Centre of Sámi Research Celebrates 10-year Anniversary

 Peter Sköld, director (in the back) with the invited guest

“This is a really happy day,” said Peter Sköld, the director of Vaartoe,  Centre of Sámi research at Umeå University in northern Sweden, on their 10-year anniversary celebration. During the ten year period, the research centre has made a number of achievements.

Listen: {play}/media/jukebox/10thanniversary.MP3

“We have done strong improvements in education related to Sámi issues at the university, with the development of a masters program. We are also the first university in Sweden to introduce compulsory education about the Sámi society for all at the teachers programme. We have achieved major research funding for a number of projects, we have resources to do a good research, we have been very successful,” Peter Sköld says.

At the centre they have a couple of projects with focus on climate change and traditional knowledge. “Our contributions to the research on climate change in the Arctic is to put a focus on the humans, there is a terribly lot of research going on in geophysics and natural science,” says Peter Sköld and continue to tell that at least in Sweden, the people who are facing consequences of climate change has been forgotten, and that the centre wants to contribute with research that is relevant for the people.

Some of the people who had come to celebrate Vaartoe. Photo: Thomas Sarri.One of the invited guests and speakers, the Canadian researcher Willie Ermine said that the research centre is invaluable for the Sámi people. “I think research institutions like the Sámi centre here contribute a lot to bringing back the memory for the people themselves to start again asserting who they are and their believes and values in their culture,” Ermine says.

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