In my thesis, I’m looking for possible tools for the Sámi to render themselves visible. Sámi people have formerly faced systemic oppression. They have been made invisible. Their bodies have been racialised, examined, scaled and measured. Fennoscandian countries Norway, Sweden and Finland tried to suppress the Sámi voice. The nation states tried to silence the Sámi language, and silence their drum.
Sámi are the indigenous people of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Some Sámi also live in Northern Russia. They are the only indigenous people recognised by the European Union, but no-one ever asked if they would like to join. Instead, their land was occupied and their history over-written. The above-mentioned Nordic nation states interfered with Sámi territory, where they had been living in for thousands of years. Maps were drawn and documents created. According to the documents designed by the oppressors, the semi-nomadic Sámi weren’t able to move across their land according to their natural, annual cycle. They had to choose between their colonisers.
In my thesis I’m asking how an oppressed language can emancipate and be noticed amidst the majority. I’m writing against a universe, I’m arguing for diverse conditions of living – a pluriverse. Furthermore I’m asking, whether, in the context of language, a typeface can become a vessel for communicating values of inclusion. Theory will be accompanied with very hands-on practical knowledge that I have gained along the thesis process through discussions, lectures and literature. Theory and practice intertwine and morph into a cyclical design methodology. This methodology will, in one way or the other, be used to actualise the graduation work that will follow. The endeavour is thus both theoretical and practical, preparing me to the actualisation of a culturally sensitive, multilingual design.
Monotheist religion and nation state have a long tradition in going hand in hand. Within our populist times, there is also a freak show of white suprematist ideas. During these times it is important to listen to cultures that operate with a whole another set of values.
My plan is to conduct a hands-on study of Northern Sámi, Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi, which are the three Sámi languages spoken in Finland. For centuries, it was forbidden to teach or speak Sámi languages in Fennoscandian schools. Because of polytheist and animist beliefs, Sámi people were blamed for occultism. Sámi children were taken from their parents age 7, and sent to boarding schools with strict discipline and punishments if speaking a word in their own language. The children were told that their culture is dying. Before the second world war eugenics was being introduced, especially in Sweden. Sámi people were among those, who were being racially examined. Soon the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology concentrated their racialising gaze wholly towards the Sámi. Indigenous graves were being dug open to conduct more research.
Today Sámi languages are reviving. They are being taught in schools and universities. In their written forms, the languages are based on the Latin script. However, there’s a scarcity of typefaces taking the typographic needs of Sámi into consideration.
When including specific languages that are in a threatened position, can a typeface have a role in a cultural paradigm shift? Can it have a role in introducing a more inclusive tone of voice and facilitating change?
There are examples of insensitive type design trying to reflect the character of a culture, ending up as caricatures. Connections with linguistics and experts should be established. With care and thoroughness one can reach a conscious design that doesn’t appropriate nor stereotype.
As background, I will introduce some key elements of Sámi world view and mysticism. These are essential tools that do not work by the logic of colonialism. This is a Northern real-life example of how language, and thus typography, is political. I believe to reveal something about the nature of typography as a tool for oppression and on the other hand, a means to include.
Abstract
Visual essay
Prologue
1. How to understand the Sámi?
2. How to design type for another culture?
3. How to design type for a language unknown to the designer?
4. How to find an indigenous typographer?
5. How to design type that includes the Sámi?
6. How to emancipate an oppressed language?
Conclusion
Epilogue
Bibliography
Year 1688, Fennoscandia. A Swedish county governor and bishop makes an inspection trip in the far north. He has heard, that despite the missionaries’ systematic efforts trying to root out all natural beliefs, there are still some indigenous individuals out there practicing what he likes to call occultism. The governor encounters Lars Nilsson, a Pite Sámi man who is carrying a drum. The object, large and oval-shaped made of wood and reindeer hide, has unfamiliar symbols drawn on it.
The governor examines the symbols, but can’t understand what they stand for. According to his Christian religion, any kind of shamanistic act is a wrongdoing. The use of the Sámi drum has recently been made punishable by law. With the help of their drum, he has heard, Sámi shamans have a tendency of falling into a trance, flying over the treetops in a shape of a bird. Co-operating with the forces of nature, they are said to be leading flocks of animals and moving mountains. With their animist and polytheist views, they represent everything the governor does not believe in.
