ABSTRACT
The Saami are the only indigenous ethnic minority of arctic and sub-arctic Fennoscandia and the Kola peninsula of the Soviet Union, where they have been living as hunters and fishers, then also as reindeer herders and farmers, for several millennia. Saami territorial habits have been interpreted by and their identities negotiated with the dominant societies organised in nation states for the past several hundred years, even though some trade, taxation and colonisation pre-dates the Viking era. The Saami are a single fourth-world people in four lands, with Saami dialects following traditional transhumance routes rather than national boundaries. Subsistence and territorial patterns characterising Saamiland today are rooted in a wide variety of traditional economic and ecological settings impacted by an equally wide variety of colonisation and resource extraction. In the mid-eighteenth century, a precocious ethnohistorical work was commissioned by and delivered to the Danish-Norwegian Crown by a Major Peter Schnitler.
