Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Hungry to know what this unconventional form of co-management and collaborative self-rule was doing for the Sami, a bright young doctoral student called Carina Green, from the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology at Uppsala University in Sweden, took her questions into Laponia and conducted an elegant and thorough study of the situation from the indigenous point of view. What she found was a story that was quite different from that told by the other partners in the experiment. Laponia had not been a total failure for the Sami—some good had come from setting aside lands for their reindeer in perpetuity and from the increased awareness of others about who the Sami were and what their struggles looked like—but it had not been a great success either.

  In particular, Green found that in the actual governance and management of Laponia, the Sami had been systematically marginalized in all manner of negotiations. To some of the non-Sami in the project, the indigenous inhabitants of the area were too similar to the dominant cultures in Laponia, so that it was often a non-Sami person who spoke for the people of the region, assuming that the Sami point of view was included in the remarks. But Green found also that the Sami were sidelined from constructive participation in Laponia affairs because they were too different, in that their worldview just didn’t fit with that of the non-Sami people who were trying to make this experiment in collaborative natural and cultural conservation work. It was a classic Catch-22 situation.

  But Green also found something else. Having been marginalized in the Swedish deliberations, local Sami people were now working within an international context as set by the UNESCO World Heritage site designation. Thanks to digital communications and channels that were opening as a result of publication of the Laponia story around the world, were starting to connect with indigenous people in other countries, such as New Zealand and Australia, where similar cultural/natural reserves have been created.

  I was keen to settle into Jokkmokk and explore Laponia to find out what some of the insiders were saying about how things were going in the summer of 2011. Serendipity, however, had other plans that revealed themselves on our first morning in the Hotel Jokkmokk on the shores of beautiful Lake Talvatis.

  From our window I could see what the ravens had discovered: wire bins full of old paper plates and napkins on the back lawn of the hotel. Beyond these, by the lake, was a constellation of large canvas teepees that were apparently being disassembled. I dressed quietly and headed out for a walk.

  From the other side of the lake, I got a sense of just how dominant this canvas quasi-Native encampment was on the hotel property. It took up the whole back lawn. Some wedding! The set-up was reminiscent of photos of Sami encampments we had seen in pictures and museums, but without people to animate the scene, it was oddly out of place.

  Curiosity brought me back around to get a closer look. Inside the teepees there was litter everywhere, including soggy papers, coffee cups, handouts, plastic name tags, and tattered programs for a conference called “Indigenous Terra Madre,” which apparently had ended moments before our arrival. Scattered about were dozens of cheap single-use headsets, the kind used for simultaneous translation.

  A crumpled list of participants indicated that there had been people at the conference from thirty-one countries. I sat down on the stack of flattened tables and had a closer look at the discarded program, which explained that the conference had been convened to explore “the relationship between man and nature from an indigenous perspective [and] how to explain that everyone needs to learn it in order to save the planet and the resources,” all hosted by a local organization called Slow Food Sápmi. Bingo!

  Feeling like something of a voyeur but intrigued by the energy radiating around the area and especially inside this unusual canvas-covered gathering place, I kept on sifting through the conference leavings. There were copies of speeches with what looked like presenter’s notes, with last-minute edits. There were versions of at least two declarations made by conference delegates. There were handouts from some of the participating and sponsoring organizations.

  With a muddy and disorganized sheaf of very tired and damp paper, I headed back to the room. Gail, who believes more than I do in the power of serendipity, awoke. Even before her customary kick-start morning coffee, she saw the notes, heard the sketch of the emerging story, and, still in her nightie, began helping me sift and sort the papers.

  “Do you realize what you’ve stumbled onto?” she said with total incredulity. “This is a treasure trove!”

  Now with a computer to aid in the re-creation of the conference, I was able to see just what it was that the Slow Food Sápmi had been up to at the Jokkmokk conference and what they had created. And it was a remarkable story.

