[BGHater]

Sámi, great photos.

[Jack Black]

Finnish bump

[Jack Black]

Finnish bump

[Dixie Yooper]

We must get these poor people cell phones so we can warn them...about liberals.

[Responsibility2nd]

During this joyous Christmas season, I’d like you to know....

A reindeer bit my sister once.

[blackminorca]

Awesome pics - what a demanding life - none of them look too old.

[JoeProBono]

Great post!

[Spike Knotts]

"“The Sámi are believed to be the first known culture to have herded animals,” writes one scholar."

"Meanwhile, a smaller minority of Mountain Sámi continued to hunt reindeer, and around the 1500s began taming the overhunted animals into herds, becoming the famed reindeer nomads"

Uh...something doesn't compute. Is it the author's contention that no one else on Earth "herded animals" until the 16th century? Ok...no wonder the "scholar" chose to remain nameless.

The pictures seem contrived and poised to me. Natives ginning it up for a naive, or not so naive photographer out looking for his romantic preconceptions of a stone age existence...much like the highly stylized and arranged 19th century American Indian pictures that the media used to introduce the idea of the noble savage. To believe that most of these pictures are genuine seems similar to believing that if a photographer decided to come by my house to document a rapidly vanishing breed, the Southernus Redneckus, he'd just happen to find me in the front yard wearing a Budweiser cap, wife beater and cut offs...and I conveniently have my dogs, Camaro, truck, guns, tools, and family arranged around me. Ready for the glamor shot.

[BerryDingle]

Gramma got run over by a reindeer “bump”.

[blam]

The Sami are mostly mtDNA haplogroups 'V' and U5.
My mother was 'V' and my grandmother (Father's mother, Mrs Smith) was U5a.

My yDNA is R1b1b2, an Irishman with roots in Denmark.

[Rebelbase]

Didn’t Chernobyl poison the lichens across northern Scandinavia and cause the reindeer farmers to cull their herds?

[Rebelbase]

I had no idea these people were ordering their clothes out of catalogs from the North Face, Columbia Sports, etc. 100+ years ago. The shipping charges must have been tremendous.

[blam]

FYI:

Why are we writing Sami instead of Lapps on these pages?

"Lapp" means a patch of cloth for mending, thus the name suggests that the Sami are wearing patched clothes, a derogatory term and one that needs to be replaced. The word "Laplander" is also problematic since that could mean any person who lives within this region, also those that are non native. Finally there's a part of the Sami population who always have lived outside the region of "Lapland" such as the Sami's in Swedens, Jemtland and Härjedalen.

Webmasters note:

As a curiosity I'd like to mention that there's one Sami word that has made it into several of the major languages of this world, that word is Tundra -doesn't it speak volumes about which part of the world this is. :)

[Hot Tabasco]

Santa gets his reindeer from the Sami peoples......

[Kenny Bunk]

Thanks for a wonderful post.