From Indigenous private property to full dispossession – the peculiar case of Sápmi

The concept of dispossession has become ubiquitous in contemporary critical theory, including analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship. It suggests that in addition to being colonised, Indigenous peoples have been deprived of their lands and the territorial foundations of their societies. Critics, however, allege that theories and arguments of Indigenous dispossession are inconsistent, arguing that Indigenous peoples did not have conceptions of land as property or possession. The critics’ question is as follows: how can there be an act of dispossession if there was no prior possession or Indigenous concept of ownership? This article examines a case where there was both prior possession and a concept of ownership adopted by and extended to an Indigenous people, the Sámi, and upheld by the colonial court system. What can the Sámi case of individual (family) land ownership tell us about the concept of dispossession and Indigenous conceptions of ownership and property? The objective is to demonstrate how the concept of dispossession has different histories in different contexts, and how individual land ownership has not historically been alien to Indigenous peoples.


I. Introduction
The concept of dispossession is central in contemporary critical theory analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples. It refers to the loss of Indigenous peoples' relationships with their territories, which were typically rooted in communal ownership and responsibility. The argument that Indigenous peoples did not have a concept of ownership is based on a flawed assumption that overlooks the complex and nuanced ways in which Indigenous peoples relate to the land. Critics, however, maintain that theories and arguments of Indigenous dispossession are inconsistent and contradictory. In their view, there cannot be an act of dispossession if there were no conceptions of land as property or possession or Indigenous concepts or institutions of ownership.
This article examines a case where there was both prior possession and a concept of ownership that was extended to an Indigenous people, and which the Indigenous people embraced and actively upheld through the colonial court system. I focus on what is considered the historical Swedish region of Sápmi in the period from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Sápmi is the traditional territory of the Sámi people in the north of the present-day countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula, Russia. 1 This article focuses on the Sámi territory that was historically considered to be under the jurisdiction of the Swedish Crown. The period from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries distinctively demonstrates a historical trajectory from Indigenous land ownership and acceptance of multinormativity in jurisprudence to Indigenous exclusion, dispossession and racialisation.
While Indigenous dispossession broadly refers to the unilateral imposition of settler 'sovereignty' on Indigenous territories, I specifically examine Indigenous dispossession as expropriation of land. The article argues that the Sámi case is an example of literal Indigenous dispossession. There was prior Sámi ownership of territories, and Sámi were subsequently dispossessed of their lands through various administrative and legislative measures. I am interested in examining the following question: what can the Sámi case of individual land ownership tell us about the concept of dispossession and Indigenous conceptions of ownership and property? The article illustrates and analyses the ways in which the concept of dispossession has different histories in different contexts and how individual land ownership has not historically been alien to Indigenous peoples. That said, historical Indigenous conceptions of property differ from contemporary frameworks of land ownership, which typically view land as commodity and/or real estate. 2 I suggest that examining the case of Sámi land ownership as individual property will also advance Indigenous theories and understanding of dispossession and settler colonialism.
The colonisation of Sápmi goes back at least to the fifteenth century, when the Danish and Swedish Crowns began claiming jurisdiction over and imposing their laws on different parts of the Sámi territory. For the most part, however, Sámi laws ('customary law') were upheld and considered part of the state legal systems until the nineteenth century. 3  most of the northern territory considered Sápmi until 1751 when the first political boundary was demarcated between Sweden and the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway. In 1809, Finland was transferred from Sweden to the Russian Empire as the 'Grand Duchy of Finland'.
Two archival sources in particulardistrict court proceedings and taxation records of the Swedish Crowndemonstrate how the institution and mindset of proprietorship characterised the common conceptions of justice in Sámi society at the time. These conceptions were based on the reality that most Lappmarks or individual families had their own tract of land for their livelihoods, which in many cases were carefully delineated against one another. 4 The system was actively maintained by the Sámi through the frequently attended courts, and the threshold for seeking the protection of law was low. 5 Gradually, however, this legal order was undermined and ultimately, the Sámi were dispossessed of their territories. Previous conceptions of Sámi property rights gave way to a view according to which traditional Sámi livelihoods of hunting, fishing and reindeer herding were fundamentally unsettled, and thus too nomadic and unsystematic to give rise to land ownership.
The article begins with a consideration of Sámi individual and collective land ownership in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Kingdom of Sweden. In what ways were Sámi individual and collective rights recognised by the Crown? The first section builds on ground-breaking legal history research in the late 1980s and 1990s into early court and other records of the Swedish Crown, which upended common and persistent views and interpretations according to which the Sámi did not historically own their territories. A key scholar in this regard, legal historian Kaisa Korpijaakko-Labba, notes her own initial shock and disbelief when she encountered the extensive archival material that indisputably conveyed the Sámi's real property rights to their lands and waters. 6 She writes: 'Nothing in the archival records seemed to match with any of the common views and perceptions about the Sámi', which had also informed People's Perspective' (2004)  Korpijaakko-Labba's own understanding. 7 More recently, historians Jesper Larsson and Eva-Lotta Päiviö Sjaunja have demonstrated how the Sámi established property rights to their territories through institutions, some of which were their own, and others that of the Swedish Crown, such as the justice system. They argue: 'Defined property rights were a prerequisite for early modern Sámi to engage in reindeer herding, fishing and hunting, and to use other natural resources, such as plants and berries'. Moreover, property rights for Sámi were 'not only a way to secure and designate harvest; it was also a means to create social justice '. 8 In the second part of the article, I consider Sámi land rights in the settler colonial period of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I focus on the factors such as the racialisation in the nineteenth century that contributed to the undermining of the Sámi land ownership and ultimately, the dispossession of the Sámi of their territories. The third and final part of the article examines the concept of dispossession as an Indigenous critique of settler colonialism, and how it pertains to the Sámi case.

