Kirkenes is a small town with a population of around 3,000 people on the shore of the Barents Sea, on the Norwegian side of the Norwegian-Russian borderland. It hosted its first Pride event in 2017, Barents Pride. The history of this Pride, which we as authors attended in 2018, is a tale of diverse lineages of queer and indigenous resistance coming together in solidarity.
Kirkenes is a place of contested geographies. It is part of the Barents Region, a regional cooperation initiative comprising the northernmost parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland and the north-western corner of Russia. The region was established in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a strategy to renew and maintain a political dialogue as well as socio-economic relations between Nordic countries and Russia. Kirkenes is also in Sápmi, the land of the indigenous Sámi population, covering northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, many tourists from Russia visited Kirkenes regularly.
Barents Pride was initiated by an LGBTI+ activist from the Russian side of the Barents region. The Pride’s intention was to bring LGBTI+ activists from Norway and Russia as well as people from Kirkenes together in an act of transnational solidarity with queer people in Russia who since the late 2000s experienced increasing pressure from the state. In 2013, the Russian Parliament (State Duma) approved the so-called “gay propaganda” bill – a notorious piece of legislation that forbade the dissemination of information about same-sex relations among minors. The “anti-propaganda” legislation officially marked the launch of political homophobia in Russia that consequently led to the increase of hate and violence against queer people in the country.
The Pride weekend we attended started with a ‘Rainbow Mass’ in the Kirkenes Church of Norway. Three people led the mass – Nadia, the Russian activist who initiated Barents Pride the year before; Máijá, a Sámi laywoman and reindeer herder; and Magnus, a local pastor from the Church. These people came to the Rainbow Mass through quite different paths.
Nadia initiated the inclusion of the mass in the program of Barents Pride, to show to attending Russian LGBTI+ activists that the Church as a religious institution could be accepting and welcoming to queer people. This idea was in stark contrast with their experience from Russia, where the dominant Russian Orthodox Church allied with the state in homophobic campaigns against LGBTI+ people.
Magnus, the local pastor, took an active role in organising the Rainbow Mass upon the Pride organisers’ invitation. In turn, he invited Máijá, the Sámi laywoman, to be part of the mass. In his view, the Rainbow Mass – and a Sámi presence in it – was in itself an important event for helping to create acceptance for non-heterosexual forms of life in the region, among families and in the parish. Thus, at least symbolically, the mass brought together past and present struggles of indigenous communities and of queer people in the region.
The Rainbow Mass was held in three languages – Norwegian, Russian, and Sámi. The mass attendees prayed for people who lived through oppression and state violence – queer people who were increasingly attacked by the Russian government as well as Sámi people who experienced violence from the Norwegian state throughout history. After the mass, we as researchers continued to think about these connected histories of struggle against state violence. Mia was reminded about the feelings of shame among the older generations in her own family history, which had erased their connections to the Sámi heritage. Eager to learn more about the Sámi revitalisation process in the area, Mia decided to travel back to Kirkenes to talk with Marcus and Máijá, two of the mass organisers.
From them, she learned about the harsh assimilation process enacted by the Norwegian state over the Sámi community for more than 100 years, from the early nineteenth century until the 1980s. The so-called Norwegianisation process was executed in the educational system and other public institutions. During this process, among other things, Sámi children were taken from their parents and put in schools where they were not allowed to speak their mother tongue. Historically, the Norwegian church was one of the actors who carried out the worst abuses towards the Sámi people in Norway.
It was in 1993, the year the Barents Region was established, when the Secretary General of the Sámi Church Council, an organ of the church of Norway responsible for Sámi church life, encouraged Máijá to attend a network meeting, organised by the United Nations in Geneva, against racism for minority women in Europe. After her return home, Máijá assembled a group of interested women in the area and asked them what they wanted to do to strengthen their connection to the Sámi heritage, culture and tradition.
All answered unanimously that they wanted to sing – sing the hymns that they had been listening to and singing as children at home. As the Norwegianisation process had banned everything Sámi – language, traditions, and culture – these women hadn’t heard these hymns for a long time. Hymn singing is now recognised by people in the region as having played an important part in the Sámi revitalisation project.
The activity of singing hymns in Sámi started in 1996 and continued until 2006, when the women involved became too old to continue. But Máijá and her group had set the goal to make the institution of the church responsible for keeping up the presence of Sámi language and cosmology in church services. Different from the Christian creation story, which many theologians build on, in which the human is described to master nature and to submit nature under their powers, Sámi cosmology is rooted in the idea of nature as having subjectivity, and sees the relationship between nature and human as a mutual encounter.
The Norwegian Church Council is now taking a more active position in relation to this and expects all members of congregations in the north to include Sámi in their masses and learn about Sámi theology/cosmology. The activity of keeping church services in Sámi has not only revitalised the Sámi community in the church but also had a broader effect on the whole municipality. Many people have begun to don the traditional Sámi clothing during festive events. Others have explicitly recognised their belonging to an indigenous group or other minority populations in the city, such as Kvens.
Importantly, struggles among Sámi for their right to the land, culture, and self-determination are far from being over, as our interlocutors underline. Yet, within a complex and contentious history of colonial erasures, the collective performance of religious ritual and hymn singing has inspired cross-generational exchanges in the area and a sense of pride in Sámi language and heritage.
In this story, what made the 2018 Barents Pride take off in the local church in Kirkenes was the community building work that had begun twenty-five years earlier. The collaboration between Máijá, Magnus, and many others in their struggle for addressing and challenging state violence and reversing colonial processes resulted in a praxis of solidarity that was then extended to queer people in Russia upon Nadia’s initiative. Initially, tensions emerged in the organisation of Barents Pride between organisers located in the south of Norway and local activists in the region, on both the Norwegian and Russian side. Nonetheless, during the Pride’s second year, these tensions were dissipating, due to a stronger involvement of activists from the region in collaboration with the local church and the Sámi community, through which the idea of queer solidarity broadened to include multiple axes of violence and oppression in the region.
The intersectional nature of these solidarities – across boundaries of sexuality, ethnicity and nationality – owes its depth to the compound history of the place, the complex role of religion, and the problematic relationship of Sámi people to the Norwegian church and the settler colonial state. As a result of the process of Norwegianisation, often led by the Norwegian church in the area, many people in the region felt shame, and still do, sensing that they are “not good enough, not Norwegian enough, not Christian enough, never enough”, as Magnus the pastor explains it.
Yet, the historically strong presence of social movements, both workers’ movements and religious revivalist movements, have been crucial for the vitality and sense of community in the region. Because of these deep and intersecting traditions of struggling for rights – as a worker in relation to a capitalist corporation, and as a Sámi community member in relation to the settler colonial state – the Norwegian church today takes an explicit stand in solidarity with Sámi and LGBTI+ communities. Through time and persistent commitment, participants of these divergent solidarity projects developed a culture of working together. This involves not only contentious politics in the form of public protest or a Pride parade, but also mundane, seemingly apolitical work – such as hymn-singing and holding mass in Sámi in the case of Kirkenes.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, much collaboration in sports, education, and cross-border mobility between Norway and Russia in the Barents region has been suspended. Yet, the Barents Pride and the Rainbow Mass continue “against the backdrop of war and the threat of closed borders”. Three years ago, the Pride organisers introduced a new activity – Pride participants picketed Russia’s state-led homo- and transphobia at the cross-border point between Norway and Russia. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, anti-war messages have regularly appeared at the annual border protest. In these times when anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles are ongoing in Ukraine, Palestine and beyond, remembering the transformative potential of long-term solidarity work can help activists and activist-researchers to sustain their resilience and hope for transnational social justice.