MLQ CUESTIONARIO DEL SIGNIFICADO DE LA VIDA

One grey and gloomy day I went to visit Jonas in his house to chat over a cup of coffee. I had just returned from Gásluokta where I had gone with a woman to visit her elderly mother who lives in a care-home. I told Jonas about our trip to the other side of the fjord and it prompted him to recount that many people moved from the settlements around the inner fjords to take up employment at Gásluokta’s cement factory during the post-war years47. “I’m sure you saw the factory today,” he said, “it dominates the skyline together with the mountain peaks” (fig. 32).

Jonas recollected how his uncle had taken a job at the factory in the 1960s. “It was a job that guaranteed an income, but it also required a change of lifestyle,” he said. “What do you mean?” I curiously inquired. Jonas explained:

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After the war the demand for cement increased and, as a consequence, the cement factory, which had been established in Gásluokta in 1918, expanded their business.

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Well, even if it was not self-evident for people to always have food on the table in the past, they lived more freely. It was of course hard to sustain a family, but everyone was their own boss and could decide over their own work much more than they could at the factory. To work at the factory was a 9 to 5 job, under the supervision of a manger, and you had to speak the Norwegian language and wear ‘Western clothes’. For sure people wouldn’t have been allowed to enter the factory dressed in the gáppte!

“Was it first when people moved to the villages around the outer fjords that they stopped making and wearing the gáppte?” I asked when Jonas stopped. In response, he smiled and said that people had experienced discrimination also when they lived in the inner fjord settlements from tourists and at school. “I didn’t have so many problems in school myself,” Jonas said, “my mother sewed trousers and knitted jumpers for us and she had always spoken both the Lulesámi and Norwegian languages with my siblings and me.” Jonas quieted and looked sad. When he continued, it was with a lowered voice:

Other children came to school dressed in the gáppte without understanding a word of Norwegian… and the majority of teachers came from southern Norway and they didn’t know anything about the Sámi. Now afterwards many Sámi say that they felt stupid at school as they looked different and didn’t understand what the teachers said. Sometimes they also received jeering comments from their peers. Not all teachers were so understanding either… and for other teachers it was probably hard, what could they do when the children didn’t understand them?

We were both silent for a while, before Jonas continued:

It was maybe easier for those who still lived or had their families in the settlements around the inner fjords as those areas only were populated by Sámi people. So even if you were bullied at school, you went home and were surrounded by the comfort of your kin. From the inner fjords it’s also close to Sweden and people kept regular contact with their kin on the other side of the border. As you already know, in Sweden the politics was very different from here. While the Norwegian state wanted the Sámi to become Norwegians, the Swedish authorities wished for the Sámi to remain Sámi48.

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In contrast to the Norwegianisation policies of ’salvaging’ the Sámi from their ’subordination’ by assimilating them into becoming ’Norwegians’, the Swedish state implemented a different political agenda, commonly referred to as lapp ska vara lapp (S) (Lapp should be Lapp). At the same time as the Sámi were perceived with inferiority in Sweden, they were also, according to Lennart Lundmark (2002), considered a valued indigenous population. Because of the rapid transformations in society, the Swedish authorities believed that the Sámi were heading towards extinction by becoming assimilated into the majority population. This view was influenced by a definition and static perception of what it means to be indigenous and Sámi. Lundmark writes that the state declared that the Sámi, due to their ’racial characteristics’, were only suited to tend reindeer and should not engage in other forms of employment. Additionally, special schools, so called nomadic schools, were established. These schools provided a poor level of education to prevent the Sámi from progressing into a ’civilised state of being’ (ibid.). Hence, while the Sámi in Norway were incorporated into the Norwegian system, the Swedish Sámi were often forced outside the mainstream society by the state.

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Jonas took a hasty sip of his coffee and added:

But then the situation changed when people moved to the villages around the outer fjords. There they became neighbours with non-Sámi people and started working side by side with them in the factory and other places… and not everyone showed an understanding for our different ways of being. Also some Sámi people that abandoned their previous ways of living started being critical towards other Sámi who, for example, wished to continue speaking the Lulesámi language.

Jonas highlighted that it was not always the case that people would actually say negative things about the Sámi out loud, but that the Sámi realised that they had to wear clothes other than the gáppte and to speak Norwegian to get a job and manage to go through the educational system.

Jean Briggs (1997: 228) argues, in a study among the Utku of Canada, that previous ways of doing things for ‘living comfortably’ became, with the growing contact with non-Utku, ‘emblems’, or emotionally charged markers, that were used as ‘mirrors’ to understand and distinguish oneself from others. Likewise, Jonas emphasised that the Lulesámi became aware of what the differentiating elements were between them and the non-Sámi population through which projections of inferiority could be channelled. Phrased differently, people became attentive to their positions within the world and of how they were perceived by others. The gáppte, which had been a practical daily garment, became an evident visual indication of the difference between Sámi and non-Sámi people. Jonas described how many Lulesámi started feeling sartorial alienation and, as a result, strategically stopped wearing the gáppte. Many also ceased to speak the Lulesámi language and changed their personal names and surnames to become less Sámi and more ‘Norwegian-sounding’ (e.g. from Gælok or Gintal to Andersen and Jonsen) in order to manage their relations with others and avoid discrimination.

As we continued talking, Jonas said that the Lulesámi stopped wearing the gáppte to avoid emotional distress, but that, in the process, they also experienced a loss of autonomy; of being able to choose how to live without fear of discrimination. Jonas explained that many Lulesámi started feeling ashamed and lost self-confidence in who they were and from where they came.

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