  Slow Food Sápmi, it turned out, was a branch of the international slow food movement, whose principal objective is the defence of biodiversity in the global food supply. In a speech delivered at the opening of the conference, Ol-Johán Sikku, the head of Slow Food Sápmi, declared, “The philosophy of the slow food movement is Clean, Good, and Fair. It strongly resembles the indigenous ways of thinking and living. The main thought is that clean food is attached to a clean environment. And a clean environment is attached to how we treat our planet. Indigenous Terra Madre is a fantastic start for lifting forward the power and knowledge that indigenous carry.”

  From the moment Sikku’s remarks were placed into context, it was apparent that what was happening here was Sami looking after Sami interests, reaching out internationally, without benefit (or hindrance) from governments of any kind. Terra Madre was an established network of local producers, mostly indigenous, from around the world. They had been invited to Jokkmokk to share their concerns on the Arctic Circle. There were Native American producers from the Navajo-Churro Sheep Presidium. There were Tuareg milk, meat, and cereal producers from Niger, the Kamchatka Salmon Fishers, and traditional rice farmers from Malaysia who had brought their “agri-cultural” rituals, ceremonies, and celebrations. Also present, to my great surprise, were members of the Crofters Association from the highlands and islands of Scotland.

  The problem was that not everyone who had been invited could come. The Swedish government had refused visas to delegates from poorer African countries, because of worries that without sufficient means and cash resources, they might disappear from Jokkmokk and become a future burden on the state. Bolstered by confreres from around the world, Chairman Sikku cobbled together a Resolution and Statement of Profound Concern, and called the Swedish government on its duplicity. In it, he pointed out that article 36 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which Sweden had signed along with 143 other countries, indicated that all indigenous people have a right to “maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation, including activities for spiritual, cultural, political, economic and social purposes, with their own members as well as other peoples across borders.” And what incensed the gathering even more, so the document said, was that the UN Declaration stated further that in consultation with indigenous peoples, signatory states “shall take effective measures to facilitate the exercise and ensure the implementation of this right.”

  By now, Gail was with me on the back lawn, sitting among the detritus of this most remarkable gathering, still feeling the energy in the air. Bit by bit, we pieced together what had gone on. There had been sessions on traditional knowledge, land biodiversity, and indigenous food production; discussion groups on threats to pastoralism; and organized discussions about climate change, which, it was readily apparent, fell far down the list of threats behind agro-monocultures, dams, timber industries, oil and gas extraction, mining, and deforestation. The Sami hosts offered taste workshops, midnight sun walks, and cultural experiences serenaded by Sami artists singing joiks, traditional Sami songs.

  Among the most interesting papers of all, once my litter pile was sorted and assessed, were those showing the development through consensus of a concluding statement. As this communiqué was coming together, early drafts
were entitled “The Jokkmokk Manifesto,” in the spirit of their first piece of business: to admonish the Swedish government on its responsibilities vis-à-vis the UN Declaration. In the final draft, “manifesto” had given way to “agreement,” but the message was clear and the cause of much celebration. People were proud, none more than the Sami hosts, of what they had crafted.

  Written in English, for maximum benefit in distribution, but simultaneously translated into as many languages as the delegates could muster, the final communiqué, a unique northern declaration, made clear that exactly the same appetites that were causing climate change were also threatening indigenous peoples and communities worldwide. Sustainable local food systems and food sovereignty were inextricably tied to maintaining cultural practices, spiritual values, and indeed the health and survival of the natural world, which, of course, is the source of all life on earth. Powerful ideas, scattered on a lawn right on the Arctic Circle.

  The last piece of the puzzle was a dog-eared two-page speech, stapled in the corner, on which a delegate had written, “Jörgen Jonsson’s Speech Closing Ceremony.” Jonsson, president of the Swedish Sami Association, had begun with an old saying in his culture: “If the reindeer feel good, we feel good.” He told the assembly that the conference discussions had helped him feel good, but that there was much work to be done. “We must stand up, speak our languages, share our knowledge, and feel confident that together we have the keys to create a sustainable society. We must at all costs raise our voices in a world where indigenous knowledge is neither valued nor heard.”

