Samer, självmord och historiska trauman

Abstract

Sami, suicide and historical trauma

This article describes and analyses Swedish research on suicide among Sami over the past 25 years. It focuses on how two studies published in 2004 and 2005, which showed that the Sami had no excess mortality in suicide, were subsequently reinterpreted during the 2010s, whereby they came to support researcher-driven knowledge production that showed excess mortality by suicide among the Sami linked to mental illness, colonial oppression and historical trauma. In both research and social debate there was even talk of a "suicide wave" among the Sami, and research projects that referred to "alarming" scientific reports concerning suicide among the Sami were initiated. However, in the early 2020s, new empirically thorough studies showed that the concern was unjustified with respect to mental illness (concerning Sami in general) and reindeer-herding Sami, the subcategory identified as particularly affected by suicide. What had long been perceived as an accepted truth, supported by research, was thus no longer valid. This article argues that the 2010s' researcher-driven knowledge production about widespread mental illness and high suicide rates among the Sami was partly an expression of the impact of the international ideology of indigenism. One of its ideological cornerstones is victimhood and vulnerability, but also the indigenous collective mobilisation that can emerge from this position. Here influential researchers inserted their results and interpretations into indigenism and the social force it represents. In addition to the ideological influence, there was, at the scientific system level, excessive written knowledge production paired with poorly functioning peer reviews.