It is uncertain how the future will look, but the Sámi are sure to carve out their place in a climatically and geopolitically altered world.
For 7,000 years, the Sámi people have witnessed changes to their lake-strewn lands at the edge of the Earth. Glaciers have ebbed and flowed, kingdoms have come and gone, and wars have raged and waned, but the Sámi and their reindeer herds have traversed the test of time. Man and animal carry on traditions first represented in rock art carvings dating back to 4200 BC, when the sea level was 26 meters higher and when another 1,500 years would still need to pass before the Great Pyramid of Giza would rise out of the Sahara Desert. Despite this deep-rooted resilience, the past three decades have put an enormous amount of pressure on the Sámi people.
While traveling across the traditional Sámi lands, known as Sápmi, in northern Norway in mid-September 2024 with the Fulbright Arctic Initiative, our group of 30 scholars and practitioners from seven Arctic states heard from Sámi representatives about the dramatic ecological, economic, and geopolitical changes they are facing.
Sápmi was experiencing record high temperatures for this late in the year. On our first night together in Tromsø, we sailed around the city in a breeze more redolent of the South Pacific than the Arctic. On board the hundred-year-old Hermes II, one local told me that the summer had been long and beautiful, but that people were tired of it. If you’re used to leaving work early to go hiking or fishing whenever it’s sunny, once the midnight sun starts to shine for months on end, you start to go a little crazy. Another local, however, admitted to me that they’d had the best summer of their life.
The next day, upon arriving in Alta, a settlement in the interior of northern Norway in a region called Finnmark, we disembarked the plane to another unnervingly balmy evening. At a time when snow should be starting to fall on the mountains, the radio bore news of a “tropical night,” which is when the mercury fails to drop below 20°C (68°F). The next morning, I opened my phone to a “Forest Fire warning.” The worrying message would pop up again each day as we traveled to Karasjok, a municipality at 70°N that is home to the Sámi Parliament of Norway.
Besides making summers warmer, climate change has challenged reindeer herding by making it harder for the herbivores to find food and to cross rivers and lakes that fail to freeze over. Yet not all Sámi are entirely perturbed by global warming. One man we met at a health clinic said that he was fully enjoying the summer as he could chop wood every evening, a practice he found cathartic as much as practical.
The return of war to Sápmi
All the golden rays of northern Norway’s perennial summer are doing little to combat the shadow of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has introduced new disruptions to Sápmi, compounding centuries of chaos that colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism have brought to the reindeer herders’ lands.
At the University of Lapland earlier this week, Rasmus Gjedssjø Bertelsen offered a sober overview of the state of international relations in the Arctic. He argued, “The post-Cold War world of the 1990s is not coming back.” In his view, the circumpolar liberal Arctic order is not returning because there was never any “Arctic exceptionalism” to begin with. Rather than a snow globe safe from the havoc of the rest of the world, instead, he contended, “The Arctic simply reflects the international order.”
The changes that the Arctic has witnessed over the past 30 years are more of a global mirror than foil. When we visited the Sámi Parliament in Karasjok, its leader, Silje Karine Muotka, reflected on the history of war in Sápmi. Kirkenes, the town where she was born in 1975, was the second-most bombed city in Europe in World War II. “We have war experience, and it’s not good,” she underscored. Muokta added, “My upbringing was the Cold War at the time, so everyone was always fearing big weapons, state politics – it affected everything: the way we were thinking, or [what] we did.”
Things got better for a brief period towards the end of the Soviet Union. Looking back on a life bookmarked by wars, Muokta explained, “I also lived as a young person when Gorbachev brought the doctrine of perestroika and glasnost.” The last Soviet premier’s move to open up the country made it possible for the 3,000 Sámi living on the Kola Peninsula in the Soviet Union to meet their brethren in the Nordic countries. Muokta reflected, “It was actually the first time we got to meet each other even though we were living so close. I’m very appreciative of this time. It did challenge us, but it was beautiful to meet other people from the other side of the border.” She added, “It was a pure joy for us to get to reconnect.”
