as a value for the future
In the north of Europe lies a territory older than the borders that were later drawn across it. It is called Sápmi: the traditional homeland of the Sámi. This area stretches across what is now Northern Norway, Northern Sweden, Northern Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
Sápmi is not a modern state, but a cultural, spiritual and ecological landscape. It is a territory of languages, family histories, reindeer, rivers, mountains, forests, memories and routes passed down through generations.
The Sámi are often captured in a single image: the reindeer herder in a snowy landscape. That image is not incorrect, but it is too limited. Not all Sámi are reindeer herders. Sámi identity also lives in language, music, clothing, craft, landscape, family, experiences of loss, political struggle and spiritual connection with land and nature.
That is precisely why their history is so important. It shows that colonialism did not only take place overseas, but also in the heart of Europe. In a region often seen as progressive, social and civilised.
Colonialism without being called colonialism
For centuries, Sápmi was incorporated, redrawn, Christianised, measured, regulated and economically opened up by states. What was presented from the outside as civilisation, education, national unity or progress often meant, for the Sámi, the loss of land, language, religious practices, freedom of movement and self-determination.
Their homeland was used for mining, forestry, hydropower, agriculture, military infrastructure, wind farms and, later, for projects presented under the banner of the green transition.
This contains a painful contemporary layer. Even a future that calls itself sustainable can become colonial when it is once again built on Indigenous land without genuine authority for the people who have lived there for generations.
The history of the Sámi shows how a people can be colonised without the world always naming it colonialism. By forbidding language. By redrawing land. By measuring bodies. By demonising rituals. By reducing culture to folklore.
The colonial wound in language, land and body
One of the harshest instruments of colonial oppression was assimilation. Through school, church and administration, Sámi children were separated from their language, family knowledge and cultural sense of belonging.
In Norway, this process became known as Norwegianisation: a policy designed to absorb minorities into Norwegian national culture. The majority language was associated with progress. The Sámi language was linked to shame, poverty and backwardness.
Colonisation works here not only through visible violence, but also through the reprogramming of the inner compass. A people is not only deprived of land, but also of the words with which it understands itself.
The colonial wound of the Sámi therefore lies not only in the ground, but also in the throat: in languages that were forced into silence, songs that had to disappear and names that were replaced.
Spiritual systems were also attacked. Before Christianisation, Sámi communities had their own rituals, cosmologies and spiritual practices, in which landscape, animals, ancestors, drums and seasons played a central role. Missionaries and states often saw these worldviews as pagan, dangerous or backward. Sacred drums were confiscated or destroyed.
A confiscated drum is therefore not merely an object. It is the symbol of a cosmos that was taken away.
From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries onwards, Sámi bodies also became part of racial science. Researchers measured skulls, photographed bodies and placed Sámi people within hierarchical racial theories. The body became an archive of power. The colonial gaze said: we measure you, therefore we define you.
The body was measured before it was heard. The skull was made more important than the voice.
Sámi women: the suppressed bearers of culture
Within this history, the position of Sámi women is particularly important. They were often located at the intersection of two forces: colonial power from the outside and patriarchal structures strengthened by church, state and modern law.
This must be named carefully. Sámi societies were not simply matriarchal or perfectly equal. But women did hold important economic, social, spiritual and cultural roles in many communities.
They passed on knowledge through language, care, food, clothing, craft, ritual, healing, family history and daily practice. Their knowledge lived not only in words, but also in hands, movements, materials, songs and memories.
Colonialism, therefore, did not only suppress a people. It also rewrote gender relations.
Through European, Christian and patriarchal models, property, labour, family and leadership were increasingly registered and recognised through men. Female knowledge was pushed to the margins: domestic, supportive, folkloric or invisible. What had once been a living form of intelligence was downgraded into tradition.
For women, the loss of land also meant the loss of autonomy. When routes, grazing lands, food knowledge and family economies were interrupted, it was not only land that disappeared. A structure of transmission disappeared as well.
In some contexts, marriage, ancestry and legislation determined who had access to rights within reindeer herding and the community. The female body thus became a border post. Through bloodline, marriage and children, the state determined who could still belong to the culture.
Language loss also affected women deeply. Women are often bearers of everyday language transmission: lullabies, names, words of care, warnings, stories and landscape words. When children were no longer allowed to speak their language, the maternal line was damaged as well.
Colonisation sometimes begins not with a gun, but with a child who comes home ashamed of their mother’s language.
What is Ancestral Knowledge?
Within the Post-Colonial Gold series, this is where the value of Ancestral Knowledge emerges.
