Belonging to the Land: The Sámi in Their Environment

An integral part of an Indigenous people’s cultural heritage is their special re-lationship to the land and the closely connected traditional ecological knowl-edge and tradition of cultural landscape.62 The relationship to the land is a fundamental question of existence for Indigenous peoples, as cultures grow

60 T. Joona, ‘Ihmisoikeusnäkökulma ILO-sopimukseen No. 169’ [A Human Rights Perspec-tive on ILO Convention No. 169][2013] Agon 37-38, 6-12; J. Joona, ‘Kuka kuuluu alkuperäis-kansaan – historian vastauksia tämän päivän kysymyksiin’ [Who Belong to an Indigenous People – Answers of History to Contemporary Questions], Lakimies 4/2013, 734-755; See also Lehtola 2015, 202-207.

61 Cf. E. Sarivaara, Statuksettomat saamelaiset. Paikantumisia saamelaisuuden rajoilla [Sámi without a Status. On the Edge of Sámi Culture] (Dieđut 2, Sámi allaskuvla).

62 P. Magga, ‘Mikä tekee kulttuuriympäristöstä saamelaisen?’ [What makes an Environ-ment Sámi], in P. Magga and E. Ojanlatva (eds.), Ealli Biras. Saamelainen kulttuuri-ympäristöohjelma (Sámi Museum – Saamelaismuseosäätiö 2013), 10-13.

from the land and in places. The relationship to the land bears on the place where an indigenous people dwells, where its members practice their tradi-tional livelihoods and what the people’s broader cultural conception is of it-self, its identity and its past.63

The connection to the land in Sámi culture is an ethnic underpinning of all Sámi groups and the foundation on which Sámi culture rests. According to the anthropologist J. Pennanen, undergirding the Sámi feeling of ethnic identity is the conception that they belong to the same language family and share a nature-bound cultural background comprising the hunting, fijishing and gath-ering livelihoods and reindeer herding.64 Sámi culture has a connection to a historical place defijined through their life practices, to the ethnic ties and social relations which prevail in that place, to memories and to biographical experi-ences of place. The connection to the land produces and sustains Sáminess and through the connection a Sámi today can experience an afffijinity with Sámi who lived millennia ago.65

Any examination of the Sámi connection to the land must take into consid-eration that the connection involves both the intangible and material cultural heritage. The Sámi worldview makes no distinction between nature and cul-ture, nor are the two mutually exclusive. Accordingly, the connection to the land is seen as including not only a material bond but also elements of the intangible heritage, such as place names and the oral tradition. In the Sámi worldview, the human being is not an agent who manipulates or exploits na-ture; rather, the relationship entails a deeper awareness of, belonging to and obligation towards a place.66 The Sámi connection can be aptly described as

” ecological connectivity”, a term coined by D. Rose. It indicates a ”mode of ex-istence” in which the land is not only a place or object but also a subject (or

”agent”) in its own right.67 According to Rose, for Indigenous peoples, the land

63 See T. Ingold, 2000, 148-150.

64 J. Pennanen, ‘Ihmisen ja luonnon vuorovaikutus saamelaiskulttuurin lähtökohtana’ [Hu-man-Nature Interaction as a Basis of Sámi Culture], in J. Pennanen and K. Näkkäläjärvi (eds.), Siidastallan. Siidoista kyliin. Perinteinen luontosidonnainen saamelaiskulttuuri ja sen muuttuminen (Inarin saamelaismuseon julkaisuja 2000), 13-18.

65 See J. Valkonen and S. Valkonen, ‘Contesting the Nature Relations of Sámi Culture’ [2014].

Acta Borealia 31(1), 25-40.

66 E. Helander-Renvall, ’Saamelainen tapaoikeus’ [The Sámi Customary Law] [2013], in P.

Magga and E. Ojanlatva (eds.) 2013, 132-134.

67 D. Rose, Sharing Kinship with Nature: How Reconciliation is Transforming the NSW Nation-al Parks and Wildlife Service (NSW NationNation-al Parks and Wildlife Service 2003); D. Rose, D.

