Mariusz Wilk

Following the Reindeer

About the book

3 February
Alexander (Sasha) Kobelyev is president of the Saami Council, in other words head of the world’s main Saami organisation, an association of the Saami of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. To put it another way, Sasha is president of Sapmi, as in the Saami language they call the land at the edge of northern Europe where the Saami have lived for a thousand years. The president sets off for Sapmi every two years.
We began our conversation with language, because without their language there is no question of a future for the Saami. The trouble is, to this day the Kola Saami have never actually had their own written language. Attempts to create one in the 1930s on the basis of the Roman alphabet ended up in the prison camps, and present experiences with Cyrillic, elaborated among others by Alexandra Antenova, author of the Saami alphabet, are not yet out of their infancy.
“But please note,” sniggered Sasha, “that in the days when Alexandra Andreyevna taught Russian at the school in Lovozero, she used to rap us over the knuckles for chatting in Saami.”
It was the Soviet school where they were taught in Russian that caused most of the Kola Saami to stop using their own language. In the tsarist era no one made them go to school, nor was there a school anyway, if you don’t count the church school, which no one actually attended, because the children were out wandering the tundra with their parents. It was only the Soviet authorities that introduced compulsory education, built a boarding school in Lovozero and forced children apart from their parents as well as their native language. And once they finally realised that without a language there is no question of having a nation, they found that only the old people could still remember some of it. However, to preserve it without writing would be like trying to catch water in a net.
“Imagine your countrymen had forgotten Polish and only spoke in English. They’d be able to revive it at any time because they have Polish literature, in which they have immortalised their language. But what about us?”
A second problem is the Saami blood, in other words the question of lineage, because until recently being a Saami was a source of shame. On the Kola Peninsula the Saami were the lowest class of citizen, after the Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and the Komi-Izhem.  So whoever was able to wrote a different nationality into his passport. The paradox was that by the time they removed the “nationality” category from the passports in Russia, being a Saami was becoming an advantage. That was when people started making noises about the rights of the northern aborigines, contact was made between the Saami and Scandinavia, and dollars and grants began to flow in.
“There was a poacher,” recalled Sasha, “a Ukrainian from Apatity, who got himself Saami status because he had found out we could get discounts on our hunting licences.”
 So then came the question, according to what criteria do we define who is a Saami and who is not? That is very important, if we’re going to think seriously of creating a Saami parliament. Russia is the only place where they still haven’t got one. In Finland it has been functioning since 1973, in Norway since 1989 and in Sweden since 1993. To establish a Saami parliament in Russia first we have to know who has the right to create it, selecting members from among whom? In other words, a list of Russian Saami needs to be drawn up… The criterion of blood has been adopted – at least one parent has to be a Saami.
“Anyway, we all know each other here, and we know who is who. All that’s needed is a legal document.”
The hardest thing is the issue of Saami land. Too many people have claims on it, from the Russian army and the lobbyists for the mining industry, to the new Russians and the tourist business. You only have to cast an eye over a map of the Kola Peninsula to realise how little living space there is left for the Saami. They have been driven away from the Barents Sea coast, where for centuries they hunted seals, but where now there’s a nuclear submarine base. They’ve been displaced from the north-west, where the “closed” cities of Nikiel and Zapolyarny have been built. The railway has cut them off from Lake Imandra, which for the Saami was what Lake Baikal is for the Buryats. Finally the Monche tundra (in Saami “Monche” means “beauty”) has been ruined by Monchegorsk, and the Khibiny mountains by Apatity. Now they’ve started to dispossess them of the eastern part of the Kola Peninsula. The best fishing sites for northern salmon on the Ponoy river have been leased to Americans for twenty-five years, and new Russians have taken over the Iokanga. Not long ago a Swedish firm called Buliden planned to build an open-cast gold mine near Lovozero, on the river Voronya. That would have been the end of the reindeer, and consequently of the Saami in Kola too. Luckily this time they realised in time, kicked up a fuss and got some outside support, and the Swedes withdrew. But that doesn’t mean someone else won’t appear. As long as there is something to extract from Saami land, the Saami’s existence there will be under threat.
“They’re even taking reindeer moss from here to the West. Several hundred tons of dry lichen a year. You know what for?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“To decorate graves with it!”
Silence fell. Sasha was lost in thought, while I chewed over his words. Quite by chance we had found a disturbing, yet at the same time apt metaphor for Europe, draping its corpses in life-restoring reindeer moss, which was a source of life for the primeval Europeans.
“Today’s Europeans,” said Sasha, glancing at me as if reading my thoughts, “build a house first, and only then decide what was growing under it. When they choose a place to build, they’re guided only by their own benefit, not any advantage for the earth. To us the earth is sacred.”
That is why they must act to save Saami land from ecological barbarism. It is not in the least about breaking the Kola Peninsula away from the Russian “motherland”, as some people accuse them, but just about the Saami, the indigenous people of this territory, co-farming the land. That means having a legally binding say on the subject of its use. As, for example, the Canadian Inuit have in Nunavut. However, so far the Murmansk Duma has not adopted a law on the ethnic population. The Komi-Izhem are against, because they would like to get a piece of the action too.
At this point Sasha briefly digressed to explain the role of Count Witte in the history of the Kola Saami. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Russians decided to build a port on the Barents Sea (today’s Murmansk) and to link it by railway with the rest of the country. This massive undertaking was planned for sparsely inhabited lands, which moreover was non-Russian territory. Sergei Witte foresaw that there could be problems in the distant future, so he supported the resettlement of the Komi-Izhem from Lake Pechora to the Kola Peninsula, bringing the two small nations into conflict ahead of time, and assigning Russia the role of arbitrator in this argument.
“It’s absurd for people who only arrived here barely a hundred years ago to make claims on aborigine property,” I said, outraged by this.
“But nevertheless it is a fact.”
In the process the Komi-Izhem introduced their methods of reindeer pasturage here, which are well-suited to the boundless expanse of the Bolshezhemelska tundra, but murderous for the limited pastures of the Kola Peninsula. For centuries the Saami had let their herds run wild for the summer, thanks to which the reindeer had never trampled their feeding ground into bare earth, just trimmed it, while moving from place to place in small groups. You can’t make money out of this sort of pasturage – it’s a way of life rather than a way of earning a living. Whereas the Komi-Izhem keep huge herds in a crowd all year round with herders watching over them, and until the reindeer have eaten all the feed in one place, they do not drive them to another.
“They just farm reindeer, while we owe our lives to the reindeer. If the reindeer die out, we won’t survive either.”

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones