Visiting Sweden’s Sámi: The Lost Nomadic World, The Undying Nomadic Wisdom
Twenty hours later, my feet finally touched the ground, sinking into the thick snow of Lapland in northern Sweden. It was seven in the morning, and the sky over Jokkmokk had not yet fully brightened, but the light reflecting off the dazzling white snow all around was already enough to make out the silhouettes of the nearby trees.
All was silent around us, and only this tiny station had livened up a little with the arrival of our train. Most of the passengers were here for Jokkmokk’s 418th Sámi market.
The Sámi people are an indigenous group living in the northern regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The Arctic environment has shaped their way of life. For thousands of years, they adapted to the harsh climate and seasonal changes through reindeer herding. Today, most Sámi people have transitioned to a settled way of life, yet the nomadic traditions of the past continue to play an important role in their culture and identity.
A deep blue hat, striped with the colourful bands typical of the Sámi — waiting for me in front of the station was John, a Sámi friend of my undergraduate professor. Against the backdrop of his hat, his face looked as pale as the snow. In shoes made of reindeer hide, John walked towards me, waving as he came. He was rather thin, but his lively, spirited energy made him seem nowhere near seventy. I hurried over at once to shake his hand and greet him warmly.
Before setting off for his home, John insisted on showing me the first famous attraction here. He walked about five metres out, pointed at a completely blank white board in front of him and said, “Look! This is our tourist information.”
It was so cold that the entire board was encased in frozen ice — you couldn’t see a thing. But that inexplicable sense of humour gave me a small measure of warmth in the twenty-below weather.
I. The Reopened Sámi Market
“You simply must come back in summer! We’ll go fishing at the mountain lakes, hunt moose!” His eyes brimmed with longing for the season.
Once we arrived at John’s cabin, set down our bags and greeted his girlfriend Lisabeth, we headed straight for the market. The Jokkmokk market opens on the first Thursday of February each year and runs for three days; today was the first day. Alongside the trading, more than sixty Sámi-related cultural and artistic events were running simultaneously. This market tradition had remained unbroken for over four hundred years — the only exception being the two years it moved online during the pandemic. This year marked the first in-person market since then.
John told me that the market’s original purpose had nothing to do with trade or cultural exchange. It was established by the Swedish king to tighten control over the northern population. In the early seventeenth century, the Swedish Crown set up permanent markets on both sides of the Gulf of Bothnia, across all Sámi Lapland territory, near the Sámi winter settlements — for population registration, tax collection, court hearings and missionary work. Over four hundred years later, the market has become a vital meeting point for Sámi culture.
I trailed behind John, threading through the crowds, and everywhere I looked there were young Sámi in traditional dress. John would stop every few minutes to greet someone — it seemed he knew everyone here. The feeling was uncannily like walking through the rural market in my parents’ hometown in Anhui, where you look up and every face is a relative. Sure enough, all of them were his cousins — some thirty in all, scattered across every corner of Lapland.
Some sold handmade Sámi silver jewellery at the market; others offered reindeer and moose meat they had hunted and air-dried themselves; a few, like John, worked in writing and text; one was at the television station, promoting Sámi culture; another was a renowned musician in jojk, the traditional Sámi musical form; and even the reindeer team that had been parading through the market for decades belonged to his cousin’s family, who worked as herders… I must admit, in that moment I felt the power of family ties all too deeply.
Looking at their occupations, you could see that a people once sustained by reindeer herding had now woven themselves into every sector of Swedish society. Of the 80,000–100,000 Sámi people alive today, only around 10 per cent still work in reindeer-related trades. Without traditional dress, you would have no way of telling a Sámi person from a Swedish one.
II. Fishing and Hunting: Sámi Food DNA
In Sweden, pairing meat with fruit sauce is perfectly ordinary. I wasn’t keen at first, but I grew used to it. The fresh, tart-sweet sauce balances the richness of the meat and cuts through any gamey smell — a surprisingly delightful combination.
The moose we ate was one John had hunted himself in the mountains last year and carried home — over three hundred kilos. Five hundred years ago, the Sámi of Jokkmokk still lived by hunting, fishing and gathering. The sharp seasonal shifts meant they led a semi-nomadic existence, tracking food sources as and where the seasons allowed. Then the expansion of agriculture from the south flattened many of the forests and seized Sámi land; add the government’s taxes on top, and they turned to reindeer (reindeer) herding, raising herds to earn the income they needed to pay what was owed.
The Sámi once migrated alongside their herds, but today most herders have settled on the fells, and skis have long since been replaced by snowmobiles, all-wheel-drive vehicles and helicopters. The reindeer industry is thoroughly modern. The moose we ate was wild, but wild reindeer disappeared from Sweden in the early twentieth century. Swedish herders now manage roughly 260,000 reindeer, of which some 50,000 are slaughtered each year for meat, hides and tools.
