Sami people and Sami culture in Malå-Máláge
From a linguistic perspective, Malå Sami Village belongs to the Ume Sami language group.
There are 51 Sami villages in Sweden, 33 of which are mountain Sami villages, 10 are forest Sami villages, and 8 are so-called concession Sami villages.
The reindeer of the mountain Sami villages move between the mountains and the coast, while the forest Sami reindeer husbandry, which exists in Malå Municipality, operates during the summer from the border of Lapland in the east up to the Lais River near Sorsele in the west.
Calf marking takes place at night for about a week around midsummer. In the autumn (August, September), the annual reindeer slaughter begins until the rutting season starts around September 25th. Then, in November, the reindeer herders start gathering the reindeer for separation, where the reindeer are divided into 3 winter groups.
The winter groups utilize grazing lands from the main railway line down to the coast and then return to the summer land around Malå in April. This migration covers approximately 200 kilometers.
We are also proud to announce that since 2010, Malå Municipality has been a Sami administrative municipality.
There is also the Malå Sami Association, which today has about 250 members. They frequently work to promote Sami culture and preserve and develop traditions. A key issue for the association's members is to reclaim and preserve their mother tongue, which is Ume Sami (ubmejesámiengiälla). This is an active association with its premises in central Malå, Parkgatan 1, Malå.
Difference between a Sami village and a Sami association:
A Sami village is an economic organization with its own entrepreneurs who primarily engage in reindeer husbandry and are responsible for monitoring and conserving nature's resources so that continued reindeer husbandry can exist in the future. The Sami villages are bearers of Sami culture.
Members of a Sami association cherish Sami culture and language.
The indigenous people, the Sami, reside in the Sápmi region, which includes land areas in four countries: Russia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
The Sami people have been present in northern Norrland for at least the past thousand years, according to linguists. Over the centuries after the Common Era (CE), we can discern something that we can call Sami material culture in Sápmi, which includes Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. Local and regional variations are encompassed in Sami culture, such as language, religion, and architectural culture. This is partially due to the fact that the Sami people have long interacted with other nearby and distant cultures. The Sami people seem to have had direct and indirect contacts, especially with Siberia and the Baltics, but also with Northern Europe.
Linguists and ethnologists are still debating when the Sami people became nomadic, but according to most researchers, it probably began in the 17th century and continued until around 1950. This likely began with individual reindeer being kept as decoys for wild reindeer hunting, and some reindeer being tamed as draft and dairy animals.
Before the 17th century, the Sami people lived in a mobile settlement pattern in so-called "sijdda" communities, which consisted of delimited settlement areas with a common social organization. The areas, which were relatively small and round in shape, were formed as early as the first millennium BCE. The transition from "sijdda" communities to nomadic life may have been due to increased population in the mountainous areas, which meant greater competition in hunting and fishing. But also increased taxation of wild reindeer and other game, as well as a decrease in the number of wild reindeer, may have been other reasons.
The old communities dissolved and were replaced by more elongated areas adapted for the migration of mountain reindeer between the mountains and the coast.
FOREST SAMI
Even the forest Sami transitioned to keeping larger herds of domesticated reindeer. However, forest Sami villages remained relatively intact, and they did not transition to nomadic life to the same extent as mountain Sami villages.
TRADE
During the Middle Ages, the Sami people traded with merchants at the coast, who also had the right to tax the Sami people. The control and jurisdiction were strengthened during the 17th and 18th centuries when church duty was introduced. It was only after the 1673 Lappmark Act that it became permitted to establish new settlements in the Lappmark. Although the settlements were regulated, they spread towards the mountains and began to disrupt reindeer husbandry. A cultivation boundary was established in 1867 to protect the interests of the Sami people, which meant a prohibition of settlements above the boundary. This was not followed, and in 1915, those settlements that were built were legalized as so-called mountain farms.
Reindeer husbandry, like agriculture, has undergone changes, and today the number of Sami engaged in reindeer husbandry has decreased, but the number of reindeer per Sami village has increased. Malå is the southernmost and only forest Sami village of the seven villages in the county. The Sami village was previously divided into eight Lapp tax lands, which were dissolved by the 1886 law. The Sami people as Lapp tax landholders had little opportunity to oppose the encouragement of settlement activities from the state.
The Sami people's residence settlement was particularly affected by the land partitioning (the process by which private land was separated from state land in northern Sweden) in 1887, but also in connection with the land redistribution that was gradually implemented in the latter half of the 19th century. Several settlements had to be moved from their old locations, as happened, for example, in Koppsele, Malå. At the turn of the century, reindeer were only found in Vourbejaurlandet, Gransele- and Koppselelanden, and Släppträsklandet. From these areas, the Sami people moved downward along the Malån River and from Släppträsklandet along the Vindel River during the winter. Most of them lived at the time in the same type of log houses that the settlers built. Some of the traditionally constructed "kåtor," which are a characteristic feature of forest Sami culture, are still present today, including in Koppsele.
During the 20th century, reindeer husbandry was usually combined with agriculture. This means that most of the older Sami remains in the area consist of log "kåtor" and pole sheds, which have often been moved to farmsteads with agricultural buildings. One such example is Setsele. Furthermore, there are many place names within the municipality that indicate the area's Sami history.
Source: samer.se, Malå cultural program, sametinget.se
Read more about Malå as a Sami administrative municipality: