Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

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Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic: Perspectives from the Barents Area

Box 8.5 Case study: Skolt Sámi in the Näätämö basin, northern Finland This case study (Mustonen and Feodoroff, 2013; Mustonen, 2015) concerns the Skolt Sámi in the Näätämö basin in northern Finland, where initiatives ranging from language nests to rights, co-management, climate change and preservation of traditions have been undertaken.

been a process of addressing cultural and language loss.The first Skolt ‘ABC’ books were developed in the 1970s. Their traditional economies have been maintained to this day. In the 1990s and 2000s,the Skolts initiated wide-ranging cultural documentation and oral history gathering projects with partners covering, for example, traditional songs, language, and handicrafts, mapping of land use and occupancy, and traditions and knowledge relevant for climate variability and change. The Skolts have been the subject of much research, and have successfully emerged to create research partnerships on water quality monitoring and co-management. In an acknowledgement of their historic presence on the land, their Gramota edicts, were recently accepted to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, a landmark decision for all Arctic indigenous peoples.The Gramota edicts were issued by the Russian Czars between the 17th and 19th centuries, and documented Sámi rights and privileges to lands and waters. In the period 2009–2015 and after much community self- reflection, the Skolts developed the first co-management project in Finland to address the impacts of climate change on the Näätämö river and the Atlantic salmon ( Salmo salar ). This included an assessment of salmon dynamics in the Barents Sea and beyond as well as the Norwegian side of the Näätämö basin, with the Kven minority as a partner. The process has also looked at historical damage created by the state forestry company Metsähallitus to the waterways, and a cross-disciplinary discussion with scientists on water quality and future resilience. The result has been a very hands-on method to increase theNäätämö and Skolt resilience,including the harvest of predator fish, plans to restore the Vainosjoki sub-catchment areas, and rigorous monitoring of water and

The Skolt Sámi arrived in the Atlantic Salmon-rich basin of the Näätämö river in the 1940s, after their traditional lands had been ceded to Russia in the Finnish-Russian wars of 1939–1944.Historically, another tribe of Skolts had occupied this basin, but assimilated with the Norwegians and Finns in the late 1800s. Despite the trauma of the re-location, the families reinstated their siida family use areas in the Näätämö basin – preserving their Skolt Sámi traditional indigenous governance, the siida system and the associated village council. (A siida is the endemic community level organization unit of the Sámi that has been lost in most of their current living area, but preserved as a governance regime among the Skolts. Siida is used by North Sámi in a modern context to refer to a use area in herding, but here refers to the socio- political historical system of the Sámi society.) Tucked away during decades of the Cold War, the Skolts emerged in the early 1990s to discuss revitalizing their culture, language and traditions. The central Skolt community is the Sevettijärvi village with 500 inhabitants. Traditional economies are reindeer herding, fisheries, and some hunting and gathering economies.There are specific laws within Finland that address the Skolts, putting them in a special legal category of their own separate from the Inari and North Sámi of Finland. The Skolts witnessed an out-migration in the 1950s and 1960s from Sevettijärvi, and since the early 1970s there has

Atle Staalesen

At the opening of the Skolt Sami museum in Neiden, Norway, June 2017