Stories of reconciliation enacted in the everyday lives of Sámi tourism entrepreneurs

Abstract

Reconciliation has gained political interest in Norway, where a commission was established in 2018 to investigate the injustices committed in the past towards the Sámi and Kven. In this article, we argue that reconciliation can also be found in the small stories and events enacted in everyday life. Our analyses are based on a collaboration with a Sámi reindeer herding family who, through objects, food and tales, invite visitors to get "A taste of Sápmi". Through storytelling events, they bring the colonial past into the present. In communicating that "nature is our culture", these events have become a way to explore and express the interdependency between Sámi practices and landscape. We seek to explore how the act of telling locally embedded stories enables the Sámi entrepreneurs to reconcile with their colonial past. The storytelling events also offer a space for engagement in which visitors can reconcile with their own participation in these encounters. ARTICLE HISTORY

20 years of research on Arctic and Indigenous cultures in Nordic tourism: a review and future research agenda

“…It has brought forth that tourism is an activity that may simultaneously be contested and welcomed by indigenous people and has also shown that tourism may contribute to essentializing as well as strengthening Arctic indigenous cultures. In some instances, tourism can even work to reconcile past injustices (Kramvig & Førde, 2020). For future research, we argue it is important to further diversify and supplement accounts of how tourism and indigenous culture in the Arctic entangle in multiple ways.…”

“…Many Sámi entrepreneurs see tourism as a complementary income to their other livelihoods, such as reindeer herding and duodji, handicrafts. At the same time, tourism offers for many an important platform to share knowledge about Sámi cultures and identity (Fonneland, 2017;Kramvig & Førde, 2020;Leu et al, 2018).…”

Unfinished indigenous geographies: The endurances and becomings of a Sámi tourism venture

“…We suggest to see the sum of their different moves as discreet non-strategic enactments of the multi-ethnic geographies of Sápmi, within which reconciling undertones are heard (cf. Kramvig & Førde, 2020).…”

“…Several research projects have engaged in the co-creation of knowledge about Sámi tourism with indigenous entrepreneurs (see, e.g. Höckert, Kugapi, & Lüthje, 2021;Kramvig & Førde, 2020).…”

“…The topics range from commodification, tourism imaginaries, and the indigenous "other" (see, e.g. Mathisen, 2020;Niskala & Ridanpää, 2016;Olsen, 2002Olsen, , 2006Wright, 2018), boundary making (Schilar & Keskitalo, 2018), and indigenous spirituality (Fonneland, 2012), to storytelling (Kramvig & Førde, 2020), the care and protection of Sámi cultures (Saari, Höckert, Lüthje, Kugapi & Mazzullo, 2020), and governance issues (Angell, Nygaard & Selle, 2020;Pashkevich, Stjernström & Lundmark, 2015). Hence, and while focusing more on explicit and unambiguous indigenous topics in Sámi tourism, the research literature has attended less to the way that indigenous identities, meanings and material practices imprint more discreetly on the steps taken by indigenous entrepreneurs when starting and developing tourism ventures in Sápmi, which is the aim of this paper.…”