Coloniality perplexingly underplayed in an otherwise valuable study of sporting nationhood

Malcolm MacLean
University of Gibraltar; University of Queensland

The current growing awareness of empire, coloniality, and indigeneity has drawn attention to the circumstances of the Sámi people, whose Sápmi homeland extends across northern Scandinavia and into Russia. With Sápmi crossed by three national borders, meaning that Sámi engage with four distinct nation-state political cultures while marked by notable internal differentiation, Sámi present a distinctive but far from unique case of transnational indigeneity. With growing awareness has come growing analysis, although unevenly spread across the four states – with most study focused in Norway and Sweden, while the circumstances of Russian Sámi remain least explored.

Skille shapes this study of Sámi sport around two core questions. The first is an exploration of the roles of indigenous sports organisations in nation building, while the second shifts perspective to unpack the implications of Indigenous sport for Indigenous culture and nationhood. This approach is grounded in a critical assessment of the banal acceptance of the nation-state as both equal to the nation and as a framing device for studying sports. Before delving into the specifics of the Sámi/Sápmi case, Skille sets out his comparative case, looking to locate Sámi in a wider scholarship of Indigenous sport, principally through a discussion of sport in colonial settings.

This discussion allows Skille to explore some of the ambiguities of Sámi sport, where athletes participate in nation-state teams, often unrecognised as Sámi, while teams representing Sápmi also participate in international competition such as in the Arctic Winter Games, as well as events that challenge the international sport governance system. As useful as this distinction and discussion is, it could have been enriched with a greater specific focus on the conditions of settler colonialism – Skille does little to distinguish sport in settler colonial contexts from other colonialisms. This gap appears throughout the discussion and is the source of the major weakness in the analysis: a shifting frame of reference that at times presents Sámi as distinct because Indigenous, and at times seeing them as a minority ethnic group akin to migrant and other communities. While there are times in Indigenous studies when this shifting frame can be justified, the terms and criteria are not clear in this discussion, undermining the rigour of the case.

Paradoxically, despite this richness, Skille’s problematic depiction of colonial relations and coloniality means that he does not explore as well as he needs to the tensions between the Norwegian state and Sápmi as a colonised space.

Despite this conceptual slippage in the analysis, Skille’s case is built on a solid foundation, a close reading of Sámi sports clubs in three contexts: in Sápmi-wide sporting activities, within a Norwegian Sámi setting, and in a Norwegian non-Sámi sport world. This tripartite division means also that the clubs are, in each context, engaging in different sports – a non-Sámi sports world made up of colonial sports when in the Norwegian state setting, and a balance between Sámi and non-Sámi sports in Norwegian and trans-state Sápmi contexts. Yet, despite these distinctions, Skille’s central focus on the club – the primary unit of sport-as-organised-competitive-activity – means that these three settings remain comparable.

The analytic comparability of the club therefore over-rides the distinctions between Sámi in ‘mainstream’ sports clubs, Sámi clubs in ‘mainstream’ sports federations, and Sámi clubs doing ‘Sámi sport’. One of the key strengths of this analysis, therefore, is that it shows the value of a focus on the club as principal analytical site. The insight this approach allows is enhanced by Skille’s reflexive positioning of himself in the analysis: as a non-Sámi raised in a Sámi region he invokes an interpretivist pragmatist research paradigm to emphasise research relationships centred on (self-)reflection, researched-researcher relations grounded in reciprocity, and the heterogeneity of the Sámi population, highlighting the distinctions between core Sámi regions, depicted as small town and rural environments, and Sámi in urban, major city, populations.

Paradoxically, despite this richness, Skille’s problematic depiction of colonial relations and coloniality means that he does not explore as well as he needs to the tensions between the Norwegian state and Sápmi as a colonised space. Consequently, the richness and power of the analysis grounded in The Club is undermined by a less clear grasp of the multi-layered context of those specific clubs. In making this case Skille struggles to balance expectations linked to his reflexive interpretivist pragmatism, between the interpretive approaches of his participants and of his sociological training, repeatedly deferring to his participants’ analytical and meaning-making views in a manner that undermines the complexity and subtlety of the emic-etic dialogue central to sociological and anthropological insight.

