« Slavery in the settler colony: Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon (eds), Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand, Manchester University Press, 2026

It wasn’t me! (the stories the settlers tell): Sami Lakomäki, ‘Imagining a Birkarl conquest: mediated violence and the cultural construction of colonialism in Sápmi’, Acta Borealia, 2026

07Apr26

Abstract: At the turn of the seventeenth century Swedish Crown officials popularized a violent story describing how men called Birkarlar had long ago conquered the Sámi people and their homeland, Sápmi. Since then, the story has enjoyed widespread popularity in both Sweden and Finland, and it has been retold for a variety of political, academic, and artistic purposes by diverse Swedish, Finnish, and Sámi narrators. While the Birkarl conquest is today considered a fictional invention, the stories depicting it open an important window into a very real historical process: the construction – and deconstruction – of colonial power and ideologies in Sápmi. Drawing from the growing scholarship on the role of mediated violence in colonialism, this article scrutinizes how stories about a violent Birkarl conquest have participated in Swedish and Finnish colonialism in Sápmi from 1600 to the present. It argues that the stories have engaged with three important processes in Sápmi’s colonial history: colonial state-building, efforts to define the place of the Sámi within the colonial state, and debates over the morality and persistence of colonial rule in Sápmi. Moreover, the stories reveal important connections between Swedish and Finnish colonial imagination and broader currents in European colonial ideologies.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed