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Sámi survivance: Homemaking as decolonization of everyday life

Homes are a fundamental part of our lives, yet often curiously overlooked in social sciences. In this presentation, I will discuss how Sámi homemaking can be seen as a part of the decolonization process, where homemaking includes political, practical, material, and affective practices. The home represents the trivialities of everyday life, about creating a space that provides shelter, comfort, and a strong sense of being oneself, as a process that traverses, time, place and social status. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) remind us, decolonization is not a metaphor, it is a concept that intrinsically deals with the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. In the INDHOME project, we explore through an interdisciplinary research design how Indigenous homemaking can be seen as a form of survivance in the past and present, as a reaction to assimilation policies and often well-meaning welfare and housing policies that continued to tie Indigenous people to the states’ colonizing structures. The survivance (Vizenor 1999) concept involves more than just survival. It is a way of nourishing Indigenous ways of knowing, including the complexity, contradictions, and self-determination of Indigenous lives.

Astri Dankertsen is a Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Nord University. Her research is mostly qualitative and concerned with Sami and Indigenous issues, such as urban indigeneity, identity, health, (de)colonial processes and cultural loss. She is inspired by postcolonial, indigenous and feminist theories.