Northern Saami

The Saami are the indigenous people of northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula.

Saami Origins: 10,000 BCE-500 CE

Until about 10,000 years ago, all of Scandinavia was under ice. As the Ice Age ended, people began to move north and settle these previously glacier-covered lands. The first signs of human habitation in Scandinavia are found in western Norway: the Fosna culture and the Komsa Stone Age culture beginning around 8000 BCE and 6000 BCE respectively (Simms). Both cultures were hunter-gatherers (Gaski & Weinstock). It is believed that the Komsa culture spread from the Uralic region; a trail of Komsa cultural artifacts link this Scandinavian people back to their origins in "central and Uralic Russia." Linguistic evidence lends more credence to this theory: Saami languages and modern Uralic languages share a common ancestor. Researchers speculate that these Komsa people are the ancestors of the Saami (Simms).

Saami myths tell of a two-part migration from the north and the south (Gaski & Weinstock). Image: Spirit Boat.

The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (55-117 CE) provides the first written account of the Saami (or Fenni, as he calls them) in his work Germania:

The Fenni live in astonishing barbarism and disgusting misery: no arms, no horses, no household; wild plants for their food, skins for their clothing, the ground for their beds; arrows are all their hopes; for want of iron they tip them with sharp bone. This same hunting is the support of the women as well as of the men, for they accompany the men freely and claim a share of the spoil; nor have their infants any shelter against wild beasts and rain, except the covering afforded by a few intertwined branches. To these the young men return: these are the asylum of age; and yet they think it happier so than to groan over field labour, be cumbered with building houses, and be for ever involving their own and their neighbors' fortunes in alternate hopes and fears. Unconcerned towards men, unconcerned towards Heaven, they have achieved a consummation very difficult: they have nothing even to ask for.

The Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea (490-562 CE) referred to the Saami as Scrithiphini (Gk. Skriqifinoi), or "skiing Finns." The Northern Saami had introduced skiing to Scandinavia centuries before (Simms).

 

Early Exploitation

Alfred the Great, King of Wessex from 871 until his death in 899, was a great proponent of translating Latin works into Old English. One of these works, OrosiusHistory Against the Pagans, recounts the story of a Norse explorer named Ohthere who exacted tribute from the Saami:

Ohthere was a very wealthy man in those possessions in which their wealth consists, that is in wild animals; yet he had, when he came to visit King Alfred six hundred beasts unsold (they call these beasts reindeer); six of them were trained as decoys; they were highly prized among the Lapps because with them they capture wild reindeer. Ohthere was among the foremost men of that land; yet he did not have more than twenty head of cattle, and twenty sheep, and twenty pigs; and the little that he ploughed, he ploughed by horses. But their revenue is greatest in the tribute which the Lapps pay to them. That tribute consists of the skins of animals and the feathers of birds and the bones of whales and in ships' cables, which are made from the skins of whales and seals. A man of the highest rank has to contribute the skins of fifteen martens and five reindeer and one bear and forty bushels of feathers and a tunic made of bearskin or otterskin and two ships' cables; both must be sixty ells long; they must be made either of whaleskin or of sealskin. 

Already, the Saami were being taken advantage of by colonizers (Simms). As other groups began to spread throughout Scandinavia, the Saami were too scattered and disorganized to resist them. The Saami were forced to abandon reindeer hunting and take up reindeer herding in order to produce the sizeable tribute demanded by the Norwegians (Gaski & Weinstock). 

 

A Sami shaman

A Saami shaman "communicating with his attending spirit." Christian missionaries confiscated shamans' drums; they believed the drums were evil instruments for communicating not with an "attending spirit," but with the Devil. Drawing: Samuel Rheen, from A kortt Relation about Lapp Arnes Lefwarne och Sedher, wijdskiepellsser, sampt in många Stycke Grofwe wildfarellsser (1617). Source: "Myths: Notions of Sami Witchcraft." The Northern Lights Route. University Library of Tromsø, 1999. Web.

Christianity, Conversion, and Suppression

In the 17th century, the combined forces of the Swedish Empire and the Swedish Church forced the Saami to hand over shaman drums and religious symbols. Those who refused were killed; some were burned alive along with their drums (Woodard). Serious missionary efforts in Norway didn't begin until the 18th century (Gaski & Weinstock). In 1716, missionary Thomas von Westen supposedly converted over one thousand Saami during his first visit to Finnmark (Woodard). In the 1840s, many Saami began converting to Laestadianism, a movement rooted in Lutheran Christianity. It encouraged believers to accept oppression in this life and focus on the reward of heaven (Eiermann). At the end of the 19th century, the Norwegian government ruled that only Norwegian could be spoken in schools and rewards were given to teachers who most effectively "Norwegianized" their Saami students (Gaski & Weinstock).

In the 19th and early 20th century, Saami children were sent to Norwegian boarding schools, where speaking in their indigenous language was forbidden (Eiermann). The goal of these schools was to introduce a nationalistic worldview; the Saami were expected to forget their Saami identities and become, first and foremost, Norwegians. Boarding schools continued to be a part of Saami life until the 1960s, when a Saami movement began demanding educational reform (Partida).

 

Exploitation and Assimilation

After the German-Norwegian war of 1940, Germans occupied northern Norway for four years. Adolf Hitler wanted to seize control of the rich iron deposits in Scandanavia to "fuel the Nazi war machine." German forces retreated in 1944, burning down residences, schools, churches, and fishing boats as they went. Thousands of Saami were forced to flee south. Many were forced to assimilate into the Norwegian culture and language as they attempted to adapt to an industrialized society (Sommer).

Because of this industrialization, it was no longer profitable to run a family farm or be a fisherman, and many Saami had to abandon their previous lifeways to find work in industry (Eiermann).

German infantry in a burning Norwegian village on April 1, 1940. Wikimedia Commons.

In the aftermath of World War II, attitudes towards the Saami became more accepting. With the UN's declaration of human rights in 1948 and civil and political rights in 1966, the Saami began to be recognized as an ethnic and linguistic minority to be valued instead of dismissed and discarded. After a long history of exploitation and oppression, the Saami have begun to reclaim what has been lost (Gaski & Weinstock).