ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how political and legal concepts whose function is to produce explicit and governable classifications and categorisations in order to protect rights may also blur the prevalent social categorisations. It describes the process in which the legal concept of Indigenous people as well as the concepts of Sami and Lapp have received new interpretations and definitions that are politically articulated and repeated in public, and supported by some research. The legal and political position of the Sami in Finland saw considerable advances in the 1990s. The Sami society has existed as a network of small regional communities which have been kept together by linguistic, cultural, religious and social factors such as kinship relations and joint livelihoods. Historically, the Sami have been known as Lapps in the majority populations' discourses. Historical Lapp villages were traditional societal units of the Sami that were situated north from the historical Lapland border, an area that covered in Finland's area almost one third.
