The Modernization Of The Sami Indigenous Peoples

Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

The Modernization of the Sami Indigenous People
Theory and Fundamentals of International Political Thought

Andrea López Reitmaier 05455930 - P

The Sami indigenous people are an ethnic community that lives in Sápmi, an area that extends from Idre in Dalarna (Sweden) to the Arctic Ocean in northern Norway to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. There are about 70 000 Samiliving in this area, with the majority of them living in Norway and Sweden. This community is considered as indigenous because they have lived in this area before the territory was colonized by Norway, Sweden, Finland or Russia. They have their own language, culture and customs that are different from those of the rest of the society. They traditionally lived off reindeer herding, hunting, andfishing but now this community has developed and adapted to the modern society the Scandinavian countries hold. This will be my topic of study, the need of modernization of the Sami indigenous people to survive in the society. It is believed that the Sami people arrived to the Sápmi land when the inland ice receded in northern Scandinavia in 10000-5000 BC. Since then, this indigenous community hasdeveloped their culture and identity. However, this was not always easy, as the people that make up present-day Scandinavia moved to their territories and took advantage of them. By taxing the locals every country showed their sovereignty, in the 17th century Russia, Denmark and Sweden laid claim to the Finnmark area and the northernmost part of the Norwegian coast, resulting in the Sami paying taxesto three countries 1. Eventually the three nations resolved the issue, the land was divided and the Sami did not have to pay taxes to all three countries. The creation of borders would create a problem for the Sami people since they would not be able to cross the borders in the nomadic travels, this was avoided by the Lapp Codicil of 1751 which allowed the Sami people to continue with theirmigratory reindeer herding between Norway and Sweden2. However what was divided, and still is, was the territory in which they were allowed to fish and hunt. At the beginning of the 20th century, nationalism became a common feeling between the Swedes and Norwegians, who started to look at the Sami as a lower developed culture and discriminated them, being influenced by racial biology. Thisdiscrimination went as far as purposely not teaching the Sami children enough to be “civilized” under the Nomad Schools Act of 1913. Two decades later, however, public opinion demanded that Sami schools should have the same standards as Swedish schools, improving the
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A brief Saami history Christian J. B. Hicks The Sami – an indigenous people in Sweden

situation by the time of the Second World War, whena Sami was appointed director of nomad schools3. This relative development in Sami education caused an important struggle for the Sami children, since their education was not based on the Sami culture but the Swedish one. The children attended school three months in summer and three months in winter, when they were not moving around with the reindeer herding, but that was the only part where theschool adapted to the Sami way of life. During the lessons they did not learn Sami but Swedish, classes called “mother tongue”, and in the later schooling Sami children were taught how behave and feel like a Swede. This same process happened in Norway and Finland, allowing the Sami to “catch up” with the rest of Scandinavia in formal education4. The struggle for the Sami was now to preserve theiridentity since with the assimilation policies they were slowly transformed into regular Swedes, Norwegians and Finns. Johannes Marainen, former head teacher and chairman of the Gothenburg Sami Association says: “Sami like us who lived in the town soon learned that the best and simplest thing to do was to adapt ourselves and become as Swedish as possible. Unfortunately, this led to self-denial in...