The fall of the Iron Curtain even allowed other sorts of travel and exchange. Muokta shared a story about how her grandparents went for a trip to Moscow and brought back for her a pair of ballet shoes and the best kind of Russian caviar. Such gifts bring to mind ancient histories of Viking-era exchange across Bjarmaland, a region that stretched from the White Sea to the Northern Dvina River.
Another Sámi man we met regaled us with stories of hijinks from a Christmas party that a local company in Karasjok had organized in Murmansk in the 1990s – just because they could. Alcohol was cheap and free-flowing on the Russian side of the open border, and why not check out the biggest city in the entire Arctic? The caviar, too, was plentiful, although apparently, one employee “accidentally” ate the entire bowl of the fish roe that had been placed on the table before anyone else could have a taste of the eggy luxury.
The return of war to Sápmi
Since February 24, 2022, the relative freedoms of movement and exchange that Sámi and other residents of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia enjoyed have come crashing down. On May 23 of this year, Norway finally shut the Storskog border crossing outside Kirkenes to Russian tourists and shoppers. This had been the last open land border between Russia and the Schengen Area.
Worse, though, has been the fate of Sámi in Russia ordered to fight in Ukraine. Muokta stated, “We are fully aware that a part of our people is at war in Russia, on the Russian side.” Putin’s push to conscript people from remote regions of Russia has taken a disproportionate toll on Indigenous Peoples.
At the same time, Sweden and Finland’s inclusion in NATO means that a greater portion of Sápmi is now subject to NATO military exercises. These can interfere with reindeer herding while draining Sámi time and resources. For who does the military ask when they need to know how to move across the tundra in the deep snow of winter or the mosquito-infested bogs of early summer? The Sámi, who have what Muokta called “supreme knowledge” of the region.
The military is also trying to recruit Sámi into their forces, but they need to tread carefully. Some Sámi are asking for the red, green, blue, and yellow Sámi flags to wear with their military uniforms. The Sámi have also begun a collaboration for the first time with the Norwegian Armed Forces in Porsanger, a municipality in Finnmark, by offering an introductory course on their culture. Other Sámi have pushed back against the military’s use of the wolf, considered a predator in Sámi culture, as the insignia of defense battalions carrying out exercises in the region.
Overcoming borders in a nomadic world
Borders are anathema to the semi-nomadic Sámi lifestyle. While reindeer herders were used to moving freely across the undulating terrain for thousands of years, borders have cut and scarred the landscape with fences, walls, radars, and artillery. They restrict grazing lands much in the way that power lines, mines, and wind turbines do, too.
When the Russian border was open in the 1990s and 2000s, Sámi and the other 23 Indigenous reindeer herding people around the world in 13 different countries eagerly embraced the ability to reconnect. They traveled from places like north Norway to eastern Siberia to exchange knowledge, stories, and traditions. In a lavvo (Sámi tent) one evening, Anders Oskal, executive director of the International Centre for Reindeer Husbandry, expressed, “As a reindeer herder, it was always difficult to get homesick – even in the Siberian forest – because you are always around similar people.”
Yet even reindeer herders’ feeling of home has limits. Their grazing lands are wilting under an encroaching sun. Transmission lines are slicing through valleys, powering the Tesla charging stations popping up across the Norwegian petrostate. Turbines are shearing the skies. Sámi from Russia are being thrust into the battlefields of Ukraine. And in a subversive attempt to make concrete cozy, Sámi rock art motifs serves as decoration for airports whose runways have bulldozed long stretches of grazing lands.
The convulsions are immense, but the Sámi are resisting with new techniques. As they have done for the past 7,000 years, the Indigenous Peoples of this northern corner of Europe are adapting. Muokta, the Sámi leader, noted that one of her go-to lines is now: “I’ll see you in court.”
On the side of a road, one Sámi man had built a colorful lavvo. Gray clouds billowed out of the top, where they melded with the sturdy white clouds so characteristic of Scandinavian skies. A colleague and I poked our heads in and met a man smoking reindeer meat. He chatted with us for a while, inviting us to stay the night before he hopped out into his Toyota and sped off. It is uncertain how the future will look, but the Sámi are sure to carve out their place in a climatically and geopolitically altered world.
