Strategic Production of Conflicts on Indigeneity to Reassemble the Sámi Homeland: Dynamics between Land Use Intensification, Indigenisation, and Self-Indigenisation

This study explores the dynamics at the intersections of land use intensification in Northern Finland, the recognition of the Sámi people’s claims to land, and the political and economic relations of countermobilisation. Northern Finland’s economy has undergone significant change since Finland joined the EU. Like many other Indigenous peoples around the world, the Sámi have organised politically to gain recognition for themselves in relation to dominant populations. The success of the Sámi Indigenous mobilisation has generated also a mobilisation known as the New Lapp movement, having taken the forms of countermobilisation and self-Indigenisation.
This study aimed to examine the tactics used by political and economic elites to attract investment in Northern Finland and by businesses to secure access to land, how these tactics intertwine with the Sámi’s political action for their rights as an Indigenous people, and how they affect local communities.
The study is a multisite ethnography that relies on actor-network theory as its methodological approach. The empirical materials consist of qualitative case studies of the organising activities of actors involved in mining-related projects (gold panning, mineral exploration, mining, the Arctic railway) in the Finnish Sámi homeland and its bordering areas in Northern Finland, with a specific focus on connections with and consequences for the Indigenisation and self-indigenisation identity processes.
The study finds that in the cases studied, decision-making did not adequately recognise the Sámi’s claims about how the proposed projects would impact the respective Sámi communities. Instead, actors having competing land interests with Sámi reindeer herding delayed negotiations on Sámi land rights by supporting countermobilisation and self-Indigenisation. The analysis suggests that through its political and economic affiliations, the New Lapp movement transformed negotiations over Sámi rights into a conflict over Sáminess. Support for self-Indigenisation groups was also identified as a strategic tactic that mining-related advocates used to gain legitimacy.
The results suggest that the political and economic elites strategically produced a conflict over Indigeneity to replace negotiation over how to strengthen Sámi self-determination in land questions. Based on the analysis, I argue that today, the New Lapp mobilisation and the conflict over Sáminess are more about municipal and regional politics than ethnicity. The results provide grounds for conceptualising strong elite-affiliated self-Indigenisation with political and economic motives as a particular form of astroturf organising.