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Paper short abstract:

The paper studies toponymic notions of Sámi past(s) in the texts of Finnish geodesist and ethnographer Karl Nickul. In Nickul’s correspondence with the Sámi and an international network of scholars, Sámi notions of the past traveled from Sámi communities to the international scholarly sphere.

Paper long abstract:

Franz Boas, the famous German-American anthropologist, saw in native place names “the mutual influence of the earth and its inhabitants upon each other.” Boas considered the study of indigenous place names as one of the best ways to study their mental and social life, including notions of past and present.

In a Nordic-Sámi context, the Finnish geodesist and self-learned ethnographer Karl Nickul (1900–1980) studied the indigenous nomenclature among the Skolt Sámi in northeastern Finland/northwestern USSR. Nickul considered the Sámi to possess the “moral right” to name their own region, and to keep these names in cartographic representations: “With the sensitive intuition of a people of nature they identify with the landscape that they know through and through. They belong to it [the landscape]”. According to Nickul, studying and documenting Sámi place names was a gateway to the mental imagery of the Sámi. They did not only reflect the landscape “as it was”, but also ancient events, beliefs and livelihoods. In Nickul’s correspondence with Skolt Sámi individuals on the on the one hand, and an international network of scholars on the other, Skolt Sámi notions of the past traveled from Sámi communities to the international scholarly sphere.

The paper focuses especially on the following questions:

How did Nickul frame Sámi past(s) in relation to “Western” history?

How did Sámi place names form Nickul’s thinking on history?

In what ways did Sámi notions of the past travel through Nickul’s international correspondence to the international arena of anthropology and ethnography?