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.