Paper Presentation III:
Identities
Friday, April 9, 10.30–12.30

Hans Chr. Pedersen
Finnmark University College, Alta, Norway

In my presentation I will focus on the role of organized football in the revitalization process of Sámi culture in terms of Sámi identity and nation building in the period between the early 1980s and today. The Sámi sports Association (the SVL) was established in 1979 and emerged as one of several new Sámi organizations in the course of the 1970s and 80s and should be understood as an element in the heightened ethno-political awareness of Sámi society. All along, a core concern for Sámi sports has been to revitalize and modernize Sámi identity, and at the same time to function within Sámi nation building by improving the awareness of the Sámi as one nation with a common history, culture and traditions, divided by four separate states.

I will use football and the organizing of the Sámi Football Association (SSL) as an example of how sport functioned as an arena I developing a new and broadened Sámi identity. Entering the Sámi national football team is based on ethnicity rather than nationality or citizenship. In spite of this apparently segregationist notion of Sáminess, I would argue that football has actually contributed to reshaping and expanding the conception of Sámi identity in the last 25 years. When the Sámi national team played its first game against Åland in 1985 it consisted only of players from the core Sámi area, with Sámi as their first language, “Sámi” surnames and close ties to reindeer husbandry. In the 2006 Viva World Cup (organized by football federation NF-board) in Monaco, however, this had very obviously changed. The players had now been recruited from a larger geographical area, mainly from urban areas, with apparently tenuous connections to the previously established symbolic identity markers. This goes to show two things. Firstly, the conception of Sáminess has undergone changes between 1985 and 2006: the geographical area conceived of as Sámi had grown to include coastal and urban areas, which before would have been defined as Norwegian. Secondly, it shows that football contributed to this extension of Sáminess to new areas. You no longer needed to master the language, engage in reindeer husbandry or wear traditional clothes, to qualify as Sámi. I will explore how this broadening of Sámi identity came about and how Sámi football and Sámi society interacted in a period of heightened ethno-political awareness and debate in Sápmi.