This chapter is an email conversation on Sweden’s own colonialism—inside the country as well as overseas—and its historic role and continuing relevance to Sweden. Among the topics that are discussed are the significance of Swedish colonialism within a broader context of European colonialism; how the history, legacies and continuing practices of Swedish colonialism often fail to be recognized in Swedish political and public life; Sweden’s continuing colonization of the Sámi and Sápmi; decolonial Indigenous and Black consciousness among the Sámi and people of African descent in Sweden, the struggles of Sámi and people of African descent in Sweden to correct the public and political lack of recognition of Swedish colonialism and how these struggles are connected to other decolonial and human rights struggles across the world.

During the second half of the 18th century, west of the Forbidden Path – a trail going north from Philadelphia to Seneca territory in New York – Lenape, or Delaware, people faced the offer of conversion extended by Moravian missionaries, while pressured from all sides by European settler colonists. Moravian reports detail everyday activities and relations in Moravian mission towns and Delaware towns which the missionaries visit. Through these records I expand upon forms of dominance and authority within dispersed Lenape communities, and the complications and consequences of their encounter with European settler perceptions and expectations. Production of necessities, extensive diplomatic duties, and an increasingly volatile situation between different nations, Indigenous and European, in the period leading up to the American War of Independence forced all involved to reckon with different and cross-cutting orders of authority which makes it difficult to speak of any one form of dominance.

In 1874, Captain Jack’s riding (Modoc resistance leader) came to the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. How did the whip end up in a glass case in Sweden? What happened along its way across the Atlantic? What significance did it acquire and how did that change over time and space? Borderlands as cross-border relations emphasizes conceptual boundaries, fluidity and multiple identities. The whip twines together a history of colonialism; from its reminder of the Spanish introduction of the horse to its decontextualized enclosure in a museum showcase it offers an entry point for rethinking encounters between Swedes and American Indians.

This article reviews the following work(s):Sanela Bajramovic, Hierarchical sisterhood: Supporting women’s peacebuilding through Swedish aid to Bosnia and Herzegovina 1993–2013, Örebro Studies in History 19 (Örebro: Örebro University 2018). 322 s.