The governor threatens the Sámi man with both a temporal and eternal punishment, if he doesn’t hand over his drum. Having no choice, Lars Nilsson let’s go of the artefact so precious for him. The governor sets it straight – the drum is going to be burned, like many similar symbolic instruments, that for the Sámi people represent links between this and the otherly world. (Ahlbäck and Bergman)
Fortunately, some Sámi went underground with their drums, beliefs and shamanistic acts. The Nordic museum in Copenhagen seemed to understand the historical value of these artefacts early. Simultaneously when drums were being destroyed by authorities and missionaries, the museum managed to gather a collection of around 100 old Sámi drums. In spite of the effort, every single one of the drums was destroyed in the fire of Copenhagen in 1795.
When starting out with my research, one of the palpable facts that I found was that today there are only three old Finnish Sámi drums that have survived. The Finnish drum is special in a sense, that the membrane of the drum depicts a northern Sámi world view as opposed to the southern (Swedish and Norwegian), heliocentric drum. Whereas the southern drum always has the sun god in the middle of the membrane, the northern drum pictures the cosmos divided into three – the underworld, the visible world and the celestial world, which was the world of gods. A small object was laid on the drums membrane. When drumming, the object moved around between these three worlds. The movements of the object assisted the shaman in moving between the worlds, simultaneously helping to predict the future.
Zooming out a bit, Sámi people inhabited the northern Fennoscandia 10 000 years ago, right after the ice age ended, causing the arctic ice to withdraw further to the North. The Proto-Sámi territory was as it’s biggest 2000–1000 years ago (Lehtola, 1997). The Sámi people were practically residing in the north all alone until the end of 16th Century, when the nation states’ interest towards the Northern territories and resources started to awaken.
The Sámi usually desire harmony with nature. Their world view can be described as animistic and polytheist. According to the Sámi time is cyclical. The common belief is, that in spite of the cycles that can be witnessed in the nature, time itself is not going anywhere. The culture is embracing processes, describing what is happening and what is being done, rather than focusing on the outcome. Sámi people believed that all objects in the nature possess a soul. There were a god for each force of nature – a god of thunder, a god of wind and a fortune-telling fish-god to name a few. The Sámi shaman, Noaidi, was the person dedicated for using the Sámi drum, making the gods more favourable and working as a healer. However, most of the Sámi had a drum of their own.
Nowadays the world views of Sámi people are usually derived from their tradition. Rather than believing that all objects have a soul, a Helsinki-based Sámi artist, film maker and curator Marja Helander states that she believes in all animals, all living creatures having a soul. This kind of animist thinking can be seen as a philosophy that aligns with post-humanist thoughts, and with their rejection of anthropocentrism even with object-oriented ontology.
Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a metaphysical, 21st Century school of speculative realism. OOO rejects the privileging of human existence and human perception over non-human objects. As opposed to the Kantian thought, objects do not become products of human cognition nor conform to the minds of the subjects.
In a reader / exhibition catalogue edited by Anselm Franke, the authors contributing continue with the themes of the artist / curator’s exhibition project by the same name. The editor focuses on the thresholds between nature and culture, humans and things, the animate and the inanimate. The idea of the editor is to mediate versatile perspectives, both artistic and theoretical, on the boundary between subjects and objects.
Drawing from the ethnological concept of animism, Anselm Franke, by his own words “sees animism as node, a knot that, when untied, will help unpack the “riddle of modernity” in new ways, helping us to understand modernity as a mode of classifying and mapping the world by means of partitions, by a series of Great Divides.”
The editor also goes into a conversation with Bruno Latour. OOO prioritizes the properties of objects in themselves, whereas Latour is known for his association with actor-network theory, ANT, which gives primacy to the relationships between objects and subjects. He has dealt with object-oriented ontology in his book titled The Speculative Grace. “Where now the work of science”, he argues, “is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. […] Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness.”
As images of this thesis I’m presenting scientific and spiritual objects, that are part of the repertoire of the oppressor or the indigenous, respectively. As outlined in the introduction and the epilogue of my thesis, the Sámi people have faced centuries of oppression in Fennoscandia – Scandinavia and Finland. Language and typography have both played a crucial role in actualising this oppression.
