The Delicate Work still undone in the Church of Sweden's Reconciliation Process

A group of Sami delegates stands outside the cathedral in Uppsala where the Church of Sweden issued its formal apology to the Sami people in November 2021. Photo: John Last

Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Arctic since time immemorial, establishing rich regional cultures and governance systems long before the introduction of modern borders. The Arctic Institute’s 2022 Colonialism Series explores the colonial histories of Arctic nations and the still-evolving relationships between settler governments and Arctic Indigenous peoples in a time of renewed Arctic exploration and development.

The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022

• The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022: Introduction
• Neo-Colonial Security Policies in the Arctic
• Brussels Looks North: The European Union’s Latest Arctic Policy and the Potential for ‘Green’ Colonialism
• Poverty, Well-Being and Climate Change in the Arctic: a Musical Perspective
• Colonialism and Reproductive Justice in Arctic Canada: The Neglected Historical and Contemporary Analysis of Genocidal Policies on Arctic Indigeneous Reproductive Rights
• The Delicate Work still undone in the Church of Sweden’s Reconciliation Process
• Selling Stolen Land: A Reexamination of the Purchase of Alaska and its Legacy of Colonialism
• The Old Colonialisms and the New Ones: The Arctic Resource Boom as a New Wave of Settler-Colonialism
• China, Circumpolar Indigenous People and the Colonial Past of the Arctic
• Language, Identity, and Statehood: A Brief Insight into the History of the Minoritization of the Komi People
• Russia’s Colonial Legacy in the Sakha Heartland
• How to Develop Inclusive, Sustainable Urban Spaces in the European Arctic and Beyond – Insights from Kiruna
• The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022: Conclusion

The Church of Sweden must reckon with the complex and varied history of Sámi belief if it is to make progress toward reconciliation.

Last November, Archbishop Antje Jackelén took a historic step on behalf of the Church of Sweden. Kneeling before a circle of Sámi — the Indigenous people of Arctic Europe — themselves surrounded by representatives from Sweden’s dioceses and Protestant denominations around the world, Jeckelen apologized for historic wrongs committed by her church against Sámi people.

The apology, aired live on the public broadcaster and attended by hundreds of delegates and dignitaries, was a significant milestone in the Church of Sweden’s still-young reconciliation process with the Sámi. The Sámi — whose traditional territory spans parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia — were subjected to programs of forced assimilation and conversion by various churches and colonial states over the centuries.¹⁾Laframboise L (2022) Brussels Looks North: The European Union’s Latest Arctic Policy and the Potential for ‘Green’ Colonialism. The Arctic Institute, 20 September, https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/brussels-looks-north-european-unions-latest-arctic-policy-potential-green-colonialism/. Accessed on 9 October 2022. In Sweden, this history has been documented at length by the White Paper Project, a scholarly anthology started in 2012 with a specific focus on the impact of 17th century religious trials and the impact of the 1913 Nomad School Act. For an introduction, see Lindmark D & Sundström O (2018) The Church of Sweden and the Sámi – a White Paper Project in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag. In Sweden, as elsewhere, Sámi languages were suppressed; cultural signifiers, like names, dress, and customs, were stigmatized and, later, fetishized in equal measure; Sámi sacred sites were destroyed; and Sámi graves were desecrated by priests and scientists alike in the search for a “proto-Aryan” race.²⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church, Mission and School in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag; Ildikó Tamás has also written about the stigmatization and subsequent fetishization of pre-Christian Sámi culture, see Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 28-42.

