The Sami people have lived in northern Scandinavia at least as long as the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish majority, and they are therefore considered indigenous to this area. The Sami people are the minority everywhere except from Central Finnmark, Norway, where most still have Sami as their first language. Most Sami people live in Norway, but they also live in Sweden, Finland, Russia and Ukraine.
The Sami people were discriminated against for a long time, and the Sami languages were suppressed until after the Second World War. Things have changed a lot today. Sami is one of Norway’s official languages and there is no official discrimination of Sami people or languages in Norway, Sweden or Finland. Yet it is very likely that several of the smaller Sami languages will die out within a few decades because they have very few speakers. Northern Sami, however, is so sufficiently widespread that it will probably survive the foreseeable future.
Dear @useless-scandinaviafacts, if you are going to make a post about my people, would it be too much to ask for that you don’t fill it with a) a shit-ton of annoying misinformation and b) stereotypical twee pictures of us?
I literally don’t even know where to begin, but
“At least as long” - I swear to God. We and our ancestors have lived in this part of the world for at least 10,000 years, whereas Scandinavian settlers only started entering our lands some 500 years ago. The first Swedish town in Saepmie, Lycksele, was built in 1607, on a Saami gathering place that has been in use for at least 8,500 years.
Even if indigeneity was simply a measure of how long a people has been in a place, this wouldn’t be the reason as to why we’re considered indigenous. Our indigeneity is based off of a combination of our claims to our ancestral homelands and our traditional trades.
To paint Finnmark as the only truly Saami place left in the world is both racist and factually incorrect. There are 9 Saami languages left today, and they are spoken by widely different communities. We are not one homogenous people, and to continue to pretend that we’re all North Saami, from Guovdageaidnu in Finnmark - as the pictures seem to suggest - is getting more than old.
Ukraine? Ukraine!? I literally can’t. Saepmie encompasses a large part of Fenno-Scandinavia and the Russian Kola Peninsula, and that’s it.
Our languages are suppressed to this day! My best friend’s sons were forbidden from speaking their language at school as recently as four years ago, and to this day, it’s an uphill battle each time you try to exercise your right to speak your language with schools, hospitals and governmental departments.
The still on-going discrimination of the Saami can be seen throughout Saepmie on a daily basis; from the forced closure of Saami schools, to the opening of wind farms, mines and the like on Saami reindeer herding pastures, to the closure of rivers and the branding of Saami organisations in Russia as terrorist groups, the list could go on for ages. To pretend like things are perfect today is incredibly ignorant.
“Oh, too bad, some languages might die” - the death of our languages is the result of a government supported cultural genocide that forcibly sterilised Saami women in Sweden well into the 1970′s, forbade the use of our languages in public, and had ‘scientists’ document our naked bodies and desecrate our graves in the 1920′s, but at least you showed some pictures of some reindeer so I guess whatever.