James, and C. Watson, Indigenous Kinship with the Natural World. (NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service 2003).

is “nourishing terrain… a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home and peace; nourishment for body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease”.68

In R. Harrison’s view, the ontological basis of Indigenous peoples’ connec-tion to the land hampers effforts to safeguard their intangible cultural herit-age. He asserts that the protection of Indigenous cultural heritage is based on a Western, anthropocentric mentality that emphasizes a distinction between culture and nature and a pre-eminence of human beings over nature. In in-digenous ontologies, by contrast, there is no boundary between nature and culture; rather, they emphasize that the two are intertwined and that culture is everywhere. Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land and notions of pro-tecting their cultural heritage proceed from a wholly diffferent ontological ba-sis, making protection of such heritages challenging.69

The Sámi researchers E. Helander-Renvall, A. Schanche and P. Magga have recognized and identifijied special and distinctive features of the Sámi cultural environment.70 To Sámi a natural landscape can be a cultural landscape re-gardless of whether it bears traces of human activity. These scholars argue that the Sámi cultural environment has not, to date, fijit neatly into any of the public categories used in defijining and managing cultural environments.71

Management of the environment in the Sámi homeland of Finland is gov-erned for the most part by the Wilderness Act and the Conservation Act, which are essential elements of the Finnish system. In contrast, sites in the Sámi cul-tural environment, in particular culcul-tural usufruct areas, have not been given any particular consideration. Yet, given that Sámi usufruct of the landscape and environment difffers from the Finnish, it easily remains invisible. It lives in

68 D. Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness (Australian Heritage Commission 1996).

69 Harrison 2015, 30.

70 E. Helander, ‘Sámi Subsistence Activities – spatial aspects and structuration’ [1999] in Acta Borealia 2, 7-25; A. Schanche, ‘Horizontal and vertical perceptions of Saami land-scapes’ [2004] in Dieđut 3, 1-10; P. Magga and T. Elo, ‘Johdanto’ [Introduction] [2007] in Tiina Elo and Päivi Magga (eds.) Eletty, koettu maisema: näkökulmia saamelaiseen kult-tuurimaisemaan (Lapin ympäristökeskus 2007); E. Helander-Renvall, ‘On customary law among the Saami people’ [2013] in N. Bankes and T. Koivurova (eds.), The proposed Nordic Saami Convention: national and international dimensions of indigenous property rights (HART 2013), 281-291; P. Magga, 2013; E. Helander, ‘The nature of Sami customary law’

[2014] in T. Koivurova, T. Joona and R. Shnoro (eds.), Arctic governance (University of Lap-land 2014), 88-96.

71 Ibid.

the cultural knowledge of small communities and, inasmuch as it has not been articulated and asserted verbally, it is ignored in decision-making.72

The Sámi cultural environment is defijined flexibly in keeping with the situa-tion at any given time; it is a whole consisting of the seen and unseen. The spe-cial feature of the Sámi conception of the cultural landscape is that the human being is not accorded a special status as a shaper and manipulator of nature;

rather, a landscape may look like a natural landscape but nevertheless bear values and meanings associated with a cultural landscape. One implication of this, however, is that the content of that landscape is not readily understood by an outsider; it appears to be wilderness, uninhabited and unused.

As the Sámi conceive it, nature is linked to everyday life, the use of resources and travelling from place to place. In this way the concept broadens in the di-rection of intangible culture heritage. Place names tell how the areas are used and encompass the settlements, the routes people use in getting from place to place as well as invisible boundaries. The place names and locations that live in the oral tradition cannot necessarily be found on maps. Other elements to be found in oral history, such as the yoik tradition, also reflect the people’s knowledge and use of nature. These have been shaped for generations by cus-tomary law: the knowledge of resources such as good cloudberry picking sites and fijishing waters was often shared and their use agreed on jointly. The Sámi landscape also includes mystical sites, such as old places of worship and sieidi (sacred sites), sacred fells and burial places. It is difffijicult to translate the oral tradition into a form that can be understood by others; there is a fear that infor-mation on sacred places will end up being misused.73 However, the new Sámi cultural environment unit, established at the Sámi Museum Siida in 2011, took as its starting point that even though the “coordinates” of a sacred landscape must be withheld to some extent, the landscape, along with other archaeologi-cal cultural heritage, has to be recorded so that it is taken into account in land-use planning, forestry and other land land-uses.

In Finland, the Sámi have continually sought recognition of their connec-tion to the land as part of the safeguarding of the Sámi cultural heritage. The need for this recognition derives from the powerlessness the Sámi have ex-perienced when it comes to the policies that steer the use of the land in the Sámi Homeland. Since the beginning of the 1990s, one has seen a series of legal reports and committees in Finland that have tried to determine how the Sámi could hold the rights to their lands and how these rights could be safeguarded without their infringing the legal rights of the other local residents of the area.

