Sámi Assembly Of 1917

The Sámi Assembly of 1917 was the first Sámi National Assembly. The Sámi who took part in the assembly were from both Norway and Sweden. The meeting was held at the Methodist Church in Trondheim from 6 to 9 February 1917. The Sámi National Day is celebrated on 6 February to commemorate the beginning of this assembly. Around 150 participants gathered at the assembly, of which the majority consisted of Southern Sámi from Nordland, Trøndelag, and Hedmark counties.

Elsa Laula Renberg (1877–1931) from Helgeland and the Sámi Women's union at Brurskanken initiated the assembly. Renberg was the assembly's chairwoman and gave the opening speech at the meeting. The other major Sámi leader at that time, Daniel Mortenson from Røros/Elgå, was also a chairman and gave a lecture at the assembly about reindeer farming and how it had become hampered by the Joint Sámi Act ("Felleslappeloven") of 1883. The lecture sparked a debate that led to the forming of a separate committee concerning reindeer farming by the assembly. The committee later presented a proposal for a new reindeer farming act, which influenced the final shaping of the law in 1919. The other main issue at the assembly was the demand for a separate Sámi school, where children were taught and allowed to write in the Sámi language.

Background

In the years preceding the assembly, Sámi people in both Norway and Sweden felt that their culture and livelihoods were threatened. Therefore, in the years 1904–1910, both Sámi organisations and journals started to arise.

Territory restrictions and Norwegianization

The Joint Sámi Act of 1883 was the first major attempt by the authorities to "gain control of the Sami's reindeer herding". The law applied to both Norway and Sweden, and established territories for reindeer grazing. The law introduced the principle of collective liability for all shareholders in the reindeer grazing territories for damages inflicted by the reindeer on the local agriculture. In 1894, the boundaries for reindeer grazing were established, yet important grazing areas such as Trollheimen and Gauldalsvidda fell outside these boundaries. With the Supplementary Sámi Act of 1897, landowners received the right to prohibit reindeer herding outside of the reindeer grazing territories. Prescriptive rights and common law were thus disregarded. However, the legal regulation of reindeer herding was in constant motion, and several commissions worked on the reindeer herding question up until the next reindeer herding act came in 1933.Jernsletten (1991)

In Sweden, the "limit of cultivation" had given Sámi nomads the right to use grazing land in the areas of the country that were situated above rural communities. These territories, however, were eventually adopted by new settlers, a process that has been characterized as "rural colonization", so that the reindeer herds were pushed away from the known grazing areas. The Sámi's liability for reindeer damages remained however.

Questions of territory and grazing rights were particularly a problem in the Southern Sámi areas. In the Northern Sámi areas of Troms and Finnmark, the biggest challenge was Norwegianization, within "schools, industries, the church, defense and intelligence - often in a close (and intimate) relation". The pressure was particularly directed at Sámi in "transitional districts" in coastal areas and remote fjords. A part of this was due to the school governor not wanting Sámi teachers to teach in Sámi villages where they could "be to the detriment of their Sámi knowledge"; they should therefore be sent to non-Sámi villages.

Outside of Namsos, the Sámi school in Havika had started in 1910 as a boarding school for children from Southern Sámi families; the school was in many ways a "Norwegianization school", but was also a meeting place for the Sámi. The Sámi missionary organisation was founded in 1888, and from the beginning, made a conscious effort to use the Sámi language. After national assembly resolutions in 1912 and 1913, the organisation adopted into its bylaws that "the organisation should in no respect be in violation of the State's work concerning the church and schooling". This was interpreted as supporting the Norwegianization effort.

In Sweden, the authorities, through a school reform in 1913, had split Sámi children into two groups, the so-called "category splitting": children of reindeer herding Sámi went to "the Nomad school", whilst children of non-nomadic Sámi went to regular schools, where they lost their Sámi identity. This was called "Lapps should be Lapps" politics, where "real Sámi" were defined in a way that ostracized large groups of Sámi.

The question of reindeer herding across the border between Norway and Sweden had been a difficult topic during the Karlstad Convention. From ancient times, the Sami reindeer herders placed little emphasis on national borders, and had let their reindeer graze in Sweden during the winter and in Norway during the summer. Through the Lapp Codicil of 1751

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