6 Witchcraft and Ethnicity: A Critical Perspective on Sami Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Northern Norway

2 | 1 | 2022 Humanities, Ecocriticism and Multispecies Relations. Proceedings (part II)

“…Although some people willingly embraced Christianity, historical evidence proves that children were sometimes taken from their communities to be educated in Christian environments so that, upon their return to their families, they could proselytise as cultural insiders (Lindmark 2013). Missionaries targeted Sámi worldviews and their visible concrete elements, working to locate holy sites to destroy them or force local Sámi to do so; ritual drums were seized, Sámi knowledge systems demonised, and witch trials led to the execution of Sámi ritual practitioners (Hagen 2014). Many Sámi refused to surrender their drums, often handed down from generation to generation, thereby connecting their owners with ancestors and descendants.…”

Is there a future for indigenous and local knowledge?

“…The witch-hunt was an attack on women (Federici 2018) as much as on the local and traditional knowledge they held, as it destroyed a universe of practices and beliefs considered to be incompatible with the process of modernization (Ehrenreich and English 2010). Many 'witches' were midwives, healers and 'elder wise women', holders of the ethnobotanical knowledge and memory that sustained health and reproduction control systems in local and peasant communities by administering medicinal plants and contraceptives (Midelfort 1972;Hagen 2014). With the persecution of the popular healer, women were expropriated a vast heritage of empirical knowledge related to plants and healing remedies, accumulated and transmitted through generations.…”