Saamis, we used to live in the Tundra.
This is a story about the modern life of Saami indigenous people in Russia through the itinerary of the little girl Uliana. Despite her colored hair and her smartphone in the pocket, an 11 years, she shows some characteristic traits of her ethnic group: the Saami. Uliana loves fishing, tinkering, living in the open air, knitting and eating reindeer meat with her bare hands. Living in a village of Lovozero on the Kola Peninsula, the hinterland of Murmansk city, Uliana comes from a long line of reindeer herders whose traditions almost disappeared. The Saamis of Russia lost their nomadic autonomy with the arrival of the Soviet power in the 1920s. This people who lived mainly from reindeer herding and fishing in the tundra, was forced to live in apartment buildings. Children of nature, Saamis were depressed about losing their ancestral rhythms and being locked in "cages". Gathered by Soviets in the main Saami village - Lovozero, this place was considered as a reserve. Other villages were also built on the Saami lands to gather reindeer herders. Settled to work in kolkhozes, they no longer had the right to be Saami: the practice of the language and the wearing of the traditional costume were prohibited. Today, some 1,500 people still live on the Kola Peninsula, but only 200 speak the Saami language and these are mostly elderly people. The language itself proves to be a pitfall to federate the people. In the face of disagreements over the phonetics of the Kildin dialect, a dictionary is expected to be published soon. A breathless culture, to which tourism could help, if it does not reduce it to folklore. Added to these difficulties to preserve their culture, the climate warming persists more and more in the Arctic region with temperature peaks of 15°C above the average in the summer. The consequences of this change will also have to be overcome soon by this people from the Extreme North.






















