Last Saturday on February 5, Kashmir Solidarity Day was marked. But since I don’t know how to solve that issue, and nobody else knows either, I shall not attempt to write about it. Well, I have some opinions, but let me leave them for another time. Instead, I shall today write about the indigenous Sami people in Norway, and the three neighbouring countries. In addition to being an interesting and important people, they can teach people anywhere a few lessons about culture and identity, with emphasis on recent history and the current situation in Norway.
The day after the Kashmir Solidarity Day, on February 6, the Norwegian Sami People’s National Day was celebrated; this year it was only the 30th time. Yet, the Sami people are the indigenous Norwegians who came before the Germans and the other Europeans, who constitute the backgrounds of most Norwegians. The Same people came long before the Gujratis from Pakistan and the about-half-a-million immigrants from far away who came in the last fifty years’ time. In addition, an equal number for Europeans and Americans have come in the recent decades so that Norway today has close to a million newcomers in a multicultural land. All people in the country are important, indeed the indigenous Sami people as well.
Today, there are about 50-60,000 persons who identify as Sami in Norway in a total population of about 5.5 million in the country. Interestingly, in recent years, more people claim Sami heritage than before. The estimated numbers of Sami people in the other Nordic countries are as follows: Sweden 30-35,000; Finland 10-20,000; and Russia, 2,000. The total number is in the range of 80-100,000 people.
In Norway, the Sami Parliament (‘Sametinget’) affiliated to the Ministry of Labour, was established in 1989. It has 39 members and the president from October 2021 is Silje Karine Muotka from the Sami Party NSR, and the Speaker, since 2018, is Tom Sottinen from the Labour Party. Currently, over 18,000 have the right to vote. The Sami Parliament has become a competent and professional body, located in Karasjok town in Finnmark, in an architecturally-prized building together with a library, museum and the Sami Council. There is also a Sami research institute and college, and at the universities in Tromsø and Alta, Sami subjects can also be studied. The forerunner to the Sami Parliament was the Sami Council, established in 1964, with sister organisations in the other countries on ‘Nordkalotten’. It operates as an NGO, and has great authority on many cultural, religious, language, economic, land-use and ownership and other issues.
The Sami Parliament has the right to decide on issues of special importance to the Sami people in the Sami areas (Sâpmi), and it has the right to be heard on other issues. Recently, there has been a broad public debate about a windmill park as far south as the Trøndelag province because the noise from the windmills scares the reindeer herds, especially during the time of calving. Further development on the windmill park has been put on hold.
Traditionally, a major group of the Sami people, mostly living in the far north of Norway, Nordland, Troms, and Finnmark provinces, especially the latter, were reindeer herdsmen, and some engaged in coastal fishing. The highland plateau in Finnmark, the northernmost and easternmost province in the country, has very low winter temperatures, sometimes below minus 30 degrees Celsius. However, people have, over the centuries, found ways of living even there. The reindeers are able to dig through the snow with their hooves to find dry grass and heather for fodder in winter and ordinary grazing in summer.
Today, the Sami people live all over the country, with a large community in the capital Oslo. Until the 1960s, the official policy was ‘Norwegianisation’ of the Sami people, often implemented with rigorous force, such as school children being placed in boarding schools, and they would be punished if they spoke Sami. It should be noted, too, that the Sami language has several versions. Since some Sami people were not Christian, or had some local belief aspects added to Christian dogma, there has since 1888 been Christian mission organisations, proselytising in the Sami areas, and also running boarding schools. The largest organisation is ‘Norges Samemisjon’, established in 1925, and it still has some activities, run by conservative Christians, who oppose the right of women pastors and same-sex relations. It should be noted that Norway had a state church until 2012, which was more liberal than independent sects and denominations often were.
As late as the mid-1970s when I studied and worked at the University of Oslo, I came to know Professor Anton Hoëm (1931-2014), who had just completed his higher doctorate of Dr Philos. on issues related to education, ‘knowledge and power’, as the theme was, with empirical data from the Sami education history, and with future-looking aspects in multicultural education. He was a Sami, with an exotic appearance, looking more like a South-East Asian, maybe Mongolian, as some Sami people do because of earlier immigration; others have blond hair and features like the majority of Norwegians. At that point there was no teacher training college specifically for people with the Sami language and cultural background. Obviously, Professor Hoëm saw this as outrageous. In the 1980s, I worked with development aid to the nomadic people in Turkana, Kenya, and I invited Professor Hoëm to come and give advice on education issues there, and how to help preserve and develop the culture, drawing parallels to the experience of Sami people in Norway. His important work has been much appreciated by many, indeed by Professor M Daud Awan, who studied in Oslo in the 1970s and 1980s, knowing Professor Hoëm well. He often talks about him till this day.
The national government has provided financial support to the Sami people, but less support for their culture and language. Terrible injustice and discrimination of the same people has been done in Norway and its neighbouring countries. In other countries with minority groups, either they are national minorities, indigenous people, sometime called ‘fourth world people’, or other minorities, including religious and cultural minorities, and today many immigrants, there is often unequal treatment and discrimination.
The title of my article today states that everyone has the right to his or her own cultural identity, and it is the people themselves who have the right to decide on these issues. For example, if a Kashmiri person says he or she is Kashmiri, not Pakistani, they have the right to claim that, irrespective of legal aspects. In practice, they would probably say they are both. In Norway, those who want to identify as Sami can do so if they want to do so themselves, even if they live outside the main Sami areas, including in the capital Oslo, or abroad for that matter. Some may also be of mixed cultural and language heritage.
It is the responsibility of the nation state not only to allow and help indigenous and minority people in preserving and developing their own culture, language and identity, but simultaneously allow for integration in the mainstream society. Sami children must be taught Norwegian language—and Sami—so that they can be able to function and hold any positions anywhere in the country, otherwise it would be another form of discrimination and a way of keeping them out. All policies in these fields must be implemented cautiously, and the most important thing is to listen to the minority groups and individuals themselves.