Through the Sami Council, Sami participate in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and, since 1989, the Sami Council has had consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. The Nordic Sami Council has been known as the Sami Council since 1992, when representatives of Russian Sami joined it. The Nordic Sami political programme, adopted in Tromso in 1980, sets out certain principles: Sami are one people and should not be divided by national boundaries they have their own history, traditions, culture and language, and an inherited right to territories, water and economic activities they have a right to self-development and they will safeguard their territories, natural resources and national heritage for future generations. Nordic cooperation among Sami was initiated in 1953, and in 1956 it was decided to establish the Nordic Sami Council. Such moves are not entirely popular, however in 1994, the leader of the far-right Progress Party called a fellow member of parliament an extremist after she made part of her speech in the Norwegian Parliament in Sami, and he asked whether MPs would be forced to listen to debates spoken in Sami, Urdu or any other ‘language incomprehensible to most Norwegians’. That same year, the government submitted new legislation to give the Sami language equal legal status with Norwegian and to increase the possibilities for using Sami in an official context. Norway ratified ILO Convention 169 of 1989 on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples in 1990. In 1988 an addendum to the Norwegian Constitution declared it ‘the responsibility of the authorities of the state to create conditions enabling the Sami people to preserve and develop its language, culture and way of life’. The Sameting has the power to take initiatives in Sami concerns and to ensure that Norway fulfils its international obligations. Although this body has failed to address key legal questions of landownership and resource rights, it paved the way for the establishment of the Norwegian Sami Assembly, the Sameting, which was inaugurated in 1989. In 1980 the Sami Rights Commission was established to deal with political and economic issues.
Sami organizations have won significant concessions from the Norwegian state. Part of the Sami Act concerns the status of the Sami language. The Norwegian Sami Act 1987 defined a Sami as someone who has Sami as a first language, or whose father or mother or one of whose grandparents has or had Sami as a first language, and who considers themselves a Sami. Many Swedish northern Sami were forcibly displaced from summer lands in Norway to southern areas of Sweden, and southern Sami were forced to accept them on their territory. The drawing of national borders, for example the 1751 division between Norway and Sweden, made their movement across traditional grazing lands more difficult. At the same time, among Sami there occurred a gradual transition from the hunting of wild reindeer to the practice of herding, with the result that Sami became a nomadic people. The Norwegian government later encouraged this process as part of its Norwegianization policy. Significant colonization of their areas by southern farmers began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Sami have lived in Samiland since time immemorial. In coastal and other areas, however, the language is losing ground to Norwegian.
(1)Within the prevailing unity of Sami ethnic identity exist linguistic, economic and cultural group distinctions.Īn estimated 20,000 Sami in Norway speak one of its three Finno-Ugric dialects.(2) Sami is in everyday use in the northern core area and is now an official language in five municipalities in Finnmark County and one municipality in Troms County it is therefore also an official language in the courts. In Norway they are concentrated mainly in Finnmark County, where there are some 25,000 out of an estimated 40,000 Norwegian Sami. Sami (previously known as Lapps, a name they consider derogatory) are the indigenous inhabitants of northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and the far north-west and north-east of Russia. We have a small favour to ask: if you appreciate our work, would you mind considering making a donation to support our work? Thanks for using our World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples! We hope you find it interesting.