Ancestral Knowledge refers to the knowledge that lives in land, body, language, ritual, care and transmission. It is knowledge that was not always written down, but passed on for generations through stories, gestures, craft, song, observation, seasons, family ties and daily practice.
Within the Post-Colonial Gold series, Ancestral Knowledge stands for a value that was often marginalised by colonial systems. Knowledge that did not fit within Western institutions was dismissed as superstition, folklore, domestic work, primitive tradition or female intuition.
Yet precisely within these forms of knowledge lay a profound understanding of survival, connection, responsibility and care for the world.
Among the Sámi, this value becomes particularly visible. Their knowledge was connected to landscape, reindeer, language, migration routes, spirituality, craft, music, family and seasons. Colonial oppression affected this knowledge in many ways. Languages were pushed back. Spiritual practices were made suspect. Land was redrawn and opened up for economic exploitation. Bodies were measured and classified.
What had once been a living knowledge system was broken apart, renamed and often made invisible by colonial power.
Not nostalgia, but future intelligence
For a new generation, Ancestral Knowledge is not nostalgia. It does not ask us to return to the past. It offers a different compass for the future.
We live in a world of speed, extraction, climate crisis, technological acceleration, loneliness and loss of identity. Ancestral Knowledge reminds us that knowledge does not come only from universities, data and institutions. Knowledge also lives in hands, bodies, landscapes, rituals, families and memories.
It teaches us that land is not possession, but relationship. That care is a form of intelligence. That progress does not always have to mean faster, bigger and more. That listening, repairing, waiting, passing on and connecting may be exactly the skills a new generation needs.
Ancestral Knowledge is therefore not a romantic glance backwards. It is a way of moving forward differently.
What was once dismissed as backward may be precisely the intelligence a new generation needs.
Art as a bearer of repair
Yet Ancestral Knowledge never fully disappeared. It remained present in fragments, in bodies, in rituals, in art, in language spoken again, in objects that return and in stories that are told once more.
In the work of Sámi artists such as Britta Marakatt-Labba, Máret Ánne Sara and Outi Pieski, this knowledge is not presented as the past, but as a living force. Thread, reindeer hide, clothing, landscape and material become bearers of memory, resistance and repair.
Britta Marakatt-Labba works with embroidery as a form of historical memory. Her threads speak of landscape, colonial power, community, myth and resistance.
Máret Ánne Sara makes visible the struggle around land, reindeer herding and ecological sovereignty. Her work shows how extraction, state power and green colonialism intervene in the survival of Sámi communities.
Outi Pieski connects textile, landscape, female transmission and cultural continuity. Her work makes visible how knowledge can continue to live in material, rhythm, colour, movement and craft.
These artists show that Ancestral Knowledge is not static heritage. It is not a museum piece. It is an active force that continues to resist, repair and renew itself.
Post-Colonial Gold
For the Post-Colonial Gold series, this theme is particularly powerful. The object does not have to literally depict a Sámi woman, a reindeer or a traditional symbol. That would quickly become folklore. An abstract translation is stronger.
A ring can become an interrupted maternal line.
A broken migration route.
A closed form through which sound tries to break out.
An organic structure overlaid with cold measuring lines.
A map without consent.
A ritual object in which a confiscated cosmos is charged again.
The gold is not decorative. It is not luxury, not ornament and not a simple symbol of wealth.
In Post-Colonial Gold, gold marks a new value system. It activates what colonial systems denied: language, body, land, ritual, female transmission and ancestral intelligence.
The gold does not cover the wound. It marks the place where another value becomes visible.
In this sense, the object becomes not only a memory of loss, but a bearer of repair.
Why this value matters now
The struggle of the Sámi is not only history. New mines, wind farms, infrastructure and energy projects show how Indigenous territories are again under pressure. Even when the language of progress changes, the structure of extraction can remain.
That is why Ancestral Knowledge matters so much today. It forces us to ask again what knowledge is. Who decides which knowledge counts? Which knowledge was removed from archives, but continued to live in bodies? Which voices were never written down, but were still passed on? Which women were never named, but kept communities alive?
For a new generation, this offers a radical possibility. Not to return to an idealised past, but to learn from knowledge that never fully disappeared. Knowledge that is relational. Knowledge that connects instead of possesses. Knowledge that takes care, rhythm, landscape, body and transmission seriously.
Ancestral Knowledge is not the past. It is future knowledge, covered by colonial silence.
And perhaps that is exactly what this time needs: not more speed, but deeper memory. Not more extraction, but restored relationship. Not more possession, but responsibility.
Ancestral Knowledge is the value that reminds us that the future is not built with technology alone, but also with what generations before us already knew: how to live with the world, rather than merely use it.
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