Too many generations of Sami kids have been taken to missionary schools and raised to deny their traditions. It is currently estimated that there are between 80, and , Sami people spread over four countries. Most of them have been urbanised, but there is a substantial amount still living in the traditional Sami villages in the high Arctic. Depending on where they live, each Sami group has distinct differences; from the language there are 10 different Sami languages to the details of their clothing and many of the aspects of their day-to-day lives.
Norway is one of the most tolerant societies in the whole world, welcoming all kinds of people from all ethnicities and religions. In the past, the Sami living in Norway have suffered from discrimination — their traditional religion was condemned as witchcraft, their ritual drums were burned thankfully some can still be found in museums today.
In , the Norwegian parliament passed a bill that allocated the best lands to non-indigenous groups of people. As recently as , the Racial Discrimination Committee of the United Nations had to make recommendations to Norway to improve its treatment of the Sami population. The Sami people now have their own parliament and rights to their ancestral lands earned in great part thanks to their own Sami activism as they should.
You can interact with the reindeer, which play a vital role in the Sami way of life by providing them with milk, transportation, fur and food. A law practically forced the Sami to choose either reindeer herding which meant a nomadic way of life or farming.
The Sami language was not taught at Swedish schools until , which explains why so many Sami today still cannot read or write their own language. The parliament is now financed by grants from the Swedish Government, and has been given resources to preserve the Sami culture and language, which was recognised as an official minority language in Sweden in Nowadays, the Sami population in Sweden live mostly in the north. The Sami villages, or sameby , are more like administrative unions to facilitate the keeping of reindeer.
You can feed the reindeer yourself in a stunning winter landscape, discover a lot about these beautiful animals, and also learn about the only indigenous people of northern Europe — the Sami. A Sami woman, Anneli, explained many Sami traditions to us. Native to northern Scandinavia, recognized as the oldest indigenous peoples of the North, the Sami people live in four countries.
They reside in Norway pop , , Sweden pop. They speak their own Sami languages, which are most closely related to Finnish and Hungarian rather than Norwegian or Sweden. Want to read this post later? Pin below to save or share!
The Sami are ethnically and genetically distinct from other Norwegians and faced a lot of discrimination within Norway in the past. Outsiders may find it hard to distinguish the physical traits of Sami from the physical traits of other Norwegians. However, the few Sami I met explained that their Sami appearance, in addition to their Sami name, marked them as different in Norwegian society.
The traditional Sami way of life is fishing and hunting; today many of them, even many of those who still make a traditional living, have moved into towns and cities. Reindeer in Norway, roaming around their farm. The Sami who herd reindeer make most of their money through the sale of reindeer meat.
For those of you who are beyond disgusted by the thought of Rudolph in a soup, or think this all sounds awful and unhealthy hello LA audience! Plus, the reindeer are all free-range and treated very well during their approximately 15 years of life. So, this really is a best-case scenario meat origin story. In fact, reindeer meat is used in quite a few dishes in the Arctic Circle, as it is one of the few good sources of protein in an otherwise sparse land.
But the taste is worth it. One of the most traditional dishes is called bidos, a stew made of reindeer meat, potatoes, carrots, and reindeer heart. The Sami sometimes eat it at their traditional youth confirmation ceremony at age Yes, I ate it. No, I was not aware there was a heart in it beforehand.
Still tasted delicious. The Tromso Arctic Reindeer experience lets visitors go to a Sami village reindeer farm in order to learn about Sami culture, reindeer, and even help feed the reindeer themselves.
Reindeer on the farm are neither hostile nor affectionate; if you have food in your hand, they come to you, and the second they realize the food is gone, you are invisible to them. I would advise keeping an eye on how close your body is to the food bucket when feeding reindeer. No one wants to be accidentally impaled with a four-foot long antler on their Arctic getaway.
The reindeer population in this area of Norway is between 70, and 80, Wondering where else you can see reindeer in Norway?
You can visit farms like these or farms in central and southern Norway, where reindeer are actually more plentiful. Slightly under half of these people talk Sami.
The Sami people speak a language that is a member of the Uralic linguistic group along with languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. A total of nine different but closely related Sami languages are spoken in the Sami region. Today, three of these languages are in active use in Northern Norway. Sami people from the south of Northern Norway can talk effortlessly to their nearest Sami neighbours in Sweden, but cannot communicate with Sami people from the far north.
The dialect boundaries do not follow the national borders, however, as most of the Sami languages are spoken in multiple countries. Sami language is currently the major language in inner Finnmark and is also used in small communities in most parts of Northern Norway as well as in some environments in the Northern Norwegian towns.
Around 2, Sami people in Norway make their living from herding reindeer, and the majority of the region of Northern Norway is actually used for raising reindeer. Traditionally, most Sami people have supported themselves through fishing, livestock farming, and hunting, along the coast, on the fjords and alongside the large rivers farther inland.
Today, a large proportion of the Sami people live outside the traditional Sami areas and have moved into the towns of Northern Norway or to the Oslo area. Even more, they still live in traditional Sami settlement areas but earn their living in the modern service sector, industry, travel and the public sector. Sami culture has many unique forms of expression. Joik, one of the oldest song traditions in Europe, is alive and well. A joik is dedicated to a person, an animal or a place, and the harmonies reproduce the qualities of the object of the song.
Sami boots filled with blister sedge will keep your legs warmer than the latest developments in survival equipment and are used diligently when the temperature drops below In the twenty-first century, Sami culture is meeting the modern world in a new way.
No Sami people live a completely traditional life today, and the everyday lives of many of these indigenous people appear very modern indeed. At the same time, however, interest in joik, duoddji and the language itself is increasing rapidly.
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