Lapland is truly a magical place to visit. – Iveta
As is my wont, I had learnt a smattering of Finnish before going to Finland. I familiarized myself with a few basic Finnish words before we reached Helsinki, like kiitos for thanks and mitä kuuluu for How are you. I was surprised by the coincidence that the word for hundred is sata in Finnish, like shatam in Sanskrit.
When we reached Lapland, I discovered that the people there speak an altogether different language. Called Sami, it belongs to the Finno-Uralic language family. There are countless nations and people in the world. Some are better known internationally than others: Japan, Korea, Peru, Indonesia and France, for example. By and large, every nation is associated with a so-called ethnic group, although this is fast changing, especially in Europe and the Americas. Most ethnic groups inhabit nations they can call their own. Over the centuries, for various reasons, some groups migrated in large numbers to distant lands. They are known as the diaspora. Since one of the earliest to do this were Jewish people from Israel to Babylon, the term often refers to them. But in our own times we have diaspora of many ethnic groups.
However, we don’t have a term for groups into whose lands other nations have moved, as a result of which they become minority in their own native lands. I became aware of this in 1994 when I had a chance to visit a region known to its people as Sapmi, but to the English-speaking world as Lapland. I came to know that the people of Lapland do not care for this name, even though it is derived from the Finnish Lappi.
The Sámi people do not have a nation they can call their own. They are scattered in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia as a minority population. In this, they are somewhat like the Kurds. In any case, during that visit I coined an acronym for such people: MITOL: Minoritized In Their Own Land. This does not necessarily mean they are treated as second-class citizens.
As we drove from Jyvaskyla to Rovaniemi, we saw hundreds of lakes. At Rovaniemi – the capital – we went to the Roavvenjárgga Girku (Church). The guide told us that this beautiful Lutheran church had almost 50,000 members. The magnificent building was less than fifty years old when I visited it.
In the Sami religion, one believes that animals and plants, and even stones have a soul. Here was religious democracy of the highest kind, I wrote in my journal. We went to an interesting place for a taste of Sami culture where we experienced a Sami ceremony. During this ceremony (which was tailored for tourist amusement), they painted our nose tips black, made us drink reindeer milk, and mumbled something in the local language of which we could not understand one word. But then this happens in some other traditional religions also.
The ceremony was conducted by a tall young man wearing a colorfully embroidered costume with a fancy cap to match. It did not occur to anyone that the show was a politically incorrect trivialization of an ancient Sami ritual which had lost bits sanctity to the Christianized descendants of the ancient Sami people. But that is how cultural sensitivities change with time. Religions erase what was sacred to their predecessor-religion.
We stopped at the Santa Claus Village, through which the Arctic Circle passes. We were given a certificate that we had crossed it. But it was the wrong season (late July). So there was neither the white-bearded old man in a red coat with broad and white cuffs, nor the tiny team of toy-makers, let alone snow and sleighs.
We saw sunset after 11 p.m. and sunrise before 3 a.m. It was an experience of the well-known fact that noon and midnight are very much functions of season and latitude. Like languages and cultures, even nature’s aspects differ from place to place on the planet.
Another unusual venture in Tankavaara was panning for gold. It was nice to see eager tourists sitting on stone seats on the muddy water, fishing for grains of gold which many actually found. Nearby was a bronze statue of a man with a hat and huge shoes, in the posture of panning for gold.
A local Lapp who was working as a tour-guide asked me why I wasn’t going to collect some gold. We got to talking. This young man, whose name was Somby, had spent a summer in Paris, and spoke French and Finnish. He said that the Sami people – no matter where they lived – had a flag which had been inaugurated less than a decade earlier, in 198. He mentioned the Sami poet Anders Fjellner who described his people as paiven parneh: Sons of the Sun (Súrya-putras, one would say in Sanskrit)
I told him I had never been to a tundra before and how much I admired the natural beauty of Lapland. He said, somewhat sadly, that Finland was losing trees at an alarming rate. This was the first time I heard about deforestation from someone whose country was a major victim of that eco-epidemic. There was something calm and calming in the way the young man spoke in that land that seemed far away from the hustle and bustle of the overcrowded cities. There was pristine simplicity in the faces of the people. Though Somby spoke with some ethnic pride, even in endearing tones about the reindeer, he did not display any nationalism. I wrote down in my journal that “the trend in history is to make nations and people more similar than distinct.” When I wrote that in 1994, I did not know that in the 21st century, ethnic pride and nationalist paranoia would pop up with vengeance.
Spurts of Thought 