Culture and business collide in the land of the Sami

I wrote last week from Kiruna, in northern Sweden, about plans to move the center of that city eastward and referred to possible negative implications of this move for the Sami people’s way of life. Today, I will discuss the conflict in the area between traditional culture and big businesses in this area.
These Sami people are the indigenous people living near the North Pole. They were known in the past as Lapps, or Lappish, but they no longer accept those terms, which were given to them by non-Sami settlers and explorers.
The Sami also prefer to call their area Sápmi, which stretches across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. In Sweden alone, they claim an area of about 150,000 square kilometers or one third of Sweden’s total area. Yet they number fewer than 100,000 people in the whole of Sweden.
The Sami living in the four countries are regarded as one people, but the cohesiveness of their culture has been compromised by harsh living conditions and the fact that they live across different national jurisdictions. Recognition of their rights differs considerably depending on the country within which they live.
Sweden’s treatment of the Sami today may compare quite favorably to treatment of indigenous people in other parts of the world, but it falls short of Sami’s expectations and is not always consistent with some key international agreement to which Sweden has acceded, as has been argued not by only by Sami advocates but by a number of international organizations and important legal scholars from Scandinavia and elsewhere.
To be fair, the Swedish state did apologize in 1999 for the wrongs committed against the Sami in the past. Since then it has been making an effort to build up Sami cultural institutions and promote Sami culture and language to make up for past suppression, but in the eyes of many that is going quite slowly.
One reason is that economic factors and pressure from business groups have made it difficult sometimes to maintain balance between justice and economic development. I referred last week to the fact that Sami land may contain 90 percent of iron ore found in Europe. When you keep in mind that prices of iron ore have quadrupled over the past few years, you can imagine those pressures. The fact also that Sami people are a tiny minority with very little clout and lobbying power, you get the picture.
Similarly, there are contradictions in the cultural area. While Sweden is proud of its sensitivity to Sami cultural uniqueness, the Sami find it difficult to transform that into a positive force. For example, there is a “Compulsory School Ordinance” that entitles Sami kids to be taught in their native language. However schools are obliged to arrange teaching in Sami for them only if a suitable teacher is available and the student already has a basic knowledge of Sami. What is also astounding is that it is still technically illegal to speak in a language other than Swedish in the workplace and Sami chants (yoiking) is also banned in schools, according to Sami representatives I met.
That explains some of what a visitor witnesses in Sami land. There are certainly lively Sami cultural manifestations, which I had the privilege to witness with my family this past week. There is a Sami museum and a Sami college. There are also small markets for traditional Sami artifacts and wares, which attract a growing number of international visitors. There is also Sami theater, and some novels and poetry collections published in Sami language. However, it is all quite small-scale and limited in resources and effectiveness, despite the enormous riches of their land.
Many have hailed a major reversal in Sweden's legal thinking about Sami rights that came out in 2011, which they hope will have a dramatic effects on Sami life and livelihoods.
Last fall, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled in favor of Sami villages in a case related to their economic rights in their ancestral land. The Court’s decision was the first to reverse in a major way centuries of land grabs by outsiders. The Court ruled that Sami reindeer herders in northern Sweden can continue to let their animals graze in forests, thereby ending 14 years of legal wrangling. In the landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by an appellate court which found that the Sami had been able to prove that their ancestors had grazed reindeer on the land in the Nordmaling area since time immemorial.
The Supreme Court's decision ended a legal battle that started in 1997 by over a hundred forestry business concerns, a group of outsiders who claimed that they “owned” forests located in Sami land. They sued three collectives of impoverished Sami reindeer herders for grazing in their forests. They claimed that reindeer grazing caused damage to their land, and argued that Sami claims of traditional rights in that area had no basis in modern law. However, the Supreme Court saw otherwise and ruled in favor of the Sami maintaining their traditional rights in using those lands.
It was an important landmark decision, but it remains to be seen whether it will have much effect on the ground beside the particular conflict it resolved. It may turn out to be merely a symbolic victory for the Sami at large, unless it is translated into some practical outcome. The fact that the case took 14 years to be adjudicated, at tremendous cost in legal fees, testifies to the resistance they face from business concerns of the non-Sami majority. As I illustrated in the case of Kiruna last week, the fate of the city was effectively decided by the mining company that has the largest stake in its economy.

- This article is exclusive to Arab News
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