Indigenous Women: The Strength of Our Communities
Reindeer are central to Saami culture and the Saami carry an obligation and responsibility to protect them. Photo by Jannie Staffansson.
Living in Two Worlds in Sápmi
J
annie Staffansson (Saami) is a renowned Indigenous climate change expert. She lives in Jokkmokk, Sápmi, in the north of Sweden, where she works with her partner and her beloved reindeer. She holds a degree in organic and environmental chemistry from the University of Gothenburg, and is a former representative of the Saami Council to the Arctic Council; a member of the executive committee of the Sustaining Arctic Observing Network; former Indigenous representative in the Arctic Science Summit Week steering committee, the former Arctic Focal Point of International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change; and a Cultural Survival board member. Staffansson was a member of the Arctic Council Working Group on Assessment and Monitoring Programme and its associated expert groups on black carbon and methane, persistent organic pollutants, and climate change. Now, Staffansson has her own consulting business serving Saami communities and organizations. Shaldon Ferris (KhoiSan), Cultural Survival Indigenous Rights Radio producer, recently spoke with Staffanson.
Cultural Survival: Please tell us your personal story. How did you grow up? Jannie Staffansson: I grew up in a reindeer herding family
where my father was out with reindeer. We are one of the smallest reindeer herding communities in Sápmi. I went to the same school as the Swedish children and I grew up in a non-Indigenous town where we are the minority. It was sometimes difficult to balance those two very different cultures, and also quite difficult to explain my culture to my nonIndigenous friends. It was hard for them to understand my customs, my vision, and my worldview, whereas I could easily understand theirs because we attended the same school and learned the same things. At home, I got different perspectives. I realized that Saami and Indigenous Peoples are not listened to and our knowledge 12 • www. cs. org
is not valued—I quickly understood that listening to the dialogues at our kitchen table about the change in weather. The grownups in my Indigenous community spoke to each other about climate change. I told my father to go and tell the rest of the world about this, because it was not known or reported on the news. He just said, “Jannie, you go and do that. Get yourself an education and then they might listen to you, because they’re not listening to us.” I realized then that I needed to go and get an education. I studied science and chemistry for five years to understand nature at a micro level. CS: What led you to choose your educational and current career paths? JS: The things that my grandmother had taught me and
people in my surroundings about medicine and healing from nature and how you prepare them were verified in my chemistry degrees, including medicinal chemistry. I also studied environmental chemistry, so my Indigenous knowledge and the knowledge that I received from my education in Western science fit quite neatly together. Together with both perspectives, I get a better understanding of what is happening. I was brought up always defending and putting reindeer at the forefront, and myself and others second. Whatever difficulties the reindeer are facing, I have promised to protect them. They face threats from extraction industries, tourism, predators, and the politics of predators in the EU or Sweden, but also deforestation issues and climate change. My focus is on Indigenous science and knowledge and Western science working in combination to tackle climate change. When I studied environmental chemistry, climate change became the issue that I felt I could give more insight to. When decisions are made when it comes to climate change . . . it’s so complex and difficult to understand, we need the best science available. And today, those that are deciding and those that are researching in non-Indigenous sciences, they don’t have all the best
