Climate change is a reality in all our lives—but some places and people are already more severely and directly affected by it than others. The Arctic is one of the fastest warming regions on our earth and its inhabitants are facing life-altering challenges.
One Arctic community are the Sámi, Europe’s only Indigenous people. The Sámi’s homeland, Sápmi, stretches across the borders of what are now the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Kola Peninsula. Their life on these lands can be traced back almost 10,000 years, but as is the case with many Indigenous peoples, has been shaped by colonial violence, Christian mission, assimilation policies and displacement.
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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for Grey map of Europe with Sapmi territory in the north marked in red
While identifying as one people, the Sámi speak a variety of languages and inhabit different landscapes spanning from mountains to forests and the sea. What unites them all is a uniquely close relationship to nature.
The Sámi world view can be described as animistic. This is the belief that all natural things—whether humans, plants, animals, rocks, lakes or natural phenomena—have a soul and deserve equal amounts of respect. Humans are therefore considered to be only one part of nature, rather than at it its centre. People living in a particular place must remember that the land is shared and that all its inhabitants should be taken into consideration. Despite persecution by the Christian church and forced conversion to Christianity, this world view still shapes how the Sámi perceive and interact with their environment.
Reindeer and Sámi livelihood
At the heart of Sámi culture is the reindeer. Originally hunters and gatherers, the Sámi have been herding domesticated reindeer since the 17th century. Historically leading a nomadic life, they moved their herds from winter to summer grazing lands, following the changes of the seasons.
In Sápmi, time is structured into eight seasons rather than four and shaped by the behaviour of the reindeer, who are sensitive to the smallest variations of weather and temperatures. Every season brings different types of food resources, such as cloudberries, lingonberries, and different varieties of herbs. By adjusting their resource use accordingly, the Sámi contribute to balance in nature and to avoiding resource depletion.
Today, reindeer herding is mostly regulated by law, but this varies depending on which country the Sámi territory is located in. In Sweden for example, the Reindeer Husbandry Act determines that only Sámi people who are members of administrative unions, called sameby, are permitted to own reindeer. This applies to only ten percent of the Sámi population, who still follow their herds but are usually settled in the winter grazing lands. Other traditional Sámi livelihoods include fishing, hunting and crafts, as well as more recent additions such as tourism and design.
Even for those who aren't reindeer herders, however, the animal is a significant part of art, language and identity. As can be seen in this illustration by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, for centuries the reindeer’s strength has been used for travelling by sledge, its meat and milk for food and its skin for clothing. Its leather, bones and antlers have been used for the traditional craft called ‘duodji’ and turned into knives, jewellery, drinking cups and many other goods. A beautiful example is this Norwegian Sámi tobacco pipe from the late 19th century, made of antlers and incised with a reindeer pulling a sledge.
How is climate change affecting Sámi life?
Living at the frontiers of the climate crisis has brought new threats for the Sámi way of life. The warming climate leads to longer summers and warmer winters, which is slowly merging the eight Sámi seasons into four—with mid-seasons like spring-winter or autumn-summer disappearing. The reindeer are perceptive to these developments, which often leads to behavioural changes like a delayed rutting season. This change is also a problem for the reindeer’s main food source, which is lichen growing in the tundra. Warmer temperatures are causing the treeline to edge slowly upwards, and lichen is increasingly being replaced by moss.
Sustenance becomes particularly sparse in winter, when the reindeer rely on lichen most. Unpredictable temperatures lead to snow repeatedly falling, melting and freezing, which produces several layers of impenetrable snow cover that prevent the animals from digging the lichen up with their antlers and hooves. To avert starvation, herders must adapt and implement new measures, such as keeping them in enclosures where they can be fed during winter. Apart from being an economic burden for their owners, this also encourages the spread of infectious diseases among the animals.
Laura Büllesbach
Considering the Sámi’s close relationship with nature, this doesn't only impact the reindeer. Since culture, language and nature cannot be separated in the Sámi world view, climate change comes with economic, cultural and social change. The majority of words in the Sámi languages have their origin in nature and relate to temperatures, winds, animals and plants. For example, there are more than 300 words for different types of snow alone! Disappearing natural phenomena can thus lead to disappearing vocabulary.
Colonial history and climate justice
Climate change in Sápmi is not a standalone issue, but is intensified by a centuries-long history of colonial oppression and political disputes. When the Nordic nation states were formed in the 17th century, their northern territories were highly contested. Each country tried to establish control over the land and therefore also the nomadic Sámi population, which was perceived to be a threat to political stability. The Sámi were subject to religious persecution through the Christian church, and to relocation, segregation and assimilation.
