Map: Sápmi

Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen started a life-long project of making hand-drawn maps with Sámi place names, a practice of storytelling by maps show-ing the presence of Sámi cultural landscapes. Mathisen’s maps are artworks

that belongs to the context of Indigenous emancipation, acknowledgement of Indigenous rights and revitalisation of Sámi culture. Spoken language, texts and music have temporal extents that have the power to invoke mental images. Images, on the other hand, seemingly give away all information at a glance. Turnbull (2007) notes that it is the viewer that lets the eyes move across the map plane, that adds the extent of time to the experience of reading the map.

From his art research into cartography, landscape and ancient and traditional Sámi expressions, the artist-cartographer Hans Ragnar Mathisen has devel-oped a cartography of connectedness, which turns a critical searchlight on the lack of Sámi place names in official maps of the region. The map Sápmi (Fig 2.3) from 1974 demonstrates a reinterpretation of all the conventional map el-ements, the legend, the frame and icons. Borders are absent, while the shape of the water sheds, the topography and Sámi place names provide orientation.

The colour intensity and density of typonymes is fading at the southern mar-gins of the traditional Sámi territory, where the map serves as a background to insertions of large-scale and small-scale maps, as well as depictions with ornamental and symbolic content.

The claims in Mathisen’s maps are the right to belonging and connectedness, and the proofs are the occurrence of Sámi place names. At the time, questions about knowledge production and Sámi identity and rights started to surface.

For Mathisen, who has produced almost 40 such hand-drawn maps over several decades of dedicated work, Sápmi is best represented in accordance with a ‘cartography of connectedness’ that registers the historical continuity of Sámi place names. ‘From Kola to Lofoten, from the North Cape to Femun-den, the map became a reminder of our connectedness in the larger context’

(Mathisen 2010). Mathisen was concerned about the public reception of the map he was planning to draw of Sápmi. In order to negotiate the ambition to show undivided Sámi lands and to mitigate the ethno-political impacts, he expanded the map with cultural documentation, thinking that, if he managed to craft this in a pleasing and beautiful manner, even critics would accept that Sámi culture and place names existed in large parts of Fennoscandia.

Sámi place names were under-represented on the official topographical map series, and this is what got Mathisen started. ‘Place names are essential to any map,’ he wrote in 2010, ‘and it was the bad treatment of the Sámi place names on existing maps that made me try to initiate another practice’ (my translation). A year earlier, he had made a map based on rector and linguist Just Qvigstad’s collection of Sámi place names from Tromsø Municipality,

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published in 1935. Historian Per Pippin Aspaas (2011) notes that later collec-tions by Stine Benedicte Sveen and the Sami language centre in Lakselvbukt (Gáisi giellaguovddáš, established in 2004) have documented that many Sami place names are still in oral use in several settlements within the current mu-nicipal boundaries, but that the Sami names of settlements are only to a small extent incorporated into official maps. ‘The Sami names are almost exclu-sively localised to the mountain and the plains, while urban areas are named in Norwegian. (…) This helps to cement an impression that the Sami is something to do with reindeer husbandry, while the larger resident Sea Sámi population are wiped out of history.’¹⁵ Sámi place names are an integral part of Sámi cultural heritage. Mathisen has been engaged in a personal and col-lective effort to collect Sámi place names, with a passionate sense of urgency.

‘The old people are dying; now I am old too. I have challenged young people to take up the tradition of collecting names, place names are cultural heritage’

(Lecture in Tromsø, October 15, 2013). Indigenous typonymes/place names carry traditional knowledge about the environments and landscapes.

Place names provide the basis for the transmission of a cultural land-scape, through an oral way of mapping built around narratives and the designation of specific landmarks…because official maps are unable to express the continual renewal of Sami place names and the land features that are meaningful to the Sami. (Cogos et al., 2017, 43) Depicting companion species in his cartography, Mathisen negotiates the culture-nature divide. Displaying motives extracted from Sámi history and artefacts collaged into topographic representations, together with fish and birds, poems, people and cosmologic icons, his cartography maps conjure a state of timelessness and connections between peoples and lands. The scales in inserted smaller maps on the sheet range from the whole coast of Sápmi to connection between small biotopes and cultural practice.

Mathisen has crafted a large series of territorial maps that can be seen as re-appropriations of mapping into artworks. Mathisen negotiated his en-titlement to produce Sámi maps; to comment on, represent and inscribe his métier as a creator of maps into the Sámi tradition of duodji (traditional handicrafts), within the Sámi community. The act of crafting a map, using the

15 My translation of Aspaas (2011): ‘De samiske navnene er nesten utelukkende lokalisert til fjell og vidde, mens tettbygde strøk navngis på norsk. Slik Pedersen ser det, bidrar dette til å sementere et inntrykk av at det samiske er noe som har med reindrift å gjøre, mens de tallmessig overlegne, fastboende sjøsamene blir visket ut av historien.’

tools at hand: the drawing table, the foils, the different ink pens, the colouring pencils, tools he explored in his work as a draftsman at an architect practice in the 1970s, and the way he invented methods to make these tools perform what he wanted to achieve is one such connection to duodji. Mathisen’s care-fully crafted maps join the past to the present and demonstrate the continuity of human existence with the natural world. ‘Besides his goav-dis, the shaman drum, Noaidi also had an inner map of the region. He knew which moun-tains were Bassevárit, sacred mounmoun-tains, and what they entailed’ (Mathisen, 2010, 123, my translation). Reiterating the need to protect Indigenous sacred knowledge, Mathisen warns that, ‘One has to be cautious about naming sámesiiddat [Sámi sacred sites] on maps, because people can go there and destroy them’.

The now young generation of Sámi artists and activists occasionally uses maps to voice criticism of extracting governance in Sápmi. The anonymous Sámi art collective, Suohpanterror, spread the map Sámietnama Diamánta on social media as an answer to the mineral strategies that were launched in Scandinavia in 2013. Sámeeatnama Diamánta [The Sámi Diamond] (2014) is a game board, proposing that the intensified resource exploration and exploi-tation in Sámi lands is a continuum of colonial praxis.