Triple stigma
  by Jahn Arill Skogholt

Without a doubt there are thousands who carry Sami “shame” in themselves.  We can assume that many of these at one or another level feel themselves “homeless” in society.

    Most people will acknowledge the Sami struggle, especially in the last twenty years, to win back the rights they have lost during Norwegian colonization.  But all too many will think of Sami as synonymous with Finnmark and especially reindeer, in their colorful outfits, those who can stand tall and proud and demand their rights to further their language and cultural heritage.  Few will know about the bent backs and the shy sideward glances from the large majority for whom the Sami movement came too late.

    It is a historical fact that the last 250 years have been characterized by a more or less aggressive Norwegianization and assimilation policy toward the Sami.  This policy intended that Sami should reject their language and their core cultural values. 

    Those of us who grew up in the periphery of Norway after the war felt the social pressure and discrimination even though at home we were Norwegian speaking.  Our parents, or perhaps our grandparents, had bowed to the pressure and stopped speaking their language.  But we were still not accepted.  We were continually exposed to swearwords that referenced our Sami heritage.  For many of us it was a relief to get away from our home town into a larger milieu where no one knew about our shame, even though perhaps they suspected.  This was the first stigma.

    There were—and are—those of us who preferred to hide as well as we could.  Others of us reacted differently.  Some of us became angry, got ourselves gákti and stood up for ourselves, as it was referred to.  But I must say that I never experienced any discrimination in Oslo during the late 60s on those occasions when it was appropriate to wear gákti.  The reaction was rather paternalism or maternalism.  People showed a certain concern for this “son of the wild” who had lost his way into the big city.

    But the struggle of the Alta dam, the setting up of lavvu in front of the parliament building during the fall of 1979, hunger strikes, and the women’s “occupation” of the prime minister’s office, showed the Sami were serious about making themselves visible in Norwegian society.  And even if we lost the battle of the river, we won the battle of public opinion.  The larger society became aware that the Sami were not just a small rustic minority wearing outfits who herded reindeer on the Finnmark plateau.

    The fall of 89 the first Norwegian Sami Parliament was in place.  Those who could register in the Sami census must “perceive themselves as Sami and speak Sami at home, or who had parents or grandparents who spoke Sami at home.” 

    So we stood there rather uncomfortable in our gákti, those of us who gleefully threw ourselves into Davvin, the Sami language textbook for beginners, when it came out in 83.  Those of us who tried out our new vocabulary when we met the real Sami—those who could speak the language—more often than not received ironic smiles at our helpless attempt at speaking a language we couldn’t master. 
    When the criteria for the Sami census came, we learned the truth that we had feared for some time.  We “new Sami” were not welcome into the Sami family.  I hung my gákti in the closet and referred to myself from them on as a “former Sami.”  And this was the second stigma.

    The Sami administrative area includes six municipalities.  Five of them are in inner Finnmark and sixth is in north Troms, Kåfjord.  There, a group of young people started Gáivuona Sámennuorat (Kåfjord Sami Youth Association).  One of the objectives with this association is to attempt to reestablish Sami language and culture in Kåfjord.  Arild Hovland writes in the book Modern Indigenous People - Sami Youth as a Movement about the difference between “new Sami” and “real Sami.” 

    “In direct opposition to the consciousness of heritage, we find among the central entrepreneurs (in Kåfjord) and in the circle around them, those who maintain that the hangers on ‘just do it for the money’ or because ‘they want to be different.’  They maintain that the activists are opportunist in a sort of lifestyle marketplace.  These reactions are common locally, both among close relatives and among more distant neighbors.  Accusations of opportunism are not only local.  They come also from inner Finnmark.”

    In other words “métis” (mestizos)—mixed Sami and Norwegian—who want to be Sami must expect opposition from at least two camps.  First from their own, especially from their parents and grandparents’ generations, who through young peoples’ striving and searching for identity are confronted with painful issues in their own lives.  Thereafter from “the real Sami” who throughout the centuries have managed to preserve their language and culture.

    In another small north Norwegian coastal community, Kvæfjord outside of Harstad, another group is starting a project BIKUBEN (User directed issue oriented education—base for personal development and networking).  This project aims, among other things, to provide a service for the “métis.”  It has received funding from the Health and Rehabilitation Council.  The premise is that people who carry so many stigmas are particularly disposed to psychic suffering and will have particular difficulty if they acquire a mental illness, in other words, a third stigma.

    Professor of education research, Jens Ivar Nergård, writes in the magazine Mimes in 1993 that “psychologists, psychiatrists and other health professionals must understand working among people who have another culture.  In order to help, they must understand the person’s individual history and society’s cultural history.  Individuals who carry hidden identity conflicts, carry the largest pain of a culture that has lost a foothold in the north Norwegian cultural landscape.”
    Of course Nergård is writing about this within the context of health professionals working in a Sami speaking environment, but much of this also applies to the métis society. 

    Probably the challenge of developing psychiatric services for the métis would be just as challenging as psychiatry in a purely Sami cultural context. 

    Here it is a matter of helping individuals to one choice: either be Sami or Norwegian, or better yet stand forward as a carrier of two cultures, with those qualities and qualifications this implies.  I think there is truth in what a friend of mine said recently:
    “In our modern, globalized society it is a handicap to not have roots in at least two dissimilar cultures.”  Many of us who have established ourselves reasonably well in the Norwegian society—as Norwegians—still fuss with the Sami part in ourselves.  We recognize a place deep inside us that if we let go of the Sami in us, we will lose an important and valuable part of ourselves.

    So we can ask: How large a group is it that struggles with these identity problems?  It is, of course, problematic to answer this, since most have hidden themselves in the Norwegian.  But it is without at doubt that there are tens of thousands who go with the Sami “shame” in themselves.  We can assume that a great many of these, in one way or another, feel themselves “homeless” in society and that many of these feel “homelessness” as stressful.  They are not only in north Norway.  Many have followed the move south and struggle with their “homelessness” there.

    It is a well known theory that prevention is the best cure.  And this has been the starting point for the forward looking women and men in Kvæfjord.  They have said: Let us help those to acknowledge their ethnic background.  Let us help them to be proud of their ethnic background.   Let us help them to begin their “process of liberation.”