Posted on 07/24/2007 3:11:20 PM PDT by blam
Russia's Sami fight for their lives
By Jorn Madslien
BBC News, Lovozero, Russia
Bored youths kick a football against a grey concrete wall. A husky dog languishes in the quiet street. In this town, where many would struggle to pay for a bus ticket, there are hardly any cars.
Most Sami have been forced to quit their nomadic lives
"The last villagers came to Lovozero in 1968," says Nina Afanasyeva. "But there were no jobs for them."
These days, some make traditional garments and souvenirs for the occasional tourist. And the Tundra reindeer farm cooperative provides some 300 jobs.
Yet the majority of the Kola peninsula's indigenous people are unemployed, and in most cases reindeer herding is no longer an option.
Instead, many spend their days in cramped apartments or in shacks on the edge of town, where vodka is their only comfort.
"People were promised apartments with modern conveniences, but only three people from my village got that," says Ms Afanasyeva, a Sami elder.
"The rest moved in with other families. To this day, many still haven't got their own place."
Miners and soldiers
The deserted and seemingly endless potholed road to Lovozero cuts through a landscape of vast lakes and forests that has changed little since the nomadic Sami people arrived on the Kola peninsula some 5,000 years ago.
The vast arctic tundra provided good grazing for their reindeer, so they quickly fanned out across invisible borders to the west, into neighbouring Norway, Finland and Sweden.
Over time, borders were drawn and strict controls were introduced. Then, during the Cold War, the border between Russia and the West was closed. Contact between Russian and Nordic Sami people was completely cut off.
The Sami people's traditional way of life has been under assault for decades as they have been gradually forced off arctic Russia's fertile tundra grazing-land and into artificially created towns.
Much of the displacement was caused by a steady expansion of industry, forestry and mining, and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of workers from other parts of the Soviet Union - many of them arriving as forced labourers in Gulag camps.
Then, during the Cold War, Sami coastal fishermen were ordered to move away from the shores of the Barents Sea, which is currently littered with secretive navy installations, and reindeer herders were forced away from a 200-mile exclusion zone that ran along the Cold War frontier.
Nina Afanasyeva is angry at the way the Saami people was treated by different regimes throughout the 20th century
To this day, the few who still herd reindeer complain about bored and hungry soldiers who use their machine guns to shoot their animals.
Urban Sami, meanwhile, bemoan the way powerful tourist companies prevent them carrying out their fishing traditions in Voronya River or Lovozero Lake.
"We are not used to private property rights, and we are not used to competing," laments Vatonena Lyubov, vice president of the Association of Kola Sami.
"We will never regain our grazing lands and our rivers."
Natural riches
Both the Kola peninsula's mineral riches and its geographical location, on the shores of the Barents Sea, make matters worse for the indigenous people.
Existing mining and smelting activities have destroyed vast areas, and given the sharply rising demand for minerals these activities are set to expand fast in the near future.
Mining and smelting activities have wiped out much of the tundra, making it harder to find good reindeer grazing land.
Add to that the many nuclear power plants and nuclear waste heaps that litter the peninsula, and the Sami people's future looks bleak.
Even the oil and gas industry threatens to encroach on their territory.
For years, there was talk of a pipeline connecting Siberian oil fields via Archangel, across the White Sea and Kola, to the ice-free ports in Murmansk.
And plans are under way to build a gas pipeline across Kola to link Barents Sea gas fields with the European pipelines further south.
"Other organisations with strong lobby groups, such as Gazprom, the tourism industry and mining companies, want access to the resources," says Ms Lyubov.
"We don't have much experience with capitalism and we never understood communism," she adds.
"We understand we will be the losers in any conflict, so we try to avoid them."
Public protest
Such fatalism is widespread among the Sami, though it is not shared by everyone.
Avdeeva Larisa shows of the Sami flag, which was banned along with traditional costumes during Soviet times
In the middle of Lovozero's concrete jungle, the Sami flag is flying proudly over a cultural centre that was built in 2003.
From here, the formerly forbidden Sami language is spoken on the airwaves via the nation's own radio studios.
This is mission control for those who want to preserve Sami traditions and culture.
"The first public protest by Sami people took place in 1998, when a Swedish company wanted an open-pit gold mine nearby, in the heart of the grazing lands," says Larisa Avdeyeva, daughter of an activist reindeer herder.
"We think the region's resources belong to the Sami people," she says as she shows off traditional costumes that were banned during Soviet times, only to be painstakingly recreated from photographs in recent years.
"Our nation should have a share of the oil and gas, minerals and forestry profits."
With only 1,600 Sami people left in Russia, such a territorial claim could - in the unlikely event that it was successful - make them all very wealthy, but Ms Avdeyeva insists their claim is not about money.
Instead the Sami are fighting a perhaps futile battle for the right to decide when, if at all, they should join a supposedly civilised world.
If Ms Avdeyeva's sentiment is anything to go by, it will not happen anytime soon.
"The Sami cannot live without reindeer," she says.
Benjamin Franklin was also haplogroup V.
"The Sami People live in the northernmost Sweden. They have survived in this chilly region for more than 7 000 years. Their origins are still unknown. These people, until the early decades of this century, were nomadic, following the reindeer up into the mountains, where they lived together during the summer months. The reindeer stay up in the high mountains, where the pastures are rich and where the wind blows away the ever-present insects and mosquitoes."
The Sa'ami DNA can be traced to the Franco-Iberian Ice Age refuge and is some of the oldest DNA in Europe.
