Negative attitudes to the Sámi population among Norway’s majority population is an old phenomenon. “Antisámism” has existed for centuries in Norwegian popular culture, academia, and politics, and remains a challenge today: anti-Sámi attitudes and practices constitute part of the social landscape that modern Sámi must navigate while struggling for self-determination and the survival of Sámi identity, culture, and traditional industries. This paper looks at “antisámism” not as one single ideology or discourse, but rather as a set of several distinct negative views on, and treatments of, the Sámi. The paper clarifies the roots of different types of antisámism – and provides modern examples of Sámi experiences with each of them, based on interviews and media studies. These “genres of antisámism” include Sámi invisibility as a form of structural discrimination; the Sámi as an economic threat to the majority; the Sámi as a lower "race" or lower class; the Sámi as a threat to Norwegian identity; and the Sámi as a security threat to the majority. The paper also sums up the present quantitative knowledge status about Sámi experiences with antisámism, and adds earlier unpublished data from a recent quantitative study.
