ABSTRACT
Intersections of race thinking, ethnicity, and gender in Sámi migration complicate the narrative of Nordic whiteness in the USA. The empirical material and interpretations for this chapter derive from a study of narratives of five early twentieth-century Sámi migrant women. When the Sámi began migrating to the USA alongside their Norwegian cohorts, they had already been subjected to racialized othering and pressure to relinquish their native languages and culture under the assimilationist and colonial policy of Norwegianization. While some Sámi migrants would have enjoyed white privilege in the racial regime of the USA, which is codified by skin color, other Sámi migrants continued to endure racialized othering by immigration officials and by knowledgeable Nordic migrants. Census records, ship manifests, immigration records, and historical accounts reveal shifting racial and ethnic identification over time. Crucial to interpreting whiteness in the Sámi American context, however, are the oral histories of descendants of first-generation migrants. The narratives illustrate that racial, national, and ethnic identities in the Sámi American context are by no means firmly cemented in articulations of Nordic whiteness, but rather, fluctuate and shift depending on the location and time.
