Sámi Connections with Polar Expeditions

It’s been very warm here on the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest the last week. Not compared to Phoenix, of course, but high for those of us more used to summer temperatures in the sixties and low seventies. The heat encourages me to continue on with polar themes.

Recently, for my travel book North Coast of the North, about Arctic Norway, I’ve been doing some research into a handful of Sámi from Northern Norway who accompanied some of the famous polar explorers on expeditions to Svalbard, Greenland and Antarctic. A good source has been the website, Polar History, sponsored by the Polar Institute and the Arctic University in Tromsø. 

Along with biographies of over two hundred men, including six Sámi,  is a separate category listing twenty-eight women who had a connection to one or both of the poles, whether as cook, wife, hunter, scientist, or explorer. One woman appears in both categories. 

Margarthe Kitti

This is Margarthe (Lango) Kitti. As a young girl from a reindeer herding family outside Tromsø, Kitti was approached for her skill in sewing and commissioned to create the Sami-style gákti, fur and skin clothing and shoes, for Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa Expedition through the Northwest Passage.

 The idea of employing Sámi men, known for their abilities as skiers, on expeditions to the frozen ends of the earth seems to have originated with Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, who participated in three geological trips to Svalbard. On one such expedition in 1872, he purchased forty reindeer and hired four Sámi men to take care of them, only one of whom is named: Nils Mathisen Sara. After Nordenskiöld’s successful transit of the Northeast Passage, he set his sights on Greenland. In 1883, Nordenskiöld recruited two hardy Sámi men, Pava Lars Tuorda and Anders Rassa, to sail with him and his team of scientists to the west coast of Greenland and from there see if they could cross overland to the east coast.

Pava Lars Tuorda

Pava Lars Tuorda was born in the Tuorpan siida, in the mountains west of Jokkmokk, Sweden in 1847. He early showed himself to be a skier of great endurance and an excellent hunter of wolves and bears, with spear and rifle. In the 1860s he was hired as a guide for Swedish geographers who were in the process of mapping areas of Norrbotten province. In addition to bearing large loads, Tuorda was adept at finding routes through challenging terrains. Asked for other recommendations, Tuorda suggested his neighbor Anders Rassa. The two men sailed off in the Sophie from Göteborg with the rest of Nordenskiöld’s team in June 1883 for the west coast of Greenland.

One of Nordenskiöld’s theories was that he might discover a warmer center to the world’s largest island, where trees and other vegetation could conceivably thrive in a drier climate away from the coast. But the team, burdened with a massive amount of equipment, found it difficult to navigate their sledges across Greenland’s glacial fissures and the deep snow that hid wet pockets underneath. Tuorda took the lead, but eventually Nordenskiöld decided the sledges could no longer go on. Instead, he sent Tuorda and Rassa ahead. With two compasses, a barometer, and a pocket watch, they were to ski as far as they could inland. Tuorda also took his bear spear. In the next fifty-two hours the two Sámi skied east 143 miles and then turned around and skied back, resting only two hours during that time, when they were enveloped in a snowstorm and had to dig themselves into the snow until it passed. They found no grass or trees, only endless vistas of ice and snow.

Per Saivo (l.) and Ole Must,1898 

 

Another pair of Sámi men who participated in Arctic exploration were Ole Must and Per Saivo from Kirkenes.   These two young men had their photographs taken by Elissif Wessel before they left for the South Pole on the British Antarctic Expedition 1898-1900, headed by the Norwegian-British leader, Carsten Borchgrevink, and with the aim of collecting scientific data, including fixing the location of magnetic south pole, and then advancing as far as possible towards the pole itself. The expedition’s crew, almost all Norwegian, successfully spent the winter of 1899 in two prefabricated houses on the Antarctic mainland and managed to get by sledge to 78° 50′ S., setting the “farthest south” record of the time.

 

        

Queering Polar History in Tromsø

Queering Polar History, an exhibit at the Polar Museum in Tromsø, just ended this past June. Sadly, I only became aware of it recently, though I was in Tromsø twice during the three years it was on. My focus in Tromsø both times was library research on Sámi folktales, and I didn’t have much time to revisit museums I’d already been to over the years. I also recalled the Polar Museum, in a remodeled wooden warehouse down on one of the city wharves, as being a little too taxidermic for my taste.

 But on October 7, 2022, a temporary exhibit opened in connection with Norway’s Queer Culture Year, a joint initiative from the Queer Archive at the University of Bergen, the Norwegian National Museum, and the Norwegian National Library. This was to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of male homosexuality in Norway. The repeal of section 213 of the Norwegian Penal Code marked the beginning of a greater openness about gay life, literature, and activism, which would transform Norwegian society in the coming years. 