Character and scope
The early Sámi land ownership within the Kingdom of Sweden was unique compared to many other Indigenous peoples who owned their territories collectively. 9 In the realm of the early Swedish Crown, there were three distinct categories of land ownership: 'privileged freehold' (odalrätt) controlled by the nobility, 'taxable freehold' (skatträtt) belonging to independent freehold peasants and 'crown land' (kronojord). These categories also applied to the Sámi territories or 'Lappmarks' (as the Sámi territories were called in historical records). The Sámi were considered owners of their lands on par with freehold peasants, the legal status of whom 'was referred to as a taxpayer right' that comprised 'rights as well as obligations described in detail in legislation'. 10 The substance of this right is conveyed in the following quote: The Lapps [Sámi] certainly enjoyed so-called protection of possession with regard to their taxable land: where violations of rights occurred, provisions on unlawful use of land were applied. A Lapp could also resort to certain legal measures concerning his or her land. Succession of land proceeded in accordance with the principles set out in the Inheritance Code. A Lapp could even sell his land (although this was not common). As in the case of peasants' land, the land was subject to redemption on the basis of right of inheritance, a characteristic which like those above, distinguished the land clearly from Crown land; a tenant on Crown land could not transfer it to his heirs any more than he could to anyone else. It is also clear that the tax which the Lapps paid on their land was a land tax in nature. 11 The initial Sámi ownership of their territories was recognised and upheld by the Crown and recorded in historical tax and court records until the late eighteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, a district court system of the Swedish Crown began operating in the countryside, including the Sámi territory, which was divided into judicial districts. Each district had a local court, which operated largely according to previously established customary practices of conflict resolution. In Sápmi, the court typically convened once a year, presided over by a nonlocal judge who relied heavily on a panel of 12 local, mostly Sámi, lay judges for their knowledge of community circumstances. The lay judges were selected from those who paid taxes in their community, and it was a sought-after position in Sápmi. A key element for the legitimacy of the court was community participation, and the court was actively used as a local dispute settlement arena. 12 Settling disputes frequently in court rather than out of court was a distinct feature of the early Nordic judicial system. District courts were social arenas where community and Crown representatives 'took part in the exercise of social control'. 13 The Sámi were also keen to proactively utilise the court system to resolve disputes over land and resources, which is why the court  records provide a detailed view into the history of Sámi communities. The court records show that Sámi families used the same territories from year to year, referred to their territories as their tax land, and considered to own them. Formally, these tracts were known as the 'Lapp tax lands' (skatteland in Swedish) for which tax was paid to the Crown. 14 In addition to historical court proceedings, another key source for Sámi legal historical analysis are the taxation records. The Sámi territory was divided by the Crown into regions called Lappmarks, which were further delineated into siidas. A siida is a traditional Sámi social organisation consisting of a group of extended families who made decisions regarding their natural resource use. A siida's main functions historically included the distribution of lands, waters and resources, and later, collecting taxes from individual families to the Crown. In most cases, siidas had delineated boundaries against each other, although they changed several times throughout history, and sometimes were split into smaller siidas or merged into bigger ones according to changing circumstances. Although no longer in operation as the basic unit of Sámi society, siidas continue to function in reindeer herding both formally and informally. 15 In this article, I use the term siida to refer to the Swedish term lappby, adopted as part of the administrative system of Swedish Lappmarks.
Initially, disputes pertaining to infringement on someone's territories and resources were typically between individual Sámi over hunting, fishing or grazing reindeer on someone else's lands, but as non-Sámi settlement grew, disputes increasingly arose between Sámi and non-Sámi settlers. In some Lappmarks, disputes between Sámi and non-Sámi arose as early as in the seventeenth century (such as Kemi Lappmark), while in others, conflicts with non-Sámi were rare until the late eighteenth century. 16 It is particularly significant that until the end of the nineteenth century, the district courts actively upheld Sámi land ownership in the same manner as farmers' ownership of their lands. 17 The 14 Korpijaakko-Labba (n 10); Lundmark (n 2); Nils-Johan Päiviö, Från skattemannarätt till nyttjanderätt. En rätthistorisk studie av utvecklingen av samernas rättigheter från slutet 1500-talet till 1886 års renbeteslag (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 2011). early Sámi history of individual land ownership, however, is neither well known or nor accepted by many. Consequently, there are several persistent misinterpretations of Sámi land ownership not only in public discourse (including among the Sámi) but in a number of disciplines, many of which continue to shape common understandings of the history of Sámi property rights to land.
