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Multicultural Citizenship as Sami in Norway
by
Kristin Strømsnes
Rokkansenteret, Nygårdsgt. 5, N-5015 Bergen, Norway
"The Norwegian state is founded on the territories of two people - Norwegians and Sami". By these words HM King Harald V opened the Sami Assembly in Norway in 1997. The Samis are an indigenous people, spread as minorities in four countries - Finland, Sweden, Russia and Norway. The majority (about 2/3) of the Sami population lives in Norway (about 40-50 thousand people). They have their own settlement areas, language, culture and history. In this paper I want to take a closer look at the civic engagement and political mobilization of the Sami people in Norway.
The Sami people are in the Norwegian constitution recognized as an indigenous people within Norway´s border (since 1988) (Gaski 1997). But the history of the Sami people is a history that includes centuries of isolation and oppression by the Norwegian state (Skotvedt 1993). Prior to World War II the official Norwegian policy was to incorporate the Sami population into the Norwegian society (assimilation). This Sami Norwegianization was devastating to Sami language and culture, and even as late as in the 1950s Sami pupils were punished for uttering a single Sami word at school (op cit.). From the 1960s the Sami started to organize and to protest against the official politics of Norwegian authorities, and it is reasonable to talk about a "Sami movement".
The conflict between the Sami and the Norwegian state in relation to construction of the Alta-Kautokeino dam in 1979/1980 created a political crisis for the legitimacy of the Norwegian authorities, and improved the political climate for raising Sami issues (Josefsen 2001). The Sami lost the battle against the dam construction, but the Alta affair proved to be a watershed in Sami ethno-political history, and represented a turning point in the self-understanding of the Sami people (Eidheim 1997). This resulted, towards the end of the 1980s, in the inclusion of the so-called "Sami paragraph" in the Norwegian constitution, which guaranteed that the Sami in Norway, by virtue of being an indigenous people, would be able to preserve and develop their culture and society. Also a "Sami law" was enacted, which legalized the organization of an assembly, elected democratic by the Sami - the Sámediggi (the Sami Assembly). About 10.000 people are registered in the Sami-register (9923 in 2001, an increase from 5497 since the first election to the Sami Assembly in 1989) (The Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Labour, 1995).
As part of the "Sami law", a new language law was also approved, which equated Sami and Norwegian as official languages in six communes in the Northern part of Norway. According to the Norwegian Sami Act, "Sami" is defined on the basis of a combination of linguistic and subjective criteria. The Act states that all persons who provide a declaration to the effect that they consider themselves to be Sami, and who either have Sami as the language of the home, or have or have had a parent or grandparent with Sami as the language of the home, are entitled to be included in the register of Sami electors in their municipality of residence, and are entitled to stand for election to the Sami Assembly.
In this paper I will analyze Sami citizenship as a type of multicultural citizenship. One crucial theoretical gateway to this field is found in Will Kymlickas book Multicultural Citizenship, which will be important in this study (Kymlicka 1995). The empirical point of departure in this paper is a comprehensive postal survey carried out in 2001, on a random sample of people living in the six communes in the north of Norway included in The Sami language-act (N=1.500). These communes are dual-linguistic, which means that Sami and Norwegian both are official languages and that one may address an official institution in either Sami or Norwegian, and get an answer in the preferred language. These communes have also the right to decide that Sami shall be a core subject in primary and secondary school. Five of these six communes are in Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, and one is in Troms. All of them are small communities within large areas. Totally, in the six communes under the Sami language-act there lives about 16.500 people (Bjerkli and Selle 2003).
The design of the study will be comparative as the survey also was carried out as a national survey, which included a random sample of 5.000 people living in Norway. This enables comparation of Sami people with the non-Sami population in the same area, as well as with the Norwegian population at large.
In the paper I will study indigenous responses to national politics by distinguishing degrees of participation and non-participation. Do the Sami people participate more or less in politics than other Norwegians? Do they to a lesser degree choose the forms of participation that are closest related to the national political system, like elections and participation in political parties and voluntary organizations, and rather participate in more direct forms of political participation? What does citizenship mean for the Sami as an indigenous people? How does the Sami look at the national democracy? Do they trust the politicians more or less? Questions like this will hopefully give us a better understanding of what this type of multicultural citizenship actually mean.
Literature: Bjerkli, Bjørn and Per Selle (2003) "Sametinget - kjerneinstitusjonen innenfor den nye samiske offentligheten" in Bjørn Bjerkli and Per Selle (eds.) Samer, makt og demokrati. Sametinget og den nye samiske offentligheten. Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk, pp.48-86.
Eidheim, Harald (1997) "Ethno-Political Development among the Sami after World War II" in Harald Gaski (ed.) Sami Culture in a New Era. The Norwegian Sami Experience. Karasjok: Davvi Girji OS, pp.29-61.
Gaski, Harald (1997) "Introduction: Sami Culture in a New Era" in Harald Gaski (ed.) Sami Culture in a New Era. The Norwegian Sami Experience. Karasjok: Davvi Girji OS, pp.9-28.
Josefsen, Eva (2001) "The Sami and the National Parliaments: Direct and Indirect Channels of Influence" in Kathrin Wessendorf (ed.) Challenging Politics: Indigenous Peoples´Experiences with Political Parties and Elections. Copenhagen: IWGIA Document No. 104, pp. 63-92.
Kymlicha, Will (1995) Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Skotvedt, Tove (1993) "Sami: The Indigenous Peoples of Norway" in Anne Cohen Kiel (ed.) Continuity and Change. Aspects of Contemporary Norway. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, pp.163-174.
The Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Labour, 1995.
Date received: October 9, 2003
Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # camm-60.