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This week marks Sami National Day in Tromsø – the country’s largest Sami municipality. According to the Sami Parliament’s electoral roll, there were close to 2,100 registered Sami living in Tromsø at the end of June 2023. This was 479 more than in Karasjok, which is the rural municipality with the highest number of registered Sami.
If we also include Sami under the age of 18, the number of Sami living in Tromsø rises to well over 2,500. This is more than the combined population in the municipalities of Ibestad and Gratangen.
No one predicted such a development of the Sami settlement pattern either in the preparations for the Sami Act (NOU 1985:14) or when the Language Act was passed in 1990.
In this post, we will highlight some factors that can explain the strong growth of registered Sami in Tromsø.
In the study Sami culture and education (NOU 1985), the committee unanimously agreed to equate Sami and Norwegian as languages of communication, and also came up with a proposal for a geographical delimitation of the language act’s scope. The committee wanted to concentrate the investment on Kautokeino, Karasjok, Tana, Nesseby, Porsanger and Kåfjord in Troms.
The Ministry of Local Government did not want to include Kåfjord and Porsanger, partly out of resource considerations and partly also because it was believed that Sami language and culture were so weak in both municipalities that a revitalization was not a likely outcome. The government shared this view, but included Porsanger and excluded Kåfjord, which was a lonely island in Troms county.
This led to strong protests from Kåfjord municipality. The arguments put forward by Kåfjord municipality attracted attention, among others with the case mayor, right-wing representative Halgrim Berg. Halgrim Berg was the goalkeeper and put forward a separate proposal during the parliamentary proceedings that Kåfjord should be included in the administrative area, since Sami language and culture had a much wider area of influence than Finnmark. The proposal received a surprising majority.
We remind you of this because it shows that attention to Sami culture and language both in general and particularly in the ministry and government was strongly centered on Finnmark. The idea of the emergence of a large Sami population in other parts of the country, as the development has been, was absent. The term city Sami had not come into use and Sami who lived in cities were considered guests or on their way into the Norwegian population.
Growth in the Sami population in Tromsø
The demographic development of the Sami population after 1989 has two core features: (1) an exceptionally strong increase and (2) a radical change in the settlement pattern, cf. the figure below. Between 1989 and 2023, the population in Tromsø grew by 1.9 times, which is far stronger than the population growth in Norway.
However, the Sami population in Norway grew by 4.3 times in the same period, while the corresponding figure for Tromsø is 12 times, from 171 in 1989 to nearly 2,100 people in 2023.
The growth in the Sami population cannot be explained by demographic factors alone. Immigration from abroad has essentially no effect on growth, and there is little reason to believe that the natural population growth (the difference between live births and deaths) is significantly different from the Norwegian one.
The Sami community, however, has a socially conditioned growth factor of great importance which in demographic literature is termed ethnic mobility. Ethnic mobility means that a person changes their ethnicity from one registration to another. Investigations i.a. from Canada shows that ethnic mobility accounts for between 60-80 per cent of the growth in the indigenous population in major cities. There is good reason to believe that this also applies to Tromsø.
What has stimulated the strong growth?
The reasons for this are many. One is the city’s location. Tromsø is centrally located in relation to the large Sea Sami population in the county. Around 1900, the town already had a Sami population of 951 and in addition 728 of mixed origin. Finally, throughout the post-war period, Tromsø has had a large influx of people from both Sea Sami areas and from the interior of Finnmark.
Many of these disappeared quietly with or against their will into the Norwegian population. The Norwegianization policy and lack of investment in Sami language and culture almost decimated the Sami population in Tromsø to only 171 in 1989. But the potential for growth was there. Both the large proportion of people with Sami background around 1900 and the immigration from especially the Sea Sami areas throughout northern Norway in the post-war period were a source of ethnic mobility which was triggered by several factors.
