American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When the Great Creator created the ancestors of the Sami people, he laid down in the middle of the earth the living and beating heart of a two-year-old reindeer cow, so that when the Sami people are in trouble, they can put an ear to the ground and listen for the heartbeats from below. If the heart is still beating, this means there is still a future for the Sami people, and whatever problems they have can be solved one way or another. From the beating of the female reindeer heart deep in the earth there is a line to the beating of the Sami drum and to the ancient times when the songs of the people were developed and performed-the songs that tell the story and continue to renew the Sami people's belief in the future. The Sami form an indigenous ethnic group that settled in wide areas of Norway, Sweden, northern Finland and on the Kola peninsula in Russia. It is difficult to establish their number, because ethnic definition may vary, and the choice of identifying oneself as a Sami is an individual one. The current estimate, however, places the total population between thirty thousand and fifty thousand, most of whom live in Norway. The name Sami is derived from our own designation of ourselves as sámit or sápmelaccat; no one knows the real meaning of these names. Formerly we were known as Lapps. Today the designation of Sami is coming into international use, due to the global cooperation between ethnic minorities, where the Sami have played an active part since the founding of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) at Port Alberni, Canada in the mid 1970.