"The Sami people lives in the northern parts of four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (the Kola Peninsula). In earlier times Sápmi (the land of the Sami) covered a much bigger part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, probably also more of northern Russia.
In this north-western part of Europe the Sami people is the indigenous population, as far as we know today. Many scientists believe that this ethnic group descends from the Komsa people, who lived along the northern coast as far back as eight to ten thousand years ago.
Through the ages the Sami culture has changed very much and become diversified in the same process. The Sami were gatherers and hunters for thousands of years. They may have been farmers, too. Wild reindeer in the inland and fish in rivers, lakes and the coastal waters were among their main food resources."
I have read that Sami men have an extra copy of a gene that thereby gives them twice the normal level of testosterone.
Aren’t they close to the Finns ?
I’m waiting for FReeper Muawiyah to show up and hopefully answer your questions. I’ve only recently discovered that I have Sa’ami ‘blood.’ I’m still learning myself.
All I can say "Is that what it's called".
Well, not exactly, but they have a reputation for being able to impregnate their mates at a distance.
The deal is the Sa'ami are not related to the Finns. Rather, some Finns, some Norwegians and some Swedes have Sa'ami ancestry. Right after the Black Death that killed 1/3 or more of all Europeans, the Sa'ami, who were essentially unaffected (having natural immunities to stuff that hasn't even been discovered yet), were able to move South back into older parts of Sapmai that'd been overrun by Norse people.
The Norse died just as fast as other Europeans.
Many of them took up farming in the 1400's, and later. Some old Norse farms were still vacant in Norway right into the 1700s. At the same time the Sa'ami adapted a boat hull design they'd come up with for use in fast flowing inland streams to conditions in the fjords and the North Sea.
This design was scaled up and became fundamental to the various Scandinavian navies and fishing fleets.
These people also moved out into some serious whaling.
They are genetically different from other Europeans in many different ways. At the same time many Europeans who are not Sa'ami share, to some degree, in these differences due to many contacts their ancestors had with those pluri-potent Sa'ami gentlemen.
One evening my spouse informed me that when Earth cools down the Northern herdsmen move South with the animals, sometimes several thousand miles. As conditions improve, they move back North following those animals to their normal ranges. These contacts have occurred over many thousands of years and tend to blur the records, but you can look at the percent of the Sa'ami having a given gene and the percent of the other people to the South having it, and get an idea what the full difference is and where that gene came from.
Eskimos have similar genetic differences. Both peoples can survive full immersion in 32 degree water for about 4 hours until death, and even then they may simply pass into a coma, or hibernative state, and live even longer. The world's record for this (in humans) is now held by a young Sa'ami woman in Norway who was cold and underwater for 6 and 1/2 hours.
Tough babes I'll tell you.
All 11 tribes are notworthy for having a high percentage of dwarfs in their populations. Apparantly dwarfism is a protection against lack of food, a common occurrence in the Arctic.
I suspect their widespread immunity against many rodent born diseases arose out of their 10,000 years of constant, chronic contact with rats.
Concerning their languages ~ the closest congnate language is Sumerian ~ the guys who invented writing.
Sumerian, in turn, is quite probably an offshoot of one or the other ancient Dravidian languages (in India).
Through contact with Finns, Estonians and Mongols the Sa'ami languages have picked up numerous uralic/altaic words. At the same time all Germanic group languages seem to have picked up some terms and a fair degree of grammatical peculiarities from contact with the Sa'ami at a far earlier time.
Since it's been just a year since scientists finally figured out that the Sa'ami were the indigenous people of Fenno-Scandia, you will run into all sorts of seemingly strange arguments about Sa'ami and Finnish relationships ~ these will disappear with time. Current stuff involves American Indian, Berber and Sa'ami relationships and connections. A strong theory is that the Clovis people in North America were, in fact, Sa'ami. The three groups share a gene generally not found elsewhere.
It's a whole new world.
"Pre-V, perhaps 26,000 years old, is found infrenquently in a limited distribution stretching from east to west, from the Trans-Caucasus through the north Balkans and Central Europe to Southern Spain and Morocco."
Oppenheimer goes on to say that the mutation that produced V (Vera as he calls her) occurred in the refuge in south west France or Spain, 16,300 years ago.
There is still a lot of uncertainties about the relationships among the non-Indo-European peoples of Europe. You are right that their is probably no relationship between the Sami (formerly the Laplanders), and their Finnish and Scandinavian neighbors, except for some intermarriage. The Finns are related to the Estonians and the Hungarian Magyars, along with some isolated peoples in Russia.
They also recognize the Sa'ami, Pomors, Russians, Gypsies, Jews and other ethnotypes in their country, but the differentiation of the Finns themselves is rather startling.
Finland's medical community says research reveals that eye-color alone tells them if someone has a greater than average chance of developing cardiovascular disease.
Things to watch for ~ medical studies that identify "Skolt Sa'ami" ~ the Finns have ethnic Finns who do reindeer herding as well as Sa'ami in the business. These people have identical lifestyles so that gives Finland's researchers a base of comparison to ferret out genetically related diseases.
The reports I've found are pretty interesting ~ these guys have a rugged life in the outdoors ~ totally alien from that of the Pajamahadeen Fur Shur. So, check out on what you've been missing.
Well I am a blue-eyed half Finn, son of a Blue eyed Finn, and this material looks interesting. God any links?
First place to look is Discover Magazine of about 6 or 7 months back. Then you need to go look for the writers on the net. There’s a lot more on the topic once you get their names.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.