72 See P. Magga and E. Ojanlatva (eds.), 2013.

73 Ibid.

The impetus for these effforts is Finland’s commitment to ratifying ILO Con-vention No. 169. Ratifijication has been put offf numerous times due to “ambi-guities” where the land rights of the Sámi are concerned. The key issue that has emerged is who could be the subjects of the land rights on the individual level.74

Sámi claims to the lands and waters in their region have been interpreted in terms of the legal and governance discourse; this requires that a legal basis be demonstrated for the connection to the land, a demand that makes it difffijicult to take the Sámi connection to the land into account in land-use policies in the Sámi Homeland. According to Sámi researcher A. Nuorgam, Finnish legislation contains no defijinitions of the concept “cultural environment”, let alone “cul-tural landscape”. The landscape in the Sámi region is classifijied essentially in its entirety as a natural landscape, although large tracts of it are areas in which the traditional Sámi livelihoods are practiced.75 E. Helander-Renvall points out that the Sámi connection to the land is based on customary rights that are integrated in the form of an oral tradition into the daily practices of the lo-cal community”76 The members of the Sámi community do not even conceive of these as rules; the practices are renegotiated if someone for one reason or another departs from the land-use practices established by custom. Helander-Renvall takes the view that the use and applicability of traditional legal notions are further eroded by the fact that there is a constant collision between them and national legislation and orders issued by government authorities. Moreo-ver, the non-Sámi population in the Sámi region does not necessarily adhere to or even know the Sámi’s traditional norms as regards use of the land, a situation which might even prompt some members of the Sámi community to depart from the norms.77 What is more, as T. Kurttila and T. Ingold have shown, the Sámi’s traditional system of knowledge that underlies their use of the land is very difffijicult, if not impossible, to express in concrete terms, for it is far too dy-namic and practically oriented and adapts too readily to the situation at hand.78

74 See e.g. J. Joona, 2013.

75 A. Nuorgam, ‘Saamelaisia koskeva lainsäädäntö ja sopimukset’ [The Legislation and Con-vention Pertaining to the Sámi], 220, In P. Magga and E. Ojanlatva (eds.) 2013, 220-225.

76 E. Helander-Renvall, Saamelaisten perinnetieto, tapaoikeudet ja biologinen monimuo-toisuus [The Sámi Traditional Knowledge, Customary Law and Biodiversity. 2011, 3.

<http://www.ymparisto.fiji/download.asp?contentid=127691andIan=fiji> accessed 24 No-vember 2015.

77 E. Helander-Renvall, 2014, 133-134.

78 T. Ingold, and T. Kurttila, ‘Perceiving the environment in Finnish Lapland’ [2001] Body and Society, 6, 183-196.

The nature of Indigenous peoples’ connection to the land, including the un-derpinnings of that connection in customary law, has led to its not necessarily being accepted – or accepted at all – as equal to what is set out in the written legislation of the state. Yet, this does not mean that rules deriving from cus-tomary law cannot be taken as the basis for legislation or as part of it. There are many examples internationally of how customary law has been taken into ac-count in legal proceedings and negotiations dealing with Indigenous peoples’

land rights.79 According to Helander-Renvall, acknowledging the customary rights indicating in a state’s land-use policies the connection of an Indigenous people to the land requires active elaboration of that connection through diffferent practices and discourses so that the rights will be recognized more broadly and become part of society’s commitments.80

The implementation of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage requires Finland to defijine, among other things, the diffferent elements of the intangible cultural heritage in the Sámi Homeland and to do so in cooperation with communities, groups and the rele-vant civic organizations. According to Nuorgam, where Indigenous peoples are concerned, it is problematic that the UNESCO conventions do not recognize ownership or possession of the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples;

rather, the process of documentation and inventorying changes the status of cultural heritage such that it is seen as benefijiting all of humankind.81

In our view, as regards bringing the connection to the land within the scope of the protection of cultural heritage, a more daunting problem than owner-ship or possession is how the Sámi connection to the land can be rendered in a form that the discourse on safeguarding cultural heritage is ready to recognize.

As P. Magga, a researcher who has done work on the Sámi cultural environ-ment, points out: “The concepts and vocabularies that defijine the cultural envi-ronment have not been directly applicable in the Sámi region, whereby it was essential to start the work [on defijinition of the Sámi cultural environment]

from these and ask what they mean in the Sámi context”. According to Magga, it is difffijicult to explain fully what landscape and the environment mean from the Sámi perspective. “To a Sámi the landscape is more than an object nor is the environment merely an object of one’s actions; it is a person’s partner –

79 See Helander-Renvall, 2014, 132; See also M. de la Cadena, ‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond Politics’ [2010] Cultural Anthropology 25(2), 334-70; M. Blaser, ‘Ontology and Indigeneity: on the Political Ontology of Heterogeneous Assemblages’ [2014] Cultural Geogra Vol 21(1), 49-58.

