The Great Outdoors in Sápmi

QC 20261027

Abstract

This thesis explores the material and discursive construction of Swedishrecreational landscapes in Sápmi, 1880s-1980s. It reveals how recreationalinfrastructures became entangled with the Swedish colonial project and howthese historical legacies still inform the land-use controversies of today.The thesis focuses on the work of the Swedish Tourist Association (SvenskaTuristföreningen, STF), whose infrastructural efforts of building tourist trails,cabins, stations, transportation networks and information services wereparamount in producing the present-day Swedish Outdoors. In a series ofchronologically ordered empirical chapters, this study traces how this recreationof the dispossessed Indigenous lands was made possible: throughclose cooperation with industries, state authorities, scientific and culturalinstitutions, regional administrations, STF established and consolidated adominant position in spatial governance and became one of the key stakeholdersin opinion-building, decision-making and land-use matters operating in theSwedish side of Sápmi.This thesis mobilizes different types of historical sources that illuminate themultiple and overlapping forms of exclusion and inclusion within recreationalstructures. It demonstrates that these structures are profoundly intersectionaland dynamic, as access to tourism, leisure, and spatial decision-making wasshaped and negotiated through relations of gender, class, ethnicity/race, andpower. Examining the archives of recreational histories from decolonial andcritical feminist perspectives, this thesis also challenges normativerepresentations of the Swedish outdoors as nature spaces equally accessible forall. Instead, it reorients the reader along setter colonial and Indigenous historiesoffering a different lens to viewing northern recreational landscapes shaped bypower relations, resistance and negotiations over land-use.By tracing the construction of the Swedish Outdoors in Sápmi across more thana century, this dissertation argues that recreational development did not happenin an “uncivilized, wild, and empty” space: instead, it imposed settlerinfrastructures and settler regimes of access and land-use onto Indigenouscultural landscapes. Contemporary conflicts surrounding outdoor recreationand tourism land-use in the Swedish side of Sápmi are thus rooted in long-termhistorical dynamics rather than isolated present-day disputes. Materialinfrastructures, institutional arrangements, and dominant discourses continueto reproduce enduring path dependencies, serving both as evidence of thehistorical reproduction of colonial space in Sápmi and as living archives of landusenegotiations and relational care practices. As such, they also hold importantpotential for ongoing processes of decolonization and reconciliation.

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