15 | Sami Responses to Poverty in the Nordic Countries CHRISTIAN JAKOB BURMEISTER HICKS an D ÁNDE SOMBY
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15 | Sami responses to poverty in the Nordic countries CHRISTIAN JAKOB BURMEISTER HICKS AN D ÁNDE SOMBY The Sami are the indigenous people of Fenno-Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden and Finland) and the Kola Peninsula (north-western Russia). This chapter deals exclusively with the Sami of Fenno-Scandinavia owing to the contrast- ing economic conditions of the Fenno-Scandinavian Sami and those of the Kola Peninsula. The Fenno-Scandinavian or ‘Nordic’ Sami live in highly developed social welfare systems with governments that allow for greater autonomy than the Russian government. The Kola Sami do not share the same benefits as other Sami, owing to the limited political and economic control they have in Russia. The control that the Russian central govern- ment and the global markets hold over the Kola Sami makes it difficult for significant economic improvement even today. There are also differences in the political and social situations of the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sami. For instance, although the Finnish Sami do not have nearly such expansive rights as the Norwegian Sami, they did establish the first Sami parliament ten years before the Norwegian Sami and twenty before the Swedish Sami. The Finnish Sami also receive many of the same political privileges as the Norwegian Sami. Yet in Finland the Sami argue that there are no Sami-specific laws to secure them additional rights through their indigenous status.1 In Norway, there are language laws that do allow the Sami greater latitude to teach their own language. In Sweden, on the other hand, Sami are far more disadvantaged legally than either of their eastern or western neighbours. Countless court rulings have gone against the Sami, despite the fact that prior to the nineteenth century Swedish Sami received the same rights as other citizens.2 This chapter will first trace the history of the Nordic Sami within the context of their current political/economic situation. It will then discuss their mechanisms and strategies for poverty alleviation within Finland, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic Sami have been extremely successful in their use of two distinctly different but co-dependent strategies. The first strategy has been to create a common Sami identity and culture during the last half-century and utilize the Nordic sense of morality and human rights to attract support for the Sami as a people. In this way, the Sami have effectively increased their ability to combat the social and economic ills that have plagued them for centuries. This strategy includes the use of public and governmental ethical principles to create pressure for increased rights and funding for the Sami, in order to correct and protect against poverty in northern Scandinavia. As an approach to combating poverty, this first strategy involves a range of activities that can together be termed ‘cultural strengthening’. The second strategy is the Sami’s effective use of the collective financial resources available from different sources, including ministries of the national government, municipal governments and Sami organizations. Cultural strengthening Arguably, in the early twenty-first century the political and societal stand- ing of the Sami people is at its highest ever. There are vital Sami schools, social organizations, businesses and political parties. Poverty is at an all- time low in the northern parts of Scandinavia. In Norway and Finland, the Sami language is on track to be recognized as an official language in all government documents and in departments that pertain to Sami issues. The standard of living for the Sami is now nearly equal to that of other northern Scandinavian citizens. The primary and most interesting reason for this transformation is the cultural creation of archetypal Sami traits, or ‘Saminess’, by the Sami elite from the 1950s to the early 1980s. The aim was to provide a stable basis for the development of a healthy indigenous community in northern Fenno-Scandinavia. In the late twentieth century, the Sami in Norway, and throughout Fenno-Scandinavia, have articulated a vision of pan-Sami identity based on ethnicity, culture, tradition and heritage, making putative ties to the past in an attempt to establish historical legitimacy. But although all such categories share in their normalized links with an imaginary past, in the ethno-political context they are invoked and reproduced tactically, and are ‘created in the present, thus reflecting the contestation of interests more than the cultural essence of a purportedly homogeneous and bounded povertytoresponses Sami “traditional” group’ (Conrad 1999: 1). This is not to say that there was no such thing as a standard Sami type, or even Sami cultural and ethnic traits, prior to the 1950s. On the contrary, Sami culture was and has remained a distinct culture from the surrounding Nordic culture. The Sami are continually in conflict among themselves, however, owing to the fact