Indigenous Culture Jamming: Suohpanterror and the articulation of Sami political community

Abstract

This article examines the work of the anonymous Sámi artist and activist group Suohpanterror as an example of Indigenous culture jamming, which uses global visual archives and the social media to articulate a contemporary Sámi subjectivity politically. In a short time, Suohpanterror has gained national and international recognition as a new Sámi voice, which is challenging earlier representations and conceptions of the Sámi. However, instead of focusing upon Suohpanterror’s efforts to address the dominant society, this study is concerned mainly with Suohpanterror’s operation within, and at the fringes of, the Sámi community itself. To this end, I examine Suohpanterror’s entanglements in the small Sámi “uprising” that took place in the social media in spring 2013 around the interconnected issues of Sámi definition, identity and the potential ratification of the ILO convention 169 in Finland. I argue that in the context of a highly politicized national public sphere which is considered insensitive to Sámi perspectives, “liking”, consuming and sharing Suohpanterror’s work online has offered an easy, effective and unmistakably trendy way to publicly identify with a certain set of (Sámi) political views, and to perform a political “us” which feeds, in particular, on experiences of a shared community of knowledge, and of collective laughter.

Keywords

• Culture jamming
• decolonization
• Facebook
• Indigenous art
• collective laughter
• Sámi people