Lina Tebbla on the Sami and Being an Atheist

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/18

Lina Tebbla has Sami background, which, as far as I know, is the only recognized Indigenous group or people group in Europe. She is an atheist. This is part of a wider effort to catalogue those freethinkers who are Indigenous, to get their views and experiences too. Here she talks about her life and views. 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did the Saami start? Was there a connection to people like the Vikings?

Lina Tebbla: There was a differentiation between the Vikings and many other people, but the lifestyle they had a resemblance to what the Sámi people are doing today. So yes, there’s a connection, but it’s not at all the same, of course. 

Jacobsen: These kinds of interviews are going to be necessary. This is new, and a credit to Magnus Timmerby for connecting to you through the Copenhagen World Congress and General Assembly of Humanists International. He and I were having a conversation about Victoria Gugenheim. I was helping her cut some A3 frame stuff into fit. He mentioned your name because I said I was hoping to do this project of interviewing indigenous freethinkers. He said that he knows some heritage of a friend of his. 

Tebbla: Oh, yes, I understand now. So yes, my family is off and on because we ultimately left the Sami identity around 1920. Then, in the late 1990s, a woman doing her thesis in archaeology contacted our family and said, “Hey, did you know?” And, of course, some of the elders of our family knew but did quite a good or bad job at hiding it. Some people were good at it, and others were terrible at it.

Half living the Sami lifestyle, half living the Swedish lifestyle, but denying and hiding. Once my grandmother died, the Sami people of our village were very frank about the fact that they knew that she was Sami-speaking. They were sharing knowledge about my family’s heritage. As in other countries like Canada, the Sami people have been persecuted, and the children have been taken from them and put into boarding schools. Being a Sami person at the beginning of the century was a problem. That’s why my family decided to leave that identity and take on a Swedish identity. Also, the memories of my grandmother and her siblings made them afraid to share their background and knowledge with others. It was only the closest people who already knew that also knew their story. And when they died, the memory of our heritage was still among the people who are alive. They have been generous enough to teach me the old ways and let me into the lifestyle of my grandmother and father’s error. 

Jacobsen: And these boarding schools; were these religious?

Tebbla: Not so much. A little bit, but not so much. It varied. I don’t know very much about it. I know what’s from popular culture, but what I know about it is that they have been in effect from, like, let’s say, the mid-1800s. Of course, religion had a much more significant role in society back then. Still, the focus has always been to wash away the Sami identity and the language from these kids and teach them to be Swedish because Sami did not fit into Swedish back then.

Jacobsen: How big is the population of the Sami now?

Tebbla: That is also a question I still need to learn, but there are several different layers of Sami in Sweden right now. There are the people who are hardcore Sami. The Sami people have lived in Scandinavia, or Sāpmi as we call it, for a very long time. So, we’re very much blended. We come in many different shapes and sizes. You cannot see who is Sami just by looking at their appearance or their racial identity. It is much deeper than that. It’s the culture. But I was saying that there are culture bearers. Some people are a little in between, who may know some language and are active in certain areas, and others are like me. I think that the vast majority are people like me, who are several thousand in Sweden, who every year, when somebody in their family dies, or they find papers or whatnot, family history reveals itself. They understand that we have been living a lie. In my case, it was my father who told me. So, I think it is a rough definition; 70 to 80% are people who live without the culture, 20% are half-time living with the culture, and the other 10% are hardcore living it, almost like the old school days. 

Jacobsen: The language itself – typically languages and cultures evolve – evolves. So, they’re not a static thing similar to personal identity or senses of the self. Has it been traced how the culture became over time in some ways?

Tebbla: That’s a fascinating question. Well, my reflection upon the language is that the Sami language was like many indigenous languages, never really written down. So, that is a fabrication of our modern times, which has been helpful because that means that many people who don’t have native-speaking relatives who can teach them can go to different schools and buy books. Even though the material is very scarce. Still, there is an alternative to do that, at least. That Sami differs from the spoken language of the elders. You can hear it when they speak. It is just that the people who wrote down the Sami language only had part of the language themselves. So, there are gaps in grammar and words, which makes it so that the language needs to find new ways. So, there are new words. An elder of mine told me that “heartbeat” is the same as “snowmobile” because the snowmobile makes the same sound as a heartbeat in the snowmobile engine. That is beautiful. I never thought of it that way, but it speaks volumes about how the language has evolved. Adapting to modern times is essential because that means it has a chance to survive.

Jacobsen: How is Sami traditional spirituality, for instance? In North America, there are over 600 bands of indigenous people in Canada. Each has its orientation, but there tends to be an idea of a creator of some sort, their narrative of how they came to be, and so on. For individuals who might be in a freethought community within, like Sweden, who happen to be Sami, how do they incorporate that into that free thought?

