– Ellen-Astri Lundby tracks a vital multi-year court case in which two indigenous communities were pitted against each other, each fighting for its rights
In the 1930s, Sweden forced the Northern Sámi to migrate from the north of the newly independent country into Southern Sámi territory. The work of a regional bureaucrat several decades later eventually led to only the Northern Sámi being recognised as Sámi people, causing the Southern Sámi to be disenfranchised from their rights. This series of events has rippling consequences today, leading to a years-long, multi-community, intra-indigenous dispute largely acknowledged as an example of indirect settler-colonial violence.
Norwegian filmmaker Ellen-Astri Lundby, who learned of her Sámi descent as an adult, tracks the case finally brought to court by the Southern Sámi community of Vapsten Lappby and places it on screen in a new documentary, aptly called Sámi vs. Sámi. The film had its world premiere in the Tromsø International Film Festival’s Films from the North sidebar, nestled firmly at the heart of this section as one of the projects depicting indigenous peoples of the northern regions of the world.
The legal battle takes place over several years, with multiple appeals by the Southern Sámi, during which courts of increasing Swedish national scale repeatedly rule in favour of the Northern Sámi village of Vapsten Sameby. Both communities are located in the Västerbotten county of Sweden, where our story occurs. In this area, the Southern Sámi are fighting to be recognised as Sámi altogether, while the Northern Sámi fear being invalidated as “settlers” themselves, given that their ancestors migrated to the region.
Viewers unfamiliar with indigenous rightsholdership may struggle slightly to understand what’s really at stake through the director’s approach, which focuses on personal accounts of disenfranchisement. Lundby relies on one archival photo repeatedly shown on screen to tell us that the communities should really be allied, rather than fighting, which lands at first but then slowly begins to lose its narrative meaning. However, we slowly learn that what’s at stake concerns special herding and hunting rights, among other crucial points of recognition, as told to us mostly by Erik Östergren (Southern Sámi) and Inger-Ann Omma (Northern Sámi), who become the cinematic representatives of each side. But the film fails to examine the legal context or the historical context related to forced migration in enough detail, which feels like a missed opportunity to hammer home how this problem is ultimately one created by the state.
When Lundby reaches the core of the story, she depicts courtroom scenes through a composite of a static image of each face laid on top of the respective courtroom, with audio of each testimony. (Presumably, these are not recreations, but this is never made officially clear.) This comes across as a bit of a visually haphazard way to convey what is being interrogated in court, even as the audio is an enlightening part of the narrative.
What the filmmaker depicts here is clearly a fascinating and important story, but the viewer is hardly privy to the consequences for the community on either side, which are merely spoken about and not shown. This leads Omma to feel like a near-villain by the end, skewing the viewer towards Östergren and the Southern Sámi’s lack of indigenous rights, including his desire to raise his children into this culture. Sámi vs. Sámi emerges as a valuable method through which to become interested in this case and the complex landscape of indigenous rights and state-inflicted violence in our world’s northern regions, but its outcome is disappointingly too scattered for the impact it seeks to have.
Sámi vs. Sámi is a production by Ten Thousand Images (Norway), Saltfilm AB (Sweden), SVT (Sweden) and Filmpool Nord (Sweden).