that they see themselves as Norwegian or Swedish or Finnish first, and Sami second. The main reason for this dual identity is their assimilation into the dominant culture. It is also based on the fact that the Sami enjoy many of the benefits of being 275 Scandinavian and readily identify with the Nordic culture owing to these 15 cultures’ co-existence with each other over centuries. Nor has there been one common identifying basis for Sami culture. The coastal Sami of Norway differ in culture from the mountain Sami of Norway and Sweden, who differ from the Kola Sami of Russia. To make things more difficult, Sami cultural lines do not follow but rather transcend national boundaries. Sami in northern Norway have more in common with Finnish Sami than Hicks and Somby | Somby and Hicks they do with southern Norwegian Sami. Through the building of Sami- ness, the elites made their cultures more uniform and less confusing for the outside cultures to understand. The Sami leaders wanted to be able to protect their people through the use of common cultural symbols that were common to most of the different Sami groups. The movement towards a common Sami culture began in the 1950s and continued to be modified through the 1970s because the Sami elite found the need to promote and protect their communities in order to diminish discrimination and other hardships, including economic deprivation. Prior to the end of the Second World War many Sami hid their Sami identity in order to save themselves and their families from persecution. After the Second World War and the atrocities surrounding the Holocaust, however, world powers were concerned with human rights and colonial issues, allow- ing the Sami to benefit from a change in political sentiment. … (A) culturally and politically fragmented Sami population characterized by the ‘tutelage’ of the majority population and by a lack of a collective ‘ethnic spirit’, under the leadership of a small cultural-political elite, beg [sic] building an organized and nationally unifying ethno-political move- ment which has been called ‘The Sami Movement’. (Eidheim 1969: 3) Their cultural strengthening involved promoting the Sami culture as a relatively cohesive culture which has particular cultural traits that set it apart from mainstream society. Indigenous identity is vital to cultural strengthening because it is particularly useful in showing the authenticity and legitimacy of the Sami as original inhabitants of Scandinavia and therefore entitled to special rights. ‘In linking the present to the past, the “ethnogenetic function” gives the group the “terms to understand the present and make claims on it”, and has, since the 1960s, been an effectively employed and well-recognized strategy of indigenous groups in the political disputes with “dominant powers” over land, resources, and self-determination’ (Conrad 1999: 1). In the Nordic countries, where equality and homogeneity were promoted over and above individuality, indigenous identity was both particularly difficult and important. The sameness of Nordic culture conflicts with 276 and impedes differentness and made the Sami elite’s task more difficult than might have been the case in countries with a more heterogeneous population. This publicly articulated, politically motivated, and ethnically determined Sami identity co-exists and, at times, conflicts, with other intersecting terms of identification: ones perhaps more individualized, or whose lines of identification are drawn more from social experiences than from an a priori ethnicity. Nonetheless, what can be seen as an ethnic identity consciously constructed by the Sami elite for ethno-political purposes cannot be dismissed on the basis of this same ‘construction’. The terms of Saminess have sedimented deeply into popular enactment and individual concep- tions of Sami identity, with the official terms of ‘Saminess’ tending to take on a ‘powerful salience in the experience of those who bear them, often to the extent of appearing to be natural, essential, primordial’. (ibid.: 3) Owing to the political climate in the 1960s and 1970s, however, this was less complicated and better received than previously. By having a coherent and consistent Sami culture, the Sami asserted their difference from the Nordic majority culture and therefore demanded special rights and support. This meant that additional protections from racist policies could be formulated by the government and the public. The protection was also an attempt to reduce the poverty level for the Sami. It included resource ownership, or at least stewardship of fish, game and land rights (threatened by mining and logging interests from outside of Sapmi (the Sami name for their region) and even by the public’s request for national parks in the north of Fenno-Scandinavia), as well as access to financial resources. The increased resource rights allowed the Sami to maintain a subsistence lifestyle and increased their legitimacy as an indigenous people. Most importantly, the grazing rights for reindeer on public lands meant that the Sami would not lose a major icon of their culture and significant amounts of income.