In Alphabet versus the goddess, the writer Dr. Leonard Shlain sheds light on the link between literacy and patriarchy. He argues that oral human interaction is complex and profound in a way that it has always been combined with bodily gestures, received by the means of aural and visual, bodily cues. This all-encompassing way of interacting with each other demands both eyes, both ears, both hands and thus also both hemispheres of the brain (Shlain, L.). As bodily gestures were there already before we could speak, they are still prioritised when we receive mixed messages with contradicting visual and spoken information.
The Sámi shaman, Noaidi, can be seen as the goddess, that used diverse means of communication, his body and his spirit to convey a message. When the alphabet arrived, Leonard Shlain argues, the written word slowly but surely superseded the spoken, enhancing the dominance of the left brain’s hemisphere: “To write and read, an individual uses primarily the left hemisphere, only the hunting cones and only the killing hand. With the strokes of a thousand chisels, styli, brushes, and pens, literacy diminished the right brain’s complementary role in creating and deciphering language, dismissing with it the importance of both the rods of the retina and the left hand.”
Furthermore, in his essay This was written on stolen indigenous land, Chris Lee writes about the language of profit and Western economy that for the indigenous people is, in many cases, very hard to comprehend. When the coloniser is describing everything in this capitalist language, the indigenous people don’t have similar vocabulary in putting their complex and intertwined interaction with the nature into words. Sámi people are semi-nomadic, relocating according to the time of the year and establishing temporary residencies according to the movements of reindeer and salmon. The use of land for these temporary settlements as well as the possibility to hunt and fish according to the tradition that has been inherited from the elders, is today one of the main questions with the Sámi in Fennoscandia. Chris Lee argues that language, especially in it’s written, typographical form (such as maps, documents, and law) was justifying the use of land as a commodity, rather than seeing it as something cultural: “The indigenous story is all too often either trivialised or totally dismissed as primitive mythology.”
In the case of Sámi people this happened by demolishing the drums and other ‘idols’ of symbolic value (Ahlbäck and Bergman). Bibles were translated into Sámi languages. Scandinavian printing and punchcutting was evolving, but simultaneously the Sámi language translations as well as original literature didn’t get a permission to be printed. It took several centuries until the first non-religious book, Muiddalus Sámid Birra – The Account of the Sámi, would be published.
Today, Finland is breaking the constitutional law in relation to the Sámi. Both Finland and Sweden haven’t ratified the United Nations agreement number 169, which is an international instrument to prevent discrimination of indigenous people in independent countries. UN Human Rights Committee has already intervened with the logging of the forests on Sámi lands practiced by the Finnish nation state.
Typography served as a powerful instrument not only in oppressing, but also in creating colonial and national myths (Lee, C.). The myth making can be seen as part of the oppression. Researching the topic I discovered Mythologia Fennica, an 18h Century epos written in the form of a lexicon. This book describes a proto belief system based on forces of nature. This book was intentionally written out of history, as it portrays Finns as unprogressive people of the forest, who practice natural beliefs. The writing out of history served yet another function – The Finnish wanted to create their own myth and strengthen their national identity to differentiate themselves from both the Sámi as well as the Swedish. Mythologia Fennica was originally written in Swedish, Finland being part of Sweden at the time. What comes surprising is the fact that Mythologia was first published in Finnish not earlier than 200 years after it’s release, in 1995.
Instead of Mythologia Fennica, Elias Lönnrot collected epic poems from Eastern Finland, drawing influences from orientalism and theosophic beliefs, which were both inspirational undercurrents in European art during later 19th Century. His book Kalevala replaced Mythologia Fennica as the Finnish national epos. The book was written in Finnish and compiled from stories that can only be associated with Finland. As a consequence, Sámi culture was otherised during these finnomanic efforts and marginalised as something primitive. This kind of conscious writing away from history ensured, that the Finnish could exclude the Sámi, and reject any multiculturalism along with their endeavours towards an independent, Finnish nation state.
In 1922 in Sweden, the world’s first governmental institute of race biology was established –with the purpose to study human genetics and eugenics. Twelve years later the parliament passed a sterilization law. The Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala and it’s founder Herman Lundborg, doctor of medicine, were building a center of Swedish race research.