In population history, the Sámi have been misconstrued as belonging to a 'lower level' of cultural and socioeconomic development for which an institution of private land ownership was unknown. As hunters, fishers and reindeer herders, they were considered as neither having a need nor a perception of real property rights. 18 In ethnography, the Sámi have been perceived to possess historically and culturally very precise usufructuary rights to their lands and waters, which only existed internally within Sámi culture and thus did not carry weight in the states' formal legal apparatus. Ethnographic scholarship has also constructed a view according to which historically, Sámi society was characterised by a collective ownership, a form of 'village communism', in which a siida as the collective was the actual owner of the territory and individual families only possessed a usufruct right to lands and resources. 19 In legal history, the question of the juridical or legal status of the Sámi has been largely examined as an outcome of different legislative initiatives. 20 This scholarship has commonly concluded that even though the Sámi themselves perceived to own their traditionally occupied lands and waters, specific legislative measures have demonstrated the 'true' ownership of Sámi territories belonging to the state. Regardless of the discipline, most studies have concluded that the Sámi have possessed no formal legal title to the lands they used. 21 regarding the Crown's recognition of Sámi land rights before the eighteenth century; that otherwise 'unproductive' lands were used and owned (through reindeer herding, hunting, and fishing) in a way that enabled Crown taxation and thus, placing them under Crown sovereignty. Much of early Nordic legal and other scholarship has associated, in the Lockean tradition, the acquisition of title to land with the practice of cultivation. 22 The need for a concept of property rights to land arise only in circumstances of scarcity of and competition for land, which, combined with mixing one's labour, give rise to land ownership. The prevailing view has long been that Sámi livelihoods of hunting, fishing and reindeer herding could not contribute to scarcity or competition in the seemingly vast Lappmarks. 23 Legal historical research and archival data shows, however, that the relative size of the Lappmarks notwithstanding, the use of the Sámi territory by Sámi livelihoods was intensive and efficient. This is due to the fact that the land was exploited only according to the opportunities the land provided itself (ie game, pastures). Regardless of the livelihood, the 'available' land could and, as the historical records demonstrate, did run out. Hence, what was considered important for both farming and Sámi traditional livelihoodsie the landwas regarded as in need of legal protection. 24 The archival material patently conveys that there was no 'excess' or 'vacant' land or water, and the 'problem of scarcity' became evident much earlier than assumed by previous research. It is this scarcity the Sámi encountered that gave rise to the need to first individual ownership and a conception of property rights, and second, seeking legal protection through the Crown court system. 25

Historical records of Sámi exclusive land ownership
According to the longstanding representation of the 'nomadic Lapp', Sámi people wandered in the tundra with their herds wherever the reindeer took them without a conception of land ownership. 26 This is, however, a misrepresentation on two accounts: Sámi who semi-annually migrated with their herds had well-defined summer and winter pastures, as well as migration routes. It could not have been aimless, for most land was not only used but also owned by someone, except in the mountains in some Lappmarks. Second, Sámi used different areas at different seasons, and not only for reindeer herding. Sámi whose main livelihood was fishing, and, to a lesser extent, hunting, also migrated seasonally between certain territories. 27 Further archival records of the Swedish Crown from the mid-1500s to mid-1700s demonstrate how the notion of a nomad without rights is misleading. Not only did the Sámi consider themselves as owning their territories; the official records at the time also indicate that most Sámi were de facto owners of their tracts of land as individuals or as a family. Even though the court system in Sápmi was of the Swedish Crown, it operated in the early modern period largely on local Sámi terms, employing Sámi conceptions and understandings of land use and its needs. 28 At the time, the Swedish judicial system was established on lay dominance, reflected local contexts and practices and sought to maintain community economic and social equilibrium. In some Lappmarks, the court consisted of only Sámi lay judges (in addition to the Swedish judge) into the mid-eighteenth century. That period was extended in some Lappmarks, it should be noted. 29 The early Sámi conception of an individual property right to land did not, however, imply or regard land as a commodity for the purposes of accumulation of capital. Korpijaakko-Labba suggests that in ecological conditions where the options for subsistence were limited, accumulation of territorial property as capital made little sense. Selling or buying real estate was considered meaningless in the everyday land use in the Lappmarks. Another factor preventing the commodification of land had to do with Sámi culture and socioeconomic context: land upon which subsistence dependsboth individually and collectivelycannot have exchange value. The loss of land or even part of it could not be compensated with money. Nevertheless, the archival records show that the Sámi legally possessed the competence to transfer their lands to someone else. Had Sámi territories been Crown land, individual Sámi would not have possessed this legal competence. 30

Other forms of land rights and ownership in the Siidas
