Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the agency of Sámi dwellings. By engaging with historical and contemporary examples, it explores how these dwellings are negotiated by colonial power structures while also embodying Sámi craftsmanship, knowledge, cosmology, and resilience, offering alternative narratives rooted in Sámi perspectives.

Paper Abstract:

The Sámi dwellings and especially the conical tent, the lávvu, has come to be an established symbol for an entire Sámi culture. Outside of the practices that makes Sámi landscapes home, Sámi dwellings are engaged commercially, in visual arts, and in political arenas. This paper explores the agency of Sámi dwellings, both from inside and outside perspectives, with reference to both historical and contemporary examples.

Such dwellings are constantly reproduced in ways that align with colonial politics and complex power structures: In acts of cultural appropriation, in cultural representations of Sáminess, or embedded in government interventions into Sámi landscape practices.

Unwriting the lávvo as ‘an object of Sámi heritage’, how can such Sámi dwellings otherwise be engaged and described from an inside perspective? The tangible materiality of Sámi dwellings are extensions of Sámi people, they materialise craftsmanship and embodied knowledge. They are testament to lifestyles, they are archives of language and epistemology, they embody cosmology, and Sámi resilience. Sámi dwellings can reshape, challenge or indigenise, in negotiations over landscape, meaning, use and understanding.

This paper exemplifies how the meaning of Sámi dwellings extend beyond the material cultural heritage. Sámi dwellings are epistemological infrastructures, they generate relationships between peoples and land. Unwriting here, originates in both a Sámi academic and artistic standpoint, in conversation with examples from both inside and outside cultural practices.