A Hermeneutic Critical Inquiry of Kuokkanen’s Sámi Feminism Within Indigenous and Decolonial Feminisms

This article presents the results of a hermeneutic critical examination of the scholarship that situates Kuokkanen’s Sámi feminism within Indigenous feminist paradigms. As a prolific and substantive contributor to Sámi scholarship, Kuokkanen has provided noteworthy clarification and distinction regarding how and why Sámi feminism has unique characteristics specific to the knowledge, experiences, resilience, culture, and activism of Sámi women. This critical analysis, delimited with intentionality to one scholar’s corpus, employed an iterative hermeneutic review cycle to examine thirty-nine of Kuokkanen’s peer-reviewed articles and book chapters across four thematic categories to fundamentally extract, define, and determine how Sámi feminism is distinctively situated within the broader Indigenous feminist paradigm. Six essential tenets of Sámi feminism are presented as synthesized from the Kuokkanen corpus that warrant further inquiry: (1) Indigenous self-determination; (2) Relationality/Relational autonomy/Relational freedom; (3) Gift paradigm; (4) Land as sacred to selfhood and community; (5) Indigenous gender justice; and (6) Sámi agency and activism. Scholarship must continue to be examined for insights into the nuances of Sámi feminism, including its importance and position within Indigenous feminism in comparison with Nordic feminism, and to better understand Indigenous women’s self-determination as reconciliation measures continue across Sápmi.