under post-workshop review & slated for publication in Biography in winter 2027

By foregrounding the futures that karjalazet (Indigenous Karelians) articulate within mediated life narratives, this article challenges dominant national and archival narratives that circumscribe karjalazet to an unfuturity and consign them to a forever-vanished past. The political rendering of karjalazet as non-Indigenous within Finland’s borders, yet Indigenous to the other half of our homelands in Russia, destabilizes the political recognition of Karelian Indigeneity. This instability shapes the representational conditions of Karelian lives.

Finnish state and cultural mediations overwhelmingly depict karjalazet as disappeared or caricatures. Beginning in the 1800s, nationalist artistic, literary, and political movements appropriated Karelian lifeways and cultural traditions to construct an ancient past for the nascent Finnish nation. In the 1940s, Finland’s military destroyed familial and spiritual archives of karjalažus (Karelian lifeways), sacrificing karjalazet lands as the primary theater of war. Since then, Finnish cultural institutions represent karjalazet by reproducing figures of the evacuees ‘saved’ by Finland—at the expense of any other images of karjalazet in the present or future. Across multiple media, Finnish national archives frame and record Karelian lives through loss, absence, and assimilation. These mediations foreclose the space for imagining and articulating Karelian futures.

Reading amidst and against dispossession, disappearance, and cultural appropriation, I employ a futures-oriented methodology to reveal notions of endurance and futurity in contemporary Karelian life writing. I read the 2025 government-commissioned revitalization report for the endangered Karelian language as well as the responses to two questionnaires about karjalažus as sites where Indigenous futurity is imagined, negotiated, or embedded implicitly. Following Ebony Coletu’s argument that “biographic mediation makes the case for exploring less visible linkages between paperwork and politics,” I approach this official report and these personal testimonies as entwined sites where forms of karjalažus are collected, evaluated, and constrained. Their existing mediation reveals what life writings have been deemed worthy of preservation. Reading these life writings for articulations of Karelian futures actively resists and challenges the accepted pastness of Karelian identities and lifeways.

Taken together, the texts offer a sketch of how karjalazet articulate futures for their community, language, and cultural heritage within a context where Indigenous recognition remains politically fraught. Intervening in life writing studies and global Indigenous politics, the article contributes a methodological intervention for reading small archives for both the politics of mediation and the possibilities of imagining abundant Indigenous futures where official narratives foreclose them.

forthcoming

forthcoming

you can find all nine interviews conducted here.

full-text available here.

“Americans came here to eat our bread!” clamored the new neighbors of North American settlers who immigrated to Karjala to be the “civilizers” of its people and build a utopia for themselves in a new land (Saramo, 6, 23, 67, 122). Reading Building that Bright Future: Soviet Karelia in the Life Writing of Finnish North Americans, however, prompts questions about who would have benefited from and thrived in the “bright future” the settlers envisioned, and for whose peoples, cultures, and lifeways it would have been a death sentence (128). Saramo synthesizes how decades of Finnish nationalist rhetoric, in particular through arts and culture, had ingrained into settlers the notion of Karjala as the “cultural cradle” of a preserved and pure Finnishness (29). Continuing the long-standing geopolitical strategy of claiming Karjala and remaking it in the image of other nations, recruiters inscribed their rhetoric with a moral imperative to “modernize” Indigenous karjalazet (Karelians), vepsläižed (Veps), and Ingrians (6, 29). Reading this utopian project as part of Finnish settler colonialism broadly, Saramo shows how rather than being novel, its roots reached back to seventeenth-century attempts to colonize Turtle Island (6, 20).

Within the broader global context of futures-building efforts that exclude and decimate Indigenous peoples, lands, and more-than-human kin in the pursuit of others’ aspirations, Saramo’s work deepens our collective understanding of the historical and ideological roots underpinning settlers’ utopianist efforts. Her book helps us interrogate the geopolitical rationale provided to justify projects that continue historical injustices and produce further inequities in the futures that ensue. By critically examining the ideologies and geopolitics that made this settlement possible, Saramo does not let us forget who settlers pushed outside the borders of their imagined utopia. If materialized in full, the future that settlers envisioned would have required the increased marginalization and continued assimilation of Karjala’s Indigenous peoples: karjalazet and vepsläižed (29). Engaging with Saramo’s Building that Bright Future prompts readers to consider how we might instead imagine life-sustaining, abundant futures for all people—not only settlers and their states. We can—and for our collective futures, we must—construct worlds capacious enough to sustain the Indigenous peoples of Karjala, our lifeways, and our languages, rather than condemning us to live and die in the pages of history books.

full-text forthcoming

The play “Nimettömiä (Nameless)” interrogates the politics of names, their loss through settler-state legal imposition and forced assimilation, and possibilities for recovering names by queering more-than-human kinship understandings. In Indigenous Karelian culture, we do not call kondieloi (bears) by their species name, using euphemisms like ‘honeyed-palm’ instead. To call bears by their name, particularly on holy days, incurs their wrath as bears are humans’ elders in the forest realm. I juxtapose this hiding of bear names with how we karjalazet (Karelian) humans also had our names disappeared by nation-states. To assimilate us into their citizenship, Finland, Russia, and Sweden hunted karjalazet through the erasures of our language and identities and the appropriation of our culture and customs — which continue today. Using recorded Karelian names for female cows (Kuzmin, “Karjalaisten naisten esikristillinen nimistö Pre-Christian Nomenclature of Karelian Women]”), the last act speculates how Indigenous Karelian women could recover our names by queering what it means to identify as a human versus as a karjalaine — human person, more-than-human animal, or otherwise.

full-text available here.

“Tulevazuksii (Futures)” imagines ways as a karjalaine (Karelian) to build abundant alternative futures for karjalazet (Karelian people). Among many other specific place names, we karjalazet name our Indigenous lands Karjala (Karelia). The current international geopolitical border that separates Russia and Finland cuts its way through Karjala, splitting our peoples in two. As a poetic intervention, “Tulevazuksii” weaves together childhood memories, ancestral knowledge, and everyday acts of resurgence to reclaim one’s own karjalažus (Karelianness, being Karelian). I invert the caricatured descriptions of karjalazet from Finnish popular imagination into a source of subversive strength for our people. I insist on the karjalažus of our language, stories, more-than-human relations, and foodways and foreground the active work needed to ensure futures where karjalažus continues to exist. “Tulevazuksii” serves as both a refusal of assimilation, forgetting ourselves, and forced transparency and a call to the continued work of futures building for karjalazet.