Sami History - An Economic Shift

An Economic Shift

From the 15th century on, the Sami came under increased pressure. The surrounding states, Denmark-Norway, Sweden-Finland and Russia showed increased interest in the Sami areas. Sweden, at the time blocked from the North Sea by Danish-Norwegian territory, was interested in a port at the Atlantic coast, and Russian expansion also reached the coasts of the Barents Sea. All claimed the right to tax the Sami people, and Finnish-speaking tax collectors from the northern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia reached the northern coasts, their Russian colleagues collected taxes as far west as the Harstad area of Norway and the Norwegian tax collectors collected riches from the inland of the Kola peninsula.

Hence the hunting intensified, and the number of wild reindeer declined. The Sami were forced to do something else. Reindeer husbandry was previously practiced in a limited way, for instance one tamed a few reindeer to divert the wild reindeer towards a cliff, hunting ditches etc. Subsequently, a more intense kind of reindeer husbandry was practiced, in which the reindeer were more or less tamed. Now, all reindeer in the Sami area are tame, or owned by someone.

The majority of Sami people, however, settled along the inland river, along the fjords and on the outer coast. Fishing, in the sea or in fresh water, hunting and a simple herding of cows, sheep and goats together make the livelihood of most Sami.

Reindeer and other animals play a central part in Sami culture, though today reindeer husbandry is of dwindling economic relevance for the Sami people. There is currently (2004) no clear indication when reindeer-raising started, perhaps about 500 AD, but tax tributes were raised in the 16th century. Since the 16th century, Samis have always paid taxes in monetary currency, and some historians have proposed that large scale husbandry is not older than from this period.

Lapponia (1673), written by the rhetorician Johannes Schefferus, is the oldest source of detailed information on Sami culture. It was written due to "ill-natured" foreign propaganda (in particular from Germany) claiming that Sweden had won victories on the battlefield by means of 'Sami magic'. In attempts to correct the picture of Sami culture amongst the Europeans, Magnus de la Gardie started an early 'ethnological' research project to document Sami groups, conducted by Schefferus. The book was published in late 1673 and quickly translated to French, German, English, and other languages (though not to Swedish until 1956). However, an adapted and abridged version was quickly published in the Netherlands and Germany, where chapters on their difficult living conditions, topography, and the environment had been replaced by made-up stories of magic, sorcery, drums and heathenry. But there was also criticism against the ethnography, claiming Sami to be more warlike in character, rather than the image Schefferus presented.