ABSTRACT
“Mo beassat márkomennui?” translated literally from Márku Sámi means “How to get to Márkomeannu?” This chapter tries to answer this seemingly simple question by addressing the complex local Márku Sámi history and examining its connections with both local and transnational Sámi experiences of stigmatization, language shift, toponymic colonialism, and power asymmetries, as well as toponymic reclamation, Indigenous efflorescence, and cultural-linguistic activism. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews regarding the Márku Sámi linguistic landscape, the role of Márkomeannu festival as a site of toponymic activism is examined through an in-depth analysis of the 2012 festival's waymark and its decolonizing functions. By contextualizing the waymark in the wider ethno-political context of the Sámi's late-20th and early-21st century fight for the acknowledgement of their toponyms in the public sphere, this chapter offers new insights into bottom-up heritagization and valorization processes of aspects and elements of the Márku Sámi culture, long regarded as peripheral by exponents of local hegemonic cultures. The chapter also examines Márkomeannu festival's linguistic landscape with a focus on the 2018 politically charged graffiti, and its function as symbolic ethnopolitical statements connected with wider Sámi struggles for recognition and sovereignty.
