Great Journey 🇸🇪 Day 527
We wander through the snowy Jokkmokk. Here we visit the Sámi Museum, learn a lot about the Sami way of life and even more about the nature in which they live. We can touch, try out, feel, listen and discover for ourselves.
On the museum website we read: "Sápmi - Land of the Sámi - stretches across four nations without borders and includes vast mountain, forest, tundra and moorland areas. Here we have fished and hunted for many thousands of years, here we have trodden endless trails and given streams and mountains their names. We have raised our children, poetised over the land and appeased the gods for a good hunt. We have followed the reindeer on their wanderings."
The museum is rather traditional and shows little or nothing about the struggle that indigenous peoples have to fight today. There are documentaries and also feature films that tell of racism in their own country. On a political level, there are several sides opposing each other, and the Sámi would like to be independent of the country. But as it is always the case in the so highly esteemed "civilisation": the strongest is right.
Here in Jokkmokk, however, we don't feel any of that; here we are allowed to park our Felix directly on the Sámi learning centre overnight. Here people live with and for each other. The snow-covered, almost kitschy-looking main street-birch avenue in the evening seems quiet, the many Sami craftsmen display their products for sale and if you take your time, you can have a pleasant chat. No, not in Sami, not even in Swedish. No, here in Jokkmokk, like everywhere else in Sweden, people speak the best English (which we are very grateful for!).
