« Settler dishumanitarianism: Ron J. Smith, ‘A failure of humanitarianism: the West, Settler Colonialism, and the Manufactured crisis in Gaza’, Third World Quarterly, 2025
Growing settlers thinking about settler colonialism: Robert Petrone, ‘”I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help”: An examination of how Firekeeper’s Daughter educates about settler colonialism’, Bank Street Occasional Paper Series, 54, 2025, pp. 73-85 »

Settlers out of time and out of place: Linda Andersson Burnett, ‘The “Savage” Within: The Sámi People and the Archaeology of Whiteness’, Isis, 116, 4, 2025, pp. 766-777

21Nov25

Abstract: In this article, I will examine how the Swedish zoologist and archaeologist Sven Nilsson (1787–1883) constructed what I refer to here as the archaeology of whiteness. Whiteness denotes here a racialized and colonial epistemic venture that positioned Europeans at an “evolutionary advantage” over Indigenous and colonized peoples. Specifically, I will analyze how Nilsson’s writing denied the Sámi people, Indigenous to Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, any sense of temporal “coevalness” with Europeans and how they were marked as racially and temporally different from other European inhabitants. I will conclude by addressing the colonial and political implications of this denial of Sámi historical motion, particularly in the context of how narratives of Sámi “savagery” and their supposed extinction were entangled with the increased extraction of natural resources from Sámi territories in Sweden and settler colonialism.


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