Engineering indigenous identity: the construction of an authentic Sámi

ABSTRACT This article wishes to contribute to the study of indigenous identity by focusing on the role of the modern industrial state of the nineteenth century as a powerful and enduring agent that ‘makes, owns, and uses’ indigenous identity through the application of targeted artificial ascriptions. These ascriptions are the result of processes of legal reclassification and mechanisms of legal othering and legal authentication, which remaps indigenous belonging and sense of self. To this end, the article steps away from the typologies of indigenous identity as being exclusively a product of ancestral ties, territoriality, group belonging, and self-identification – and thus indigenous agency. The essay problematizes these conceptualizations and looks at the indigenous Sámi people of Sweden as an illustration. A number of key legislations and documents are used to expose how the state in Sweden reconstructed the local indigenous population into a de jure bona fide, or authentic, Sámi. These legal reclassifications progressively transformed the Sámi people's customary rights to fit the state's narrative within a discourse of nineteenth century modern industrial state consolidation, resulting in the control, reduction, legal dissimilation and assimilation of the Sámi into the greater society and state project.