Norway creates fund to compensate Sami

MONTREAL — The Sami of Norway will be receiving a compensation package from the government of Norway to correct injustices inflicted upon them in the past.

On January 1, Norway’s Prime Minister, Kjell Magne Bondvik, announced the creation of a new fund that would be collectively held by the country’s 45,000 Sami.

“If we want to create and maintain a national unity, we must straighten up old injustices and create unified communities,” said the Norwegian prime minister in his address, translated by Sami law professor Ande Somby for Nunatsiaq News.

“Today I am announcing that the government is going to propose that we establish a fund. This shall provide a collective compensation to the Sami people for the damages that the Norwegian policy of Norwegianization caused in Sami society,” Bondvik said.

This fund will have a value of about $9.3 million.

A spokesperson for the Norwegian embassy in Ottawa said that this money would not be distributed directly to individuals, but would be directed towards projects to benefit the entire Sami community.

“It is important to reflect over the past and it is important to make restitution over injustices that have happened in the past,” Bondvik concluded in his New Year’s Day speech.

From the 1800s to the early 1960s, Sami living within Norway’s borders were subjected to a policy called “Nowegianization.”

Their children were required to attend school in Norwegian, and no Samis could buy land if they didn’t speak Norwegian.

This official policy didn’t change until 1963, when the Norwegian parliament determined that “policy of the national state must be to give the Sami-speaking population the opportunity to preserve its language and other cultural customs on terms that accord with the expressed wishes of the Sami themselves.”

The Sami lis now taught in many elementary schools, and two high schools. Sami langage and culture courses are also taught at the university level.

And in 1978 a cultural heritage act passsed stated that anything more than 100 years old or related to the cultural heritage of the Sami would be protected by law.