Who are the Sámi people and is Sápmi a Nation?

The Sámi people, also known as Saami or Sami, are indigenous to the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula. They have a distinct language, culture, and traditional way of life, heavily dependent on reindeer herding, fishing, and hunting. Despite being recognized as an indigenous people by the United Nations, the Sámi have historically faced discrimination and forced assimilation policies, which have threatened their cultural survival. In recent years, there have been efforts to promote and protect Sámi rights and cultural heritage and to protect their lands from exploitation.

Camilla Andersen DEC 15, 2015 (https://thegroundtruthproject.org/indigenous-people-of-the-arctic-head-home-after-an-historic-climate-agreement/)

Nations have been drawn and bordered using fabricated notions of nationness, redistributed, and renamed by its conquerors, and traded and bought by the elitist governments. In true colonist fashion, Sápmi and its Sámi caretakers have been added to the sickening multigenerational Indigenous stories, not unlike the Natives of Australia and those Native to American and Canada. Sámi land was maliciously stripped of their original names and cultural significance and placed under the grouped countries we now call Scandinavia. (Bjørklund 2003) In the words of Gellner, “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist. Before the ideas of landownership existed and Scandinavian countries became sovereign nations, borders were not engrained in their citizens minds. However, the raise of nationalism compelled lands to be renamed in the image of the country’s meticulously constructed national culture.

With Scandinavian nationalism in mind then, the Sámi national movement must also be defined according to its political positioning in the Scandinavian law. In 1977, The Swedish government for the first time, acknowledged the Sámi as a minority people. Norway followed in 1990, and then Finland in 1995. At this juncture, it is important to point out that Russia has never recognized Sámi parliament claiming to represent the Sámi living in the Kola Peninsula till today nor has Russia amended its constitution to include the Sámi as a recognized minority with rights: Sámi are invisible and considered effectively erased in elite minds of the Soviet Union.

Here is a map of the recognized borders of Sápmi and therefore their land rights.

(https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/sapmi-the-sami-homelands/)

These small victories in the previously mentioned Scandinavian countries did not come without tumultuous political debate and continued Sámi shaming and oppression. This project hopes to show some of the struggles and recent downturn of these victories that current Norwegian Sámi are facing.

Why Did I choose Windmills? Isn’t natural energy a good thing for the Enviroment?

There is a misconception surrounding natural energy especially for Windmill fields.

For one Wind power provides unstable power supply which means that this power source needs to be supplemented by other sources of power. Electricity from wind power plants can be stored in batteries but this is very expensive and requires large resources which many companies buiding the fields do not budget for or plan on implementing once the initial build is complete.

This project will show just a small side of Wind power damage. Though it may produce relatively small amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, the local damages caused by encroachments in nature and the environment life cycle are severe.

On the basis of the desire to preserve natural habitats, landscapes and reindeer herds, wind power is not environmentally friendly, but rather a largely environmentally harmful form of power generation. This is also a blatant encroachment on the Sámi indigenous peoples cultural and rights and the future for reindeer herding.

“Wind power must also be assessed on the basis of the environmental impacts concerning the production of wind turbines and their aftereffects. Wind power requires mines for copper, neodymium, dysprosium, lead, nickel, aluminum, iron, limestone and more, production plants for generators, turbine blades and foundations, as well as the blasting and driving connected to assembly of wind power plants. Wind power generation is far from”emission-free”! Power cables from wind turbines to consumers also use a lot of metals.” (Motvind Norge and Naturvernforbundet i Ávjovárri 2020:19)

Number of Windmills Per Site

This interactive map visualizes the coordinates for each windmill field in the country of Norway excluding sites currently under construction. This map demonstrates the location of these windmill fields as being primary built on recognized indigenous land or Sápmi in Norway.

This data set is a sample of manually collected data from https://resdm.com/home. All rights are reserved by RESDM.

This data set is a sample of manually collected data from https://resdm.com/home. All rights are reserved by RESDM

Enviromental decline seasonal timeline from 2010-2019

Fig 1 - LAND INUNDATED: 110 Km2. Hydropower development caused habitat loss and barriers for reindeer. To estimate its impact, as a baseline scenario we simulate the removal of magazines built after 1973 in Setesdal Ryfylke, Norway [Ref: 1]

Fig 1 zooms in one of the largest hydropower complex in Europe (Blåsjø and neighbouring magazines). Moving the slider allows to compare the area flooded BEFORE 1973 (left) & AFTER (right) construction: 110 Km2 were inundated.

Fig 2 - HABITAT LOST: 222 km2. Moving the slider allows to see that an estimated 222 km2 (or 31 092 soccer fields) of functional reindeer habitat were lost due to construction of hydropower magazines.

Taken from social science experts at: https://sites.google.com/view/reindeermapsnorway/scenario-analyses?authuser=0

Lichen Decline or Growth For Reindeer

This data shows the Lichen growth from 2003 and 2015, which intentionally seemed to support a balance of Reindeer herd population in the 21st century until I dug deeper. This data actually confirms the decline of the reindeer population and loss of traiditonal grazing lands by combining this data with the above images of flooding and ecological change in the surrounding lichen grazing lands that have become inaccessible to migrating reindeer.

For more information please read what Tor and collegues has to say about this phenomenon.

Tor A. Benjaminsen, Hugo Reinert, Espen Sjaastad & Mikkel Nils Sara (2015) Misreading the Arctic landscape: A political ecology of reindeer, carrying capacities, and overstocking in Finnmark, Norway, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 69:4, 219-229, DOI: 10.1080/00291951.2015.1031274