Under the leadership of Lundborg, the institute started gathering measurements and photographs to map the racial origins of about 100 000 Swedes. This research later became the foundation of an eugenic program of the Swedish government, which consisted of both voluntary and involuntary sterilisation of persons with negative genetic characteristics.
In Germany the Swedish efforts caused admiration, arousing Germany’s dawning race research into life. This strengthened the ties between Sweden and Germany. The institute placed peculiar emphasis on anthropological measurements and ethnic attributes. Race hygiene would be integrated into Swedish social policy.
During the 1920s and 30s Sweden became a progressive welfare state in which ethnic conflict was virtually unknown. A passion for social justice preserving the physical and mental health of the Swedish population became a political topic. Race hygiene was seen as central to the well-being of a modern society.
In Sweden race hygiene theories merged with the vision of the welfare state. Social engineers were responsible for organising society for the greater good. The nation ranked higher than the individual. The Swedish population was seen as something that has to be protected from inferior and foreign elements, to meet the growing demands of a modern society.
After a few years of existence all the Institute’s resources were suddenly aimed at studying exclusively the Sámi, which was done mainly by measuring their skulls. Herman Lundborg had a fixation, that some scientists and politicians soon started to protest against. Lundborg retired in 1934, and his successor was strongly opposing the predecessors views (Preparatory Report from the Sámi Parliament in Sweden for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples).
A manifestation of the racial research in Sweden were the photographs of naked adults as well as children. In The body and the archive, the author Allen Sekula talks about the use of photograph as a silent, cold way of stating facts. “Although photographic documentation of prisoners was not all common until the 1860s, the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s. […] At the same time, photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same thorough and rigorous fashion. […] Thus photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look – the typology – and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.”
Giving recognition and value to previously oppressed indigenous populations and their histories, worldviews and values is just. It can also help people who have grown to Western belief systems to expand their imaginaries, which are currently restricted by capitalism, individualism and a utilitarian relationship to nature. Indeed, Nordic corporations like Ikea, Nokia, H&M or Spotify can be seen as part of present day national myth-making. These northern capitalist gods are something where people seek for the vanishing meaning, continuity and harmony. They also contribute as success stories and other dramatic narratives cherished in our present-day media landscape. To shift this imbalance caused by ikeafication towards a more inclusive direction in Fennoscandia, efforts should be made to introduce recognition among nation states and the Sámi. Wouldn’t Nordic countries want to be associated with the Sámi rather than with consumerist corporations anyway?
Inside the reviving Sámi culture there are already fascinating movements, such as political art collectives, forward-looking electronic music, indigenous movie festivals and new age spiritualism that can all be seen as ways to explore the Northern, indigenous identities of the 21st century. Shamanistic drum circles gather around Finland on a weekly basis, and the capital city of Helsinki is inhabited by over a thousand City Sámi. (Berg-Nordlie, M. An urban future for Sápmi?”)
I’m arguing that in order for the Sámi culture to survive it not only needs it’s own history and belief system, but it has also to be able to use every possible technology in its own terms, in order to be able to write against the dominant media narrative of the Sámi people that does not do justice to their history and culture. Language is one of these technologies. In order to claim it’s power back from the oppressor, we need more diverse typefaces supporting the Sámi languages. Sámi culture is flourishing, and the diverse voices have to be able to materialise also in written form. As a designer working from the point of view of the majority, I should recognise and try to understand these efforts to discover and practice cultural identity by means of spirituality and art. Next, I can use the means of design to introduce a step forward. Whereas typography, as stated above, was a way to colonise and oppress, I want to explore if it can also work as a device for change. Typefaces can be seen as tones of voice, and by providing a tool that looks distinctive, but not stereotypically Northern, I can contribute in encouraging and facilitating Sámi people to say whatever they have to say, to write whatever they have to write. A revolution will not be set in Times New Roman.
I attempt to shed light on how the Sámi culture can be at the center of the nation state and how it can resist the system from within. As part of the work I’m going to develop iterative steps that form a cyclical methodology for designing inclusively, taking the minority languages into account. Whereas my thesis is concentrating in the question at hand with the indigenous languages in Finland, I’m striving for developing a framework that can be used in outlining and carrying out similar design projects around the world. This is also why some examples used are exploring the questions of multiscript, not only of multilingual design.