The interwoven and interdependent history of the national churches and colonial powers in Scandinavia means that these crimes were often perpetrated by church and state together. Indeed, historians have found drawing boundaries between these two actors difficult, if not at times impossible.³⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church, Mission and School in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag. But faced with a Swedish state that continues to lag behind its neighbours on reconciliation — while continuing to profit from controversial decisions on the use of Sámi lands⁴⁾Euronews (2021) Norwegian Wind Farms Violate Rights of Reindeer Herders, Says Court. Euronews, 11 October, https://www.euronews.com/2021/10/11/norwegian-wind-farms-violate-rights-of-sami-reindeer-herders-says-court. Accessed on 1 October 2022. Leiser M (2022) UN experts call on Sweden to halt mining project on Indigenous Sami Land. Eye on the Arctic, 11 February, https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/indigenous-peoples/2022/02/un-experts-call-sweden-halt-mining-project-indigenous-sami-land. Accessed on 1 October 2022. Deutsche Welle (2021) Battle to hunt in Sweden’s Arctic. DW Documentary, 31 March, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnfZ-z-Ib7A. Accessed on 1 October 2022. — the Church of Sweden decided early to embark on its own independent reconciliation process, beginning in the mid-1990s.⁵⁾Lindmark D & Sundström O (2018) The Church of Sweden and the Sámi – a White Paper Project in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag.

This independent church process has presented a unique opportunity to envision reconciliation in explicitly Christian terms, something that is sorely needed in Sweden. Taking the long view of Swedish church history reveals just how interwoven colonialism, Christianity and Sámi identity have become over the centuries. In Sweden, as elsewhere, many Indigenous people self-identify as Christian, in large part due to deliberate programs of conversion that played an essential role in colonization.⁶⁾Until 1996, newborns in Sweden were automatically enrolled as members of the Church of Sweden if one parent was a member. This is further complicated by the existence of subsects, like the Laestadians, which profess an authentic, Indigenous Sámi Christian tradition but are in many ways more conservative than their counterparts on topics of faith and reconciliation.⁷⁾Heith A (2018) Laestadius and Laestadianism in the contested field of cultural heritage: A study of contemporary Sámi and Tornedalian texts. Northern Studies Monographs 6; Valkonen S & Wallenius-Korkalo S (2015) Embodying religious control: an intersectional approach to Sámi women in Laestadianism. Culture and Religion 16(1).

The unique work facing churches, then, is to reconcile their own history as agents of Indigenous erasure with the authentic expressions of Indigenous Christian belief within their own membership that have existed, in Sweden’s case, for nearly a millennium.⁸⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church, Mission and School in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag.

Christian missions first appeared in Scandinavia in the 11th century. Though they were initially focused on the non-Indigenous population, Olle Sundström describes a period of more than 200 years, from the 17th to the 19th century, when Sámi participated regularly in Christian ceremonies but continued to practice their own religion.⁹⁾Sundström O (2016) Reconstructing Religious Identity among the Sami of Scandinavia: Christian Sami Contextual Theology in the Twenty-first Century. Senri Ethnological Studies 93: 213-215. Bjorn Norlin, in a chapter produced as part of the Church of Sweden’s investigation into its own history, describes the incredible syncretism that resulted from this period — from depictions of the Virgin Mary sewn into Sámi traditional dress to the development of joiks, sacred songs, directed to Mary and the Christian God.¹⁰⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church, Mission and School in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag.

Yet with the Reformation and the birth of the Church of Sweden, Christian hostility to Sámi culture increased dramatically, culminating in campaigns of suppression that saw dozens of sacred sites burned and the imprisonment and execution of Sámi noaidis, or shamans. The joik was banned, as was the noaidi drum, the essential “spiritual tools”, in Norlin’s language, of the Sámi faith. “By the turn of the nineteenth century,” Sundström writes, “Christianity was the dominant confession among the Sámi.” ¹¹⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church, Mission and School in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Förlag.

But if the expansionist period of the 17th and 18th century was defined by outright hostility to the Sámi religious worldview, this attitude began to shift as Christianity became more dominant in Sámi territory.¹²⁾Norlin B (2018) The Church and Sami Cultural Expressions” in The Sami and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds Forlag. In 1845, it would be challenged outright by a revival movement infused throughout by, in some profound ways, a celebration of the Sámi spiritual perspective.

In the winter of 1845, Lars Levi Laestaedius, a Lutheran minister and child of a Sámi mother, encountered a young Sámi woman named Milla Clementsdotter who profoundly altered his faith. In the wake of this encounter, Laestadius became one of the century’s many penitential revivalists. Railing against the vice of alcoholism and drawing on Sámi cultural and religious motifs, Laestadius worked to reconcile an alien Christian message with the Sámi worldview.¹³⁾Sundström O (2016) Reconstructing Religious Identity among the Sami of Scandinavia: Christian Sami Contextual Theology in the Twenty-first Century. Senri Ethnological Studies 93: 213-215; see also Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 28-42.

