From History to Herstory of the Sámi World: Proposing a feminist approach to the settlement history of Finnish Lapland

This chapter proposes a feminist approach to examining the settlement history of Finnish Lapland. Sámi women have been overlooked in historical examination, and, at the same time, they have been marginalized in the context of land and water rights. The main sources used in practically all previous studies on land rights have been written archival data regarding property ownership and historical documents related to taxation and the establishment of properties. Addressing the matter of Sámi land and water rights from such a perspective is problematic in many ways. While Sámi-related sources reflect the colonial and patriarchal structures of states, they do not address the situation in individual Sámi families or communities very accurately. In the eyes of the church and state, only men were considered active agents eligible to produce documents in the community, and only men were usually mentioned as taxpayers in sources related to taxation. This chapter suggests that in order to arrive at a more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon, it is necessary to research the relationship between the Sámi and the lands more closely from different perspectives and using different sources.