Barnelitterært Forskningstidsskrift (Jan 2020)
Sámi Selves in the Northern Landscape
Abstract
The nomadism and reindeer-herding practices of the Sámi, the indigenous people of Scandinavia and northern European Russia, offer a model for a different relationship with space and natural resources than that of settler colonialism, centered on a fixed metropole. This article examines representations of the Sámi and the relation to space in two classics of early twentieth-century Swedish children’s literature, while focusing on nomadism and indigeneity. Deploying an ecocritical and postcolonial perspective to view the representation of Sámi selves and the relation to space in the two nearly contemporaneous Swedish classics Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige [Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Travels Through Sweden] (1906) by Selma Lagerlöf and Barnen ifrån Frostmofjället [The Children from Frost Mountain] (1907) by Laura Fitinghoff shows that, although the books ultimately reinforce an exploitative and dismissive colonial attitude toward the northern landscape and its inhabitants, they also display an admiration of Sámi nomadism that penetrates to deeper levels of the narrative. These classic Swedish novels for children not only portray nomadism through Sámi selves in the landscape of the north, but also embody nomadism through emblematic and central protagonists, as well as the overarching narrative structure. Although the romanticizing of a more sustainable Sámi relationship to people, nature, and space modeled in the course of the narrative ultimately capitulates to a hierarchical and exploitative mindset problematic from a postcolonial or ecocritical perspective, the narrative adoption of indigenous modes in relation to the land also displays a dialogic relation different from a settler colonialist view that revolves around the metropole. Indeed, these two Swedish classics display how ideas and values did not necessarily flow only from a colonial metropole to an indigenous periphery, but that ideas identified with indigeneity also influenced central narratives of Swedish national mythopoesis.
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