Laestadius set himself against the Church establishment, romanticizing what he saw as the natural puritanism of pre-capitalist Sámi life.¹⁴⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 28-42. He incorporated Sámi stories, myths, and even sacred figures in his sermons, elevating the role of women, like the Virgin Mary and Clementsdotter (who he called Maria), in contrast to the dominant Protestant tendency to marginalize them. To some, his revivals, which inspired ecstatic trances called lihkahusat, even mirrored pre-Christian Sámi forms of worship, drawing accusations of impropriety from the Church.¹⁵⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 28-42; Heith A (2018) Laestadius and Laestadianism in the contested field of cultural heritage: A study of contemporary Sámi and Tornedalian texts. Northern Studies Monographs 6; Valkonen S & Wallenius-Korkalo S (2015) Embodying religious control: an intersectional approach to Sámi women in Laestadianism. Culture and Religion 16(1).

Since the birth of Laestadianism, as his movement is known, its legacy and significance has been highly contested. Pivotal to its reception was an 1852 incident in Kautokeino, in what is today Norway, where a group of Laestadian Sámi attacked Norwegian state and church officials in an apparent uprising against colonial oppression.¹⁶⁾Heith A (2018) Laestadius and Laestadianism in the contested field of cultural heritage: A study of contemporary Sámi and Tornedalian texts. Northern Studies Monographs 6. Yet even the significance of this event is contested. Laestadius disavowed it in his own lifetime;¹⁷⁾Heith A (2018) Laestadius and Laestadianism in the contested field of cultural heritage: A study of contemporary Sámi and Tornedalian texts. Northern Studies Monographs 6. and revealingly, contemporary officials attempted to desacralize the uprising, treating it as a medical condition or an instance of mass hysteria they called “Sámi madness.”¹⁸⁾Kristiansen RE (2020) Depictions of Laestadianism 1850–1950. Approaching Religion 10(1).

Indeed, while some have argued that Laestadianism offered a form of “cultural defence” for Sámi during periods of aggressive assimilation,¹⁹⁾Sjogren D (2018) The Church and Sámi People Outside the Church of Sweden” in The Sámi and the Church of Sweden: Results from a White Paper Project. Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag. or else represents a “specifically Sámi form of belief,”²⁰⁾These views, and their opponents, are summarized in Minde H (1998) Constructing ‘Laestadianism’: A case for Sami survival?. Acta Borealia 15(1): 5-25. Laestadius himself may have rejected such an idea. He was notorious for preaching against the colorful nature of traditional Sámi dress, and reproached scarf-wearing women as “silk whores.”²¹⁾Valkonen S & Wallenius-Korkalo S (2015) Embodying religious control: an intersectional approach to Sámi women in Laestadianism. Culture and Religion 16(1): 8; Minde H (1998) Constructing ‘Laestadianism’: A case for Sami survival?. Acta Borealia 15(1): 17; Laestadius was also engaged in the desecration of Sámi graves and the sale of their remains; see Ojala C-G (2016) Svenska kyrkan och samiska mänskliga kvarlevor in De historiska relationerna mellan Svenska kyrkan och samerna. Skellefteå: Artos & Norma bokförlag.

Today, research into the movement’s legacy in Sweden is still limited,²²⁾Andreassen B-O, Kristiansen R E & Larsen, R I (2020) Approaching Laestadianism. Approaching Religion 10(1): 1-3. though the intervening century has seen it split and take on a decidedly more conservative posture. Some branches continue to be hostile to joiking and other Sámi cultural traditions, and have rejected Laestadius’ elevation of women in favour of a more patriarchal attitude.²³⁾See Valkonen & Wallenius-Korkalo for one of few studies on Firstborn Laestadianism to include the voices of current and former community members. Yet many Sámi Laestadians do not feel any less Sámi for their faith, and indeed reject the “homogenizing” tendency that would see “everything that arrived with the conquerors, including Christianity, [as] necessarily bad.”²⁴⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 39.

