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Notes -
WHAT’S THE LARGER ISSUE, ACCORDING TO SÁMI PARLIAMENT MAJORITY FACTION?
According to the Sámi Parliament majority, this is a conflict between Sámi indigenous self-governance and a group of anti-Sámi Finns who wish to take over the Sámi Parliament, supported by the Finnish courts. (Note: this view is also the one that you can read more about in English in, say, this article or this one
To Sámi Parliament majority, who is Sámi and who is not is clear – the North Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi are Sámi, while the “Forest Sámi” or “Kemi Sámi” are quite evidently not Sámi at all. In fact, in this view, while there once was a Kemi Sámi, it has long since gone extinct; the current "Kemi Sámi" claimants are then a group of mostly Finnish settler origin who have essentially created an identity to themselves out of whole cloth (by portraying common Lapland ‘Sámi-style’ work jackets as gákti etc.), in collective Rachel Dolezal style, either because they feel themselves distinct from other Finns due to their life in the hardscrabble North, or for devious purposes, believing that taking over Sámi Parliament would give them power over the considerable land use questions in Lapland. (The Sámi parliament doesn’t have formal powers over land issues, but has an advisory role, and there has been a push to grant it a more extensive role.)
To the majority faction, the issue in question is urgently recreating the voter rolls without the “Lapp paragraph”, i.e., utilizing a language-based criteria, to prevent small, organized groups of LARPers from exercising their power to take over Sámi Parliament. In this view the great danger is that this would essentially defang and implicitly assimilate the one institution working for Sámi culture, language etc., thus being a part of the general process of assimilation of Sámi to the Finnish majority. In the majority’s claim, the “Lapp paragraph” has never really recorded cases of Sámi identity but rather has been an economic moniker assigned to those working with reindeer or otherwise living a non-farming lifestyle, without reference to ethnicity.
Otherwise, Sámi Parliament majority considers this a straightforward case. Reforming the voter rolls without the Lapp paragraph, and implicitly removing the wrongly added people, would protect indigenous rights and self-governance, bring the definition to the same standard as used in Sweden and Norway, and quite importantly being in accordance with the UN’s opinion on this issue, admonishing Finland for not passing the Sámi Parliament reform act. Likewise, Sámi Parliament majority claim is that the actual Sámi are greatly united, apart from individual oppositionists who have their own reasons for contrarianism and who are bolstered by votes of the non-Sámi Finns already wrongly added to the voter rolls.
To the majority, the Finnish government’s inability to resolve this issue by passing the reform is a case of conscious foot dragging, in hopes that eventually the Sámi Parliament constituency changes lead to a new more pliant Sámi Parliament majority. This, then is considered to serve the interests of landowners in Lapland, who do not want the indigenous people of the land interfering with land use rights – particularly ones that might prevent lucrative but polluting mine development.
WHAT’S THE LARGER ISSUE, ACCORDING TO OPPONENTS OF SÁMI PARLIAMENT MAJORITY?
This is much harder to piece together – unsurprising, since there seem to be many different minority viewpoints here, they tend to be advocated by – shall we say – dissident types that may often get rather fervent about their views, and they don’t seem to have the same resources as Sámi Parliament to make easy-to-read materials. However, one general narrative I’ve seen is essentially this:
The whole topic is not as much a conflict between Sámi and Finns but one between different Sámi groups, riven apart by the actions of a small, elite radical Sámi nationalist faction ruling Sámi Parliament. According to this view, Forest Sámi are indeed a real group, and moreover one that, when properly viewed, would also include Inari Sámi and the Skolt Sámi, though the first group is divided and the Skolt Sámi are tactically allied to the ruling faction.
The claim is that Northern Sámi elites ruling Sámi Parliament – indeed, who formed it as a pressure group which then gained official recognition as the representative of the Sámi – represent large-scale reindeer herding interests also supported by the states, because it’s easier to tax large-scale reindeer herding than hunting/fishing/gathering/small-scale farming and herding style living that (according to this view) had thus far characterized life in Finnish Sámi territories.
