Since millennia the Sami indigenous people have lived in the northern plaines of Scandinavia and Russia, practicing reindeer husbandry and living a nomadic lifestyle. In the rise of the last century the arctic regions became important to the industries of mining and forestry, which caused a conflict of interest on the collective rights to lands, territories and resources of indigenous people. Sami indigenous were forced to settled in assigned areas, called Sami Village, giving up nomadism and struggling to continue to live in symbiosis with nature.
Deforestation and global warming are minimizing the grazing lands of reindeer causing starvation and a possible collapse of Sami culture. The climate crisis reveals that „Traditional Ecological Knowledge“ is making the Sami more resilient as well as making indigenous technologies the solution for the global challenge of climate crisis.
Maren Krings