On June 1st, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Norwegianisation policy and injustice against the Sami people, Kven people, and Forest Finns presented its report to the Norwegian Parliament. Based on more than 100 formal and informal meetings with relevant parties, as well as the collection of more than 760 personal testimonies, the report concluded that Norwegiansation is an ongoing process, and called for a broad civic mobilization against the undermining of Sámi, Kven and Forest Finn culture and language. At the same time, the conduct of Truth and Reconciliation processes raises challenging issues about what Mark Rifkin has called “indigenous temporal sovereignty;” fraught, as it is, with the needs of colonizing states to make their guilt tractable, compensable, and ultimately, relegate it to the past.
In this keynote panel, Rifkin and Sámi scholar and duojár Liisa-Rávná Finbog will have a conversation about the implications of national truth and reconciliation efforts with regard to Indigenous peoples, with some attention to how those issues may be at play in the Norwegian context. What next for the decolonization of Norwegian statecraft in its relations with historically oppressed minorities? Whose truth and whose reconciliation was promoted by the process in Norway? Is the process an attempt to break with the past, or a new way of establishing continuities? What is the relationship between memory-work and present or future politics? Is Norwegianisation a new grand narrative, only with a different moral quality? And how has the process of the commission’s work engaged with indigenous voices and communities?
Mark Rifkin is a professor of Indigenous studies, queer studies, and U.S. literature at UNC Greensboro, primarily researching Native American literary and political writing and their encounters with colonial legal and administrative regimes. Rifkin has written a series of books elaborating concepts of indigeneity as a source of profoundly decolonizing challenges, including Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017), Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (2019), and Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form (2021).
Liisa-Rávna Finbog is an Indigenous scholar and duojár at Tampere University. A long-time practitioner of the Sámi craft and storytelling practice of duodji, her PhD in museology broke new grounds elaborating duodji as a Sámi system of knowledge. In addition to her scholarship and activism, Finbog is a curator and part of the team behind The Sámi Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.