With my graduation work, I aim at affecting the systemic oppression against the Sámi people. I want to stress that type design is a meta process happening on a subterranean level towards a change. When a typeface is done, it can be used as a mediator, the conveyer of written voices. These versatile voices can lead to a paradigm shift in how the majority thinks and bring indigenous people to the forefront. The release of a typeface can be a statement in itself and as it’s best, cause political discussion. When it comes to further statements, I’d like to see them being voiced out by the indigenous people themselves, because as argued above, there is a wide spectrum of these voices out there.
In her talk about the female gaze, Jill Soloway addresses the instrumental way of using language as a technology. She argues that a certain language was invented by men to suppress women and to bring them down from their once imagined mysterial position of a goddess. Applying this to my case – language as a technology to control, to racialise, to overwhelm and overwrite, even to erase, remains. Jill Soloway calls for empathy as a political tool to change the way women feel when they move their bodies through the world, she addresses the right of everyone to feel themselves as subjects. Concentrating in gender, though mentioning intersectionality, Jill Soloway also talks about the otherised as an umbrella term for everyone outside of the homogenous group of dominant cis-males. She states that giving the people who have been otherised the possibility to be protagonists in art, literary, film and music, they might be exploding with the possibility, making the stories better than the usual, stereotypical stories told (Soloway, J.).
Professor in Social Sciences, Marisa Elena Duarte, begins her dissertation Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country by describing a famous 1905 photograph of Geronimo in a Cadillac. “[…] the vanishing Indian (represented by Geronimo) set against the inevitable settler future (represented by the automobile). This interpretation, of course, denies the possibility of Indigenous engagement with technology and suggests that Indigenous needs and goals cannot be aligned with technology. Connecting to core issues in Indigenous studies, Network Sovereignty gives the lie to this ideology, concretely illustrating the ways in which ICTs are supporting land-based, decolonial initiatives and providing an infrastructural backbone for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Duarte’s turn to infrastructure and material aspects of ICTs marks this book as a significant contribution to the fields of information science and Indigenous studies.”
Duarte concentrates in the material aspects of information technology, arguing that the indigenous need to be included on systemic level of information architecture to be able to claim the new channels of information technology and have their say. “Media studies, film studies, and cultural studies are beginning to make space for Indigenous students and Indigenous experiences, but the same cannot be said for engineering programs. […] thus there is much description of possible media effects and the matter of gaze but less on the functionality of information and devices as habitus in Native peoples’ lives.”
In his research project on typefaces created for Inuit syllabics, David Bennewith (head of Graphic Design department, Gerrit Rietveld Academie) comes into a conclusion that he wouldn’t design type for Inuktitut at all. According to him, there are several problems in designing for an indigenous script.
When discussing with the designer / type design researcher he says I might not come into a simple solution with my project either. As a comment to whether I should find an indigenous typography expert or not, he says trying to find an expert is already biased in a sense, that it supposes that type should be made in a specific (western) way. Taking a specific indigenous writing tool as a starting point might not be a bad idea, but he thinks it’s also quite a Gerrit Noordzij (The Hague school type design) way of approaching the subject. On the other hand, he doesn’t see as problematic that I would portray Sámi mysticism as part of my research.
Simultaneously when writing my thesis, I participate on the lectures of a course Type & Language, part of Type & Media master’s course. The lectures and discussions are led by multiscript type designer, writer and educator Peter Biľak. His view is that to design type for a language that I’m not familiar with, I would have to think carefully who is it that can give me feedback, who I can co-operate or collaborate with. This person should have knowledge in both the typography and the culture of Sámi.
Some basic principles when designing for an unknown language are, first of all, to define the language and the intended audience of the typeface. The visual effect of diacritics, vocalisation marks and other modifiers should also be considered. When designing for another script, the proportions and reading directions are things to take into account as well – in Arabic for example, the proportions are measured by how many dots of brush width fit in a counter, or how many dots wide a stroke is. Writing tools inherent to the culture, historical influences and existing models are important to study too. Finally, the designer should also examine existing typefaces that have got it right (notes taken freely from a lecture by Peter Biľak).
