki and Päivi Maria Pihlaja (Inari: Puntsi, 2005), 54–66.

29. Patrik Lantto, Lappväsendet: tillämpningen av svensk samepolitik 1885-1971 (Umeå: Umeå University, 2012); Ulf Mörkenstam, Om ‘Lapparnes privilegier’: Föreställningar om samiskhet i svensk samepolitik 1883-1997, PhD diss. Stockholm University, 1999.

30. Government Offices of Sweden, ‘Sanningskommission för det samiska folket’, November 3, 2021, https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2021/11/sanningskommission-for-det-samiska-folket/ (accessed November 10, 2021). All translations from Swedish are mine, unless otherwise noted.

31. See for example: Robinson and Martin, eds. Arts of Engagement; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

32. Åsa Simma, interview with the author, April 12, 2021.

33. Yoik (Northern Sámi: luohti; Southern Sámi: vuelie) is the traditional Sámi song. According to Gaski, the yoik is central to ‘Sami consciousness because of its traditional role both as a mark of identity and, in the old religion, as the music of the shaman, noaidi, in Sami’. Harald Gaski, ‘Song, Poetry and Images in Writing: Sami Literature’, Nordlit 27 (2011): 33-54 (33).

34. The Minority Language Act from 2000, revised in 2010 (Prop. 1998/99:143 and § 2009:724) identifies Sámi as an official minority language in Sweden, along with Finnish, Yiddish, Meänkieli, and Romani Chib. In total, there exist nine different Sámi languages, out of which five are spoken in the Swedish part of Sápmi: Northern Sámi, Southern Sámi, Lule Sámi, Pite Sámi, and Ume Sámi.

35. Simma, interview with the author.

36. The final manuscript was put together by Pauliina Feodoroff, Niillas Holmberg, Simon Issát Marainen, Elina Israelsson, Sarakka Gaup, and Mio Negga.

37. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 145.

38. Ibid., 36.

39. I am indebted to a Norwegian translation and transcription by Solgunn Solli, ‘Kraften i kunst - CO2lonialNation - Giron Sámi Teáhter’, Solgun sitt, September 7, 2017, http://solgunnsin.blogspot.com/2017/09/kraften-i-kunst-co2lonialnation-giron.html (accessed September 20, 2020). For Ailo Gaup’s own account of events, see: Ailo Gaup, ‘Min mor på vidda’, in I min mors hus: Tretten sønner forteller, ed. Knut Johansen (Oslo: Pax, 1989), 29–47.

40. Veli-Pekka Lehtola, ‘Staging Sami Identities: The Roles of Modern Sami Theatre in a Multicultural Context – The Case of Beaivvás Teáhter’, in L’Image du Sápmi: Études comparées, ed. Kajsa Andersson (Örebro: Örebro University, 2009), 436–58.

41. Gaski acknowledges the significant dialectal and linguistic differences between these languages, but also warns of the risk of overemphasizing cultural differences or divisions among the Sámi. Gaski, ‘Indigenism and Cosmopolitanism’, 121.

42. Feodoroff quoted in Helene Alm, ‘Koloniala skador utforskas av samiska teatern’, Sveriges Radio, February 2, 2017, https://sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/857766 (accessed July 4, 2020).

43. Lehtola, ‘Staging Sami Identities’, 454.

44. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström, eds, De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna: En vetenskaplig antologi (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2016), www.svenskakyrkan.se/samiska/vitboken (accessed April 20, 2022).

45. Gunlög Fur, ‘Att sona det förflutna’, in De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna, eds. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2016), 153–90.

46. Patrik Lantto, ‘Från folkspillra till erkänt urfolk: Svensk samepolitik från 1800-tal till idag’, in Sápmi i ord och bild I, ed. Kajsa Andersson (Stockholm: On Line Förlag, 2015), 58-83; Erik-Oscar Oscarsson, ‘Rastänkande och särskiljande av samer’, in De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna, eds. Daniel Lindmark and Olle Sundström (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2016), 943–60.

47. Lindmark and Sundström, De historiska relationerna mellan; Kaisa Huuva and Ellacarin Blind, eds, ‘När jag var åtta år lämnade jag mitt hem och jag har ännu inte kommit tillbaka’: Minnesbilder från samernas skoltid (Stockholm: Verbum, 2016), https://www.svenskakyrkan.se/samiska/nomadskoleboken (accessed April 30, 2022).

