Art & Reindeer – Máret Ánne Sara
Sami artist Máret Ánne Sara (1983) lives and works in her Arctic home town Guovdageaidnu (known as Kautokeino in Norwegian) where she was born and grew up in a traditional reindeer herding family. The Sami people are the indigenous people of Northern Europe and still partly live in a nomadic way. Their territory, Sápmi, stretches over the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.
During my travels through the Arctic in 2018 I pick up Márets book In Between Worlds and get drawn into a magical world where the way you treat the Earth has direct consequences on your life. I meet Máret at work at the office space of the Dáiddadállu, the Sámi Artists Collective which she has started up. This is where she stores some of the reindeer skulls she uses in her current art project and her installation called Pile ó Sápmi, which will be shown at the prestigious Documenta exhibition of contemporary art. The original installation consists of a heap of two hundred reindeer heads and was piled up in front of Tana Court in Northern Norway, where her younger brother was defending his rights as a young reindeer herder against the Norwegian government. Maret Anne Sara: 'We urgently have to go into a process of decolonization. The system is eating us alive.' A Sami voice from the tundra.
In a lot of your work the reindeer are very present. For people who don't know this area and your way of living, how would you describe the relationship between the Sami people and the reindeer?
We have always lived in a pact and a symbiosis with the universe. Everything has a spirit in the Sami cosmovision, the Earth, the animals, everything. From the reindeer we get everything we need; food, transport, clothes. The animals depend on nature for their survival and so do we. That is why they are so key and why all is connected in a circle.
When it comes to our everyday living and our culture, the reindeer are a a source for traditional Sami food and duodji, the Sami handicraft. They provide the raw material for food, shoes, belts, knives and so on. Reindeerherding is a bank for ancient traditional knowledge about climate, nature and survival, and on top of that, reindeerherding is linked to a linguistic abundance. Think of the hundreds of words we have for snow, a different one for every tiny difference in temperature which means a different snow structure which might mean we have to change our herding plans.
We constantly need to interpretate nature and animals, need to be in a constant symbiosis. If reindeer herding disappears, we run a big risk of becoming a museum culture, something we can read about in historical perspective but where a lot of our knowledge, our cosmovision, life philosophy and our way of life, disappears. Today the culture is alive, the reindeer are of major importance for that to happen.
You know, they are almost holy. When we eat reindeer meat we give thanks and return the bones to the Earth wishing to be blessed with the birth of new reindeer. When I work with the reindeer heads for my art project I ask for permission, show respect and let the spirits know I do it with good intentions. Then I receive blessings. It is like a spiritual connection.
Your installation Pile ó Sápmi is also connected to this symbiotic way of living with the environment, especially the reindeer.
Yes, I started it when my little brother went to court against the Norwegian government in order to keep his herd and his rights. The government is forcing Sami herders to slaughter down their herds, without considering how it affects individuals or our cultural future.
In the current system everyone is forced to slaughter a certain percentage of their herd, no matter how many reindeer you have to begin with. If you force a young herder like my brother who is just starting up and has 150 reindeers, to slaughter fourty percent, just like the neighbour who has 1500, you are forcing the smallest one into bankruptcy. This system is critically threatening our rights and our future. By systemically attacking our youngsters they are very effectively strangling our future.
So I made my pile of two hundred reindeer heads in front of the courthouse in Tana.
The installation is a reference to the Pile o' Bones in the North American colonial history. The political strategy in the USA at the end of the 19th century, was to extinguish the buffalos to get control over the area and to get the indigenous people, for whom the buffalo was their main resource, to leave. When I was working with my reindeer heads, this story and the photograph of piled up buffalo skulls kept appearing for me, and the parallel was just too striking. Now a political strategy is set up in Norway, where they force us to slaugther our reindeer, with the argument that the soil has to be protected from their grazing.
My brother won the first trial against the Norwegian government in March 2016, but the government appealed. Pile o Sapmi, which is an installation but also an artistic movement, followed. During the second courtcase at the end of February in Tromsø, I made another pile outside the court. Apart from that, I had also invited over twenty artist to join with their themematic work, to shed light upon the discussion from various angles. The result was a week long Pile o´Sapmi art program with different exhibitions, public installations, performances, concerts and artist talks. Some of the invited artists and activists have worked on these themes from the seventies until today. It is frightening to see how much alike the fight for our rights and the similarities in the art itself is if you compare then and now. At the same time it is also a powerful reminder of the Sami spirit and the fact we're not going to give up.
What is the biggest difference between today and the seventies?
It has become harder to identify the enemy: we are no longer standing up against police or military force, as during the Alta struggle (at the end of the 70ies there was fierce opposition against the construction of a hydro-electric power plant in the Alta river, ldco). Instead we are facing a sophisticated enemy, a system that is decorated with democracy, pimped with international conventions and promises. We now have a Sameting, a Sami parliament. The state is obliged to consult it, but not to take the oppositions of the Sameting into consideration in any decisionmaking. The fact that they can come with compulsory reindeer slaughter is because the government for decades has planted an image of Sami reindeer herders as ecological criminals, destroying the tundra with too many reindeers.
They changed the reindeerherding act, adding a whole chapter in the law about punishments against Sami reindeerherders who do not accept official governmental slaughering demands. The punishments are fines and forced slaughetring of our herds. The Sami parliament was consulted but they didn't listen to the opposition against these legal changes. This is only one example of the consultations in reality turning out to be empty gestures. Unfortunately this happens too often, and in the most crucial issues affecting our culture and our land.
Kautokeino in wintertime
CRIMINALS
It all reminds me of the English title of your book, In Between Worlds, which can be interpreted in many different ways. One way could be as a reference to how the Sami people today are in between the old ways and the modern lifestyle. Is that something that resonates with you?