In addition to the individual property rights, there were other forms of rights and ownership. In some siidas, beaver hunting, for example, was a collective right. It was commonly (but not always) held that if someone caught a beaver, it was expected to be shared within the siida. In other siidas, members engaged in collective salmon fisheries at specific times. In many Lappmarks, some lakes were 28 Lundmark (n 2) 34. left outside the division of land for the purposes of securing subsistence for those siida members who did not possess land individually. 31 In some circumstances, Sámi had conventions according to which individuals or families could use or rent other person's (or family's) land for reindeer grazing. 32 These conventions were reciprocal and typically benefited entire siidas. 33 In some Lappmarks, such as Lule Lappmark, the division of land into individual or family property was not as complete in the mountains as in the lower, forested regions. In these cases, the land in the mountains was collectively used for hunting and grazing, or the grazing areas of different siidas overlapped. Particularly as many Sámi families began growing the size of their reindeer herds due to changing societal and economic circumstances, it was imperative to have access to wider reaching pastures both in the mountains and the forested areas. In certain areas of Lule Lappmark, this resulted in common property regimes to accommodate larger herds. It has been suggested that this was a bottom-up process in which changing circumstances both internally (evolving livelihoods) and externally (changing Crown and settler policies and institutional practices toward the Sámi) in which Sámi themselves shaped local institutions for common use. 34 To summarise, in light of the court proceedings of the Swedish Crown, the early legal status of the Sámi consisted of all the elements that give rise to what is today referred to as a property right. Sámi enjoyed the legal protection of an owner and occupant in relation to other land use groups, whether a siida or an owner and occupant of another Lapp tax land. These individually owned Sámi territories could be inherited, gifted, rented, pledged, or assigned to others. Sámi considered owning their lands and waters and their formal legal status corresponded to this view. 35 III. The beginning of settler colonialism in Sápmi

Annexation and Taxation
Initially in the Kingdom of Sweden, only the so-called 'Lapp livelihoods' (lappmannanäringar) of fishing, hunting and reindeer herding were formally approved forms of land use in the Lappmarks. 36 There was, however, an increasing pressure to modify the existing institution of ownership for a number of reasons, including  Larsson and Sjaunja (n 5). 35 Korpijaakko (n 5) 582-84. Korpijaakko has further argued that the legal status of Sámi tracts of land corresponded to that of non-Sámi peasants who similarly paid taxes for their farmlands. Lundmark has challenged this point and maintains the 1602 tax reform does not provide for such a conclusion: Lundmark (n 2) 40. 36 See Lundmark (n 2) for a detailed description of the process of establishing the agricultural boundary. the desire of the Swedish Crown to annex Sámi territories more firmly as part of the kingdom due to mining and other imperial interests. Governor Johan Graan, who undertook his position in 1653, considered individual tracts of Sámi tax lands 'too large' and wrote on several occasions to the Crown to suggest opening the Lappmarks for Swedish settlement. His calls were received, and the royal settlement ordinances of 1673 and 1695 opened up the Sámi territory for settlers to farm and breed cattle. Graan argued that a person did not have right to a piece of land they did not use. Although he considered reindeer herding a 'legitimate' form of land use, he implied that it did not require meadows that could be farmed. According to Graan, Sámi who lived in areas that could be used by a Swede for farming would have to move somewhere else where there were no meadows. The first ordinance, however, did not lead to significant settlement. 37 The first mining 'privilege' (decree) was also passed in 1673, even though the first mine had already been established in the Sámi territory of Nasafjäll (in operation between 1636-59). 38 A key impetus for the settlement ordinances was the discovery of silver in the Sámi territory in the 1630s, which required more labour than was locally available. The seventeenth-century ordinances set forth that settlers should not intrude on Sámi hunting, fishing and reindeer herding. In some siidas, a settler was allowed to settle only to tracts of land for which no individual Sámi paid taxes and thus were considered unused and/or deserted. The settlers were mandated to remain as farmers and cattle breeders and not take up the socalled 'Lapp livelihoods'. In this way, the two livelihoods were intended to be kept separate, and Sámi land ownership and livelihoods were protected to an extent. 39 As an example, neither settlement ordinances provided settlers with hunting or fishing rights, considered exclusive Sámi rights by the Crown until the nineteenth century. 40 The 1695 ordinance created a new taxation system, moving from individual taxation to a fixed sum by each siida for the sake of greater clarity and manageability. It was next to impossible for the Crown to discern the exact tracts and use of land in Lappmarks. Notably, had the taxation continued on the basis of individual tracts of land, it would have provided a stronger right to the land. In the new taxation system, it was easier to justify a 'greater need' argument in order to override existing land ownership. The growing settler interests in the Sámi territory required a new approach, and a discursive shift took place among local administrative officials, particularly governors who already had begun arguing that the Lappmarks were Crown land in the eighteenth century. Initially, these views were not widely shared by local authorities or taxation officers. 41  Korpijaakko (n 5) 510-11. See also Lundmark (n 2); Kaius Tuori, 'The Theory and Practice of Indigenous Dispossession in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Saami in the Far between the district courts and county governors came to head at the end of eighteenth century. In spite of the growing influence of the county administration and governors, the district court continued to assert its right over the Sámi tax lands and the Sámi sought to employ the court system to redress their dispossession. 42 Yet the 1695 taxation amendment did not change the basic premises of land ownership, and the interconnection between land, tax and right to land remained the same. The change applied chiefly to levying the tax, not the material foundations of taxation (ie the land). In some cases, Sámi were able to block the arrival of settlers by paying the full siida tax. In others, the establishment of farmsteads against the will of local Sámi was not possible, and settlers who did so without permission were ordered to leave the Sámi territory. Further, the formal status of the land ownership was confirmed in the new land records (socalled 'land books' or cadastral records) that were of great assistance in resolving growing land-use conflicts. In this process, the cadastral system of Sámi tax lands had achieved characteristics that did not formally or materially differ from the property division of the peasantry.