In this view, the more southern, originally Finnish Sámi groups have (naturally, due to settlement) gone through extensive assimilation, language death etc. and thus seem “less Sámi” to outsiders; nevertheless, in this view, the ‘Forest Sámi’ are an actual group, formed by descendants of assimilated families who have nevertheless maintained some parts of their traditions, like keeping around gákti, having memories of Sámi being used in their past etc., and the voter rolls have failed to include many Inari Sámi, as well.
Furthermore, in this view, Sámi Parliament is an organ of Northern Sámi hegemony over other groups, and the whole process of ‘cleansing the lists’ is meant to remove inconvenient, popular Inari Sámi oppositionists from the rolls and otherwise prevent this hegemony from being disrupted electorally. Moreover, in this view, Northern Sámi are not indigenous to Finnish land, but rather migrants from the currently Norwegian areas, pushing the native Sámi groups aside. Thus, in this view, there's also a land issue - but it's the one of Northern Sámi claiming lands from other Sámi for reindeer-herding purposes.
To the opponents, the Lapp paragraph has been essential for finding such cases, since proving an ancestral language is considerably harder and such languages haven’t been sufficiently registered anywhere. As such, they believe they’re the true protectors of indigenous rights – and the UN’s statement otherwise is simply a result of extensive lobbying by Sámi nationalists, and not as binding anyway as claimed.
Note that the question of how legit the Kemi Sámi seemingly are controversial even among the oppositionists, and the general legal argumentation concentrates on the voter roll removals affecting the Inari Sámi members currently in the rolls; furthermore, there seems to exist a controversy about whether the planned voting system (too complex for me to really understand) treats Inari Sámi fairly and so on.
CURRENT STATUS OF THE DRAMA
The government’s program included a mention that the government will advance the Sámi Parliament reform, interpreted as a mandate to pass a reform law during this period. There exists a committee proposal for a reform law without the Lapp paragraph, but the actual process has been extended several times, of course, the government has had a lot on its plate with COVID and Ukraine, so it’s not surprising many other questions would take a backseat.
Now the time is running out, the government’s period ends next Spring and a failure to bring the law to the Parliament now might just mean there’s simply not enough time to process all of this. The Centre party is refusing to advance the law without the Lapp paragraph and asking for still more time to discuss it – stalling for time, other parties claim. PM Marin has promised to nevertheless bring the law to the parliament, leading to a potential situation where the government parties would vote against each other, which would of course be bad, possibly fatal, to the government’s stability.
CONCLUSION
Well, it’s obviously a complex issue. Perhaps the best summary is that both sides leave me with suspicions based on their own materials – the opposition does not really argue its case particularly well and particularly the ‘Forest Sámi” activists really give the sort of a feeling I’d guess you generally get from guys whose identity is not on a particularly stable ground and might very well indeed be engaging in some sort of an extended LARP. So, overall I sympathize more with the Sámi Parliament majority view.
However, I’ve also heard from various sources near the situation that the conflict between North Sámi and Inari Sámi is more real than the Parliament claims, a book I read defending their view and heavily promoted by their activists written by a North Sámi professor) also discussed the Inari Sámi in a way that seemed to concentrate mostly on their assimilation and “Finnishness”, and thus gave the impression that there might indeed a certain assumed hierarchy, and division against the Sámi groups, here, or at least more so than the people claiming the Sámi are fundamentally united around the reform are claiming.
(edit: somewhat extended edition of this on Substack)
Can someone explain to me why the International Labour Organisation has a convention on indigenous rights?
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I mean, my priors are distinctly that a group gets to determine its own membership- if the Sami prefer to be defined by language, I’m totally fine with that. If they’d rather define themselves by blood quantum, the way most Amerinds in North America do, that’s also fine. What I don’t think is ok is the idea that the Finnish parliament gets to tell them who does and doesn’t count as Sami when they are, as far as anyone can tell, not gaining anything from that Finnish government.
