Achievements of Indigenous Self-Determination

Abstract

The postwar period engendered a dramatic period of change and adjustment for Indigenous communities. This is no less true for the Sami, an Indigenous people whose traditional territories have been divided between the four nation-states of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Despite this fragmentation (and Russia notwithstanding), Sami in the Nordic countries have achieved an extremely high level of political organization. They have also been very active in global diplomacies at the same time as they interact with and between the Nordic countries in a manner self-consciously understood and explicitly articulated as diplomacy. The Sami Council, a representative body with NGO status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, was established only a decade after the cessation of hostilities of World War II. However, as this chapter will show, official recognition and other forms of “success” in hegemonic or “mainstream” diplomatic arenas may turn out to be quite hollow when diplomacy rests ultimately on mainstream rather than Indigenous ideational foundations.