The forestry decree of 1683, which is sometimes argued to have marked a watershed in Sámi land ownership, 43 did not, however, have a major impact on the legal praxis in the Lappmarks. Lands considered belonging to the Sámi on the basis of property rights remained as such. 44 A new directive in 1749 continued to emphasise the distinct livelihoods between the Sámi and settlers, although it actively sought to bolster settlement. 45 The enactment of the settlement ordinances led to the development of a two-tier property regime. Those practicing the so-called Lapp livelihoods belonged to the traditional siidas, and the settler farms established a new village system. This paved the way for the gradual erosion of the Sámi system and further administrative changes imposed upon the siida structure and governance. 46 From the eighteenth century onwards, some Sámi established farms on their tax lands and combined reindeer herding, hunting and fishing with farming as a survival strategy in changing socioeconomic and political circumstances. 47 Church records from the eighteenth and nineteenth century also show that Sámi who had taken up small-scale farming were sometimes registered as non-Sámi settlers. 48 North of Europe and the Legal History of Colonialism' (2015) 3 Comparative Legal History 152; Larsson and Sjaunja (n 5).

The dispossession of the Sámi
Dispossession is a complex, widely used concept in critical theory, particularly in the fields of settler colonial and Indigenous studies. In most straightforward terms, dispossession refers to the historical and contemporary processes of territorial expropriation and to the fact that in addition to being subjugated and oppressed, Indigenous peoples have been deprived of their lands that form the foundation of both their livelihoods and societies. These lands have subsequently become the territorial basis for settler colonial societies. 49 In developing his theory of dispossession, political theorist Robert Nichols has identified a contradiction, or what he calls 'a persistent limitation', at the heart of the concept of dispossession. According to Nichols, 'since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very property and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine'. 50 This ambiguity has sometimes resulted in dismissals of Indigenous claims to their own territories on the basis of supposed 'indefensibility' of Indigenous peoples' claims to 'original ownership'. 51 Indigenous peoples have been criticised for making contradictory, untenable claims that, on the one hand, argue that they are the original owners of the land that has been stolen, and on the other hand, that the land cannot be owned by anybody individually or collectively, let alone have exclusive property rights to it. 52 If ideas of land ownership and land as property have been historically alien to Indigenous peoples, the challenge goes, how can they claim for prior ownership or title to their territories?
To counter this apparent contradiction, Nichols sets out to establish an alternative conception of dispossession, applicable to the Anglophone world. He reconstructs dispossession as a process that creates previously non-existent property rights that are simultaneously negated. As a result, 'the dispossessed come to "have" something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another'. 53 This type of dispossession amalgamates the distinct processes of 'propertisation' and theft by creating property out of non-property relations and transferring the title of this newly created property to settlers or the settler state. In this process, the dispossessed are considered as 'original owners' only retroactively. This, according to Nichols, is the peculiarity of dispossession: 'theft is the mechanism and means by which property is generated'. 54 Nichols' theorising of dispossession illuminates the complexity of the concept and highlights the fact that in certain historical circumstances, dispossession is not only about expropriation of territories but also a simultaneous process of property creation. As he suggests, his conceptualisation will no doubt offer new avenues and tools to understand and critique colonialism, capitalism and property relations. As is clear from the discussion above, however, the Sámi case of dispossession does not follow the contours of Nichols' theory of dispossession (which he does not seek to universalise and is very clear about his focus on the Anglophone world).
The act of dispossessing the Sámi of their territories did not create propertyit already existed. In short, historical Sámi dispossession has a different trajectory. Instead of 'propertisation' as in Nichols' theory, the opposite takes place: in addition to the unmistakable theft of land, Sámi dispossession involves the racialisation of the Sámi from propertied individuals into a collective of 'primitive nomads'. This paved the way to the establishment of the modern, colonial property-law regime that excluded the Sámi.
In the nineteenth century, Sámi land ownership had been gradually eroding and many Sámi had been dispossessed of their land rights by settlers and the Crown. The Lapp tax lands were now regarded as grants of Crown land and the 1886 Reindeer Grazing Act stipulated that Lappmarks were to be used collectively by reindeer herders. 55 Sámi dispossession was indeed dispossession in the literal or conventional sense of the concept: not only was there prior Sámi possession of land, but also Sámi ownership had long been recognised and upheld by the Crown district court system.

Seismic historical shifts and the racialisation of the Sámi
In the nineteenth century, there was a radical transformation of the legal position and authorities' perception of the Sámi. Legal scholar Kaius Tuori notes that Sámi who previously had been considered as land-owning individuals on par with the peasants were, by the mid-nineteenth century, reconstructed as a 'primitive people' without land rights. 56 Sámi territories were now fully regarded as Crown land and distributed to settlers. It is true that Sámi dispossession was a representative case of Indigenous dispossession of the nineteenth century in which agrarian settlers displaced peoples racialised as nomads (the Sámi people) and the process relied on similar ideological justifications and policies as elsewhere. 57 Tuori is mistaken, however, to suggest that as a historical process, Sámi dispossession was identical to other Indigenous peoples. Such an argument ignores the historical Sámi land ownership and individual property rights that preceded Sámi dispossession. 55 Lundmark (n 2). 56 Tuori (n 41).

Ibid.
