Introduction

Abstract

In the first chapter we set the scene for the books overarching question: How did early modern indigenous Sami inhabitants in interior northwest Fennoscandia build institutions for governance of natural resources? We explain why we consider self-governance and colonialism as two parallel processes that are not mutually exclusive and how the book contributes to the discussion about the nature of indigenous peoples’ rights to land and water by focusing on early modern strategies for natural resource use. This can contribute to the discussion about decolonization of present-day practices and policies. We explain why an interdisciplinary approach is required that not only focuses on social organization but also analyzes how societies and ecological settings were interwoven.

How did early modern indigenous Sami inhabitants in interior northwest Fennoscandia¹ build institutions for governance of natural resources? We answer this question by exploring how they made decisions regarding natural resource management, mainly with regard to wild game, fish, and grazing land. Furthermore, we illuminate how Sami users, in a changing economy, altered the long-term rules for use of land and water in a self-governance context. Our focus is set on the “rules on the ground,” that is, how they went about to establish and change property rights on a local level, and how they solved social dilemmas associated with natural resource use.²

We focus on Sami users and analyze their practices with regard to natural resource use. Throughout history, human livelihoods and use of natural resources have been tightly interlinked with their natural surroundings, especially for indigenous peoples. In the circumpolar north, these settings were often unpredictable and climatically extreme. People also lived on land that partially consisted of low-yielding alpine tundra, so to understand the development of governance rules and changes in property rights one has to consider factors to do with both ecology and society. Pulling together the wide range of perspectives requires an interdisciplinary approach that not only focuses on social organization but also analyzes how societies and ecological settings were interwoven. Our analyses, therefore, include how ecological factors in mountains and boreal forest impacted decision-making and organization of land use for Sami users in their respective environments. Natural conditions resulted in different subsistence strategies that came to impact the inhabitants’ livelihoods and set them on different economic trajectories, depending on their access to mountains and/or boreal forest.

Governance of common-pool resources (CPRs) is a major and recurring theme in the book. CPRs are resources from which it is hard to exclude users, and where the harvest is subtractable. This means that when a person harvests a resource, someone else cannot, which leads to the risk of overuse. To avoid depletion of CPRs, and to secure people’s livelihoods in the long term, users need to communicate, negotiate, and create detailed rules around their common use of natural resources. In this book, we show just how skilled early modern Sami users in interior northwest Fennoscandia were in these kinds of negotiations. We suggest that the most important contribution of the book is that it gives a partially new portrayal of how proficiently and systematically indigenous inhabitants organized and governed natural assets, and how capable they were in building highly functioning institutions for governance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sami users still had a major influence over the governance of fishing waters, hunting grounds, and grazing lands in this part of Fennoscandia. Later, as the colonial project increased in strength and the state gained more or less complete control over lands and natural resources, almost all of this self-determination vanished. By enhancing the knowledge about early modern Sami land use, and by demonstrating how Sami users organized their livelihoods prior to colonialism or at least in its early phase, the book can also contribute to the discussion about decolonization of present-day practices and policies.

One particularly intriguing question when it comes to property rights is why interior northwest Fennoscandia developed in an opposite direction compared to most other parts of western Europe with regard to use of common lands. In the rest of Europe, more exclusive user rights were established in the early modern period and common property dissolved.³ But in interior northwest Fennoscandia, some Sami inhabitants obtained lawful user rights at the end of the nineteenth century for large common-use areas for reindeer grazing, fishing, and hunting. By then, an old system with privately assigned lands had definitively been abolished.⁴ The land was officially owned by the state. One way to decipher this development is to emphasize the early modern period as a transformative phase for property rights as a response to fundamental changes in the local Sami economy. Around this time, livelihoods changed for many Sami households, as they went from an economy based on fishing and hunting to an economy in which large-scale reindeer herding or reindeer pastoralism became the main income source. We show both how the use of different natural assets required different property rights and how complex the rules surrounding this use were.

At the same time, it is important to separate the progress of indigenous institutions and property rights from procedures where the Swedish government undeniably recognized most lands in northern Sweden as state property. The first of these processes was a bottom-up development where Sami users were involved in building institutions that gave them both rights and duties. The latter was a top-down process, where the state used its supremacy to unilaterally claim all lands and all resources in the interior of north Fennoscandia as state property without involving the indigenous population. However, for a long time, the state’s claims did not keep Sami from continuing to create institutions for hunting, fishing, and reindeer grazing. Nevertheless, beginning around 1780, the government started to enforce their measures more vehemently and thereafter Sami users’ influence and self-governance eroded rapidly. Two particularly prodigious events led to an almost complete dismissal of Sami self-governance. First, the local court, where well-trusted Sami men had been in the majority as lay-judges with a conclusive influence over rulings, was abolished as an arena for conflict resolution in land-use matters. From then on, these conflicts were to be solved by state servants in a government agency, Länsstyrelsen (the County Administrative Board), where Sami had no representation at all.⁵ Second, the number of settlers from other parts of Fennoscandia started to increase from rather low numbers in the first half of the eighteenth century to a steadier inflow at the end of the century. It resulted in markedly increased competition over resources, and thus a profoundly negative impact on Sami self-governance.