The Polar Museum is in many ways an unlikely venue for a thematic exploration of gender and sexuality in Northern Norway and the polar regions, particularly the Arctic. Due to the preponderance of male explorers, polar exploration has usually been associated with a certain kind of obsessive, fur-clad hypermasculinity, exemplified by Norwegians Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen and the many other men who participated in various late nineteenth and twentieth century races to the poles. 

Curators and cultural studies researchers at the Polar Museum, Silje Gaupseth and Marit Anne Hauan, decided to take another look at material the museum might already have in its archives and at other newspaper clippings, fiction, artifacts, and urban legends suggested by external contributors with a knowledge of queer history. The result was an expanded look—in the exhibit itself and in a large format booklet with seven articles and an interview accompanying the exhibit—at the many dimensions of queer history. 

One of the more intriguing articles focuses on a photograph from the Norwegian South Pole Expedition of 1910-12. It was snapped on the famous Fram, captained by Roald Amundsen, as the ship crossed the equator on December 14, 1910, en route to the South Pole. A celebration is in progress among the crew. A bit surprisingly, it includes what seems to be a woman in a short white costume, sitting on the lap of a crew member, with one arm around his neck and the other hand stroking his cheek. Second mate Hjalmar Fredrik Gertsen had, with the help of the ship’s sailmaker, had spent the day transforming himself into a ballerina, writing later that “I was extremely cute...and I was flirted with a lot.” 

"The Equator Party," Fram 1910

In her fascinating article about this photograph, “A Few Square Metres of Leeway,” Gaupseth delves into the Anglo-American tradition of cross-dressing or “polar drag” aboard ship during performances, perhaps as a way of providing “a safe outlet for sexual tensions between the men on the expedition.” British officers had often been educated at schools where cross-dressing was encouraged in student theaters. After around 1920, such playful acting became more stigmatized as homosexual expression, but in 1910 it was alive and well on the Fram. 

 I was also captivated by Marit Anne Hauan’s article, “The Walrus—behavior among Arctic marine mammals that breaks the norms.” I mean, with a title like that, who wouldn’t wonder about what walruses are getting up to? Plenty, as it turns out. The Arctic walrus lives along the eastern coast of Greenland, and on the archipelagos of Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, and east along the Barents and Kara Sea. These large and magnificent animals, as well as their brethren, the Pacific walrus up in Alaska, were hunted almost to extinction. 

Walruses are very social animals, as you can notice in the wild and in documentary videos and still photography. They always seem to be piled up together. Turns out, these are not mixed groups. Except for a short mating season in the winter, the male and female populations live separately. Although their mating and reproduction habits have been studied thoroughly by marine biologists, little research has taken place on what might be going on during the other ten months of the year. The sexual behavior of male walruses has received some attention in the past by Bruce Bagemihl, who is also the author of Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, published in 1999. Apparently most male walruses engage in same-gender activity: making particular sounds associated with flirting, while masturbating their erect penis with their front flippers. Sometimes they rub up against the anal areas of other males. 

This was all news to me, though I was not surprised to find that research on female walruses and their desires is still regrettably lacking. 

The curators also asked the internationally feted queer Sámi photographer Gjert Rognli to create “interventions” at the Polar Museum. I am a great fan of his magical, often eerily lit nature photography, but the small photographs in the booklet of objects he contributed to the Queering Polar History exhibit didn’t give me a good sense of either his personal art style or what exactly they offered the viewer in the museum. On the other hand, his interview with Hauan is moving and perceptive about his own vision of queer art and his role in a “double minority position—Sámi and queer.” 

Gjert Rognli                                                                                          

 

 

Save the Repparfjord!

 

Protest site at Repparfjord, Norway, July 2025

This summer, on the site of a Canadian-financed copper mine on the mountain above the Repparfjord in Northern Norway, an encampment has gone up to protest the current construction and its ruinous consequences for Sámi reindeer grazing lands and the fjord near Hammerfest. You can read about the encampment here in a recent issue of the Barents Observer and see an Instagram video on the protest made by Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, a young singer and activist affiliated with Norway’s environmental protection organization Natur og Ungdom (the youth movement of Friends of the Earth Norway). Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen asks everyone to write to the Canadian investment company Hartree to demand they stop funding this project, which is taking place without the consent of the Sámi parliament and many local Sámi in the area. 

Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen

For more background on the project, read on: 

The Repparfjord, or Riehppovuotna, is a National Salmon Fjord; the rivers that feed into the fjord from the mountains above are some of the world’s most pristine waterways, fished by the local Sámi for generations, and also beloved by fly fishermen from abroad. The fjord is a spawning ground for salmon, for cod, pollack, and other species. This marine environment was first threatened in the 1970s when the copper ore Nussir Mine in the mountains first came into operation with the promise of jobs for the nearby municipality of Kvalsund, a community of Sámi, Kven, and Norwegians located at the western end of the Repparfjord. Because of the falling price of copper, the open pit mine was only in existence from 1972-1978, but it was long enough for the company, Folldal Verk, to dispose of tailings (crushed rock, water, and trace amounts of metals or additives used in the processing) in the Repparfjord. 

This was done without consulting the local population and the effects of the dumping were never monitored. But copper is now in great demand in the manufacture of electronics, and the amount of ore under the surface of two mountains above the Repparfjord, Ulveryggen (Gumpenjunni) and Steinfjellet (Nussir) is estimated at seventy-two million tons. Although Norway has a long history of copper mining farther south, in Røros and Løkken in the Trondelag area, the ore deposits around the Repparfjord are the largest known deposits in Norway. A renewed look at the Nussir brownfields began around 2005 with the establishment of an ASA (a public limited company), and some years of test drilling and raising money followed. The issue of what to do with the waste should mining be resumed was thoroughly discussed, but the plan was essentially the same as in the 1970s. The tailings would again spew into the Repparfjord, though this time the waste would flow through a pipeline from the plant to the fjord bottom. Dumping waste into waterways and the ocean has long been a human practice, but it’s a surprising fact that Norway is the only country in Europe and one of the last nation states to allow mining waste to be discarded in the ocean. 

The Repparfjord

The mine was approved in 2019, with the goal of operating the world’s first fully electrified mine with zero CO2 emissions, but it has been bitterly fought ever since, with protests at the site driven by Sámi activists and other environmentalists. In 2020, the German company Aurubis, one of the world’s largest copper smelters, provisionally agreed to buy raw materials from Nussir ASA. A year later they terminated the memorandum of understanding after opposition, citing concerns about the effect on wildlife and the livelihoods of the Sámi in the area. The tailings were not the main issue; here it was the effect of the mine itself on local reindeer populations. Nussir ASA, in fighting for the mine, has insisted that the mitigation measures they propose will work, but most of those mitigation measures are on land. The Sámi Parliament, which in Norway is given the right of consultation but never the final say in any dispute over the environment, disagreed with Nussir ASA. The suggested mitigations were not sufficient. 

There are conflicting ways of reading Norwegian laws and how they are to be interpreted with regard to Sámi rights. For instance, the Minerals Act of 2009 gives little agency to Sámi concerns, while the Natural Diversity Act, passed that same year, states that the purpose of the act “is to protect biological, geological and landscape diversity and ecological processes through conservation and sustainable use, and in such a way that the environment provides a basis for human activity, culture, health and well-being, now and in the future, including a basis for Sami culture.” There is currently a new Minerals Act, scheduled to go into effect in 2026, that speaks of “Extending the scope of the current special rules relating to Sámi interests to cover the entire traditional Sámi area.” But this revised Minerals Act is also focused on streamlining permits and encouraging production, in line with the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act of 2024. What some critics, Sámi and non-Sámi, have noticed is how little say the Sámi Parliament has over the marine environment. While the rights of land-based reindeer herders are often threatened, there has been progress at times in finding compromises and/or limiting damage. But the rights of the traditional Sea Sámi to clean waters and a healthy marine ecology seem to be more nebulous when it comes to the law. 

Hammerfest protest against dumping in the fjord

Although a number of people in the Kvalsund municipality are in favor of the mine because of the jobs involved and protests and continued pushback from the Sámi Parliament have slowed the process, the plans for the mine haven’t been given up. As of 2025, Blue Moon Metals of Canada is working with Nussir ASA to pursue mining operations. The Sámi Parliament President, Silje Karine Muotka, has been outspoken about the Nussir mine and about a “green shift” that depends on extractive processes that harm the environment and have an outsize effect on Indigenous populations in Norway. “It isn’t a question of economics, it’s a values question, a moral question about what we want to leave future generations. I do recognize that we need materials for new technologies – so we should look for better projects that don’t harm the environment and destroy our culture.” 

Sámi Parliament President, Silje Karine Muotka