Tuori is correct to suggest that the ideologies of progress and civilisation offer a more ubiquitous rationale behind Indigenous dispossession than international law and sovereignty arguments, which have only a limited bearing on cases outside the United States of America. As part of a new land-use legislation debated in Sweden and Norway in the 1850s, the Sámi were represented as a nomadic people without a concept of ownership. The new view of the Sámi was based on the emerging evolutionary and racial 'theories' promulgating the inferiority and savagery of non-settler populations. Lockean views of property rights that fused land ownership with agriculture and labour became dominant also in the Nordic discourse and Sámi policy. As Tuori suggests, the Sámi were 'aboriginalised' because Sámi did not cultivate their land, they were no longer regarded as owners of their territories. 58 The new view of the Sámi as an inferior race destined to disappear was driven by multiple factors, ranging from economic and population growth (growing need for natural resources) to rising ideologies of nationalism and nation-building in Europe. The emergence and development of the doctrine of cultural stages and cultural evolution gained ground. In Scandinavia, this coincided with the district court system losing its influence on the county administration at the turn of the nineteenth century. 59 Discussing the key role of racialisation in settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe makes an important point that 'we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting'. 60 He notes that Blacks were racialised as slaves, and Indigenous peoples in North America as Indians. Similarly, the Sámi were racialised as a collective of wandering nomads in the nineteenth century through discourses that had not been previously prevalent. By racialising the Sámi as either a Mongoloid race or primitive nomad, it was possible to dispossess them of the territories they owned; the ownership of which had previously been meticulously recorded and documented in the Swedish Crown tax and court records.
Racialisation refers to a process of establishing hierarchical human relations and ascribing ethnic or racial identities or meanings to a 'previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group'. 61 While seeking to appear as 'a rationally inevitable normative system that merely sorts human beings into categories of difference', 62 it is a deeply political process for the purposes 58 Ibid. of domination and exclusion. 63 Through racialisation, Indigenous peoples are made to disappear as subjects in a range of ways while non-Indigenous subjectivity and claims to land are established and naturalised with the help of discourses of superiority, civilisation and progress. A common strategy was the construction and imposition of 'ethnic' or 'racial' minority categories that have domesticated Indigenous peoples, erased their status as distinct polities, and equated them with ethnic minorities and/or other racialised groups. 64 Legal theorist Brenna Bhandar notes: Scientific techniques of measurement and quantification, economic visions of land and life rooted in logics of abstraction, culturally inscribed notions of white European superiority, and philosophical concepts of the proper person who possessed the capacity to appropriate (both on the level of interiority and in the external world) worked in conjunction to produce laws of property and racial subjects. 65 The nineteenth century obsession with race and racial hierarchies gained a stronghold in Scandinavia, leading to extensive studies demonstrating how Swedes, Norwegians and Finns belong to the superior Aryan and Germanic races, while the Sámi were seen as a Mongoloid race. 66 Pekka Isaksson noted that Norwegian historian Rudolf Keyser sought in the 1830s to establish Norwegians as the original people of Scandinavia. Keyser argued that the 'Finlaps' (ie the Sámi) 'were nomads without any strength of war' and thus at the lowest scale of development. What followed in the second half of the nineteenth century Norway were intense assimilation policies seeking to eliminate Sámi language and culture, considered not only primitive but 'foreign' together with the Kven, descendants of Finnish migrants in Finnmark. 67 Assimilation policies were deepened by state-sponsored settlement of northern regions of Norway and Sweden in the second half of the nineteenth century. 68 The Swedish government 'gave away substantial parts of the Saami people's traditional land to non-Saami settlers as if no Saami population existed in the areas. Between 1800 and 1890, the non-Saami population in the Saami traditional territories quadrupled'. 69 While Sámi lost their rights to their tax lands individually and collectively, freeholding peasants gained stronger property rights. 70 If the Sámi had received the same right to their tax land as peasants did, it would have made settlement very difficult, if not impossible. 71 The Sámi title and rights to land were not considered in the process of land division and partition (avvittringen in Swedish), an agricultural land reform in the Kingdom of Sweden that began in southern Sweden in the seventeenth century. The reform reached the South Sámi territories in Jämtland in the mid-eighteenth century and ended in the northern parts of Sápmi in 1925. Only farmstead titles to land were recognised, and the rest were registered as state land. 72 In Sweden, the racialisation of the Sámi as a culturally and mentally inferior, nomadic race took the form of a policy known as 'Lapp should remain Lapp', meaning that Sámi should remain as reindeer herders and kept separate from the ethnic Swedes. On the one hand, the Sámi were not considered able to survive in the 'civilized society', and on the other hand, mixing the two races was deemed undesirable. 73 As a result, reindeer herding Sámi were prohibited from attending Swedish schools, receiving higher education, or pursuing other livelihoods. The non-reindeer herding Sámi, on the other hand, were not seen as 'real' Sámi and thus were targeted for assimilation and integration into Swedish society. Until today, no justification has been provided by the Swedish state for the expropriation of Sámi territories or the loss of Sámi legal rights to their lands, beyond racialised arguments about the inability of an inferior nomadic culture to acquiring title to land. In 1922, the Swedish Parliament took a decision to establish the State Institute for Racial Biology to study 'racial science'. Among the research priorities was the study of negative effects of 'race mixing' between Swedes, Finns and Sámi (the latter two were considered 'lower races'). The Institute closed in 1958 but the study of race and genetics continued in other research institutions and universities. See Martin Ericsson, 'What Happened to "Race" in Race Biology? The Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, 1936Biology, -1960Biology, ' (2000 46 Scandinavian Journal of History 125. 74 Åhrén (n 3).