Isn't the problem that this is circular? In order for the group to make a determination, you have to ask the people in the group. But knowing who gets to contribute their opinion is exactly the question you're trying to answer in the first place. The "simple" answer is freedom of association, where you can have multiple groups that do or do not overlap, or include each other as subgroups, and which have their own rules that may come from consensus, democracy, a charter, a dictatorship, etc, and members can come and go as they please. But this doesn't work when one group has special privileges that are being fought over.
It kind of seems like that group has a consensus as to who counts as a Sami- a person who speaks a Sami language as a first language and has a recent ancestor who is the same. The lap paragraph looks like a distinctly peripheral group and if a group wants to exclude a periphery, that’s fine, they can be their own thing and it’s up to them to convince the Finnish parliament they should get whatever privileges the Sami get.
Yes, but Democrats and Republicans have very distinct ideas about who counts as a "real" American.
If you asked either side to define US citizenship, you can bet a bunch of their outgroup ain't gonna make the cut. And that in turn means the citizens who then vote on US policy are a subgroup of an already biased sample.
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While I can't speak to the facts on the ground in this particular case, this seems like a good way to end up with a few people speaking for all of the group, and encourages the leadership to exclude as many as possible to reduce competition. I think if the Finnish government is going to do this, it might be a good idea to be more precise about its official Sami representation. For example, if the periphery is excluded, then (if possible) the parliament's scope should be re-assessed to make sure it isn't being given credit for that periphery's population, land, language, unique cultural aspects, etc.
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Yes, that's the Sámi Parliament's view. Blood quantums would be very hard to establish anyway.
Of course the opposition's view is that if the Sámi Parliament does not represent all the Sámi - ie. purposefully shuts a part of them out - it does not have the legitimacy to define Sámi-dom on everyone's behalf, either.
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A very well done write up.
I only say that judging by what I've heard, the Finns and Sami have had historically amicable relations and the imposition of brain-rot anti-colonialist narratives has created a granularity of identity which previously did not exist. (How many Finns went off into the wilderness over the centuries? How many Sami settled and became identical to their neighbors over the generations?)
Isn't this a fairer, more egalitarian way of things? Bothering with blood quantums, with ancient lists? Why impose a progressive view on race where the historical arrangement was of no controversy whatsover? Are we supposed to enforce a strict separation of ethnicities, that people cannot pass from one group to another by marriage and blood? Is that not racist?
They are neighbors of linguistically similar language isolates: they have literally been kissing cousins for thousands - if not tens of thousands - of years. The Sami are not Amerindians! It's stupid. It's very stupid.
Even then, it would be a nomad/farmer relationship, which has generally tended to mean the farmers expanding their territories and the nomads losing them, which has indeed happened in great stretches of Northern and Eastern Finland. (Apparently the Sámi call this "Lapland retreats, the Land gets thicker" - 'the Land' ('lanta' in Finnish, this also (coincidentally?) means 'manure' in Finnish) being a term for non-Sámi in Sápmi in general.)
But the land that was in dispute (and correct me if I am wrong) can be described to be 'cold as balls'. Finns were not moving en masse into the north, so the relative population densities were low enough for coexistence to be a possibility.
The Amerindians were OK with Europeans for a while until they realized they wouldn't stop coming. Grumbling about those damn farmers encircling another bit of prime pasture is one thing, but massacring and scalping is another.
Although doing a bit of research into the overall situation, it does look like they did go through the whole residential school and discrimination of language phase - but Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about Finnish policies to such effect: only Norway and Sweden. Since you're our resident Finnposter, could you look into it? Were there any particular programs to intentionally displace them in the 18th and 19th centuries?
Finnish policy towards the Sámi was highly assimilatory until the 1970s and boarding schools were used, as mentioned here, for example.
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Again, I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion but I would like to thank you for posting, as it is interesting and I wouldn't know anything about it otherwise.
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