This club-centric, reflexively aware approach is woven into Skille’s neo-Durkheimian frame to provide a rich, insightful, and often quite nuanced empirical analysis that grants some significant insights into Sámi sports clubs in these multiple national and nation-state contexts. Crucially, he finds that there is little that is institutionally distinctive about Sámi sports clubs, except for those that emphasise language and culture components of their practice – but that otherwise, despite their membership, Sámi sports clubs are close to indistinguishable from other Norwegian sports clubs. Even so, and while noting the distinctiveness of those language-emphasising clubs, he draws out some distinctions between clubs in Sámi regions and urban centres, predominantly linked to distinctions in the expectations of sports federations – both Norwegian specific and Sápmi-wide – where the single-state and multi-state requirements of federations produce tensions within clubs and over the recognition of Sámi athletes as Sámi or Norwegian in different contexts.

Much of this discussion is based in from rich evidence drawn from engagements with clubs, and while Skille’s ethical care in these engagements, and the extent to which he goes to protect the anonymity of participants, is welcome, his extension of anonymity to publicly available media reports and sources is both idiosyncratic and perplexing.

The case is subtle but important, emphasising that local clubs, as the roots of sporting commonality, show evidence of both mechanic and organic solidarity. As a consequence, Indigenous, Sámi, sport and its organisations are concurrently “substantive and symbolic” (p. 131) with the effect that nation-building happens both in clubs and in Indigenous sporting organisations. This leads to important conclusions noting that Sámi sport, as both nation-state specific and multi-state in form, paradoxically sustains and disrupts the nation-state by supporting its institutions and symbology while disrupting its borders. Here he shows that Sámi sport sits within a Norwegian frame that sees sport as a universal welfare provision, so Sámi sport is sustained by the Norwegian state, which paradoxically also supports Sámi distinctiveness within and without that nation-state sport system. This it to say, there is little that is clear or straightforward about the nation-building Skille points to in Sámi sport.

The focus on Sámi-ness through and in sport, despite some attention to sportised forms of Sámi physical culture and language development in sport contexts, does not consider sport in a wider context marking Sámi cultural distinctiveness.

Skille has therefore given us an important although flawed exploration of the ways Indigenous sport and sports organisations link with, sustain, and challenge nation-states. Its strength lies in three key features. First, there is the centrality of the club as an analytical site, ensuring the significance of the base unit of organised sport is the lynchpin of the discussion. Second, in recognising the diversity of Sámi sport experience in Norway he has shown the importance of rural, regional, and small-town sports organisations rather than the all-too-common focus on the urban sports environment. Third, he has asserted the importance of a multiplicity of cultural labels and identities at both individual and collective levels of analysis.

The effect is a study that does two things very well. These strengths are that the club focus allows a solid exploration of the competing operational demands of multiple affiliations in this case of Indigenous sport, resulting in a sharp focus in spatial distinction. Furthermore, Skille’s neo-Durkheimian approach, at the expense of post- or non-state options, shifts the analytical focus away from a supposed homogenous nation-state form, while allowing the nation and nation-state to remain central analytical sites. This approach, however, seems also to limit Skille’s ability to see clearly beyond those clubs and federations, and may also in part account for the emic-etic tension.

These strengths are, however, off-set by significant problems. Notions of colonisation and coloniality are poorly developed, and there is little sense that Sámi deal with settler colonial conditions, such that for the most part Skille sees colonialism as a thing of the past with the result that he treats Sámi as if they are just one of Norway’s several minority ethnic groups – albeit distinct in having a degree of autonomy through the Sámi Parliament. This issue of coloniality is compounded by the paradox that Skille explores Sámi as a nation-without-a-state from the vantage point of Sámi in a nation-state (Norway), arguing that Norwegian Sámi are becoming the dominant group within Sápmi. This approach fails to take account of the critique that nation-state borders are one of the ways settler colonialism maintains itself. Finally, there is an absence that is all too common in treatments of sport – a tendency to present it as culturally distinct. The focus on Sámi-ness through and in sport, despite some attention to sportised forms of Sámi physical culture and language development in sport contexts, does not consider sport in a wider context marking Sámi cultural distinctiveness. These questions are not fatal, but they do significantly weaken the analysis despite the importance of the insight gained from the club and federation emphasis throughout the study, but the focus on the club is less an Indigenous sport issue than a wider concern in sport studies.

There is a growing and important body of work globally exploring Indigenous sport forms, organisations, and practices to which this book contributes; its lacunae also remind us of the vital role an Indigenous studies perspective can play in that work.

Copyright © Malcolm MacLean 2025