Today is The Sámi National Day. I always feel a bit sorrow on this day instead of joy. It is because there is discrimination among Sámi people.
I was brought up in the Sámi minority group among Sámi nation. Despite I have relations to all northern Sámi groups like we all have, still some persons from the bigger Sámi groups experience they have the right to discriminate us who belong to the minority groups.
There is no such a thing existing on the planet Earth that we could call a pure blood Sámi of some certain Sámi tribe. We all are mixed up more or less together and many also to other nations like Finns, Swedish and Norwegians.
The discrimination of Forest Sámi and Inari Sámi people appear because they have lost the spoken Sámi language. They claim these Forest Sámi and Inari Sámi people lost also the culture. They connect the ethnicity to the language only. In practical, if your grandparent have spoken Sámi language but all the other parts of the cultural heritage have been missed and lost you can have the status to vote at Sámi Parliament elections. If the spoken language has vanished OR they don't believe your testimony but all the other cultural parts are alive, you are not able to receive the status to vote.
Always on The Sámi National Day I wish Forest Sámi people will some day be equal to the other Sámi people. I wish they stop telling lies about us and accusing us being fake and after their rights... We talk so much about the rights today. Who has which right to what ever. What about the responsibilities? As a Forest Sámi I don't have much rights compared to some other Sámi groups. One reason for that is that according to Forest Sámi tradition it was more about the responsibilities than the rights. We, perhaps, spent more energy on our responsibilities than fighting for our rights.
One of my biggest responsibilities today as a Forest Sámi is helping out to breathe alive our own language. It means I need to study first the closest possible language: Inari Sámi. It is so similar to Kemi Sámi language that they can be called each others dialects. I am studying Inari Sámi for the 2nd year now. The progress is slow and needs time but I can hear the whispers of my great grandfather and great grandmother already.
Breathing alive our own Sámi language as spoken is a slow process because we don't have the right to vote, so we don't have the right to the sámipublic funding to reactivate our Sámi language as spoken. Because we don't have the funding, we have no proper formal research group not to mention school books to start to learn! It doesn't stop us, it just slows us down. Here we come!
Puerre sääme kaažâpeäive puokkâid!
Merry Sámi National Day to Everybody!