Another type designer that I greatly admire, who is used to designing the already above-mentioned diacritics is František Štorm. The designer-artist-musician says about diacritics, that they always damage the aesthetics of reading, but that a designer must only try to control this damage. In best possible situation, when designed according to their base letters and placed right, the diacritics won’t harm the beauty of Latin text (158 Answers, Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten Den Haag, 2010). Also contrast, size and vertical placement have to be thought of.
I started this part of my thesis in August by meeting up with a type designer who has designed for Sámi languages – Underware’s Sami Kortemäki. I’m very grateful for him for providing me with contact information for Hannu Kangasniemi, the Secretary for study materials at the Sámi Parliament in Finland.
During a phone interview with Hannu Kangasniemi I hear more about the current developments. We first talk about typographic nuances that I’m going to cover in the next chapter. I get to know that from the three Sámi languages in Finland, Northern Sámi has a designated keyboard driver. Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi do not have drivers, but by using a dedicated software, one is able to superimpose also the Inari Sámi and Skolt Sámi characters to a keyboard and thus write the languages. Kangasniemi tells me that especially more informal and expressive fonts are scarce. I hear that an educational typeface Alku designed by Juhani Lehtiranta has the Sámi characters included. We talk about possible visual references and agree to stay in touch during my graduation project to come.
This part of my thesis I also started in August by visiting University of Oulu special collection in Northern Finland. With cotton gloves in my hands, I got to study centuries old printed matter for Sámi languages. I also encountered the First non-religious book by a Sámi author, Muiddalus Sámid Birra – The account of the Sámi. Simultaneously I paid a visit to Sámi Cultural archives for posters, printed matter and ephemera.
Afterwards I had a discussion with Skolt Sámi linguist Eino Koponen, working as a researcher at University of Oulu. When talking with him I realised the complexity of typographic nuances that these languages, and Skolt Sámi in particular, have in their orthographies. In Skolt Sámi two kinds of modifiers are being used, and the presence of this kind of modifier might change the meaning of a word completely. Softening sign (U 02B9) and differentiating sign (U 02BC) should be notably different from each other, but not too wide. In many typefaces – if including these symbols crucial for the language – the sign are too wide, thus breaking the word image in two. Given these attributes, the texture of even colour on a page is very hard to achieve, even for a skilled typographer.
A type designer can always learn to draw new symbols and accents, but to be able to create a typeface that works credibly as a whole the designer needs to be able to discuss and question – to make the discoveries relevant for the research. Cumulating on a page the modifiers affect in many of the fundaments in the design of letterforms – structure, pattern, texture, rhythm and spacing (or fitting) of the letters (Unger, G. Theory of Type Design).
In his essay compilation Shamanism, colonialism and the wild man, Michael Taussig critically examines anthropology and it’s conventions of seemingly objective ’agribusiness writing’. This tendency to mansplain shamanism in scientific terms, he states, usually fails to notice how biased sorcery it actually itself practices.
Taussig gives an example on the nature of ethnographic fieldwork, drawing from his own time spent in Colombia. Local peasants were struggling with the state for control of occupied land. The cultural clash between the peasants and the palm plantation owners, palmeros, leads, when lacking a common language, into the two parties to compete by the means of typography and cartography. When the peasants and their legal advisors produce maps of the territory demonstrating the usage and community history, the state replies with maps claiming ownership.
This leads into the language of legal bureaucracy to conflict with the language of shared stories and oral anecdotes. The peasants’ legal advisor demonstrates: “’We have to create a new language,’ says Juan Felipe. ‘The palmeros have theirs, and we need to show the world an alternate model.’”
This forces us to ask, how to recognise knowledge and challenge the means which oral histories have been devalued in the western culture. As discussed above, the otherised position of Sámi doesn’t derive only from a differing vocabulary or orthography, but also from differing values, world view and radically different beliefs.
In her reader ”Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) Gayatri Spivak is critically eyeing the manner in which western cultures research other cultures. Similarly to Michael Taussig, in the core of Spivak’s writing are the ethical problems of looking at a different culture based on seemingly universal, yet biased, concepts and frameworks.
Spivak critically deals with a range of western writers starting from Marx, continuing to Foucault and eventually, to Deleuze. Her argument is that western academic conventions are kept up to support western interests, and thus the colonial project. Knowledge can be seen as a commodity, research as a refinery that defines the “other” as the object of study, just to extract knowledge and import it back, similarly strengthening the western conventions and thus, the western structures of power. To shift the paradigm from “white men talking about people of colour to other white men” the academic institutions should open up for feminist and post-colonial scrutiny.
