Hii!! Could I get a moodboard of a black gray wolf from Yellowstone National Park with a black and white theme + fangs/hunting theme? If that makes sense hopefully? Thank you!!
small image of a wolf holding a dead rabbit!
black/grey wolf from Yellowstone National Park moodboard with themes of black/white, fangs, and hunting!
The last wolves in Great Britain were killed in the 15th century. In the last three decades, there has been talk of reintroduction, along with lynx and bears, but there is controversy surrounding the subject, and no action has been taken yet.
Originally written for my gab account, the 14th of March 2023
The "indigenous people of Scandinavia", reindeer and wolves
I need to get something off my chest, regarding the Sami people, and especially, some liberal/semi-woke normie Swedes who think they've found a new way of virtue-signalling.
These Swedes are under the delusion that there is a single "indigenous people" to Sweden and Scandinavia as a whole, called the Sami, and that we as Swedes (used here to refer to non-Sami ethnic Swedes, descended from Germanic people and a small branch on the Indo-European tree), are just some alien people that came from nowhere.
This is a disgusting disservice to our people, and it goes way beyond a "pet peeve" of mine, when I hear another Swede talk about the "indigenous Sami people of Sweden". They are crapping all over themselves and their people.
Before anyone gets really mad: I have nothing against the Sami as a people. I find their culture fascinating, I do love reindeer as animals, Sami are people of the north, and if any people group finds a way to stay true to their heritage and old ways - I am all for that.
I am also a very small part Sami myself, known through my family tree. So, far away, their ancestors are also my ancestors. Beyond that, my majority ancestors, which were the old Norse, had seemingly amicable relations with the Sami, and respected them for their magic (then xianity came along and changed all that).
The Sami are natives of Lapland, which is an area that stretches across Norway, Sweden and Finland (though even that - being natives - is debatable). Our people - Germanic Scandinavians - didn't really settled the far northern inland, but stayed south, and to the coasts. We came in from the south (not "Germanic" or "Indo-European" yet, since that happened later, but these early settlers are our direct ancestors) as much as 10 000 years ago, when the ice first receded from Scandinavia.
(However, addition: There are archaeological finds from the far north from thousands of years before the Sami, meaning those were made by our ancestors.)
The Sami, and their close relatives (the wider Finnic family), came in just a few thousand years ago, from the northeast. Their wider family stretches across all of northern Eurasia, with of course the majority of their various peoples being found in northern Russia. Across this band of land, you'll find a gradient of similar people, languages, costumes, and traditions.
But the key was just mentioned: The Sami came to Scandinavia a few thousand years ago, exactly how long is difficult to pinpoint. Most of Europe is populated by recent influxes of R1B and R1A haplogroups, while Sweden has the most of the ancient European I1 of any European country. This haplogroup is believed to be the original European haplogroup, and was largely mixed-out in continental Europe.
The Sami, on the other hand, are majority (of course, they have admixture, just like the rest of us) N1, which is the Finnic haplogroup which stretches across northern Eurasia. Just more to the point that they are not the original Scandinavian population, but came in from the east.
There are only two areas where the Sami as a movement irritate me, and one of these is when they whine and complain about "historical oppression", as if all our ancestors weren't oppressed by the Swedish state. This annoys me, in a similar vein as I can love and admire the Native American/Amerindian peoples, but don't like it when they use their identity for Marxist aims (and then, Amerindians have far more claim to North America than Sami do on Scandinavia).
Yes, they were historically oppressed by the government... as every people group has been. Do you or they think "Swedes" were always just one, solid group, across this vast land of forests, coasts, hills and valleys? Of course not. We were a diverse range of sub-cultures, practices and dialects, but the Swedish state, crown or church forced us to all become the same.
"You MUST speak 'rikssvenska'! You MUST be a practicing Lutheran, stop it with that heretical animism! You MUST send your children to our schools!"
But just because we're the same race (Swedes and Swedes), that makes cultural oppression okay, apparently? And because the Sami are a different race, only then is it wrong?
