The Saami: Custodians of Our Planet

Áslak Holmberg, President of the Saami Council,
is a pioneering leader who fights for the rights of 80.000
Indigenous people in the Arctic - on the global stage.


Speaking at the UN, the IPCC or in Davos, Áslak
makes sure the world understands what it means to be Indigenous
in the middle of Europe; being European citizens, whose rights to
their land, their water and their traditional way of making a
living, through fishing and reindeer herding, is being denied.


"We are colonized by 4 European countries:
Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden. That means, we are not
in charge of our own territories, governing or livelihood."


Throughout this Podcast my key thought is:
“How can we sustain the planet if we don’t empower the
very people who dedicate their life to it?”

In our conversation, Àslak and I talk about:


Indigenous communities as the Custodians of our
planet, because they live in peace with nature. They are
driven by sustainability, not by growth, by their love of the
environment not by terrorizing it.


Despite comprising 5% of the world‘s population,
Indigenous people protect 80% of the Earth's
biodiversity. We are in urgent need of their
knowledge if we really want to tackle climate change and the
loss of biodiversity.


The Saami deserve a seat at the table – so do
all representatives of the global Indigenous community. There are
more than 476 million Indigenous people in the world, spread
across 90 countries and representing 5,000 different cultures,
living in all geographic regions.


Since 2007, the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples contains a legally vague, yet symbolically
significant, recognition of Indigenous people’s rights
over the development of their own territories. It can only be
just the start.


Today, young leaders like Áslak are being listened to in the
international arena – but not in the nation states that occupy
them and strip them of their rights. Norway, for example,
has illegally built the world’s largest onshore wind farm with
1,000 turbines on Saami land, effectively killing one of
the two ways the Saami can make a living in that area.


Áslak has for the past decade worked with Saami
and indigenous issues through NGOs, the Saami parliament, as well
as through activism and academia. He is a fisherman, teacher and
holds a master’s degree in Indigenous studies.


Saami Council - World Economic Forum - Host