The Problems Tromsø Sami Face in the Norwegian Society

In my research I was not supposed to raise the issue of discrimination. I did not even ask about it. However, two of my informants started talking about it during the interviews.

Informant 16, a non-European foreigner who has been living in Tromsø for less than 2 years, says that s/he several times has watched scenes where Norwegians expressed their “bad attitude” towards Sami people. One of the stories is about a Sami girl who came to study at the University of Tromsø and has an accent that indicates her belonging to a Sami community. Norwegian young people when they hear her talking start imitate her way of speaking and laugh at her. Therefore, the Sami student tries not to appear in the public places where she can meet such unpleasant Norwegians (Informant 16 [interview]).

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Informant 16 several times has experienced the negative attitude of young Norwegians towards the Sami issues on him/herself: “When [the Norwegian] people learn that I am studying indigenous issues focusing on the Sami people, they react very negatively”. I am also a foreign student at the university researching Sami issues and answering the same question quite often (“what do you study?”) but I have never experienced any kind of negative reaction by Norwegians on the topic of my research work.

Nevertheless, another foreigner who has been living in Tromsø for about 20 years, shares other stories about Sami discrimination in Tromsø. “When people see the [Sami] hat on a bus, they start laughing. Or when people see them [the Sami] in [the Sami] dress there will be some negative comments as well”, says informant 13. Being a Russian, I can understand why Russian students – the number of which in the city is big as the University of Tromsø collaborates with a number of universities located in traditional Russian areas: Murmansk, Petrozavodsk, Arkhangelsk, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and others – start laughing when they see a Sami hat. In the Russian culture there is a personage called Petrushka, it is a person or a

“doll” that participates in a performance and is supposed to make the audience laugh. What is important for the research done in this chapter is that Petrushka, or the Russian clown, has a hat that resembles the Sami hat. In this case the Russians’ laugh has nothing to do with Sami discrimination as they see the hat that people associate with Petrushka. Furthermore, in the Russian culture the image of Petrushka has a positive connotation.

Photo 12. Petrushka's Costume Photo 13. Traditional Sami Costumes

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According to the informant’s point of view, as soon as a foreigner from a non-European country comes to Tromsø, he or she obtains “a negative focus” concerning the Sami people because the way they are presented is “like a group creating a lot of troubles”

(Informant 13 [interview]). These troubles, continues the informant, are mostly connected with reindeer herding (Norwegians want Sami to reduce the number of their animals, and the Sami refuse as they do not want to lose the job the whole family takes part in) and environmental issues (such as, for example, natural resource extraction on the traditional Sami areas). Therefore, the word ‘Sami’ is associated with “problems, problems, problems,” says Informant 13. “When we [foreign students] come here [Tromsø] with too little knowledge about Sami, we are dominated by this negative focus from people, media, not understanding what this all is about,” concludes Informant 13.

Among four other non-European foreigners whom I interviewed, only one did not know anything about the Sami people before coming to Norway. However, it is Informant 16 who has faced several cases of discrimination against Sami.

The other three non-European foreigners learned about the existence of the Sami people living in their own countries. Informant 1 learned about the Norwegian Sami by reading a newspaper article about the Sami movement for their indigenous rights. Informant 3 learned about Sami by watching a TV programme about reindeer herding. Informant 15 learned about the Sami people of Norway from his/her friend who was a former MIS student.

Therefore, before coming to Tromsø these foreigners had some – not negative - picture of the Sami people. I should note that all these informants are indigenous-related, meaning, they are indigenous by origin or had been working with indigenous issues before coming to Tromsø.

Consequently, at the time of coming to the city, they were aware about the tension that often exists in the relations between indigenous peoples and the majority of population.

Although the material Informants 1 and 3 learned about the Sami people via mass media had nothing to do with “the negative focus” (I think it can easily be explained by that fact that no country wants “to wash its dirty linen in public” and to spoil its international image) Informants 9 and 17, Norwegians who have been living in Tromsø for many years watching the development of Sami–society relations, note that “every time Sami appear in [the Norwegian] mass media, the case is connected to a scandal” (Informant 17 [interview]).

The topics of the “scandals”, the informants mention, are the same as named by Informant 13:

reindeer herding and environmental issues (Informants 9 and 17 [interviews]).

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This negative tension in Tromsø society between the Norwegians and the Sami was silenced until the elections of 2011 when one of the parties decided to support the idea of including Tromsø into the Sami Administrative Language Area.