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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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A very well done write up.

I only say that judging by what I've heard, the Finns and Sami have had historically amicable relations and the imposition of brain-rot anti-colonialist narratives has created a granularity of identity which previously did not exist. (How many Finns went off into the wilderness over the centuries? How many Sami settled and became identical to their neighbors over the generations?)

Isn't this a fairer, more egalitarian way of things? Bothering with blood quantums, with ancient lists? Why impose a progressive view on race where the historical arrangement was of no controversy whatsover? Are we supposed to enforce a strict separation of ethnicities, that people cannot pass from one group to another by marriage and blood? Is that not racist?

They are neighbors of linguistically similar language isolates: they have literally been kissing cousins for thousands - if not tens of thousands - of years. The Sami are not Amerindians! It's stupid. It's very stupid.

Even then, it would be a nomad/farmer relationship, which has generally tended to mean the farmers expanding their territories and the nomads losing them, which has indeed happened in great stretches of Northern and Eastern Finland. (Apparently the Sámi call this "Lapland retreats, the Land gets thicker" - 'the Land' ('lanta' in Finnish, this also (coincidentally?) means 'manure' in Finnish) being a term for non-Sámi in Sápmi in general.)

But the land that was in dispute (and correct me if I am wrong) can be described to be 'cold as balls'. Finns were not moving en masse into the north, so the relative population densities were low enough for coexistence to be a possibility.

The Amerindians were OK with Europeans for a while until they realized they wouldn't stop coming. Grumbling about those damn farmers encircling another bit of prime pasture is one thing, but massacring and scalping is another.

Although doing a bit of research into the overall situation, it does look like they did go through the whole residential school and discrimination of language phase - but Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about Finnish policies to such effect: only Norway and Sweden. Since you're our resident Finnposter, could you look into it? Were there any particular programs to intentionally displace them in the 18th and 19th centuries?

Finnish policy towards the Sámi was highly assimilatory until the 1970s and boarding schools were used, as mentioned here, for example.