albma duohta sápmelaš

”According to the Times, Jovsset has argued that the government’s reindeer culling policy is a violation of indigenous rights, and that killing so much of his hed would render it impossible for his family to live. (The Ministry of Agriculture and Food declined to comment to the Times because the case is ongoing.) Nicholas Tyler, a British biologist and mammal ecologist at UIT, the Arctic University of Norway, told the New York Times the case is “a tense, essential debate over what should take precedence in Norway: indigenous rights, including that to an ancestral livelihood, or ecological biodiversity and general environmental rights."”

Doesn't mean it's not also very much contemporary. One of the biggest issues we face as an indigenous people is the relegating of our traditions and our very existence to an ambiguous past and the denying of our modernity as a real, living people who also wear this stuff and not just to show it to tourists, either.

Disney likes making generic depictions of indigenous peoples and next year, it’s our turn - read the Saami’s turn - to be turned into caricatures on the big screen by everyone’s favourite animation company!

Yay, or something. 

For it’s next animated feature film Disney has chosen to turn the H.C. Andersen story The Snow Queen into a film, and the company claims that the general feel of the film is supposed to be ‘Scandinavian’.

Cue main characters dressed in what looks like a bad version of our traditional clothes that we were long forbidden from wearing and that many people to this day don’t wear because of a long tradition of discrimination towards people who openly identify as Saami.

Also, wouldn’t you know, the male protagonist who is some kind of mystical mountain man has a one-antlered pet reindeer called Sven. 

You know, the actual Andersen story in itself is great, I remember hearing it as a child, but the story has been completely altered by Disney and I am pretty sure that they will consequently ruin it, and in the process make a mockery of our traditions and clothes as well, just because they can.

Like, if you look at the clothes worn by Kristoff here - let’s ignore Anna, she’ll freeze to death dressed like that anyway - they’re clearly inspired by Saami clothes; 

Looking at this painting, it becomes obvious that they’re not only being vaguely Scandinavian, but that they’re actively drawing upon a very specific type of the traditional dress of the Saami, i.e. the beaska (or muadta in South Saami), but getting it terribly wrong, because of what they’ve done to the arms and the front of it.

This is what a muadta/beaska looks like in real life (the man in the picture comes from the Lule Saami area Sállto in Norway):

And in case anyone still doubted the Saami influence, look at the decorations on Kristoff’s clothes and tell me that they’re not similar to the ones on Niklas Granlund’s Lule Saami traditional dress from Váhtjer (his gábdde shows influences from both Lule Saami and North Saami dresses, as is typical of traditional Saami dresses in border areas between two distinct Saami cultures).

Saemesth munnjien translates as ‘Speak South Saami with me’ and this Tumblr is meant to be a page where people can learn my language together with me; this is an act of reclamation and decolonisation and you’re all welcome to join me.

I’ve only just recently started to reclaim my mother’s ancestral language, and this page, together with its Facebook equivalent is going to be a place where I post words, sentences, thoughts on grammar and on culture.