Resistant Reindeers: Human–Animal Relations and Cultural Self-Appropriation in Sámi Art and Literature

The narrative embroideries by textile artist Britta Marakatt-Labba (b. 1951), whose work was exhibited at Documenta 14 (2017) as part of the Sámi Artist Group, show motifs of traditional Sámi lifestyle in linear and cyclical arrangements: Above all, she depicts the close relationship between human and animal life, best epitomised by reindeers which co-exist and interact with human figures in different ways. Her subject matter and mode of (re-)presentation date back to modernist traditions of Sámi literature and art: John Savio (1902–1938) was considered the first Sámi artist with a formal arts education and is mainly known for his woodcuts in the style of Edvard Munch. Reindeer wildlife and conflictual human-reindeer interaction are two of his main themes. Prior to that, it was Johan Turi (1854–1936) who published the first secular book in a Sámi language in 1910. His work, combining visual and verbal narrative, has largely been examined from an ethnographic point of view, and often been dismissed as primitive. Aesthetically speaking, Turi’s narratives of symbiotic human-animal life cycles seem to represent a rather counter-modernist style. Such rigid conceptual boundaries, however, are not sufficient for Sámi cultural production from the early twentieth century. The textiles by Marakatt-Labba can help address a set of critical research questions when the works are read as modernist reverberations, more precisely as hyper-affirmative approaches to stereotypical representations of indigenous Sámi culture (which include the nomadic lifestyle, the absence of modern urban influence and a mythologically charged, intimate relation to nature). In the Sámi works considered here, it is both implicit and explicit narratives of resistance that are linked to the representation of reindeers and that counter voice dominant narratives of cultural subordination as well as of avantgarde aesthetics.