Melissa Lantto has a compelling post over at Retracing Roots about perceiving some self-destructive behaviors (such as alcoholism) within her adopted Sami community, and tying them to the indigenous experience of assimilation.
This comes close to home for me, having discovered that within the same family line (from Swedish Lapland), I am the descendant of both whiskey merchants and Laestadian clergy. Laestadius was the 19th century half-Sami religious leader who demanded complete temperance from his followers, and is alternately credited for preserving Sami culture and criticized for burying it under a severe, fundamentalist doctrine.
Sami or not, we are each of us descended from the colonizer and the colonized. Does our heritage inform our current choices? Can we reconcile competing narratives? What stories do we share with our children? In what culture do we located our “pride”?
Seattle Sámi 