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 mitäkuuluu 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. For many long centuries, and up to a point even in our own times in the first decades of the twenty-first century, 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 people from 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 my visit to Finland 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.
Spurts of Thought 