Eugenics, Admixture, and Multiculturalism in Twentieth-Century Northern Sweden: Contesting Disability and Sámi Genocide

Abstract

This article examines twentieth-century northern Swedish geographical isolate studies in Norrbotten Province involving Torne-Finns and northern Sámi, who have historically shared pronatalist Laestadian religious beliefs pathologized by mainstream eugenicists. Deemed a sign of religious fanaticism, Laestadianism was associated with the eugenic stigmatization of Torne-Finns and Sámi people and beliefs were conceptualized as an early sign of schizophrenia. Geneticists, as an outgrowth of early twentieth-century eugenics, structured schizophrenia as a genetic disease caused by first-cousin marriage. These consanguineous marriages that were reported as prevalent in Tornedalian and Sámi reindeer-herding communities practicing Laestadianism, legitimated race-based sterilization of psychitrized Torne-Finn and Sámi women. Similarly, the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, established in 1922 by Herman Lundborg, advanced reorganizing race along family lines and populations, which supported gendered disability and Sámi genocide. Torne-Finn, as well as Sámi, religious minority women, who were sterilized at first admission to psychiatric facilities, require redress for colonial violence. Current academic and directto-consumer admixture research on Finnish and Sámi peoples is recognized as upholding colonial logics of difference in Swedish multicultural policies. This, in turn, results in ongoing gendered genocide. It is concluded that in a radical break from eugenic theories, major psychoses associated with common infections lie in the neglected half of the human genome rather than according to classical genetic rules.

Colonialism, eugenics and ‘race’ in Central and Eastern Europe

“…The pursuit of ethnic homogenisation in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland took a distinctively eugenic turn, as attention was fixed on the alleged source of national degeneration posed by the Indigenous Sámi and other nomadic groups such the Roma. The work of prominent Swedish and Norwegian eugenicists such as Herman Lundborg and Jon Mjøen was firmly embedded within a colonial framework, according to which the 'Nordic' European Swedes and Danes were seen as 'white' and culturally superior and then contrasted and opposed to the 'dark skinned' Sámi (Svalastog, 2013;Marttinen, 2022) This racial vision of whiteness was invoked to justify a variety of eugenic acts against Indigenous people who were continuously marginalised and mistreated. This sense of differentiation was repeatedly reinforced through state-sanctioned eugenic policies of institutionalisation, segregation and stigmatisation.…”

Editor's Note

“…Roma children were forcefully taken from their families and placed in institutions, and their language was forbidden. 25 Those endeavors were strategic to the calculus of forging national identities in Sweden, Norway, and Finland. 26 This sanitized narrative of Nordic exceptionalism not only serves to gloss over the Nordic region's history of colonialism but also informs current thinking.…”