First of all, our “cabin”
was one in a series
of very modern dropped-in
units, as you can see.
And yet, a lot like Mongolia, once we stepped away from the mega-recent, please-the-tourist build out, we could roam in an amazing lands. A land of more than 10,000 lakes. I had visions of olden-times (for me) in the Boundary waters because all of the low shrubs were blueberries (bilberries they call them here), or lingenberries….
So we wandered. One day’s walk/ hike took us along the shorelines of a bunch of lakes, up onto a knoll where, after the Sami people, became Christian, a church was built on what seemed like a Sami seasonal gathering ground. Along the hike, there were signs: one side a biblical/seasonal quote, the other a seasonal bit of natural history.
We spent as much museum time as we could at a phenomenal Sami (Laplander) “museum”/ cultural center/ nature center, in Inari: Siida. There are film interviews galore:
- a man demonstrates how to cleanly butcher a reindeer (using a Finnish “filet knife” he stripped out the skin/hide with nary a drop of blood, dissected the carcass into perfect meat chunks he flipped onto clean snow, let the blood collect within the carcass chamber as he worked)
- two-screen collages of current Sami people and all their varieties of traditional/evolved Sami “costumes” as they do the things they do. Reminded us of the Museum of the American Indian (sic) in DC because the emphasis is on we-the-living-People vs. how-it-used-to-be….
- A fox running across arctic terrain, chasing down smaller critters
And lots and lots of displays of Sami stuff. This tobacco bag’s beading is done with micro (<1/16″) silver beads
In addition, the whole OUTSIDE grounds of the Siidi had typical Sami buildings through history. All wood tipis and others with cloth
At Inari, the Capitol of Sami people in Finland we spent two afternoons learning of Sami ways, recent and older history, of the different language groups, removals and evacuations due to war, language knowledge erasure and recovery and pressures/penalties/opportunities of assimilation. “What if there are some modern things we like? Is that wrong if we adopt them?” It would seem the Sami peoples experience with western ways and modernity shares much with that of American indigenous people.
And then it was time for us to head back to Helsinki. While we waited along the road
at the bus stop this Inari resident checked us out from the bike path across the street…