These events made it logical for us to stop our investigation around 1780. An additional argument would be that large-scale reindeer herding or reindeer pastoralism peaked in our focal study area, Lule lappmark, around that time. In the years to come, hardships in the form of tough grazing conditions and recurring famines would strike the Sami population there. So, parallel with the changes in conflict resolution and influx of settlers, the Sami population started to decrease.⁶ Our aim was to explore how Sami economy developed and expanded prior to this declination phase. Therefore, we have concentrated our analyses to a period between 1550 and 1780, when significant changes took place in many households’ economies that had great implications for land use, and when most local users still crafted their own institutions for governance. In the source materials, many different concepts have been used to describe Sami. For consistency, we have chosen to call them users in most cases, in the sense that they were users of resources and rights, wanting to avoid connotations that terms like owner and tenant might have for present-day readers.

Even if many of the rules were made in a self-governance context, all decisions were of course also impacted by surrounding actors and societies. Overall, in northern Fennoscandia, the early modern period inferred increased interest from governments of nearby nation-states. We consider self-governance and colonialism as two parallel processes that are not mutually exclusive. By focusing on self-governance, early modern Sami were engaged, deliberate, and diligent agents in their creation of viable lives within certain given frames, such as natural conditions and institutional boundaries. Their lives were shaped through, among other things, ongoing relations and negotiations with, for example, other Sami users, non-Sami neighbors, external tradesmen, priests, judges, bailiffs, and other government officials. Recognizing Sami self-determination does not mean they were accountable for the negative consequences they suffered due to different state measures.

In light of the colonial ambitions of most nation-states at this time, a self-governance perspective could strike the reader as naive, or as us being neglectful of prevailing power hierarchies. We acknowledge that already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were power asymmetries between groups, especially between indigenous inhabitants and servants of the church and the state. Inhabitants, for example, had little choice but to officially subjugate to Christian Lutheran religion, and to submit to the state’s judiciary and fiscal systems. They were also obliged to do involuntary chores, such as transports for church and state. Further, they had to share their lands with a growing number of settlers. Still, we argue that in the early stage of colonialism, state interventions were rather limited with regard to natural resource use, such as fishing, hunting, and reindeer grazing. The state simply lacked adequate information to be able to formulate directives that could control and tax indigenous land use in any detail. Thus, at that time, the state could not gain full control over the land and its Sami inhabitants, although it had started to lay the groundwork. In the early modern period, the state had merely started to use the northern realms for different purposes, and they had begun to design ambitious plans on how to control the land, but in many regards the implementation was still in its infancy.

Up to the 1980s, anthropology dwelled on societies that were radically different, or “other,” from the anthropologist’s own. From the 1990s onward, the focus on the “other” was replaced by a focus on the suffering subject.⁷ Sami historiography follows a similar pattern. An ethnographic perspective where a distinction was made between people with history and people without history has been replaced with a quest to write Sami history .⁸ In this pursuit, a major thread has been to rewrite history and to show how Sami have been deprived of rights and land. Joel Robbins points to another way forward in anthropology, focusing on people that strive to create the good in their lives.⁹ In line with this notion, we argue that studies of how early modern indigenous people created their own institutions for governance can be part of a history of the good, and be used in present-day discussions about indigenous governance. The Sami’s right to use land for hunting, fishing, and reindeer grazing is a highly contentious political question in present-day Sweden. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the dearth of political agreement has resulted in several lengthy court proceedings between Sami representatives and both private landowners and the state.¹⁰ This book contributes to the discussion about the nature of indigenous peoples’ rights to land and water by focusing on early modern strategies for natural resource use. A deeper understanding of historic land use and how rights to land were organized in the past hopefully can contribute to more just and robust policies in the future. Acknowledgment of indigenous users’ current rights is also a prerequisite before a country can ratify the ILO Convention 169 of 1989, which is the most important operative international law guaranteeing the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples.¹¹ Although Sweden has yet to sign the international agreement, its articles have recently been used by the Supreme Court of Sweden to rule in favor of Sami’s rights claims against the state.¹²

In this book, we focus on one particular region in interior northern Sweden that historically was called Lule lappmark. In present-day contexts, the concept is rarely used and it has been replaced by the more modern equivalent Lulesamiskt område (the Lule Sami region). The latter however encompasses a larger area, including parts of northern Norway, where Sami inhabitants traditionally spoke Lule Sami language and shared cultural traits such as attires and customs. Since the historical and the modern concepts do not overlap, we have chosen to use the historical term that aligns better with our sources, albeit acknowledging that the term lapp is currently considered derogatory and offensive. We will go into great detail about how fishing, hunting, and reindeer herding was practiced in Lule lappmark, but also show the complexity in the users’ subsistence with regard to other income sources. To understand more about Sami livelihood, one has to consider the diversity of the household economy.

