ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses primarily on land as a contact zone between Indigenous populations and Norwegian settlers in Norway and in the United States, respectively, in light of federal legislation and constructed ethnoracial hierarchies. It includes the Sámi population in Finnmark County, Norway and Native Americans in the Sisseton and Wahpeton or Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. The Indigenous populations in Norway and the United States had an inferior position in the respective nation-building strategies around the turn of the last century. As part of the nation-building process, authorities in the United States and Norway initiated land legislation with the purpose of settling public lands for preferred ethnic groups and for civilizing Indigenous populations.
While Indigenous populations in various locales have regarded land as a communal resource based on sustainability, authorities in agrarian western societies have historically valued land as a source of status, wealth and investment. In this process of nation-building, authorities favoured white settler populations by selling public lands and marginalizing Indigenous populations who inhabited the very same lands that the latter regarded as their homeland. Newspapers and secondary source material in the regions of study reflect the existence of distance between the groups in the contact zones studied, but the material also indicates cooperation and mutual respect towards each other.
