Hydropower company sites: a study of Swedish settler colonialism

Abstract

The settler colonial perspective has until recently gained modest attention from scholars analysing the relations between the Swedish state and the Indigenous Sámi people throughout history. This article explores the dynamics of settler colonialism in the Swedish state’s relation to the Sámi people through the expansion of hydropower. I argue that the hydropower invasion beginning in the 1910s reinforced Swedish settler colonialism, ultimately shown in the hydropower company town of Porjus. This industrial colonialism in Swedish hydropower politics and practice with following consequences continues the settler colonial policy from the passing of the ‘Lappmarks Placat’ in 1673 when agrarian settlers of various origins were encouraged to take up farmstead settlements and populate areas perceived as uninhabited. During the nineteenth century several policies and administrative practices made invisible and devastated Sámi self-determination and land rights. When Sámi land rights had been devalued and westernised, the time was ripe for a new colonial policy, a policy promoting industrial extraction of hydroelectricity from the rivers of Sápmi–the traditional country of the Sámi people, situated in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula.