The question of land rights has a long and complex history for the Saami people, because their traditional territory spans four modern nation states: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Each of these states has a different legal framework for the EU’s last indigenous people, and until now there is no umbrella organisation which acts on behalf of all Saami across the four countries.
In many ways, the Saami do not easily fit into the framework of modern nation states. Being traditionally nomadic, a permanent sitting parliament in one place would have been impractical. This is not to mention that the Saami comprise multiple regional groupings, with different traditional occupations and speaking different dialects. Before the rise of contemporary liberal democracy, the church and the tribal elders held much of the governing power over any regional area, and families herded reindeer over territories that they had been using since time immemorial. Nobody had ever thought to ‘own’ the land, let alone sell it.
These days, emerging out of several hundred years of bloody subjugation by the new majority populations, the rights to culture and language are guaranteed in all of the states where Sami populations live – with the exception of Russia, which has many minority peoples and is thus in a slightly different position than the rest of Scandinavia. However, ongoing conflicts around fishing and land rights highlight the different understandings of what Western states and indigenous peoples mean by ‘culture’.
The Finnish government, for example, has maintained its legal position that the Saami must prove their land ownership, an idea incompatible with the traditional reindeer-herding Saami way of life. This effect of this has been the Finnish government taking land without compensation, motivated by economic gain – land that has been occupied by Saami for centuries. Finland has denied aboriginal rights or any land rights to the Saami people.
Norway is the country which has perhaps gone the furthest in promoting the land rights of its indigenous people, and reversing historical land rights abuses, such as forcing Saami to adopt a Norwegian name as a prerequisite for owning land. Here, the Saami now have exclusive rights to reindeer husbandry, and in the Saami-majority county of Finnmark, the new Saami Parliament elects 50% of the members of the estate board which oversees land use.
In Sweden, the picture is more mixed. In a landmark 2016 court case, the Saami village of Girjas inside the Arctic Circle was given exclusive rights to control hunting and fishing in its area, restoring powers which had been taken from the Saami inhabitants. This may become a precedent for future legal action between the Saami and the state regarding land rights. Prior to that, in 2010 UNESCO declared a large region of northern Sweden the ‘Laponia’ World Heritage Site, which protects its environmental status and enables reindeer herding.
However, the Swedish government has also given the green light for the world’s largest onshore wind farm to be built in Piteå, an Arctic region where there are winter reindeer pastures. The wind farm will consist of more than 1000 wind turbines and an extensive road infrastructure, which means that the feasibility of using the area for winter grazing is impossible. Sweden has received strong international criticism, including by the UN Racial Discrimination Committee and the Human Rights Committee, that it is violating Saami landrättigheter (land rights), including by not regulating industry. In Norway some Saami politicians have suggested giving the Saami Parliament a special veto right on planned mining projects.
The three Scandinavian states have all, though to different degrees, publicly acknowledged ILO Conventions and other international agreements on aboriginal rights, for example ILO Convention No. 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (1989). The convention states that rights for the indigenous peoples to land and natural resources are recognized as central for their material and cultural survival. Russia is the remaining state with a Saami population to not have made any public commitment to international land rights agreements, although there are domestic and regional laws which address the many indigenous minorities who reside in the Russian Federation.
“Traditional livelihoods and utilisation of our lands, waters – including sea waters – and natural resources constitutes the fundament of Saami culture and identity,” states a declaration of the Saami Conference, the highest body of the Saami Council.
“Our parents have lived here for a long time and they have always told us these are our lands. We have grown up with that and that is natural for us. And we of course want to protect them. That is where the conflict comes from.”
“As far as we know no-one at the local level has ever signed a paper to give the ownership of the river to the national states.”
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