In Finland, the transfer to Russia in 1809 (as a 'grand duchy' from 1809 to 1917) led to the destruction of taxation and other records pertaining to Sámi tax lands. This led to the confiscation of the Sámi territories by the state, notwithstanding that the Sámi continued to pay annual land taxes as siidas until 1924. 75 In 1886, for example, Finland enacted a forest statute that provided that in the North, forests beyond the vicinity of siidas or villages, were now considered state property. 76

IV. Differing conceptions of and relations to land
It has become an axiom that settler colonialism introduced and imposed a new conception of and relation to land, that of individual and private ownership of tracts of land with clearly delineated boundaries. If this held true among all Indigenous peoples worldwide, it would place the Sámi in an interesting predicament: they would have adopted a settler colonial conception of and relation to land prior to the arrival of the settlers to their territories in the seventeenth century, and also prior to Locke's theories of property and individual autonomy. Obviously, this is not possible either theoretically or in actuality.
How can the Sámi case of individual property rights expand our understanding of concepts of Indigenous ownership of land, individual property and dispossession? First, we need to acknowledge the multiple, even conflicting uses of the term 'land ownership', a complex concept that has different meanings in the past and present. Today, we commonly use the term to denote land as commodity, exchangeable property and a means for accumulation of capital. The substance of the concept of land ownership was, however, different in the seventeenth century Sámi society, where land existed almost entirely outside exchange and was not typically regarded as someone's wealth. Further, it was only toward the end of the nineteenth century when the idea of property rights as absolute and exclusive was consolidated. Prior to that, conceptions of ownership were much more varied also within the Nordic law and judicial system. 77 Second, settler colonial theory needs to note the specific historical circumstances in different geopolitical locations. Property right is one of the foundational concepts in the long history of the Nordic legal order. The right to property was developed by independent peasants, based on free occupation of available land; so-called odal ownership right in which the purpose of land has been to guarantee the peasant a continuous subsistence received from fields, forest and cattle rather than money. Korpijaakko-Labba notes that this has not 75 Kaisa Korpijaakko-Labba, Saamelaiset ja maanomistusoikeus: Maaverotus, maanluonnot, uudisasutus ja metsälainsäädäntö Lapinmaassa 1500-luvulta 1700-luvun puoliväliin, vol 2 (Sámi Instituhtta 1985) 71. 76 In 1931, a Finnish governmental committee further decided that 'all land in the north not belonging to farmers belonged to the Finnish state' (Komiteanmietintö 7/1931). 77 Paasto (n 17). been foreign to the Sámi or some other Indigenous peoples. 78 As an example, she provides two distinct ways in which Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu discusses the concept of land ownership. Menchu describes how in her community, land was allotted to family tracts and regarded as being owned by individual families. Yet the meaning of the concept of ownership changes when colonial landlords came in to subjugate her people and their lands under the control of a new land ownership system. In this system, land was seen as commodity to be accumulated and a means to yield power over other people.
In common discourses of Indigenous peoples' relationship with their land, private property has deeply negative connotations. When we understand private property in contemporary terms through neoliberal ideologies and practices of commodification and privatisation of commonly or collectively held or owned assets, including Indigenous lands, negative connotations by Indigenous people seeking to protect their territories are understandable. But negative views of private property go beyond neoliberalism and are often bolstered by arguments that private property is antithetical to Indigenous conceptions of and relationships with land. If Indigenous peoples were considered owning their territories and resources, the argument goes, the nature of ownership or property rights was collective or communal, not individual.
Considering the general willingness of the Sámi to employ the Crown court system for their own benefit, one could conclude that historically, Sámi understandings of land ownership corresponded to those of non-Sámi peasants. At the very minimum, Sámi were willing to adopt them as much as necessary to serve their needs (ie 'play their game'). In this sense, Sámi land rights and ownership arguably fell within the category that we today consider 'Western', ie individual ownership rights that facilitate personal autonomy. 79 Instead, the traditional Sámi understanding of the world has been deeply relational and interdependent with the land, evident in ceremonial and everyday practices of reciprocating with the natural environment and non-human beings. 80 The historical Sámi interdependence with the land is also evident in the fact that even though the Sámi individually owned their territories, they did not 78 Korpijaakko-Labba (n 7) 60. 79 Taken to the extreme, these rights arguably enable a person to do whatever they want with their property, including squandering it. Obviously destroying, selling or even altering one's land would have been not only foolish but also catastrophic for people who receive their livelihood entirely from the land. Joseph Singer challenges this prevailing under- conceive of land as a commodity to be bought or sold. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, individual Sámi rarely sold their tracts of land to another Sámi and the occasional transactions were to non-Sámi settlers. 81 While the Sámi were part of the Crown regime of private property in land (on par with non-Sámi peasants), it was not a regime based on or created by expanding needs and intensive agricultural production for the market. The Sámi had adopted the regime of private property in order to protect their livelihoods and forms of land use, not to establish a political society in the Lockean sense, for which the private property regime created by agriculture is the necessary foundation. 82 The Sámi dispossession differed from that of the Indigenous peoples in what is now known as the Anglophone world. In the former, dispossession did not signify the creation of property or property relationsthey already existed. Sámi dispossession signified a deliberate process of racialisation into a lower level of cultural development and an uncivilised group of nomads who did not cultivate their lands (even though some Sámi had taken up farming as a way of surviving and/or securing their land ownership). As Wolfe notes, employing agriculture as a means to justify dispossession and settler colonialism does not mean Indigenous peoples did not farm. 83 Regardless of their actual livelihoods, settler colonial discourse routinely represents Indigenous peoples as unsettled and nomadic, while agriculture serves as a powerful signifier of settler colonial identity.
