Yesterday’s Memories, Today’s Discourses: The Struggle of the Russian Sámi to Construct a Meaningful Past1

The Generational Rift

Q: Have you ever thought of going back to the lifestyle of your parents?

A: Oh, no. I’ve never even thought about it. I wouldn’t mind visiting and spending some time where my ancestors used to live. But to work there, clean up after somebody, no thanks. I’m quite squeamish about these things, you know [laughing] (Interview of a mid-aged Sámi woman by the author, Murmansk Region, 2013).

The activist–sovkhoist rift is in many ways a generational one. In the oldest generation, the elite versus nonelite opposition is still preserved. There is a majority with nostalgic, sovkhoist perspectives against a smaller group of elders who were among the pioneers of Sámi ethnopolitical activism and who have strong ties with the Nordic and other countries.

The middle generation has proportionally more proponents of the activist point of view, especially among women who, in this generation, already fell into an extreme gender division between “tundra men” and “urban women” and are often employed in the social sector (for more details on this see the section about the gender rift). Many of these people have been raised at boarding schools. They often mention this as the main reason for perceiving themselves as Sámi with an indirect or reconstructed experience and knowledge of their native culture (cf. Scheller 2013:405). One female interlocutor from Lovozero, for example, told me that she feels completely urbanized and blames mainly her education for this. She enjoys living for a certain time in the tundra, but she feels like a

visitor there, and she would not want to give up all the comfort of an apartment, like tap water, electricity, and gas. Besides, there was a practice by the boarding school teachers of paying regular visits to parents and convincing them about the “harm” of bilingualism for their children, which made many parents of the older generation adopt Russian as the main language also at home.

Within the youngest generation, we must, first of all, differentiate between those who explicitly identify themselves as Sámi and those who do not. There are many young people who do not identify themselves primarily as Sámi, despite their Sámi roots. It is hard to assess the overall amount of those people in Russian Lapland, with its highly multiple identities (cf. Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:126–27), which are

mainly due to Soviet settlement policies and, as a consequence, intermarriage between Sámi, Komi, Nenets, and people arrived from the South during Soviet times (Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Armenians and many others, who are usually subsumed under the term priezzhye, in English aptly translated as “newcomers”) (cf. Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:20, 24; see Vitebsky and Wolfe 2001:92 about a similar situation in another case study). Especially within the younger generation, self-identifying as a Sámi or not as a Sámi matters a lot, because the continued existence of Sámi culture and languages depends on those who are young and who identify themselves as Sámi. Only they bring along the interest and enthusiasm to, for example, learn a Sámi language from scratch.

My following observations concern those young people who identify themselves primarily as Sámi. Among them, the activist viewpoints are not anymore tied to an elite. They became a relatively common attitude. Konstantinov (2015:66) comes to the same conclusion:
There is an increasing risk that popular perceptions of the Soviet past will take such black-and-white images as accurate. This public by now, it should be noted, represents not only a loosely defined “Western” popular opinion, but also the younger generations of the post-Soviet world.
This change occurred thanks to the cultural revitalization work carried out over the last two decades by middle and older generation Sámi who, while doing this work, were both carriers of and surrounded by the need-and-misery discourse dominating among activists. This younger generation now represents a public, which learned about both the Sámi culture and the Soviet times from the school desk, from assembly halls and open-air celebrations. The babies of the 1980s and 1990s were thus the true tabula rasa generation, who,

in their wish to feel Sámi, received the needed knowledge primarily from the activist sources. In many cases, they could not receive this knowledge in full amount from their parents, who belonged to the generation that was most extensively covered by the boarding school system (cf. Bloch 2004; Liarskaya 2013). Hence, the most significant proponents of an activist view on the Soviet past of the Sámi, consist in the young, post-Soviet generation: “As the gap with lived experience widens, the image of the ‘masses’ as passive, downtrodden victims of ruthless power seems to spread” (Konstantinov 2015:66).

Moreover, while the young “masses” absorb the Western discourse on Russian Sámi in their homeland, the new generation Russian Sámi elite is shaped and educated in the West: Among the Russian Sámi, Nordic Sámi educational institutions have taken over the former role of the Herzen Institute of shaping the indigenous educational top layer (for more details on this topic, see chapter “Educational Reorientation” in Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:74–91). An ambivalent effect of this reorientation is that even evidently wrong Western assumptions and prejudices about the Eastern Sámi, which the older generations would reject, are thus on the way to becoming institutionalized. This applies, for example, to the view of the Russian Sámi as a unitary “community,” an idea, which also elderly people with a predominantly activist worldview are ready to deny—usually after our acquaintance has lasted already for some time and only when talking in a private setting.

I agree with Konstantinov (2015:18), who talks about an “illusion entertained by visitors that by talking with a few local people one can hear the ‘community voice,’” and I would add that this visitor’s view on an imagined community has been internalized by many Russian Sámi of the younger generation.¹³

However, the positive effects of this educational reorientation cannot be left out of sight. First of all, the Nordic Sámi educational institutions contribute more to the formation of a Sámi identity rather than to a cultural Russianization, like in the case of the Herzen Institute¹⁴ (Overland and Berg-Nordlie 2012:83). Secondly, this process of shaping a pronounced Sámi identity is likely to contribute to overcoming the social and ideological rifts, which I am presenting in this paper and have so much inhibited the achievement of ethnopolitical goals in the past two-and-a-half decades. There are chances that the in-group cohesion among the next generation Sámi will be greater than before exactly thanks to some of the need-and-misery discourse’s generalizations.