“Look, here comes the circus animal.”
“Take that back! […] You’re just as much of a Lapp as I am!”
Over the holidays, while I was visiting my fiancé and his family in Sweden, we decided to watch a movie that had just been released on Netflix – Sameblod, or Sami Blood (2016). It wasn’t my first time hearing about the Sami: years ago, I first read about the Sami and their culture in a book on Lapland, a region I’d been fascinated with since I was a kid. Ever since, I have spent a lot of my free time researching the indigenous people of Lapland and their culture – as well as the hardships they have endured as a minority group.
This suffering is the main theme of the movie Sami Blood: set in Swedish Lapland in the 1930s, we follow a fourteen year old Sami girl named Elle Marja and her younger sister Njenna. The daughters of a family of reindeer herders, they are sent off to a so-called nomad school, a boarding school specifically for Sami children where, systematically, the children are forced to abandon their native culture – rather than their own indigenous languages, they must speak Swedish; they must leave behind their own traditions in favour of “more sophisticated” Swedish ones. Throughout the film, we’re offered a harrowing image of the treatment of Sami people in 20th-century Northern Europe as Elle Marja tries to find her place in a society that treats her as less than human.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this movie is the realisation that, while the story is fictional, the situations Elle Marja finds herself in throughout the movie are very real situations that, historically, Sami people have had to endure at the hand of the oppressive system installed by not only the Swedish government, but that of Norway and Finland, as well. From a race-segregation movement that practiced race biology similar to that of Nazi Germany, to a veritable genocide both in the cultural sense and in the literal sense through the forced sterilisation of a yet unclear number of Sami women, recent Sami history has unfortunately been one of trying desperately to preserve what is left of their culture, and of trying to reclaim their identity.
Modern reconciliation efforts between the individual states and their Sami community has not been without its issues, and this may be part of the reason why not much is known about the Sami outside of the Nordic countries. To this day, the Sami people get caught in legal battles over land rights and efforts to recover Sami remains that were displayed in several state-owned museums throughout Sweden and which were often used to support theories of race biology – and, perhaps most importantly, the fight for the acknowledgement of their oppression, which to this day remains a sensitive issue.
As someone studying abroad in Finland who has encountered many other international students who did not have the slightest clue of what a “Sami” was, I would like to gently urge you to take some time out of your day to read up on the Sami people, their culture, and the oppression they have had to endure – if not, I at least recommend watching Sami Blood, a movie that has tried to raise awareness for a discussion that is way overdue.