80 E. Helander-Renvall, 2014, 132.

81 A. Nuorgam, 2014, 222.

another subject with whom one has to act properly and wisely, because one’s own survival depends on it”.82 As the Sámi conception of the landscape incor-porates a cognitive dimension, religiousness, myths, tales and communality in addition to the values and meanings it entails it is difffijicult to inventory and to convert into discrete pieces of information in a database. Yet, safeguarding of the cultural heritage requires this to some degree, as the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, for example, obligates Finland to document and inventory the cultural heritage that the state wishes to preserve and sustain.83

In addition, the conflicts associated with the governance of land use in the Sámi region have brought with them pressures to play down attention to the Sámi connection to the land in administration. The state-controlled land and water areas in the Sámi Homeland are managed by Metsähallitus (National Forest Service), which controls some 90 per cent of the land and water areas in the region. Approximately 80 per cent of this area is set aside for conservation under either the Conservation Act or the Wilderness Act. The Metsähallitus Act prescribes that the management, use and protection of the natural resources under the control of Metsähallitus in the Sámi Homeland must be coordinat-ed such that the Sámi are guarantecoordinat-ed the conditions necessary for enjoying their culture. The government of Finland is amending the Metsähallitus Act and the special provisions on the Sámi Homeland have been removed. These stipulated that the plans and projects of the Metsähallitus could not detract from the Sámi’s opportunities to engage in traditional Sámi livelihoods. The removal of these special provisions is the result of demands of many actors in the Sámi Homeland, including the municipalities of Inari and Enontekiö. For example, the former municipal manager of Enontekiö, now a member of the Finnish Parliament, has called for “a comprehensive and independent map-ping of conditions in the region that would determine in what way the position of the Sámi is weaker than that of the region’s other population or entrepre-neurs”. Only after that can it be considered whether special Sámi provisions are needed in the legislation.84

As in the reform of the Metsähallitus Act, the criticism of the special status of the Sámi as users of the land often culminates expressly in how the connec-tion of the Sámi to the land is understood. Due to their particular relaconnec-tionship

82 P. Magga, 2013, 10.

83 A. Nuorgam, 2014, 222.

84 M. Kärnä, Uusi Suomi Blog, 9.5.2014 <http://mikkokarna.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fiji/167 651-kolme-syyta-vastustaa-esitettya-metsahallituslakia> accessed 16 November 2015;

About the reform of the Metsähallitus Act, see also L. Heinämäki et al., 2017, 34-50.

to nature, the Sámi have been expected to act in harmony with nature; when these expectations have not been fulfijilled, conclusions have been drawn on the state of modern Sámi culture. For example, it has been claimed that over-grazing of reindeer, the attitude towards predators and the increased use of technology show how the culture of Sámi reindeer herding has become “dis-located”, “alienated from itself” and “lost its special nature as a culture”. The solution to this that has been proposed is a return to “the old” and “Indigenous”

practices, which would mean giving up technology, a money economy and oth-er elements of the modoth-ern world.85

Interpretations of the Sámi connection to the land have thus had their im-pact on policies regarding nature in Finland. The Sámi connection to the land is a signifijicant factor in considering the Sámi cultural heritage and its protec-tion, for without a connection to the land the culture would end up with no concrete basis, jeopardizing its prospects for continuing in the future.

5 Conclusions

In this chapter, referring to the work of R. Harrison86 we have considered pro-tecting Sámi cultural heritage as ontological politics, that is, a process of as-sembling a particular future for Sámi communities. Central to this approach is that cultural heritage is understood above all as a present-day phenomenon:

selection of elements representing that cultural heritage, in other words ele-ments worth protecting for the future, is made from the present-day perspec-tive and under and constrained by contemporary power conditions and dis-courses, such as international legal discourses.

We have examined two social institutions of Sámi related to customary law that are closely linked to the questions of Indigenous belonging, the system of kinship-based ethnic recognition and the Sámi connection to the land, as ele-ments of the cultural heritage whose recognition and acknowledgement are extremely important for the continued existence of the Sámi and of the special features of Sámi communities and Sámi culture. Each of the institutions has

We have examined two social institutions of Sámi related to customary law that are closely linked to the questions of Indigenous belonging, the system of kinship-based ethnic recognition and the Sámi connection to the land, as ele-ments of the cultural heritage whose recognition and acknowledgement are extremely important for the continued existence of the Sámi and of the special features of Sámi communities and Sámi culture. Each of the institutions has