48. Maja Hagerman, Käraste Herman: rasbiologen Herman Lundborgs gåta (Stockholm: Norstedt, 2015).

49. Ragnhild Freng Dale, ‘En sanningskommisjon på scenen’, Scenekunst, May 11, 2017, http://www.scenekunst.no/sak/en-sanningskommisjon-pa-scenen/ (accessed September 20, 2020).

50. Jaye T. Darby, Courtney Elkin Mohler, and Christy Stanlake, Critical Companion to Native American and First Nations Theatre and Performance: Indigenous Spaces (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2020), 8 and 12.

51. Moa Sandström, Dekoloniseringskonst: Artivism i 2010-talets Sápmi, PhD diss. Umeå University, 2020, 65.

52. Anne Heith, ‘Enacting Colonised Space: Katarina Pirak Sikku and Anders Sunna’, Nordisk Museologi 2 (2015): 69-83 (78).

53. Ibid., 80.

54. Sunna quoted in Sandström, Dekolonise-ringskonst, 91.

55. Ekaterina Klimenko, ‘The Geopolitics of a Changing Arctic’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, December 2019, 1-16 (3-6), https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2019-12/sipribp1912_geopolitics_in_the_arctic.pdf (accessed June 16, 2020).

56. Moa Sandström, ‘DeCo2onising Artivism’, in Samisk kamp: Kulturförmedling och rättviserörelse, eds. Marianne Liliequist and Coppélie Cocq (Umeå: h:ström, 2017), 62–115.

57. ‘Climate justice in Sápmi: Sarakka Gaup & Mio Negga, Actress/music producer & actor’, 350.org, July 8, 2017, https://350.org/saami-climate-justice/ (accessed May 24, 2020).

58. Åsa Simma, interview with the author, May 14, 2021.

59. Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University, 32.

60. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

61. Lehtola, ‘“The Soul Should Have Been Brought along”’, 55–57.

62. Nolan, Medicine Shows, 3. See also: Inga Juuso, ‘Yoiking Acts as Medicine for Me’, in No Beginning, No End: The Sami Speak Up, eds. Elina Helander and Kaarina Kailo (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1998), 132–46.

63. Gaup quoted in ‘Climate Justice in Sápmi’.

64. Feodoroff quoted in Elin Swedenmark, ‘Koloniserade samers vittnesmål blir teater’, Sydsvenskan, February 3, 2017, https://www.sydsvenskan.se/2017-02-03/koloniserade-samers-vittnesmal-blir-teater (accessed September 20, 2020).

65. Simma quoted in Alm, ‘Koloniala skador utforskas av samiska teatern’. The quote was used as the epigraph to Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, a seminal play in Indigenous Canadian theatre history, first performed in 1989 in Toronto.

66. There are many regional variations of the gákti, some of which have elaborate embellishments, while others are more subdued. The different shapes, colours, and buttons also communicate information about gender, social, or marital status. Lehtola, The Sámi People, 12-14; Tom G. Svensson, ‘Clothing in the Arctic: A Means of Protection, a Statement of Identity’, Arctic 45, no. 1 (1992): 62–73.

67. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

68. There exist many regional variations of Sámi regalia and, as the duodji artist Anna-Stina Svakko explained to me, Israelsson’s hat, belt, and gákti were meant to pay tribute to her father who originated from the Gällivare/Jiellevárri area. Anna-Stina Svakko, interview with the author, July 5, 2021.

69. Gunvor Guttorm, ‘The Power of Natural Materials and Environments in Contemporary Duodji’, in Sámi Art and Aesthetics: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Svein Aamold, Elin Kristine Haugdal, and Ulla Angkær Jørgensen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017), 163–177 (165).

70. In a highly unusual move, each of the actors got to choose the designer with whom they wanted to work.

71. Svakko, interview with the author.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. 169, public post, Facebook, August 10, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/pg/ily169/posts/?ref=page_internal (accessed June 2, 2020). ‘Sogiid siste’ was composed and produced by Mio Negga. Niillas Holmberg wrote the lyrics and the recorded yoik was performed by the three actors and Niko Valkeapää.

75. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 155.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by the Swedish Research Council under [Grant 2019-02744]. The project has been assessed and approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority and adheres to research guidelines and protocols formulated by the Sámi Parliament of Sweden. There are no competing interests to declare.