In Europe's Arctic periphery, one people straddle four nation-states. The Saami, of the boundless and amorphous tracts called Lapland, occupy the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and a sliver of the Kola Peninsula of the Soviet Union.
In English, we used to call the Saami, their culture, and their language (a Finno-Ugric one) 'Lapp' simply because their nearest neighbors did. Those neighbors, members of the dominant culture of the nation-states in which the Saami reside, have responded over the past several decades to the Saami preference for being called by their own name, a sign that dominant cultural and national groups are more sensitive to Saami and other vocal Fourth World minorities.
Global events conspire to call our attention to the Saami, a cultural group familiar to most of us only in their stereotypical role as reindeerherding no-mads. The popular media have singled out the Saami as actors and victims in several instances recently, most notably the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, often without affording us a glimpse of the flavor and texture of Saami life.
Regionalism, reindeer, and radiation
In the past decade, Saami and other Fourth World peoples have convened a number of conferences to discuss their experiences as indigenous ethnic minorities in First World, Second World, and Third World nation-states. These ethnic minorities hope to educate other citizens of the world about their often disadvantaged situations. Even though the Saami reside in relatively benevolent countries - and do not face the genocide reported from Latin America, Africa, and Asia - their cultural and linguistic identity persists in spite of, not because of, the sometimes protective policies of the host countries, especially the Fennoscandian ones - Norway, Sweden, and Finland. In these international conferences, Saami individuals often emerge in leadership roles, in part because of their competence in several European languages plus their location in relation to major political centers.
In the past year, since shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor incident in the Soviet Union on April 26, 1986, the media have singled out the impact on the Saami minority in Fennoscandian countries as paramount among the effects outside of the Soviet Union. Because of local pockets of precipitation from radioactive clouds moving from the Chernobyl area, the Lapland food chain has suffered a dramatic increase in its load of radioactive contamination. Since the early 1960s, this food chain - abbreviated to the links from lichen to reindeer to humans - has been monitored to ascertain the effects of Soviet weapons testing, and these investigations document the previous contamination levels of radioactive cesium and strontium. This food chain absorbs radioactive and other pollution because of the physiology of the lichen, the small plant that is the reindeer's major forage during the winter. The lichen indiscriminately absorbs all available moisture regardless of contaminants, but when drying out, it loses only the water. Since these inconspicuous plants live for decades, even longer than humans in some cases, their accumulated pollutants constitute a sort of long-term environmental memory.
When the clouds from Chernobyl added to this problem in 1986 in those regions with rainfall, the level of radiation in all plants and animals
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