The story of Sámi Laestadianism shows how complex and delicate the work of reconciliation within the Church of Sweden will be. The Church must engage not only on the level of acknowledging historical and political wrongs; it must engage with how it has profoundly transformed Sámi spirituality, in a way that both respects and articulates the authentic expressions of Sámi Christian belief that exist today.

But so far, it would appear the Swedish church has, ironically, been reluctant to engage deeply with questions of theology, belief, and identity. In a comparison of the Norwegian and Swedish reconciliation processes authored before the Church of Sweden’s public apology in Uppsala, Sámi theologian Helga West remarks that the church of Sweden has generally employed secularized, communitarian language when speaking of reconciliation, avoiding terms like “sin” and “guilt” that would embed the process in a Christian worldview.²⁵⁾West H (2020) Renegotiating Relations, Structuring Justice: Institutional Reconciliation with the Saami in the 1990–2020 — Reconciliation Processes of the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway. Religions 11(7).

This posture is evident even in the decisions of the most recent general synod, which ran concurrently to the apology service. While supporting a motion to ensure its vast forest holdings in Sámi territory are managed in a “spiritually sustainable” way,²⁶⁾Svenska kyskan (2021) Sustainability in the Church of Sweden’s forestry. The stewardship committee’s report, p. 48. the church council rejected motions that would have more profoundly reconsidered the “intrinsic value” of the forest as proof of God’s loving creation, a viewpoint more consistent with traditional Sámi religion.²⁷⁾Svenska kyskan (2021) Sustainability in the Church of Sweden’s forestry. The stewardship committee’s report, p. 89. Another motion that would have seen the church reckon with the meaning of its designation as a “national church” — an opportunity to reflect on its relationship to nationhood and identity — was similarly rejected.²⁸⁾Svenska kyskan (2021) Sustainability in the Church of Sweden’s forestry. The stewardship committee’s report, p. 160.

Meaningful engagement with these issues may seem secondary to the acknowledgement of historical wrongs, but they are essential to reconciliation. In her essay, West uses the phrase “spiritual destruction” to describe the damage caused by the banning of joiking and the drum, by the oppression of language and the dislocation from the land, leaving some Sámi with fewer of the tools necessary to attain a spiritual reconciliation with the church.²⁹⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 39. When the tools of religious expression and communication with God are limited to those dictated by a colonial church, what spiritual reconciliation can even be possible?

Fortunately, within the Sámi community, the work of restoring and reimagining this toolkit has already long been underway. Since Johan Märak first joiked in a cathedral in 1993, the practice has become increasingly destigmatized and re-sacralized.³⁰⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 38. Sámi catechisms and confirmation courses, authored in the past two decades, reframe the Christian worldview, as Laestadius once did, through a Sámi lens.³¹⁾Sundström O (2016) Reconstructing Religious Identity among the Sami of Scandinavia: Christian Sami Contextual Theology in the Twenty-first Century. Senri Ethnological Studies 93: 218; see also Brydsten J R (2020) Contextualising religious education – Different understandings of teaching in Sami confirmation courses. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76(1): a5827 for a comparative approach to Sami Christian education. And Sámi religious concepts and symbols, like the sun, breath, creator god and female deities, are increasingly employed in the interpretation of the Gospels and recontextualized in the built environment of Christian churches.³²⁾Tamás I (2018) Revitalization of the stigmatized roots. How Sami yoik and shamanistic symbols appear in Christian discourses from the early modern age. Ežegodnik finno-ugorskih issledovanij / Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies 12: 37-38.

The objection to these reformed practices is often strongest in those areas where Laestadians are most plentiful, where Sámi identity and conservative Christianity are not seen in opposition.³³⁾Sundström O (2016) Reconstructing Religious Identity among the Sami of Scandinavia: Christian Sami Contextual Theology in the Twenty-first Century. Senri Ethnological Studies 93: 217. As is often the way with reconciliation, no simple solution will present itself to Sweden’s bishops. This is the delicate work that lies ahead of the church — a reconciliation that will sustain and reflect, not overpower or erase, the richness and variety of Sámi belief.

John Last is a Canadian journalist and researcher in the history of religion currently based in Padova, Italy.