KIRUNA | The Sami, Europe’s last indigenous people, living in the Scandinavian Arctic and on the Kola Peninsula in western Russia, take a dim view of industrialists’ and military’s renewed interest in their territory.
All of this human activity takes place “on the pastures and on the reindeer migration routes,” fears activist Matti Blind-Berg, reindeer herder and leader of Girjas Samebyhe, an organization that brings Sami herders together.
Ofelas
Matti Blind-Berg, reindeer herder and leader of Girjas Samebyhe, an organization that brings Sami herders together. Based in Kiruna, Sweden.
During our interview in Kiruna, the Swedish Army and American Marines were training on their ancestral pastures. But the Sami had hardly been informed.
“When the armed forces land on our land, they do what they want without asking permission,” laments the former member of Sweden’s Sami parliament, the Sametinget.
He fears things will get worse if Sweden joins NATO, as hoped, because unlike Canada, there is no mechanism obliging the state or industrialists to consult local people before undertaking projects on their territory , which they call Sápmi, and not Lapland.
Millennial culture under threat
However, the entire culture of this indigenous people, based on the communion between man and nature, is threatened by increasing human activity, which is leading to its gradual disappearance. There are no more than 100,000 specimens, distributed from Norway to the Kola Peninsula in Russia, including about 20,000 in Sweden.
Per Harald Olsen, Flickr
Reindeer photographed in spring in Scandinavia.
Human activity is tantamount to fragmentation of territory, explains Mr. Blind-Berg, whose family has been based in the Scandinavian Arctic for millennia.
With the intensification of industrial exploitation, the large intact forests are cleared, the pastures devastated and the predators move a little further north every day, threatening the survival of the fawns.
Climatic changes
As for the mines, now seen as essential to the green transition, they are driving climate change, Blind-Berg points out.
“The transition is definitely not green. “For me, she’s more black and gray,” complains the breeder. We need a transition for the love of our planet, but not an industry-driven transition like the one we are witnessing here.”
Bjaglin, Flickr
A shipment of iron ore leaves the Kiruna mine by train.
Reindeer are already suffering from climate change, which “makes winters even weirder,” he notes. The temperatures are playing yo-yo and the snow cover is getting thicker and thicker. So that “it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find food”.
For Mr. Blind-Berg, this is all just another chapter in the colonization that has plagued his people for centuries.
*This report was produced thanks to a grant from the Fonds Québécois en journalistisme international.