Tebbla: There is a story about the maker. There are a couple of female and male gods. There are certain symbols connected to these Gods. My interpretation of the spirituality connected to these is also accurate. You have a few who are hardcore, people who call themselves modern shamans or whatnot. I will not judge how true they are, but they are really into it and trying to dive deep into it, over-reacting a bit of what it has been. But then there are people, I think I’m one of them, who use these symbols to riot against the system, showing that you could not wash them away. For instance, I bought a ring symbolizing Máttaráhkká, the elder mother. She is a god. When the church tried to Christianize the Sami people, the symbol of Máttaráhkká resembled an M, and the Sami females kept wearing that M mark, making the priests believe it was a symbol of Mother Mary.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Tebbla: It is not so much about spirituality as it is an act of rebellion, a silent revolution. And many people wear these jewellery or these symbols today. They are more symbols of what was lost and what was done to the people rather than that they believe that Máttaráhkká is going to come and save them. However, as in many different types of religions, people are a little bit off and on, I guess, but it has been so shattered and so silenced that I think there are very few, if any, alive who do know what the Sami religion was. There are several interpretations, and much research is going on. I think it’s perfect, and some people need that to hold on and save a part of themselves or their way of understanding life. I’m not judging them, but for me, these symbols are my rebellion against the Swedish government trying to break down my family to show that we’re still here.

Jacobsen: You noted the Christianisation attempts as well as state involvement; that particular orientation sounds a lot more like the colonial context for what is now Canada, where the state approved and, I believe, funded the churches to go and be, in a way, an arm of the government to colonize. How was this implemented in Scandinavia, probably generally, but Sweden in particular for this case?

Tebbla: We should look upon it as in Sápmi because it was almost the same everywhere. So, that process has been ongoing and very similar to what’s been happening in Canada. I think pretty much everything can be just copy-pasted into what’s been going on in Sweden, which makes it so that the Sami people are a little bit critical about when Swedish delegates are trying to judge Canada or Australia for what they’ve been doing to their indigenous people. Still, we have fewer rights than the indigenous people of Australia, Canada or even the US. So, that is also a huge problem, but everything: boarding schools, the taxation system, not having the right to speak your language, being punished for expressing cultural artifacts or rituals. It is so that a lot of Sami people are Christian today. If it works for them, that’s fine, but I think you could also, in a more historical setting, see that as a very successive way of colonizing a people; that they still 100 years since the last wave started, people are still Christian in a very secular society as Sweden is. 

Jacobsen: Similar to Canada, although I mean in the 2001 census, 77% of Canadians identified as Christian. About the same identified as indigenous communities, although it may have a different flavour within 20 years for the 2021 census that came out recently. Only 53% of Canadians identified as Christian. So, there is a massive decline in Christian identification and probably even those who do remember have a much lighter and less rigorous form of it. At the same time, in Canada, we have more attempts which could fail; they could outright fail at reconciliation, building an educational truth among the culture about acts done by the government and the church, primarily. Are there any “truth and reconciliation” efforts in Sweden?

Tebbla: Yes. So, the church has made some efforts in that way. I think it was last year, or the year before, that the Archbishop of Sweden had a ceremony asking for forgiveness and closure of the Sami people. For me, it was very moving because I remember the shame that my father and my grandmother, whom I love very much, carried. Some other Sami people who have lived in the culture all their lives did not trust the effort; it didn’t feel natural to them. To me, it meant something that it was a symbolic act. The first try can never be perfect, but it helps you understand when you do the second, the third and the 10th try at something. So, I think it was good at least that the church tried. The government, not so much. They do what they do; they give money, support culture projects, and help make natural reserves, but they have yet to be there. They have yet to ratify, for instance, which Canada and many other countries have, but not Sweden.

Jacobsen: As far as I know, only two significant rights documents incorporate indigenous rights. One everyone knows is the UNDRIP, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The other one is more of a document within the ILO. I believe it is Convention 169—the International Labor Organization around labour rights of indigenous peoples.

It should be noted on tape that the Sami are the only recognized indigenous group within United Nations classifications of indigenous peoples within Western Europe, as far as I know. I might have to correct it, but I believe so or one of the few if that’s the case. So, when I heard from Magnus about this, I was like, “Please!” 

So, what I’m hoping to do with these kinds of things is really to gather an international repository of some of these conversations and what I’m getting preliminarily so far; a small sample size is pretty much boilerplate: similar stories of language, land, money, failed attempts at apologies – some successful, some not, not even apologizing in other cases in Canada. The pope came one time and didn’t apologize. Recently, years later, he did go and apologize. 