  We had the power. And look what we’d done with it.

  4: THINGS GO BETTER WITH SANTA

  After the initial excitement of stumbling across the flotsam of the Terra Madre event, we met quite a number of Swedes and Sami in the shops and museums in and around Jokkmokk who were only too happy to confirm peaceful coexistence among the peoples of Laponia—but less so between traffic and the free-roaming reindeer. The main roads were fenced to some extent, but on the secondary and lesser roads, extreme caution was advised. Where there was one reindeer, there were always several or several dozen, and not one of them the slightest bit cowed by traffic.

  As we moved east from Jokkmokk in our roller skate of a rental car (in order for me to change gears, Gail had to bring her knees together and close the map in the passenger seat), the first couple of encounters were funny. But after repeatedly coming upon gaggles of pot-bellied summer reindeer padding down the centre of the road, it occurred to me that relative to the substantial size and weight of the big male reindeer, our wee car would most certainly come second in any collision.

  Cars coming the other way all had supplementary headlights stacked up like trophies along their front bumpers, which seemed totally incongruous at a time when the sun never sets. But we began to speculate about how difficult it would be to spot reindeer at night, especially with their white-dusted tawny bodies against a snowy background.

  Down the road in the ghost village of Kuouka, we sat literally on the Arctic Circle in twenty-one-year-old Daniel Ohlsson’s farm kitchen. Although Daniel’s work was mostly in town, he still maintained a couple of tractors and worked the farm in his spare time. Here, the Jokkmokk reindeer story continued. He explained that many of the people in the traditional Sami villages throughout Laponia have moved to town. The Swedish government, like governments throughout the North, “encouraged” people to move to town, with financial incentives like preferential taxation.

  “Does anyone still herd reindeer?” I asked.

  “Yes, some. But everyone would still know someone or have a relative who has something to do with reindeer herding. Reindeer are more like pasture animals now. They keep them around here in the winter and then move them by truck to the mountain pastures in the summer. In the old days they would have moved with them on the ground. They make money from selling reindeer but it’s not enough. The herders need other jobs to earn enough money to live on. But everybody mostly lives in town now. I went to school with lots of Sami kids. They went to the Sami school for language lessons for a couple of hours a week, but other than that it was the same for everybody.”

  When he wants meat, or reindeer blood to make special black palt—a traditional Swedish meat-filled dumpling—he just checks with some of his Sami friends in town, who are usually happy to sell him meat under the table. “You can buy governmentinspected reindeer meat at the supermarket,” he explained. “But everybody knows somebody in town who can sell them a whole dressed reindeer for about three thousand kronor [C$475]. That’s about sixty to seventy kilos. It’s not really legal but the trade is not so great that the government gets upset enough to chase it. You can get dried and smoked reindeer too. They just smoke it and salt it and hang it up beside your house to dry. It’s quite a bit more expensive, about four hundred kronor [C$63] a kilo. But it’s more a snack for having with beer than an actual food item. We sell it at the gas station where I work. It’s very popular all the time but especially with the people who come to the winter market in Jokkmokk.”

  The reindeer dodging continued as we made our way from Jokkmokk into Finland, where we approached the Arctic Circle from the south on Highway E75. From brochures we’d collected along the way, Gail and I had learned that Finns consider the Arctic Circle to be the “border of hastiness, where regular time changes into the magic time of elves and reindeer.”

  About reindeer time we had learned quite a bit; about elf time, we had learned less, except perhaps that travelling in twenty-four-hour daylight skews any notion of diurnal rhythm or anything as ordinary and predictable as three meals a day. But we also learned that elf wisdom can be elusive and that humans apparently can see elves only when the elves want to be seen, a bit like the essence of Iceland. That was definitely the case as we drove under a giant incongruous chevron road marker and turned left into Joulupukin Pajkylä, or Santa Claus Village, north of Rovaniemi. Here, the Arctic Circle was crawling with elves: diminutive Finns, some of them most certainly of Sami extraction, eager to get at the necessary task of cash-cropping tourists like us.

