Swedish government enforcement officers have been accused of "colonial abuse" after they burnt down a traditionally Sami ‘kåta’.

Officers from Sweden’s Enforcement agency at lunchtime on Wednesday poured kerosene all over the structure, which is similar to a North American teepee, and then set it on fire.

"I feel miserable, sad and mortified all at the same time," Anita Gimvall, the owner of the dwelling told Swedish Radio. "It's completely crazy. I’m surprised how many police have come here to get rid of me."

The destruction of the dwelling could mark the end of Gimvall’s six-year battle with the local Västerbotten County Council, who since 2010 had maintained that the kåta was an illegal new building.

She claims that even though she erected a new structure in 2010, a similar dwelling had been on the site for 120 years.

"I consider that I have a right to that place. My family have been there for generations," she said, adding that she intended to return to the site one day to build a new kåta.


Håkan Jonsson, chairman of the Hunting and Fishing Samis, the largest party in the Sami parliament, came to protest the destruction of the dwelling.

"It's very sad and horrible for Anita, but I think this can be something good in the future," he told The Local. "Every newspaper in Sweden and a lot of TV channels were there. So I think the Swedish government have had a pyrrhic victory. I hope so anyway."


Jonsson said that Sweden had only granted land rights to the roughly 5,000 Sami who own reindeer, and that the destruction was intended to prevent the other 15,000 staking historic claims.

"They know the reindeer herders are a small group and they can give them money. But if all Sami people had the right to have their ancient places it will be 20,000 Sami people they have to negotiate with," he said.


"The Swedish government want to make an example of her, that if you try to restore Sami buildings, you will not be allowed to," he said. I thought that in the end they would take a step back and say to Anita 'you can have your kåta'. It's unbelievable."

"A shameful day for Sweden!" the party wrote in a post showing the blaze on their Facebook page.
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It's finally here, the internationally acclaimed feature film Sami Blood (Sameblod), in which Amanda Kernell skilfully tells a life story from Swedish Sápmi, from the 1930s until now.

Honoured at the Venice Film Festival and critically acclaimed, hit movie Sami Blood should make Swedes question why Sami oppression in Sweden is not common knowledge, and it’s time for that to change, argues Sami Parliament member Oscar Sedholm.

Amandas Kernell’s SAMI BLOOD, a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian co-production, has won the Europa Cinemas Label as Best European Film in the Giornate degli Autori-Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival, it was announced today by a jury of three exhibitors from the network. 2016 marks the thirteenth time the Label has been awarded in Venice.

In receiving the Label, SAMI BLOOD will benefit from promotional support from Europa Cinemas and better exhibition thanks to a financial incentive for network cinemas to include it in their programme schedule.

The jury issued the following statement: “This debut feature is a very powerful piece of story-telling. An emotionally charged look at the search for identity, the film introduces audiences to the relatively unknown history of the Sami people in Northern Scandinavia. But above all, SAMI BLOOD celebrates the enormous bravery of a young girl prepared to risk all in order to move away from the confines of her life. With strong performances and a truly cinematic feel, the director avoids all the usual tricks of narrative to deliver a highly original and totally absorbing film, which has relevance well beyond Scandinavia.”

Synopsis : Elle Marja, 14, is a reindeer-breeding Sámi girl. Exposed to the racism of the 1930s and race biology examinations at her boarding school, she starts dreaming of another life. To achieve this other life she has to become someone else - and break all ties with her family and culture.


Amanda Kernell (Umeå, 1986), who has a Swedish mother and a Sámi father, graduated in film directing from The National Film School of Denmark in 2013. She has directed several acclaimed shorts including Stoerre Vaerie, the pilot for her first feature film Sámi Blood, which premiered at Sundance and has won a number of awards, such as the Audience Award at the Göteborg Film Festival and Best Short at the Uppsala Film Festival.

The Sami parliament, representing indigenous people also known as Lapps, has convinced Norway’s second largest pension fund to ditch the oil pipeline project

In an act of international solidarity between indigenous peoples, the Sami parliament in Norway has persuaded the country’s second largest pension fund to withdraw its money from companies linked to a controversial oil project backed by Donald Trump.

