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The Tornedalians in northern Sweden and the Kvens in northern Norway are two large Finnish speaking national minorities. The Tornedalians was part of the continuous Finnish culture stretching from southern Finland up to the northernmost part of the Gulf of Bothnia. They were integrated in the Swedish kingdom from the 14th century but in 1809, at the time Sweden lost Finland to Russia, they were left on the Swedish side as a small and marginalised minority. In northern Norway a large immigration of Finnish speakers from Sweden and Finland took place in the 18th and 19th century. They were, according to Norwegian tradition, called Kvens and regarded as immigrants who, as time went on, received Norwegian citizenship. The Tornedalians and Kvens share a common Finnish cultural heritage within the transnational area of northernmost Scandinavia called the North Calotte.1 Both minorities were exposed to a harsh assimilation policy from the latter half of the 19th century within each nation state. During most of the 20th century they remained loyal to the majority culture of the state, but in the 1980s a strong political mobilisation and ethnic revitalisation took place, launching new political and cultural organisations. They now emphasized their Finnish cultural heritage and claimed aid from the state for the maintenance of their minority cultures. In the 1990s the political mobilisation was taken even further when part of the Tornedalians in Sweden, and the Kvens in Norway, claimed that they all belonged to a historically ancient Finnish speaking people called Kvens, who was mentioned in historical sources from the Viking Age. This new kind of transnational identity policy was deliberately directed against the Sámi people, who at that time received an official status as indigenous people in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Since the Sámi people claims land rights and political autonomy out of their history from immemorial time, both history and myth has come to be in focus for the Kven movement in their transnational political mobilisation, in order to proof their legitimacy as an ancient indigenous people. The aim of the article is to investigate how the power relation between the Tornedalian minority and the Swedish state changed from the 1930s to the 1990s, and how the expression of ethnic and national identification changed as part of the 1 The North Calotte region was created in the late 1950s, as a specific northern dimension of the Northern Countries [Norden]. It comprised the counties of Norway, Sweden and Finland that were tangent to the Arctic Circle. political mobilisation of the minority. The method for investigating the changed power relations is to analyse the way Tornedalian claims on the state changed and the way new types of political organisation contributed to this. The use of history in the public is an important part of this. Expressions of ethnic and national identification in relation to political mobilisation will be investigated through the reading of some Tornedalian periodicals and journals during the period of investigation. Some comparison is done with the Kven movement in northern Norway. ; Recalling the Past, Silvermuseet

AbstractThe cultural charisma of the Sámi people has served to inscribe them in the nation myths of the Scandinavian states. This charisma was also built into the self‐image of the Nordic countries when they established as a political organisation in the 1950s. While this charisma was to some extent created by leaders of the majority population, its symbolic value has also been used by the Sámi movement as a tool for political mobilisation. The global resistance by indigenous people towards colonialism resulted in a shift of the Sámi people's strategy from national to global action, and in the redefinition from a 'nature people' within the nation‐state to an 'indigenous people' in a global legalistic discourse. At the same time, Sámi politicians strive to unite the different Sámi groups through a common homeland, Sápmi, which crosses the nation‐state borders. The political territory of Sápmi can culturally be regarded as an imagined nation in the same way as a nation‐state, even if it is scattered across four countries. The creation of a Sámi nation also faces the same kind of inter‐ethnic problems as the nation‐state.

This book examines the diverse use of Indigenous customary rights in modern landscapes from a multidisciplinary perspective. Divided into two parts, the first deals explicitly with Sámi customary rights in relation to nature conservation in the Nordic countries and Russia from a legal and historical perspective. The authors investigate how longstanding Sámi customary territorial rights have been reassessed in the context of new kinds of legislation regarding Indigenous people. They also look at the ideas behind the historical models of nature conservation. The second part deals with the ideas and implementation of new kinds of postcolonial models of nature conservation. The case of the Sámi is compared with other Indigenous people internationally with cases from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India. The work investigates how the governance of protected areas has been influenced by the principles of equality and positive discrimination, and how it has affected the possibilities of establishing adaptive co-management arrangements for specific areas. How the legal situation of Indigenous peoples has been recognised in an international context is also investigated. The volume provides a multidisciplinary analysis of how the customary livelihood of Indigenous people has adapted to modern industrialised landscapes and also how postcolonial approaches have contributed to global changes of Indigenous rights and nature conservation models.