The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [112]
The Sámi Situation
Europeans are fascinated by their Sámi. Long after great cities had spread across Germany and France, the Sámi were still living in tents, migrating with their reindeer, living off the land by fishing, trapping, and hunting. Their mystic, highly spiritual culture is permeated with ties to the natural world, expressed in beautiful chanted songs called joiks. Furthermore, they are white. Unlike most northern aboriginals, they have a European rather than Mongol origin. Many Sámi have fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. This is partly due to centuries of mingling with Nordics, but genetically, the Sámi are much closer relatives of Basques than of Inuit.
Today, about seventy thousand Sámi live in “Sápmi,” their ancestral homeland stretching across northern Fennoscandia (see map on pp. x-xi). But Sápmi today is chopped up into four bits owned by Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. It is dismembered.
The Sámi population can never form a single collective political unit within a country, as has happened in Canada and Greenland. Traditional reindeer herding, which moved animals all around Sápmi, is difficult or impossible. Also ethnic Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, and Russians have moved in, bringing industrial development, land privatization, and the loss of grazing and hunting grounds. With four different court systems to navigate, the collective ability of the Sámi to mount legal challenges to such encroachment is dissipated and constrained. And unlike what happened in North America and Greenland, none of the four governments are signaling any possibility of a sweeping land claims agreement, or a new Sápmi state, or individual home rules for each fragment.
However, there are differences among the four countries. Since 1989 Norway, Sweden, and Finland have introduced elected Sámi parliaments, whereas Russia has not. These parliaments are politically weak, serving mainly as forums and advisors to their central governments, but they do provide a voice for the Sámi. Norway’s parliament, being the oldest and largest, is most consequential of the three.
Also, when it comes to sticking up for aboriginal rights under international law, Norway is one supportive NORC. It was the first country in the world to ratify International Labour Organization Convention 169, thus committing the Norwegian government to preserving its aboriginal people, cultures, and languages through deliberate action (later, Denmark also ratified this ILO treaty). Norway was also one of five NORCs to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.474 In part to meet its obligations under these laws, Norway passed a sort of pseudo land claims law, called the Finnmark Act, in 2005. While not specific to Sámi people, it did transfer land ownership from the Norwegian government to its largest and northernmost county, where the population is about 34% Sámi.475
While weak by North American standards the Finnmark Act is about as good as it gets in this part of the world. Similar trends are not apparent in Sweden, Finland, or Russia. None of these countries have ratified ILO Convention 169, nor is there any talk of land claims settlements. In Lapland, Sámi complain of imposters stealing their culture, wearing fake clothes, and butchering their language for tourists.476 The Sámi situation is most depressing in Russia, where a small population of two thousand has little to look forward to.
Trapped on the Kola Peninsula—the militarized, industrialized heart of the Russian North—they are mostly unemployed with no parliament. What few reindeer herders remain complain of grazing lands privatized and closed, and horrid environmental pollution from mining, smelting, and leaking radiation from old nuclear reactors. Russian soldiers sometimes shoot their animals to eat or for fun.477 Snared in poverty, lacking land tenure, and with no political voice,