The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

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Northern aboriginal people don’t like being portrayed as hapless victims of climate change. Nor are they waiting for their central governments to come in and solve their problems. Quite the opposite. After numerous interviews with aboriginal leaders,⁴⁷³ the resounding message I’ve heard is a desire for more autonomy, more control, more say over what happens or does not happen on these lands. The damages inflicted by climate change—already coming into view—only intensify their sense of urgency. More control affords more resilience, more adaptability, to deal with the consequences. The people I’ve met are not hoping that outside task forces will be dispatched to save them from climate change. They want the power—and yes, the resource revenues—to save themselves.

With this new understanding in view, I could see why president Keskitalo was pissed off. In the three countries discussed thus far—the United States, Canada, and Denmark—northern aboriginal people are becoming politically powerful. In the Nordic countries and Russia, they are not.

The Sami Situation

Europeans are fascinated by their Sami. Long after great cities had spread across Germany and France, the Sami were still living in tents, migrating with their reindeer, living off the land by fishing, trapping, and hunting. Their mystic, highly spiritual culture is permeated with ties to the natural world, expressed in beautiful chanted songs called joiks. Furthermore, they are white. Unlike most northern aboriginals, they have a European rather than Mongol origin. Many Sami have fair skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. This is partly due to centuries of mingling with Nordics, but genetically, the Sami are much closer relatives of Basques than of Inuit.

Today, about seventy thousand Sami live in “Sapmi,” their ancestral homeland stretching across northern Fennoscandia (see map on pp. x-xi). But Sapmi today is chopped up into four bits owned by Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. It is dismembered.

The Sami population can never form a single collective political unit within a country, as has happened in Canada and Greenland. Traditional reindeer herding, which moved animals all around Sapmi, is difficult or impossible. Also ethnic Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, and Russians have moved in, bringing industrial development, land privatization, and the loss of grazing and hunting grounds. With four different court systems to navigate, the collective ability of the Sami to mount legal challenges to such encroachment is dissipated and constrained. And unlike what happened in North America and Greenland, none of the four governments are signaling any possibility of a sweeping land claims agreement, or a new Sapmi state, or individual home rules for each fragment.

However, there are differences among the four countries. Since 1989 Norway, Sweden, and Finland have introduced elected Sami parliaments, whereas Russia has not. These parliaments are politically weak, serving mainly as forums and advisors to their central governments, but they do provide a voice for the Sami. Norway’s parliament, being the oldest and largest, is most consequential of the three.

Also, when it comes to sticking up for aboriginal rights under international law, Norway is one supportive NORC. It was the first country in the world to ratify International Labour Organization Convention 169, thus committing the Norwegian government to preserving its aboriginal people, cultures, and languages through deliberate action (later, Denmark also ratified this ILO treaty). Norway was also one of five NORCs to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.⁴⁷⁴ In part to meet its obligations under these laws, Norway passed a sort of pseudo land claims law, called the Finnmark Act, in 2005. While not specific to Sami people, it did transfer land ownership from the Norwegian government to its largest and northernmost county, where the population is about 34% Sami.⁴⁷⁵

While weak by North American standards the Finnmark Act is about as good as it gets in this part of the world. Similar trends are not apparent in Sweden, Finland, or Russia. None of these countries have ratified ILO Convention 169, nor is there any talk of land claims settlements. In Lapland, Sami complain of imposters stealing their culture, wearing fake clothes, and butchering their language for tourists.⁴⁷⁶ The Sami situation is most depressing in Russia, where a small population of two thousand has little to look forward to.

Trapped on the Kola Peninsula—the militarized, industrialized heart of the Russian North—they are mostly unemployed with no parliament. What few reindeer herders remain complain of grazing lands privatized and closed, and horrid environmental pollution from mining, smelting, and leaking radiation from old nuclear reactors. Russian soldiers sometimes shoot their animals to eat or for fun.⁴⁷⁷ Snared in poverty, lacking land tenure, and with no political voice, they are quickly losing their aboriginal language. Of Sapmi’s four fragmented pieces, Russia’s has the most uncertain future.

The Mi-8 Time Machine

We thudded over the taiga in an orange Soviet-era Mi-8 helicopter, crammed against one of its little porthole windows. Below us was an endless plain of mossy lakes, cottongrass sedge, and hunched conifers stretching to infinity. My doctoral student Karen Frey murmured from behind a video camera while I wrote notes and GPS coordinates into a pad. Faint reindeer trails splayed here and there across the tundra, but the landscape was motionless. We’d been at it for over half an hour with no sign of life.

Suddenly the Mi-8’s rotors whined and we were hovering. There were scraping noises up front and men speaking in Russian. The ponderous helicopter slowly eased its bulk onto the ground and a door clanged open. From its cavernous interior white Russian hands produced a burlap sack full of potatoes. From outside, dark, weathered hands reached up to take it.

We had dropped by the campsite of a Nenets family, one of the largest of several aboriginal reindeer peoples of the Russian North. Their chum, a circular tent halfway between a teepee and yurt, was made of lashed wooden poles and reindeer hides. There were corrals and long sleds with curved wooden runners. Grubby, cute kids were peeking at us. Freshly flayed reindeer skins were drying. The whole place hung with smoke from burning smudge fires. Our Mi-8 wasn’t a helicopter, it was a time machine: The Nenets are one of the last people on Earth still following the ancient practice of moving around with their reindeer.

Anthropologists, even Russian ones, have long romanticized Siberian scenes like this. But most of Russia’s northern aboriginal people do not lead nostalgic frontier lives out on the land. Instead, they live in gritty, impoverished, multiethnic villages rife with unemployment, alcoholism, and suicide.⁴⁷⁸ Life expectancies are low. Aboriginal control over outside resource exploitation is virtually nil, as is the amount of royalty they receive when resources are developed. There is no prospect of winning private land title as has transpired in North America,⁴⁷⁹ and even if there were, under Russian law all subsurface mineral and energy rights still remain with the state. Vastly outnumbered as they are by ethnic Russians, there is no hope for sizable aboriginal political majorities except in small okruga (regions) and raiony (districts). Exceptions, like a tiny pod of Yukagir people who won self-governance in Sakha Republic,⁴⁸⁰ are rare. With so little political power, even their wild food is constantly under threat by commercial interests. In one recent case, aboriginals of Kamchatka beseeched President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin to halt auction lease sales of their salmon rivers so they wouldn’t starve.⁴⁸¹

Russia’s northern aboriginals don’t have time to debate political governance models or resource revenue- sharing schemes. Their priority is simply retaining access to wildlife and land, and keeping at bay the encroaching industries that would damage them. The Russian anthropologist Aleksandr Pika, who devoted his life to studying northern aboriginals before drowning in a 1995 Bering Sea boat accident, alongside five Eskimos and three Americans, once wrote:

The numerically small [aboriginal] peoples of the North live on lands rich with oil, natural gas, uranium, tin, timber, and other resources. Society has not yet learned to take these resources without damaging nature. Society cannot live, in fact, without touching these resources. The peoples of the North are often guilty simply in that they live on these lands and their very existence poses problems for the state. Indeed, many feel that without these peoples, there would be no such problems, and that the peoples of the North should understand this, and not