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National Geographic : 2015 Oct
Contents
The relationship between the Sami and their fellow Swedes is complex, a product of the centuries-old power imbalance between Swe- den’s government and its Sami minority, who mostly lived north of the Arctic Circle. The family of John Utsi, a Sami writer and cultural historian based in Jokkmokk, arrived in Laponia in the 1920s, when his grandfather, Per Mikkelson Utsi, and his family were forcibly removed by the government of Norway from the coastal mountains in Skibotn. They were sent south, to Sweden. Their arrival caused problems. Even in such a vast region, the newcomers naturally impinged on herders who’d been established there for many generations. And though John, like most modern Sami, doesn’t earn his primary living from reindeer herding, the animals—and La- ponia itself—play a pivotal role in his life. “ We Sami live a double existence,” Utsi says. “ We speak Swedish, look Swedish, and most of us live in Swedish towns. But we act Sami, be- cause that’s who we are. Chalk it up to genetics.” Whether it’s genetics or upbringing, a large number of Sami in northern Sweden spend their summers in Laponia, living in cabins and tending to a few reindeer, fishing, and hunting moose—something other Swedes are not per- mitted to do in the park. Sami traditions were suppressed by the Swedish government and society for centuries, Utsi says. Those traditions reemerged as the Sami, who experienced a political awakening in the 1970s, demanded and won respect for their culture on the national and international stage. Whenever we stop to rest or graze on berries, Christian breaks out a plasticized map of the park. “It’s ridiculously easy to get lost in Lapo- nia if you don’t pay attention,” he says. “Hell, it’s times of day in La- ponia, especially at dawn, it’s easy to imagine what their distant forebears might have seen and heard, after roaming this far north in search of game, wrapped in animal skins, staggered by the roaring winds of glaciers in retreat. In many ways Sarek is a vision of that new- ly minted world: massive sharp shoulders of dark rock rising above a landscape carved by ice sheets. The latest one receded from northern Sweden some 9,000 years ago—so recently that the bedrock, relieved of its burden, is still rising up to 0.4 inch a year, in a phenomenon geologists call isostatic rebound. The melting ice left behind a terrain littered with glacial features: cirques, moraines, drum- lins, eskers, lakes, erratics, and boulder-strewn hills. Today, in the perfect hush of wilderness, the incremental grind of glaciers still echoes across Laponia, and it seems only moments ago that the big ice melted, leaving the rhythms of soil and rock, wind and rain, to shape the land. More recently—perhaps 5,000 years ago— Laponia was settled by nomadic hunters of rein- deer who were ancestors of modern-day Sami, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia whose lives moved to the rhythms of the rein- deer herd. Caucasians who speak a Finno-Ugric lan- guage more closely related to Hungarian than to Swedish, the Sami are thought to have rambled north out of central Europe toward the Kola Peninsula of present-day Russia and west across the frozen boreal wastes of what is now Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Judging from rock art and artifacts recovered in the Laponia region, reindeer defined indig- enous culture here from the very beginning, a legacy that can be traced in a continuous line to the Sami of today. Photographers Erlend and Orsolya Haarberg work to capture the Nordic land- scape and wildlife. Both have won awards in international photography competitions. While working, we enjoy one another’s company, and we can be in the field as long as we want, be- cause we aren’t leaving our family home alone. What’s it like to work together as a husband- and-wife team? It’s like a dream. We continually support and motivate each other. (Continued from page 64)
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