Queer Indigenous World-Making in the Sámi Tv Comedy Njuoska Bittut

Abstract

How can laughter unravel gendered, sexual and settler colonial power dynamics, and help imagine other ways of being? In this chapter, I examine the Sámi TV comedy show Njuoska bittut (in Finnish Märät säpikkäät, produced by Tarinatalo, broadcast by the Finnish public service broadcasting company YLE 2012-2013) by Sámi creatives Suvi West and Anne Kirste Aikio as a project of queer Indigenous world-making. I suggest that Njuoska Bittut offers an alternative vision of a world of Indigenous laughter, erotics and audiovisuality, where settler understandings of gender, sexuality, and the workings of the world are made strange and ridiculous. Aimed at Sámi and non-Sámi audiences alike, the show navigates between making its humor legible for a settler audience and creatively imagining queer Indigenous worlds, disinterested in such legibility."Njuoska bittut" is North Sámi language and refers to leg warmers made of reindeer skin that got wet. West and Aikio explain in an interview that they picked up the phrase from a hundreds-ofyears-old yoik (Sámi traditional vocal genre) where it refers to a treacherous woman with unruly sexual appetites (Huru, 2012). The humor in Njuoska bittut does indeed center sex and sexuality, playing with the stereotype of the exotic Native with voracious sexual appetites (Green 2007; Lehtola, 2000, pp. 138-141) but the laughter is also geared at the Sámi themselves, and tensions or prejudices within Sámi communities. Every episode introduces a broad theme, such as tourism, Helsinki, homosexuality, boobs, babies, and animals. Across the episodes, there are also recurring characters and sketch types, for example mock-ethnographic documentaries about the Helsinki tribe of people whose habits of living in concrete bunkers and of banishing people who cross to the other side of the beltway. In every episode, West and Aikio introduce a Finnish or Sámi human type in nature documentary style. These types include the white meat-eating