I know this is an old thread. A friend tipped me off to a thread about KK, who I have suspected is making false claims to Sámi identity for a while now.
I feel a few words about the loose and spread out descendents of Sámi immigrants to North America is in order.
There are literally thousands of North Americans with Sámi heritage and they are fanned out across the North American continent. They have been loosely organized into groups since the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, with social media, more and more descendents of Sámi immigrants are able to connect and share their stories of a heritage with one another. This heritage was often hidden, mostly due to colonization in Sápmi. Some of them carry real intergeneration trauma and pain that is directly connected to their Sámi ancestors' experiences of cultural duress under colonial regimes. Many of them are great allies to Native Americans and First Nations people and they walk humbly and speak quietly. Many of them have spent countless hours on their genealogies and researching history. The Sámi colonial history is different from North American experiences and the Sámi have their own way of deciding who is and who is not a Sámi, in short, in Sápmi, it is directly tied to the language, how that is formulated depends on each country.
Briefly, the Sámi North American community is tremondously diverse and has fairly limited offical leadership roles. Thus, with the nature of a hidden immigration narrative, historical trauma and the fact that the Sámi don't always "look" stereotypically Indigenous (although some do, and we are pegged in our home countries quite easily by our looks and dialect), Sámi identity in North America is very easily co-opted and exploited. Many people who have been rejected by the Native American/First Nations communities, will then all of a sudden find some long, lost, Sámi ancestor from the homelands and glom onto it. BUT, and this is important, the Sámi American community has traditionally and udnerstandably been open to everyone. There is nothing to gain from Sámi identity in North America in terms of funding or land rights. The stakes are not very high so people have generally just dismissed them or tried to compassionately take into account that some of these people have been mentally ill or lonely.
The vast majority of people with Sámi roots in North America will never be able to travel to the Sámi lands. That does not de-legitimate their claims to identify with a heritage that has been hidden from them due to colonization.
Which leads me to the final issue, and why it is important to call out North American "Sami" frauds, namely: THEY DROWN OUT the legimate voices of those who have real claims to Sámi American belonging. When they start using bizarre claims and co-opting and desecrating our pre-Christian practices and they claim Sámi identity for dubious ends, then they must be called and stopped.
Also, it appears that there are many more of the "unchecked" wannabees in Canada than in the US, perhaps owing to the lack of an organization or offical group that sets some sort of parameters, or due to the limited knowledge of the Sámi and Sámi immigration to Canada.
