Accidentally moved this post to the trash, so posting it again 😊

The following is an exerpt from Mathilde Magga’s 38 page text The places we Exist. on the struggles of having one ethnicity and a different nationality (being Sámi in Norway). Sámis do have a cultural region called Sápmi/Saepmie, but it has been devided over four countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (Kola peninsula).

““Honey, can you please put on your bunad first so I can take a photo? Then we can change into your gákti?” Bunad is traditional Norwegian clothing, and gákti is Sami. If an outsider saw a photo of the two, they might think they were variations of the same traditional clothing. For the ones owning the clothing, it was very different. (…)

I remember that I obediently put on one piece of clothing then the other. I remember that I smiled for one photo, and then for the other. One smile for each side of the family, for each side of me.

A city of 75, 000 inhabitants on a tiny island in between rows of beautiful snow-covered mountains in Northern Norway. A city split in two. The official name was Tromsø, but it had been named Romsa centuries ago. As a tourist visiting, you would probably not notice the split between the people living there, as the tourism industry invested time in portraying the Indigenous population as loved. What a joke. The Sami population was never loved.

Mattaráhku also told her that Nieiddažan´s dad had stopped speaking the language after the second war and that he had changed his name to try to erase the man he used to be. She told her that this was why he was hurting so bad, because he had killed the most important part of himself.

I once read the word postmemory while doing research for an assignment for my Holocaust Literature class during my first semester in college. It was a theory created by Marianne Hirsch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She explained how parents could pass on their own trauma to their children, which would leave children traumatized by events they had never experienced:

Children of those directly affected by collective trauma inherit a horrific, unknown and unknowable past that their parents were not meant to survive.””

Worth a read ❤ Thank you, Mathilde for writing this.