- You have this stereotype of what an indigenous person is.
Since we are white,
it's quite easy for us to hide.
And if I don't want to tell anyone that I'm Sami,
I don't have to.
My name is Jannie Staffansson.
I live in Sapmi in the Swedish side.
My people are Sami.
We're traditionally reindeer herders,
but also fishermans, hunters, gatherers.
Our culture and language are circled around the reindeer.
Many of us used to be reindeer herders
and many of us aren't today because of different things.
A lot of us are struggling.
But even if you are not a reindeer herder,
the reindeers are still a very central part
of your identity.
Our entire creation story are from a reindeer,
a female reindeer,
with her eyes being the stars,
and her blood being the rivers,
and her hair being the forests.
Everything we are are tied to the reindeers.
People in Sweden, when they Christianized the Sami,
they saw it as "This is a huge success
and we will do it all around the world
to all indigenous peoples,"
the same structure of taking our children,
making them into then men of church,
boarding school, and such things.
After the church Christianized Sami,
they had people coming up and studying us,
measuring our heads and how tall we were
and what a typical Sami looked like.
And they dug up our bones from the graves and studied them.
And they are still in Swedish institutions.
But that was at the same time as Word War II
and Sweden was very, very offensive
when it came to racial studies.
And the stereotyping of us was that we were unintelligent,
that we were childish,
and unable to know what was best for us.
My grandma, I know, when she grew up,
she wasn't allowed to even carry her own voice in court
'cause we were seen as not being able to do that.
And that kind of stereotype, it's still there.
And people are still surprised when I tell them
that I've studied university
and we have Sami professors and doctors.
It's been a process for Sami to gain our own voice.
We still don't have a representative in the parliament,
for example.
Growing up, all I wanted really to do
was go with my father on the land, being with the reindeer.
And it's still kind of what I always want to do.
When you grow up in a reindeer herding family,
you are supposed to take care of the smallest reindeers.
You grow up quite fast
because you are responsible for that life.
You have to make these difficult, difficult decisions
and especially now, in climate change,
'cause one mistake can be devastating
for you and for the reindeer.
We spend the summers in the mountains
waiting for the reindeer calves to get bigger.
And in the winter season,
that's when they're down in the forest.
Go around them and trying to protect them from predators.
You're trying to find best pasture.
What's most difficult is the winter season
when it's raining on the snow
and it forms an ice crust.
And that ice crust makes it quite difficult
for the reindeers to reach their food
'cause they dig down for their food, for the lichen.
And when they do that,
can also be ice on the lichen
which makes them cold inside
and it's difficult for them to be healthy.
The rain on the snow
also limits the reindeer to smell the lichen.
And if they don't smell the lichen,
they will just continue to migrate to better pasture.
But it's difficult to find that pasture now
with the climate change.
We have limited areas that are continuously shrinking
and are fragmented because of development.
The last couple of years,
we have had to supplementary feed them.
It's not how reindeers are supposed to live,
in a fenced area with supplementary feed.
It's not healthy for them.
It's kind of devastating
because they're supposed to be free animals.
But with climate change and with declining forests,
we can't really do anything about it.
You also have more and more disease on reindeer
you haven't seen before and you don't understand.
And when climate change comes,
it's just getting worse and worse.
And then keeping the reindeers in a fenced area
just makes those diseases thrive again.
It's a risk.
You can lose your entire herd
just by making that wrong decision
and we have to make them every day during the winter.
It's easy to kind of say that,
"Yeah, well you can sell the reindeer
and you can get money for meat,"
but that's not why we do this.
Sami made a promise a long time ago
to keep the reindeer safe.
That promise is something that's just so strong emotionally
and it's bound to who you are and your identity.
And if I were to lose my herd, I would be no more.
I was quite young when I heard my parents and grandparents
talking about the changes that they saw
and how rapid it was happening.
After a while,
you could hear more about climate change on the news
and it just struck me that they knew so little about it
in comparison to the voices of our community.
At university, I studied chemistry
because I wanted to really, really understand
changing weather patterns and how it affected the reindeer.
I got a lot of info from my elders
and from my grandma and my parents.
A lot of things that my grandmother had already told about,
medicinal plants, for example,
were taught in school and books
and it verified what my grandmother already said.
That's also where I understood that traditional knowledge
and indigenous knowledge are quite like valuable.
We are outside in the nature every day.
When you're studying
climate change's effect on reindeer herders in Sweden,
you're doing it without the reindeer herders.
So they are not partnering,
they're just continuing to study us.
And it's just a very backward way
and a very colonial way to do science.
I'm frustrated about that.
If the funders never demands it,
it's not gonna happen.
Scientists won't cooperate with indigenous holders
in a respectful way,
because indigenous knowledge is difficult to explain
and it's difficult to understand
what the elders are saying.
It could really, really be powerful
if science and indigenous knowledge holder work together
when it comes to climate change and understanding it.
It needs to be happening quite fast
'cause climate change is just happening so fast.
(mournful music)