This week, after lobbying by the Sami parliament, Norway’s local authority pension fund KLP announced it would sell of shares worth $58m in companies building the pipeline.

Vibeke Larsen, president of the Sami parliament, said the pension fund announced the move when she arrived at a meeting in Oslo to discuss Dakota Access.

“We feel a strong solidarity with other indigenous people in other parts of the world, so we are doing our part in Norway by putting pressure on the pension funds,” she told the Guardian.

The Sami – sometimes called Lapps in English – are an indigenous people living in the Arctic area of Sápmi in the far north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula.


KLP had previously argued it could not justify divestment from the project, saying that even though it visited the site in December, it had found no evidence of “serious or systematic violations of environmental or human rights”.

But Larsen alerted the investment fund to a report earlier this month by the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, which concluded the tribes affected by the pipeline had not been consulted sufficiently.

Tauli-Corpuz was also “deeply concerned” by Trump’s 24 January executive order which gave the project the green light without a broader environmental impact statement.


Opponents of Dakota Access have also waged a divestment campaign against the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners. Using the slogan Defund DAPL, activists have also urged individuals and institutions to move money out of companies involved in the project.

Larsen believes KLP realised the case was serious when the parliament began writing to them.

“It is not easy to understand if you are not indigenous, and I understand companies sometimes miss it,” she says, agreeing that misunderstandings can arise from a failure by outsiders to grasp the importance of sacred land, for example.

Annie Bersagel, acting head of responsible investments at KLP says transparency is “one of KLP’s core values”.


“That means that we base decisions on exclusion on a thorough analysis that we publish, both to hold ourselves accountable to KLP’s customers and owners, and to have a greater impact on the companies from which we divest,” she says.

Norwegian financial group Storebrand announced earlier this month it was divesting from companies tied to Dakota Access, and in February, Nordic bank Nordea sold its bonds in three of the pipeline companies.

As non state-owned businesses, they had not been targeted by the Sami parliament, a parliament spokesman says. But during the “Tråante 2017” celebration held by the Sami in February, Sami youth organisations held a flash mob in a branch of the partially state-owned bank DNB in Trondheim over the issue.


Still to divest is Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund the Government Pension Fund Global (GFPG) – the world’s third biggest investor – which has nearly $1.2bn of investments in the pipeline companies, according to Friends of the Earth Norway.

As indigenous people who are themselves protected under international conventions, the Sami campaigners believe that their voice can have an impact far beyond their numbers, said Larsen.

“It is because we are so small that we have to have solidarity with the others,” she said.
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With chants, poetry and traditional dress, the Indigenous Sami people of Europe's Arctic, formerly nomadic reindeer herders in Lapland, celebrated their national day Monday with hundreds of events.

The Sami settled with their reindeer herds in Arctic Europe 9,000 years ago and now number 70,000 people spread across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

Monday's start to the weeklong festivities — attended by Norwegian King Harald and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg in Norway, and Finland's president, Sauli Niinisto, in Finnish Lapland — marked the centenary of the Sami people's first congress in the Norwegian city of Trondheim in 1917.

Seventy-five years later, the Sami — formerly known as the Lapps — declared Feb. 6 their national day.

Speaking in Inari, northern Finland, Niinisto said he hopes co-operation between the government and "the Samis — the only remaining Indigenous peoples in the EU" would continue.

For generations, the Nordic ethnic majority sought to assimilate the Sami into mainstream culture by banning their language and culture. Russian Samis, meanwhile, were isolated by the Iron Curtain during decades of Soviet rule.

Now the Samis have their own parliaments, schools, newspapers and broadcasts in their own language on national radio and TV.

In Trondheim, Solberg said the treatment of Samis by the Norwegian majority was "a stain" on Norway's history.


"Previously, we have apologized on behalf of the Norwegian people for the Norwegianizing policy that was led for not only decades, but in fact hundreds of years, where we tried to remove the Samis' cultural expression," she said.

