Ever since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by Indigenous peoples. Growing up in Murmansk I was aware of the Sami, who are traditionally reindeer herders from the Kola peninsula in northern Russia, but there are also Sami in Finland, Norway and Sweden. In Russia, I was fascinated first by the Sami religious places such as Lake Seydozero, which is sacred to them; then I became interested in their history and how the Soviet era had restricted and changed Sami culture.
Communism effectively destroyed their whole nomadic existence and their reindeer herds were organised into collective farms called kolkhozes. They were given quotas for fishing in the tundra and were forced into a sedentary existence, housed in freezing cold apartment blocks with no heating. They were banned from speaking their language, wearing their traditional clothes or celebrating their culture – so it almost completely disappeared. Nonetheless, little by little some of the Russian Sami began to appreciate certain “comforts”, such as helicopters to get to isolated places, boarding schools where they could leave their children when they worked, and bonuses for raising herds of reindeer.