An important factor is that Tromsø was a university city with an ever-increasing number of students and with strong growth both in the public sector and in private business. This has led to a strong net migration to Tromsø during the last generation from both Sea Sami and Sami areas. It is not possible to determine what proportion of this immigration was Sami, but studies show that the Sami population has grown in all types of municipality. When the district municipalities have had significant population losses after 1990, this is because it is the Norwegian population that has shrunk.
The Sami population has experienced exceptional growth in Tromsø, but growth has also been significant in the district municipalities.
Institutionalization of Sami culture and society
Another point is that when Kåfjord joined the Sami administrative area, the provisions of the Language Act on signage and language competence in Sami were made applicable in Troms both in relation to county council and all types of state institutions, of which there are many in Tromsø from 1992.
Tromsø therefore started early on to facilitate the conditions for Sami-speaking people in the entire chain of service-providing institutions. Particularly important were the mandates of the Language Act by the municipalities in relation to both kindergarten and school provision for Sami children. In a relatively short time, this offer became so good that Sami-speaking parents could live a normal life and at the same time attend to the educational needs of their children. Tromsø’s large and differentiated labor market also made it attractive to settle here.
The rise of Bysami society is of particular interest. Bysami communities are multi-Sami in that they consist of most branches of Sami identity in traditional Sami living areas. At the same time, the By-Sami communities are densely organized and contain the lion’s share of the Sami elite.
As a university city, Tromsø has had and has an important role both as a research center and as a mediator of knowledge about Sami history, Sami living conditions and Sami language and culture – an activity that has greatly contributed to putting Sami issues on the agenda. In this Sami cultural diversity, extensive experimentation has taken place and is taking place with forms of interaction in relation to language, dress and other cultural markers.
A good example is the development in the marking of the Sami’s national day. It started early in Tromsø in 1993 and has today grown into a diverse cultural celebration that lasts for eight days and that says a lot about the development of Sami art and culture with the city as a frame of reference.
This has meant that the Sami population element has become visible in a completely different way than before and contributed to people born in Tromsø investigating their ethnic background to a greater extent than before.
As the years have gone by this has become quite easy. My generation had to struggle through censuses and church records via poor microfilm at the State Archives. Today, anyone who wants to can examine their ethnic background easily via digital archives. The fact that the family criterion for standing in the Sámi population in 1997 was extended from grandparents to the generation of great-grandparents also has an impact on the recruitment potential for the Sámi population.
Two other moves that have nothing to do with Tromsø have also been important:
Through the establishment of the Sámi Parliament, the Sámi nation gained a modern and overarching institution which centralised, formalized and politicized a large number of issues. Thus, both the conditions for Sami social life and identification with Sami society were changed. The Sámi Parliament and underlying institutions have, through their many roles, contributed to institutionalizing the Sámi nation and thus contributed to a broader Sámi identity development or nation building.
The second feature that is of great importance is the increased space Sami issues have received in all types of media. Here, Oddasat is in a special position with its daily TV broadcasts, which now have a viewership of 55,000. Also important are regional newspapers such as Nordlys and local newspapers, both Norwegian and Sami-language, where both news and debates highlight and highlight the Sami nation.
In Tromsø, this development has not occurred without struggle and conflicts, which culminated in 2011 when the municipal council decided to register Tromsø in the administrative area for the Sami language. The debate was fierce and had clear racist elements. Labor and the coalition partners lost the election and the application was withdrawn by the new city council.
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The outcome was nevertheless a cooperation agreement between the Sami Parliament and Tromsø municipality. The city council has now taken up the matter again and wants Tromsø to join the administrative area for the Sami language, without this having caused any significant reactions. Another old demand for a Sami center in the city is also facing realization these days.
Conclusion
When Tromsø has become the municipality with the most registered Sami in Norway, this is due to two factors – net immigration and ethnic mobility. It is not possible to determine which of the two factors has been most important, but research in other countries suggests that ethnic mobility is a significant growth factor and probably the most important.
When the growth in the Sami population has been so strong, this is due to the conditions we have pointed out above. The strong growth in the Sami population is also an expression that Tromsø is a good place to live for the Sami as well, despite scattered anti-Sami incidents.