A Reindeer Story Faith Fjeld
The Alaska Sámi: A Reindeer Story Faith Fjeld Rev. Tollef Larson Brevig and Julia Johnson Brevig, left, and, right, Mr. and Mrs. Tautuk, Inupiaq apprentices of the Alaska Sámi herding instructors. Vesterheim Archives. At the turn of the twentieth century, a dramatic story Yup’ik Inuit Peoples is on the left. The Sámi and the Inuit unfolded in western Alaska. The heroes of the story were have much in common. They share an animistic spiritual reindeer and reindeer herders. Together they survived storms at relationship to nature. Their physical survival in a tough sea, starvation on mountain passes, and thousand-mile trips by climate has been based on maintaining this relationship, as sled through blizzards. Along the way they encountered gold evidenced by the ceremonial traditions that are still connected miners, missionaries, and businessmen. Some of the herders with fishing, hunting, gathering, and herding. The images joined the Gold Rush and got rich, and some of the reindeer on the equipment they use, the pictographs on Sámi noiade teamed up with Santa Claus and became famous. None of this drums, the Inuit dances, and the Sámi yoiks express a common could have taken place without the Sámi. worldview that makes relatives of Arctic peoples.1 The Sámi are the indigenous people of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Kola Peninsula. They call their The Great Death and the Reindeer Project homeland Sápmi [“sahp-mee”], which is also known as During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, trappers and Lapland or Finnmark. They were brought to Alaska to teach traders came to Sápmi and began the slaughter of wild animals reindeer husbandry to the Inuit.
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