Absolutely, which is why we urgently need to go into a process of decolonization. All this education through western systems changes our way of thinking without us even realizing it. It is time to be critical, take a step back and analyse things from a Sami perspective again, to look with fresh eyes at everything we have been taught.
You have grown up in a traditional reindeer herding family. When do you feel this process of colonization has started for you?
A long time ago. I went to Norwegian schools. Even though attention was given to my language, no attention was given to what I should learn as a Sami kid. The Norwegian way of thinking is very different from the Sami way, and often we are taught to believe that our own way of reasoning, thinking or acting, is wrong.
Sami upbringing is often presented as something exotic and wild. For example because we get knives and matches when we are really young. People see that as a free upbringing instead of a necessary learning by doing-strategy. In our culture there is no tradition to directly tell others what to do or not to do, we use storytelling instead. These traditional stories are pedagogic, contain life philosophy and teach kids to evaluate situations and to reason independently. If you look at it from the Norwegian perspective you could easily think o my god, we didn't have any upbringing or any rules. But that is not true!
My personal process of decolonization happens when I read Sami research about this and evaluate the system from the natural Sami perspective. Then I understand how there is a very solid philosphy behind the Sami upbringing. Everyone needs to be able to take care of themselves, you have to be able to handle a knife if you get out into the mountains – and you can't get a knife all of a sudden and know what to do with it. It is a dangerous tool so you have to learn from a very young age to get control over it. If I hadn't learnt these necessary survival skills, I would have probably died wandering out into the mountains by myself on a beautiful day.
The same goes for the introduction of snow scooters into reindeer herding. I was driving my own snow scooter when I was ten years old. In the Norwegian system that is illegal. We are told from a very young age that what we are doing is illegal but at the same time we must learn it.
Another example where our ways have become illegal is when it comes to the killing of the reindeer. After thousands of years of practice, we believe our way to be the purest and most humane; we use a special knife that we stab in the neck so the animal is anaesthesized, then we stab the heart. The heart gathers blood and pumps it in the breast so this gives us the chance to take care of the blood. What happens when the reindeer get shot in the head in the slaughterhouse is they automatically throw up the stomach content into their nose so the heads become of no use. The heads, the blood and so much else becomes just waste! This is totally against the indigenous way of thinking where you have to use every part of the animal. And on top of that, we are criminalized if we kill our animals our own way, to make the best and most of everything.
Globally indigenous people have become more visible lately, among others through the Standing Rock water protectors where some Sami were present as well. Is there a role for the Sami people in Europe to share the wisdom that comes from your lifestyle?
For sure. Though in this western world you often don't feel the need for it. If we had taken indigenous knowledge into account and would have thought more from an indigenous perspective we wouldn't be facing a climate crisis now. We need to learn to respect the nature around us as much as we respect others. There is this constant talk of bigger development and more profit, especially in the western world. Why? Why do we need to have more all the time? We have so much that stuff is now produced in order for it to break so we have to throw it away and buy more.
I grew up with this philosophy of not taking more than you need. Maybe you have the opportunity to fish a lot in a lake but you don't. You will always be careful not to over-use the resources. You take what you need and don't overstretch it. This is how you keep the balance. Then the lake stays healthy and productive. So you know next time you come by or when the next family comes by there is food left. The lake isn't empty. It is our obligation to keep nature and other creatures balanced. We behave as if we are the only ones but when we die the world doesn't need us anymore. Those who have kids, don't they think about what their children will inherit? Do they have to find themselves another planet and hope there is life and a future there?
UNDERWORLD
Another aspect of the book are the socalled ulda people who live in a invisble parallel world. How can we reconnect to this?
As I said before storytelling has always been vital in passing on skills and knowledge. Especially this story about the ulda people is hugely important in the conversation of taking care of the land and an intelligent and responsible attitude. We grew up with these really exciting, frightening, mystical stories and it was never confirmed or denied whether a story was true or not true. That was something up to you. But they were always told in a way that it sounded so true it was almost impossible to deny. When I grew up I understood why we had been taught this curiosity and respect, even for what we don't see. The philosophy is that we share all there is on Earth with the underwordly and we must take them into account.
That is also why we are taught to ask for permission if we come to a new place and we want to stay the night there. Or why we should never leave any trace, for example after we have stopped by somewhere with the herd or have lived there. So you can't go out and do whatever you want because you share with others, even though you don't see them. If you don't respect this, there might be consequences.
There is this fearán, a traditional Sámi story my grandfather on my mother's side used to tell me. It comes from the Reisa area, where he moved when he was young. Once upon a time there was an old woman who had build a barn but there was one cow that broke lose every single morning. Even though she had tied the cow at night it had escaped by the morning. She felt very frustrated about it. Nothing helped. One night, in her dreams, another old lady comes up to her, totally irritated and says: 'you know, that cow, you have to move it because it stands and pees right on top of our dining table!' That story is just so clear, isn't it?
This oral storytelling tradition is about to disappear today because we have so much technological noice. We live in an internet world, look at Netflix, check our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, emails and so on. I gave a storytelling course for kids last winter and they loved it. They still know about the stories, but they don't have time for them in this modern world. Part of why I write the books is to keep the stories alive, exactly because there is this whole philosphy in them of taking responsibility and thinking three steps ahead.
Will the old ways survive?
Well, they've done a good job destroying a lot of our culture, even change our beliefs, almost taking our soul. But it is still there, I can feel it in my bones and I know young people who are gifted and take things forward. If the old ways haven't disappeared after all this oppression, after all this time, I don't believe they ever will.
ldco
More info
Hyundai Commission: Máret Ánne Sara at Tate Modern until April 2026