An important result of the book is that it shows how early modern Sami in Lule lappmark depended on many more activities than reindeer herding. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sami and reindeer herder often have been equated, leaving out many other aspects of Sami identity. This view has moreover been enforced by the state legislature, including in the Reindeer Grazing Act of 1928, where the Swedish government finally stated that only reindeer herders were Sami.¹³ Thereafter, one activity came to define a people’s ethnicity in a way that does not correspond to either the historical narrative or the lived experiences of people outside reindeer herding who continued to identify as Sami. It also had consequences with regard to property rights, since only reindeer herders could obtain common user rights to grazing, fishing, and hunting. To this day, the questions of who is a Sami and who has rights to land and water cause a lot of grievances within Sami society and politics. In much research about Sami land use in the twentieth century, reindeer herding has consequently been a focus, and the equation of Sami and reindeer herder has impacted the general characterization of Sami livelihood.¹⁴ For example, statements like Sami “social life revolves around the reindeer” have reinforced the equation.¹⁵ It is certainly valid for some Sami, but not for all, just as it was not valid for all Sami in the early modern era. We join a recent trend in Sami history writing by offering a wider analysis that includes greater emphasis on the diversity in Sami cultural history, both regionally and temporally .¹⁶

Large-scale reindeer herding, or reindeer pastoralism, developed earlier in interior northwest Fennoscandia, including Lule lappmark, than it did in other areas inhabited by Sami in Fennoscandia.¹⁷ Hence, our analyses of governing processes and how users negotiated and decided property rights could contribute to the understanding of these changes in other parts of Fennoscandia where they took place later. The results in the book could also be useful for understanding the development of indigenous land use elsewhere. In the early modern period, many indigenous peoples in the world had to encounter forceful European states that wanted to take control of their lands and natural assets and often turn them into good Christians. Numerous indigenous peoples subjected to these invasions had livelihoods that in many ways resembled those of Sami: an existence based on hunting/trapping, fishing, or animal husbandry. Sweden has many unique historical sources, including materials that reveal lots of detailed insights into early modern Sami land use. This circumstance enables Sami history writing in a fashion that typically is much more difficult to accomplish for other indigenous peoples around the world, and it makes the contribution of this book even more valuable in this regard. The sources make it possible to study indigenous inhabitants’ governance in detail. This is especially true for the period between 1650 and 1780. Although comparisons between indigenous land uses are hazardous due to differences in ecological settings and societal structures, we hope to contribute with useful knowledge in a global indigenous context.

Many natural resources discussed in the book are under much pressure today, where indigenous and local users are being more and more marginalized. How resources, such as freshwater for fishing and boreal forest and mountains for hunting and grazing in Sweden, are being managed today is also a very important global issue. The institutions that were used to govern these resources in the past determined the sustainability of the resources and hence survival for inhabitants. Mountains and boreal forests are cultural landscapes that have been shaped by indigenous governing institutions. The current biodiversity crisis is a result of appropriation, colonization, and intensified use of resources in the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Empowering the environmental stewardship of indigenous peoples will be fundamental for conserving future biodiversity around the world.¹⁸ Therefore, increased consideration of early modern Sami land use is critical in current deliberations about the management of resources that impact future biodiversity in interior northwest Fennoscandia.

The book is organized in three parts and nine chapters. Part I starts with this chapter, where we have given the background of our research and the geographic area we concentrated in. Chapter 2 examines the links between long-term changes in social-ecological systems and the development of property rights by introducing the terms self-governance, common-pool resources, and property rights in a Sami context. We also discuss the theoretical framework that has guided us through the writing of this book. In Chapter 3, we outline the study area and sources used. We discuss our two main sources: historical accounts and court rulings. We also introduce our interpretations of some important concepts necessary to understand the development of natural resource use and governance. In Chapter 4, some important external factors that impacted indigenous users in our study area will be introduced. These are trade, taxation, and population size, all necessary to understand the development of the inhabitants’ natural resource management. Part II is mostly empirical and comprises four chapters: Chapter 5 deals with fishing, Chapter 6 deals with hunting, Chapter 7 deals with reindeer pastoralism, and Chapter 8 deals with other income sources that inhabitants could have. The approach in all chapters is interdisciplinary and includes natural conditions as well as societal factors. In Part III, Chapter 9, we conclude the results by discussing some of the main topics of the book, including property-rights systems, equity and social justice, and how external factors impacted the development of early modern Sami economy.