She also decried the "poor educational facilities" offered to the Arctic people for decades.


The formerly nomadic Samis nowadays live mostly modern lifestyles. Yet some still tend reindeer, wear bright-coloured traditional dress and perform joik songs — a mixture of chanting and poetry —as they did Monday at several events.
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A group of three indigenous Sami people from Scandinavia arrived at the camp.

The women sat on their knees, and their bright crimson and blue skirts flowed in front of them. They offered Standing Rock’s chairman gifts, including reindeer hide and a traditional cup carved from birch. Onlookers stood silent as they cried out a yoik, a traditional song that combines deep guttural sounds with strikingly high notes.

Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Frank Archambault II, left, is given a gift by Sofia Jannok, center, Inger Berit Gaup and Sara Marielle Gail, right, representing the Sami indigenous of Northern Europe during a gathering in the main fire circle at Oceti Sakowin Camp near the Standing Rock reservation Friday, Sept. 30, 2016, near Cannon Ball, N.D. (Photo: Rodney White/The Register)

“We are one. We hear you, we see you. And the fight you have is also the fight we have.” Sofia Jannok

Sofia Jannok, a Swedish singer, told how her people combat mining and struggle to maintain natural habitats for reindeer, which many rely upon for food, fur and livelihood. The Sami ancestral area spans parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

"The message from Sápmi three is clear: Respect indigenous peoples' rights! May the gathering here on the great plains of Standing Rock be the light of a new day for all peoples of the earth, when our voices finally will be heard and recognized." said Sofia Jannok


"Looking back at an amazing journey I can't feel nothing but true strength from what I've seen among people like you and me, all in different ways trying to survive as who they are and live with the strong connection to the surrounding land and waters, families and ancestoral traditions. This Standing Rocks represents to me. Stand like a rock for future and past, as life is happening in the present."


"Make sure this earth is a safe place for next generations. Besides at camp, the souls who stand up for their children and future I also met in fathers, in mothers, in homes, at schools, in individuals, at concerts around the places I visited. Each and everyone doing their very best for a better future, with prayers and healing, teachings and patience, and most important - keeping on breathing. That is the most revolutionary thing we do: breathe. 'Cause that is what the system wants us to stop doing. So be resilient, in what way is best for you always keep the breathing up and by that make sure the next generations are safe. Water is life! You are life! Cáhci ealiha visot" said Sami girl.

Swedish police have broken up a protest by Sámi men and women protesting against iron ore mining in a crucial reindeer herding area in the Swedish Arctic Circle.

The Sámi and other activists have been blockading a mining road since early July. They have prevented workers from British-based Beowulf Mining company from drilling and exploring on the traditional land of the Sámi.

The first to be removed from the protest today was 85 year-old reindeer herder Apmut-Ivar Kuoljok. In recent weeks the Swedish police have dismantled the blockade and arrested the protesters, but the protesters rebuilt the blockade after the police had left.

The protesters have also suffered racist abuse from locals who threatened them with axes. The Sámi Parliament issued a statement saying, ‘the police used a lot of unnecessary force, dragging the activists along the ground. The activists were passive and did not resist.’

British-based Beowulf, with its Swedish subsidiary, Jokkmokk Iron Mines AB, is seeking to conduct test drilling as they explore for iron ore in Gállok, just above the Arctic circle. The Sámi community believe that the planned mine would devastate the conditions for reindeer herding in the area. The territory is used by the Sirges and Jåhkågasska Sámi communities for reindeer herding, a practice which remains spiritually and culturally crucial to the Sámi.

Jonas Vannar, from the Sirges Sámi community said, ‘This project endangers our entire existence’.

Photo Credit: Johan Sandberg McGuinne/Survival
The Sámi parliament has issued a demand to halt all mining on Sámi lands without free, prior and informed consent. The dispute has increased calls for the Swedish government to recognize Sámi ownership rights to their land and to ratify ILO 169, the only legally binding international convention on indigenous and tribal people.

There are an estimated 80,000 Sámi in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia, of whom more than 20,000 live in Sweden.
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