  The first item of business was to find and walk the actual line, which had become something of a project ritual. Finding the Circle at Joulupukin Pajkylä, however, turned out to be a challenge, until we realized that we were standing on it: the location of the Arctic Circle was paved right into the village plaza, a wide white line that read, “Napapiiri, Arctic Circle,” in deference to visitors who didn’t speak Finnish. And, if we wanted, we could connect to Santa’s wireless network for a small fee and call our friends and relatives anywhere in the world so they could see us crossing the magical line of latitude.

  A particularly tinny broadcast of Mariah Carey’s “O Holy Night,” followed by a parade of other carols, put us in the mood to shop, despite the fact that it was a rainy July morning. Given the season, reindeer, dogsled, and snowmobile rides were out. We could go and pet the reindeer, but a couple of buses had already arrived and there was a lineup. Alternatively, we could follow the advice of a lovely young host in red vest and cap and make our way to Santa’s Office for an audience with the man himself and a chance to have a picture taken. In multilingual posters around the place, it looked as if Santa had come straight from central casting in New York City or ho-ho-ho’d his way out of one of Haddon Sundblom’s iconic ads for Coca-Cola, which appeared for the first time in the Saturday Evening Post back in 1931. Suddenly thirsty, we stopped for a cold drink and made our way to Santa’s Main Post Office, where more happy elves were working the crowd.

  Inside Santa’s mailroom, the sound of music was replaced by the ring of several cash registers working transactions with visitors for mailables of every sort under the midnight sun—small postcards, medium-sized postcards, large postcards, Santa Claus Village stationery, bookmarks, and attractively branded envelopes and boxes to mail just about any item for sale on the premises, which, we gathered from looking around at Santa’s tables, ranged from key fobs to fur coats. They
’d cancel them today with Santa’s special stamp (just like in Norway) or, for another modest premium, they’d set them aside and mail whatever it was in time for Christmas. But no, they wouldn’t stamp your passport, even for a fee.

  Bumping into fellow tourists at every turn, we made our way out, past a restaurant or two and into some of the other rusticlooking buildings on the site. Resisting an offer to descend into Santa’s underground grotto (some kind of cave complex with special lights … what he needed that for was a mystery verging on creepy), we opted to stay above ground and wander.

  This place made the Polarsirkel-Senteret in Norway look like a roadside stand! Here, though, there were some very nice handcrafted Sami and Finnish items as well as bowls and kuksa cups, made from classically made northern burled birch. There were canned meats and leather goods that made me hope none of the visiting children ever connected the dots between Rudolph and Santa’s abattoir. However authentic all that was, the whole affair was gilded with the crass vulgarity of blinking lights, plastic holly, and canned polyester snow.

  Stopping at a village map on an outdoor display board (Mariah’s greatest holiday hits had come around again on the loudspeakers, making it seem even more intensely that we were in New York, Los Angeles, or Antler, North Dakota), we counted seven souvenir/gift shops, at least seven factory outlets for various Lapp products from polished gemstones to stylish reindeer purses, and about half a dozen bars and restaurants, all staffed by bored teenagers in red and green. As significant as the line of latitude on which it was situated may be, and as much as we had looked forward to experiencing the crossing in the heart of Sápmi—the wage-earning reindeer wranglers notwithstanding—this “village” on the Arctic Circle in Finland finally revealed itself for what it was: a strip mall dedicated in wallet, body, and soul to honour the Crown Prince of Kitsch, the omnipotent Deity of Consumption: Joulupukki, Père Noel, Ded Moroz, Baba Chaghaloo, Sinterklass … Santa Claus.