Sweden also has the densest moose (moose) population in the world, and in Lapland you can still occasionally spot one strolling through the woods by the roadside. Come autumn hunting season, some 250,000 licensed Swedish hunters head into the forests and take nearly 100,000 young moose. By spring, over 100,000 calves are born. Drive carefully here — you absolutely do not want to collide with a grown moose weighing four or five hundred kilos.
The next evening, John brought out something special for dinner: whitefish caught in the great Lule Lake (Luleå). Fish was John’s greatest passion — he loved catching it as much as eating it, no doubt shaped by growing up beside the river.
Norrbotten County, of which Jokkmokk is a part, has more than 20,000 lakes and thousands of kilometres of shoreline. Scattered across these waters you can find brown trout and grayling; on the fells you might even land a salmon; while at lower altitudes, perch, pike and whitefish are the common catch.
Sámi people no longer make their living from fishing, but that tradition still runs in some people’s blood. For them, a healthy fish population is also an important indicator of whether the waters are in good health.
Perhaps he preferred to stick to the traditional plate, or perhaps some of his childhood memories made him wary of any talk of north–south integration.
III. A Past No One Wishes to Recall
“On the first night, fifteen of us were put to bed in one big room. Not one of us slept. We sobbed in waves. Between tears I longed for my reindeer-hide mattress back home — that was so much warmer. I missed my family, of course. But none of that would bring back the nine years of childhood I lost. That shadow has never left me.”
He fell silent for a long while, his eyes fixed on something that might have been ahead of him or far behind. “Besides, I don’t want to spend my life being the victim. Life doesn’t move forward because you sit and dwell on it.”
Lisabeth joined our conversation, and it was her grandmother she brought up.
She said she had first seen her grandmother’s photograph at an exhibition in Stockholm. Just as the film Sami Blood depicts, the Sámi were subjected to racial research by Sweden and other European countries. Researchers came to the boarding schools, made the children strip completely naked, line up in a row, and — under the researchers’ direction — measured them and posed them for photographs.
Lisabeth’s grandmother had been one of them. But rather than anger, Lisabeth spoke of it with a kind of wry, hard-won humour: “All I could think was — how on earth am I seeing my grandmother here? It was so strange…”
IV. Land and Resource Conflicts
Alongside racial discrimination, conflicts over land and resources have smouldered between the Sámi and the Swedish government for a very long time.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Swedish government seized vast tracts of Sámi grazing and hunting grounds for agricultural reclamation. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Swedish forestry and mining expanded onto Sámi territory. The industrial operators rarely took the Sámi’s needs into account or their traditional ways of using the land, and many forests and lakes were damaged.
Last century, the Swedish government introduced regulations and policies aimed at curbing Sámi reindeer herding, while simultaneously beginning to build a series of hydroelectric dams on Sámi land. One of them sits at John’s doorstep.
In January this year, Sweden’s state-owned mining company discovered a vast rare-earth deposit at Kiruna, near Jokkmokk. Rare earths are a critical component of electric-vehicle batteries, wind turbines and other clean-energy equipment.
While most Europeans celebrated the promise of a green transition, the local Sámi grew more troubled, because mining would inevitably disrupt the reindeer’s traditional migration routes. Beyond that, the threat of mine pollution to nearby water sources weighed heavily on many Sámi people’s minds.
Every thread of this history and its present-day consequences has cast a deep and lasting shadow over Sámi life, fuelling marginalisation and a sense of exclusion while inflicting irreversible damage on the environment. Add global warming to the picture, and ecologically fragile regions like Jokkmokk have become ever more precarious.
Lisabeth’s home village sits atop a layer of permafrost. In recent years, villagers have noticed that the lakes in the frozen ground are constantly bubbling, releasing methane and carbon dioxide that will only accelerate the greenhouse effect. Before, everyone assumed climate change was something far removed from their lives — they never imagined it would unfold right under their noses.
Unlike some modern Swedes who see nature as a “pristine sanctuary” for sensory pleasure or as a resource bank for industrial development, the Sámi and many other indigenous peoples hold that the ideal state of nature is balance, and that balance is honoured only when people engage with and draw on the natural world in measured, restrained ways.
In recent years, Sámi Parliaments across the region have formed alliances with environmental groups and indigenous communities to protest government land and resource policies: bringing legal action against mining and logging companies to halt environmental destruction; protesting the sacrifice of their livelihoods in the name of a so-called green transition; and urging governments to draw on Sámi traditional ecological knowledge when making decisions about land use.
At the same time, the Sámi are also actively using the media and the arts to raise public awareness of indigenous culture and the importance of environmental protection.
V. Conclusion
The paradox of pursuing sustainability through industrialisation reminds us that the time has come to learn from the traditional ecological wisdom of indigenous peoples. The nomadic culture of old may have long since faded, but a view of nature rooted in respect and restraint can still light the way for us as we navigate the environmental and climate crises of our time.
https://sweden.se/life/people/sami-in-sweden
https://www.laits.utexas.edu/sami/diehtu/siida/hunting/jonsa.htm
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were provided by the author.
Editor: Ze’en