No, we have all been oppressed and had our cultural heritage destroyed by a state, crown or church that wants us all to be the same, as their servants.
These images are to underline how they are just normal people, they don't live in goathis anymore, and they only dress like that for tourists.
"Well, duh", you might say, but the people romanticizing Sami as "the indigenous people of Sweden 🥰" seem to think they are some kind of nature people living in goathis to this day. They are just ordinary modern people, as absorbed by civilization as the rest of us.
Also note that while all these people above are technically Sami, they also have admixture with Germanic Scandinavians, shown for example through their blonde hair.
The second issue is the reindeer industry. There are approximately 20 000 Sami in Sweden, 4600 of which own at least one reindeer, and 105 of which have more than 400-500 reindeer, meaning they are in the industry and it's their livelihood. That makes for 0.5% of Sami, and 0.001% of the Swedish population.
Thus, I would like to differentiate between "Sami" as a people, and "the reindeer mafia", as I like to call the latter. They claim they are herding reindeer as their ancestors have done since time immemorial, and that they MUST be allowed to do this, because to do otherwise would be to destroy an important cultural heritage, and in light of today's western world's difficult relationship with "former imperialism", it makes it easy to use this as a political sledgehammer (and thus, a way of milking money).
In reality, and I was shocked when I found out just when reading about the history of lapphund dogs a few years ago (I had never heard this mentioned anywhere else before that), the Sami have only been herding reindeer for a few centuries. 400-800 years. Before that, they hunted them.
Map showing reindeer grazing area, to the left, and the collective wolf population of Sweden and Norway, to the right.
There are around 250 000 reindeer in Sweden. The wild reindeer is extinct here (it's the same animal, really), so all of these are privately owned livestock. To compare, there are 340 000 elk (moose). Not always in the same habitat, but to give a similar animal to compare numbers with. There are also around 2900 bears, 1400 lynx, and 450 wolves, and the wolf used to be extinct from the 1870s-1970s.
Now then... HALF THE COUNTRY (an area the size of Minnesota) is "reindeer grazing area", where these privately owned livestock run free like wild animals, year round, getting taken out by all sorts of things, for which the owners demand taxpayer's money as compensation.
If you buy a house with a little plot of land in this half of the country, you might need to ask permission from the local reindeer mafia for what you can and can't do on your own land (we're talking your own private land, a small plot and not a thousand hectares, and their private industry based on what are basically wild animals interferes with this).
Imagine 0.001% of people having a hugely disproportionate say in what happens to 50% of the country's land area, and its wildlife. Imagine 3k Americans claiming a cultural right to have sheep roam free across half of the US, with impunity.
Each member of the reindeer industry has many hundreds of animals or more, and sometimes, herds can reach into the thousands. They are herded with snowmobiles and helicopters, taken on trucks and slaughtered for meat and pelts that end up sold all over the country.
This is not a "traditional heritage" by any means, it is a modern industry, although you must be of a specific race to be allowed to take part. If you're not an ethnic Sami (or adopted and raised by a Sami family), you have no right to do this, that's the law.
The reindeer mafia use their Sami heritage to pretend to be "nature people", and cry crocodile tears about cultural oppression, but as soon as a wolf or bear even sets foot on their land - where the reindeer maybe will pass through six months in the future (I've seen this exact scenario happen), the mafia gets the government to come out, on taxpayer's dime, and shoot the wolf, a "protected species", from a helicopter.
This is why I hate it when Swedes cry about "the indigenous Sami people".
Again, this is not about the Sami as a people. It's about the lie that they are "the indigenous people of Scandinavia", because they are only of Lapland, and we have been here much, much longer than them.
It's about them using their heritage as a tool against ethnic Swedes.
It's about the reindeer mafia "owning" half of Sweden and decimating our native wildlife in the name of a phony "heritage" that's just a modern industry, keeping wild animals as "livestock", selling them on the market, and treating true wildlife as annoying obstacles to their industry.