In 1922, the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology was founded as the first institution in the world to study genetics, eugenics and ‘racial science’. Its main focus was to prove why mixing between Sámi—then derogatorily described as ‘lapps’—and other Nordic people should not be allowed. Subsequently, the colonising countries decided that Sámi were less ‘civilised’ than others and not able to pursue anything but reindeer-herding. Under the pretence of protecting their culture and reindeer-herding practices—which were economically significant for the colonial states—from alleged extinction, Sámi people were segregated and not allowed to access education like the rest of society.
One of the roots of this scientific racism lies in the work of the famous Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) who invented the binomial nomenclature—the first formal system to classify the natural world. Apart from classifying plant and animal species, Linnaeus was also the first to describe humans as part of the animal kingdom. He divided Homo sapiens into four varieties with different characteristics, which laid the ground for future theories of race. One of the experiences that informed his research was his expedition to Sápmi in 1732, where he studied the region's nature and gathered ethnographic information about the Sámi people. He was so fascinated by their culture that he documented their way of life and collected objects to bring back home with him.
Linnaeus wasn't alone in this. Since the first encounters of foreigners with the Sámi population, scientists, priests, tax collectors, traders and collectors all made efforts to preserve Sámi material culture and traditions by forcibly removing objects and sending them to museums across Europe. This is also evident in the objects featured in this story.
Land rights conflicts and resource exploitation
Despite the Sámi being officially recognised as an Indigenous people today, the consequences of colonialism and the harm it caused continue to be felt. Apart from still having to endure stigmatisation and racism, two other examples are ongoing land rights conflicts and resource exploitation.
Sápmi is incredibly rich in natural resources—a fact that the nation states were aware of since the early days of colonisation. The first silver ore was discovered in the 1600s and the first iron ore mine was opened in 1647. Since then, the number of active mines in Sápmi has risen to more than 40, among them Kiruna mine—the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.
One of the most contested cases involves plans for a mine in Gállok, the region around the historically significant Sámi meeting place Jokkmokk. In 2006 the British company Beowulf Mining was granted permission to explore the area. Ever since, reindeer herders, locals and various environmental justice organisations have protested these plans, which they fear will have significant environmental and social impacts.
Among other things, mining projects are accompanied by the building of new infrastructure such as railways and roads. Together, they lead to the loss of more Sámi land, biodiversity and vegetation cover by destroying pastures, cutting through reindeer migration routes, polluting waterways and increasing deforestation.
A newer form of exploitation has been a phenomenon called ‘green colonialism’. This term describes how nature conservation and ways of producing renewable energy often come at the cost of marginalised communities—those who have contributed least to climate change. One example of this in Sápmi is a proposed wind plant project at Øyfjellet in Norway, which risks putting reindeer under distress and driving them out of their grazing lands.
A major contributor to the ways in which the Sámi are affected by climate change is their exclusion from decision-making. The Sámi are represented by Sámi parliaments in Norway, Sweden and Finland, which fulfil mostly representative and administrative purposes but are not granted decision-making power. For a long time, individuals and representatives have therefore been campaigning for self-determination rights over Sámi land and water, which would allow them to implement their own strategies to combat climate change, tailored to Sámi needs.
Indigenous resilience and how to move forward
Throughout time, the Sámi have had to adapt to external pressures on their communities, which made them experts in resilience and adaptability.
These skills are now being used to prepare for a changing environment. In collaboration with the drone manufacturer Katla Aero and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, reindeer herders from several South Sámi villages are, for example, working on developing drones to monitor the migrating herds. At the moment, this is done with snowmobiles or helicopters, but drones would minimise the use of fossil fuels. They would also be safer to use on steep terrain or when crossing frozen lakes and rivers, where the ice is less reliable due to fluctuating temperatures.
Laura Büllesbach
Additionally, the reindeer themselves are an important part of the Sámi resilience plan. According to a study by Gothenburg University, warmer temperatures increase the growth of bushes in the Arctic, which in turn leads to more sunlight being absorbed by the surface of the earth. The reindeer’s grazing controls this growth and thus makes a crucial contribution to keeping global heating at bay.
Currently, there is very little exchange between decision-makers, scientists and Sámi people, despite the latter’s wealth of environmental knowledge. Climate change, in the meantime, is progressing at rapid speed and the Indigenous peoples of the world are among those hit the hardest. In order to mitigate the effects of the crisis, Indigenous representation in decision-making as well as the right to self-determination are urgent matters. If their voices are heard, a holistic view of nature could play a key role in creating a more sustainable future–not just for individual communities, but for everyone.
Find out more
- WWF, Arctic climate change
- Open Democracy, To fix the climate crisis we must acknowledge our imperial past
- Earth.org, How the EU green deal perpetuates climate colonialism
- The Washington Post, On climate change, archaeological paper digs into the effects of colonization and maltreatment
- Library of Congress blog, Will the Sámi languages disappear?
