Abstract
How has Sámi cultural heritage been incorporated into the national histories of Finland? How have the national and academic discourses constrained and enabled ways of writing about the Sámi in this genre? A complete change from a hierarchizing and at worst racializing perspective to a more matter-of-fact approach is detectable quite late on, from the 1980s onwards. The Sámi have remained on the periphery of Finnish historiography, but they have become integrated into the national history, even though they still serve to illustrate Finnish nation-building in this genre. The amount of updated archaeological and historical knowledge has increased, but the approach still under-communicates the political agency of the Sámi. The inherent methodological and history-political conservativism stunts the way the Sámi are dealt with so that the Sámi histories remain mostly uncommunicated.
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