When the land speaks back: Hauntings, Return and Saami presence in a colonised linguistic landscape

In the colonized Saepmie, the land of the Indigenous Saami people, the South Saami language was supressed and nearly lost. Although South Saami has held official status as a minority language in Sweden for over 20 years, Saami language only hold marginal space in society. Against this backdrop, I investigate the Linguistic landscape of the settler-colonial village Borgafjäll, in the southern part of Saepmie. As a Saami person and learner, speaker and advocate for the South Saami language, I employ my lived experiences and my ways of seeing, being in and sensing the nearly invisible Saami spaces in the settler-colonial landscape. I explore hauntings, i.e. how also Saami non-living sociotemporally evasive entities as stance takers affect my emotions and my perception of the linguistic landscape. I also investigate how material and ghost ethnographies tease out how monolingual signs create voids and absences that speak of lost futures that could have been. Moreover, guided by the concept of Indigenous efflorescence I look into how South Saami emerges anew as linguistic rights, action performed by practitioners of Indigenous efflorescence and a sacred Saami gievrie [drum] (a nonliving actor) co-conspire to reclaim space and envisage a future for the language and its speakers. • Saami language and religion and yoik are returning to visibility after colonisation. • Indigenous worldviews and cosmologies helpful for investigating Linguistic landscapes. • Indigenous studies and ghost ethnography reveal absences in Linguistic landscapes. • Saami language and cosmologies are erased by contemporary settler-colonial practices.