There is a deceased commentator, named Lee Maracle. She noted in an interview, not mine, that if he does not apologize now, the first time when he decided not to go to the Catholic Pope. It probably means that it’s happening elsewhere, with the implication being that he would then have to have a cascade of responsibilities to apologize for this and that and that: reparations, apologies, and giving land back, this sort of thing. 

So, as someone of recent descendants who have said, “Okay, we’ll take on Swedish identity just to get rid of the maltreatment socially,” say, do you see yourself more as a freethought person who doesn’t have any supernaturalistic inclinations? And that’s the way to go for you. At the same time, you understand the historical context of colonialism in the erasure of beliefs, so those beliefs may not be accurate in a factual scientific sense. However, they have a sentimental value, and the historical facts of colonialism must be confronted to reconcile all of the contingent acts passed with present conditions for equality. 

Tebbla: Yes. So, I see. That’s the blessing of being new to something – seeing things with fresh eyes. Also, the Elders of the Sami village have been very generous with their thoughts and knowledge to me. We can be very open and speak to each other very directly, and they share what hurts and they share what they remember. My relationship with spirituality and religion is entirely dual because I can see how, in the Sami population today, spirituality plays a role in their resilience in the sense of who they are. It also depicts their relationship to nature, which is like the core value of their religion. However, I do not believe in God, and I do not believe in spirits. Just being there with the reindeer and with the people and repeating what our ancestors did is enough for me, and it gives me a sense of strength and belonging; it is the values that are the future of the world. 

Jacobsen: In the recent Amsterdam Declaration 2022 for Humanists International, there’s much democratic input into what we are defining as humanism globally; there was much feedback and one of the big pieces, I think, was a significant update, or at least a more explicit update was caretaking for the wider environment. There’s an excellent fit there. 

Tebbla: Yeah, and also understanding it. So, it’s not just about going outside and hugging a tree. It’s about understanding that when this plant grows here, the reindeer will move this way, which means that this will happen to the land, and the water will flow there. And that has nothing to do with spirituality so much as it has to do with the knowledge that people have been living in nature and maybe not knowing the cause of everything but having a sense of how natural phenomena are connected, and that knowledge is essential. One of my elders has been tracking for the government for 15 years what’s going on because he’s a reindeer keeper. He’s been following what happened with the water levels, how much snow, what moss, what plans, and how the reindeer are moving over these 15 years, and he recently sent that report to the Swedish government. It paints an unfortunate story for the climate but also shows how much informal knowledge there is in the forest today because people still live the old way of life.

So, it has to do with understanding climate change and what solutions we could do in a smaller setting besides, of course, the more significant goals, but also how we can restore essential environments for the microenvironment, how we can track the development of pollution or forest fires or floodings and also maybe knowing what’s going to come and counteract that for the people and the animal living in the nature who’s going to be affected by it. 

Jacobsen: One last question. I’ve worked at an Olympic-level equestrian facility for about two years, mostly seven days a week. Before, I was very much a writer-academic. I decided to make a switch. Indeed, that rhythm of seasons and much non-verbal communication, really just seeing what’s out there, not just codifying it in terms of linguistic representations, becomes very apparent because if you’re not able to tell, this horse has a bad attitude, then you’re going to get bitten. You’re going to misread them, and so on. I got bit yesterday. 

With this horse, we all think he has a bad attitude. I like him, but he was in a bad mood with me that day. So, I understand entirely in that context what you’re saying. That could be an explorable mesh for those who connect to their indigenous past culturally and ritually, like smudge ceremonies in North America. At the same time, they reject the idea of a maker in your terms or a creator in North American terms, spirits and so on, but the connection to the past is something. 

It’s a soft approach that harder secularists might want to take into account, that just going out and debunking, just going out and doing street epistemology, isn’t always the right approach to the Sami work with this. I think respecting people’s past who are not coming from an accessible context is essential for their orientation toward free thought and humanism. Do you have any final thoughts on our conversation today? 

Tebbla: No, but what you said is, we didn’t talk so much about that, but the reindeer is essential to the Sami culture. I used to work a lot with horses when I was young, so the step into the Sami culture was very much through the reindeer and the connection with the reindeer because they’re miniature wild horses. As you said, the soft touch because, in the end, when you come from such harsh environments and have lived through many of these aggressions from the government, you also understand that life is holy in itself. It does not come from the maker; it does not come from the Bible; it is Holy in itself, and energy needs to be preserved in any way or form. And you do that by nurturing it, caring for it, and protecting it; by that, you say, ‘Soft touch.’ And ask yourself, “What did I do wrong that the horse bit me? What did I do wrong when the reindeer didn’t want to come?”

It’s been a very fruitful perspective to have on life with my kids, with my work, with my colleagues, and with my husband. It humbles me and takes me back to a place where I feel safe, comfortable, and happy.

Jacobsen: Lina, thank you for the opportunity and participation in the series. 

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