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Paper short abstract

Sámi feminists and women artists are working to dismantle colonial structures of power by reimagining a world grounded in Indigenous Sámi practices that include the role of gender, co-productive humans/non-human relations in the remains of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.

Paper long abstract

This paper is grounded in the belief that the violence of the state -- the violence of colonialism, the violence of extractive resource industries, and violence against women -- is fundamentally connected to the logic of the patriarchal imperatives that have led us to the impending catastrophe of the “Anthropocene.”

Within Indigenous Studies, Environmental Humanities, and (Eco-)Feminism, this has led to the expansion of knowledge practices that acknowledge complex, extensive, and non-androcentric entanglements. Such different ways of knowing seek to dissolve the binary logic of nature/culture; human/non-human; secular/non-secular; and nature/supernature (cosmological) that typifies the classical humanist paradigm and replace it with relational, interconnected, and responsible ways of knowing, being, and doing beyond colonial world-making practices.

Sámi feminists have taken their activism to the public sphere in the realms of art, literature, and performance, drawing no artificial boundaries between their practice and their ideological activism, to counter what Liisa-Ravna Finbog (2023) has called "epistemicide" in the wake of settler colonialism and the expansion of extractive resources. Sámi female artists are moving away from the male-centered sensibility that typified earlier Sámi post-colonial critiques and are returning to a female-centered sensibility and an emphasis on the “mothers” of Sámi tradition, and a Sámi epistemology of aesthetics and muitalusat [stories] centered within a system of relations that are expressed as bonds of kinship. This indigenous feminist epistemology permeates contemporary art and reflects what Western thought would term a post-humanist sensibility, focusing on female solidarity and empowerment, and an alternative, female-centric perspective.