In the case of Sámi the Fennoscandian nation states have consciously tried to stop the indigenous people from writing their own history. Banning the printing of literature, rejecting the learning material and forbidding to teach Sámi in schools wasn’t enough. By ruling that the Sámi kids in boarding schools can’t even talk in their own language the nation states have managed to complicate even the passing on of the oral history.
In his essay, artist Kader Attia talks about reappropriation as a strategy towards empowerment. The word “reappropriation” was taken up in France, during the second half of the 19th century, by anarchist theorists such as Proudhon and Fourier. It’s use was inspired by the concept of property, which it aimed to redefine. “What is property? Property is theft,” Proudhon declared. Behind the agenda of this anarchist theorist was the idea of redefining the concept of property and shifting it from the single owner to the community as a whole. So the use of the word “reappropriation” arose from a social and political context, through the anarchist thinkers. (Attia, K. 2013, Repair: Architecture, Reappropriation, and The Body Repaired)
Similarly, reappropriating happens in present day Finland when a Sámi author, poet, musician and public figure Niillas Holmberg states in his bio, that he “lives in his native Ohcejohka (Utsjoki), Saamiland (occupied by Finland).” Given the undervalued, misrepresented and stigmatised position in the Nordic countries, reappropriating is a cultural tactic that is likely to have a lot potential for the Sámi people. Statements such as Holmberg’s effectively disrupt national hegemony by highlighting its oppressive, as opposed to neutral, nature. This is a possible path to take with my graduation work to come – to facilitate reappropriation. Coming back to Jill Soloway and how she argues for the otherised, also the Sámi should be given more and diverse possibilities to be protagonists, and voice out what they have to say. The possibility for the otherised to be protagonist makes voices more diverse, and expands how we comprehend our pluriverse.
The membrane of the drum, the skin of the reindeer – from which the sound of the drum occurs – is equally important that is the body of the Sámi from which the sound resonates. In order to the world to hear them it is equally important for them to have their own cultural artefacts, their own history, their on specific language and belief system – be it animistic – in order for the Sámi to resist and persist.
Back to the 17th century. The Sámi man, Lars Nilsson has recently lost his son. He has built a new drum in an effort at bringing him back to life. The same governor-bishop get’s to hear about the fruitless attempts. Lars Nilsson is brought into the court to be prosecuted. In front of the judge he explains, that no matter which authority prohibits him from doing what he does, he will still practice the custom of his forefathers. The Sámi man is sentenced to death. Court ratifies the sentence, and the Sámi man is burned alive together with his instrument.
During the 21st Century, the greatest threat to Sámi way of life is global, going beyond the powers of Nordic nation states. Our climate continues to change, and the Arctic region is becoming geopolitically increasingly heated as well. Recently China has expressed it’s will to deploy arctic natural resources for it’s use, and the new superpower is planning an Arctic Silk Road that would shorten the shipping distance, making the trade between Asia and Europe easier. The Arctic Silk Road would have two western harbour hubs. The other one being Rotterdam, the other is being planned to be located in Kirkkoniemi, a harbour town in the north of Norway facing the Arctic sea. An accompanying railroad, planned to be funded by Chinese investors, would cut the land of the Sámi in two, destroying the indigenous annual cycle of life.
Personal discussions Füsun Turetken, architect, designer and visual artist
Personal discussions Laura Savolainen, social scientist
Personal discussion Peter Bilak, multiscript type designer, writer and teacher
Personal discussion Sami Kortemäki, type designer who has designed for Sámi languages
Personal discussion Frank Griesshammer, type designer and educator
Personal discussion Anni Guttorm, curator at Sámi Museum Siida in Inari, Finland
Personal discussion Hannu Kangasniemi, Secretary for study materials at the Sámi Parliament, Finland
Personal discussion David Bennewith, type design researcher, graphic designer & educator
Personal discussion Eino Koponen, Skolt Sámi Linguist at Oulu University, Finland
Lectures Peter Bilak, Type & Language at TypeMedia 2018-2019
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Attia, K. 2013, Repair: Architecture, Reappropriation, and The Body Repaired