There is one more unique characteristic in Sámi dispossessionthat of permanence. Here we need a recourse to Wolfe who, discussing the Cherokee removal, asks, who are they that settler colonialism seeks to eliminate? He points out that 'the factor that most antagonized the Georgia state government … was not actually the recalcitrant savagery of which Indians were routinely accused, but the Cherokee's unmistakable aptitude for civilization'. 84 As one of the 'Five Civilized Tribes' together with the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole, the most vexing for the state and federal authorities was the fact that 'the Cherokee's farms, plantations, slaves and written constitution all signified permanence'. 85 The settler colonial solution was to disenfranchise them from their tribes through the 1887 General Allotment Act. In the same way, the Sámi individual ownership of land symbolised permanence. But unlike the tribal lands in the United States of America, Sámi territories were not collectively owned and unlike Native Americans, the Sámi were not, to use Wolfe's term, 'the original communist menace'. 87 Because of these differences, what needed to happen in the Sámi case, was the opposite to the Five Civilized Tribes: rather than becoming 'individuals', the Sámi had to be 'aboriginalised' in the (pejorative) settler colonial sense (collectivised in the lower rungs of development), in order for them to be removed from individual proprietorship of their lands. As unsettled nomads (irrespective of their form of subsistence), their ownership to land was first collectivised and 'usufructurised', and eventually eliminated. This paved way to 'the emergence of a modern racial regime of ownership', the establishment of property law that justifies and naturalises dispossession by racialising those considered unsuited to own property. 88 The examination of Sámi dispossession expands our understanding of the ways in which dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands took different forms in different geopolitical locations, historical contexts and circumstances. It also contributes to the critical analysis of settler colonial processes of racialising Indigenous peoples and to the growing recognition and theories of producing racialised Indigenous subjects through colonial concepts, ideologies and practices of property and property law. This is not to suggest conflating racialisation and colonisation, which is frequently employed to eliminate Indigeneity, Indigenous self-determination, territoriality and on-going forms of dispossession. 89 Rather, it is an opening to further explore the role of Indigenous peoples in 'the constitutive relationship between property law and racial subjectivity'. 90

V. Conclusion
This article has considered early Sámi land ownership in light of settler colonialism and specifically, the concept of dispossession. Detailed legal historical scholarship of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century archival tax and court records of the Swedish Crown has shown not only that in many areas of the Sámi territory, the Sámi unequivocally owned their tracts of lands as individual property but that this ownership was recognised and actively upheld by the Crown court system on par with non-Sámi peasants' land ownership. The Sámi paid the land tax for their territories in the same manner as peasants, yet by the nineteenth century, they were fully dispossessed of their property rights. I have argued that the Sámi dispossession, although a gradual process, was completed through racialisation, a deliberate process of transforming the Sámi from being individual land owners and rights holders to a culturally and mentally inferior, nomadic race in order 87 Ibid. 88 Bhandar (n 65) 6. 89 Byrd (n 64); Bhandar (n 65). 90 Bhandar (n 65) 21.
to access their territories needed for the rapidly growing settlement and consolidation of emerging nation-states' authority and control.
Another central goal of this article has been to advance and expand the theory of Indigenous dispossession. If we are to make use of settler colonial theory in the Nordics and explain historical and present circumstances of the Sámi people in Scandinavia, the theory needs to acquire further nuance to have explanatory power beyond the standard cases of settler colonial states and their strategies of dispossession. Some scholars have suggested that Sámi dispossession followed the same trajectory as that of other Indigenous peoples. This is only partly correct in that like other Indigenous peoples, the Sámi lost the title and ownership rights to their lands. It is incorrect in that as a historical process, Sámi dispossession was the opposite to that of other Indigenous peoples. In most cases, Indigenous peoples have held title to their lands collectively, property rights inhering in the tribes and/or communities. In many Anglophone settler colonial contexts, the collective title was at least vestigially recognised in the signed treaties between the settler states (or Crown) and Indigenous peoples. In the Sámi case, the recognition of Sámi title to land was completely eliminated by the emerging states.
Theories of Indigenous dispossession have also addressed the ambiguity at the base of the concept that sometimes takes the form of a question: how can Indigenous peoples be regarded as owners of their lands or having been dispossessed of their lands if they historically did not have a concept of land ownership? Engaging with this apparent contradiction, Nichols suggests that in the Anglophone world, Indigenous dispossession combines processes of theft and 'propertisation' or establishing property out of non-property relations, and immediately transfers ownership to settlers or the settler state. Indigenous peoples are seen as owners of their territories only retroactively. Thus, according to Nichols, at the core of Indigenous dispossession is a process in which property is generated through theft. Nichols' theory of dispossession does not, however, describe Sámi dispossession. While there certainly was theft, there was no process of propertisation because Sámi already held property rights as individuals to their lands. In Sámi dispossession, the reverse took place: creating non-property relations out of individual property through a process of racialisation and 'aboriginalising' the Sámi.

Acknowledgement
The author thanks Dr Juha Karhu, Heikki Hyvärinen, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).