(In)visible presences and (dis)continuities in a colonized Saami linguistic landscape - Returning from invisibility in a settler-colonial village

TimeSpaces referred to as the the postcolony (Deumert, 2022) in the geopolitical South, are haunted by their colonial past, which leeks into the present and the future. Saepmie (the Saami land overlapping Sweden and Norway), located in the far North, constitutes such a TimeSpace. Colonial presences dominate the LL and high-colonialism haunts the very contemporary Indigenous moment (Kroik, Huuva, & Milani, Forthcoming). Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the way a minority language rights discourse impacts public spaces. Furthermore, it explores tensions arising as the Indigenous Saami reclaim, revitalize and restore their with the land, a process called Indigenous efflorescence (Roche, Maruyama, & Virdi Kroik, 2018). Methodology involves multiple epistemologies and a phenomenological method in conjoint with material ethnography. Orders of visibility (Kerfoot & Hyltenstam, 2017) guides the analysis of a ‘rural’ LL in the heartlands of Saepmie. Striking absences of Saami toponyms and language on ‘signs’ create and reify what Kroik et al. (Forthcoming) analyzed as a cultural terra nullius created in Saepmie. The perspective of Indigenous efflorescence guides our gaze towards cracks in the in settler-colonial landscape; cracks, in which an indigenous Saami linguistic landscape visualizes to anyone equipped an decolonial gaze.