High atop the Luossavaara Mountain in northern Sweden, Sami reindeer herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen mapped out a bleak future for himself and other Indigenous people whose reindeer have roamed this land for thousands of years.
If a mine is established at the deposit of rare-earth minerals called Per Geijer, which Sweden heralds as Europe’s largest, Kuhmunen said it could completely cut off the migration routes used by the Sami village of Gabna.
That would be the end of the Indigenous way of life for Kuhmunen, his children and their fellow Sami reindeer herders, he said, in this far-north corner of Sweden some 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the Arctic Circle.
“The reindeer is the fundamental base of the Sami culture in Sweden,” Kuhmunen said. “Everything is founded around the reindeers: The food, the language, the knowledge of mountains. Everything is founded around the reindeer herding. If that ceases to exist, the Sami culture will also cease to exist.”
“It’s getting more and more a problem to have a sort of sustainable reindeer husbandry and to be able to have the reindeers to survive the Arctic winter and into the next year,” said Stefan Mikaelsson, a member of the Sami Parliament.
In the Gabna village, Kuhmunen oversees about 2,500 to 3,000 reindeer and 15 to 20 herders. Their families, some 150 people in total, depend on the bottom line of the business.
Even before the discovery of the Per Geijer deposit, they had to contend with the expanding footprint of Kiirunavaara. The world’s largest underground, iron-ore mine has forced the village’s herders to lead their reindeer through a longer and harder migration route.
Swedish officials and LKAB, the state-owned mining company, say the proposed Per Geijer mine could reduce Europe’s reliance on China for rare-earth minerals. LKAB hopes to begin mining there in the 2030s.
But if work on Per Geijer goes forward, Kuhmunen said there will be no other routes for the Gabna herders to take the reindeer east from the mountains in the summer to the grazing pastures full of nutrient-rich lichen in the winter.
The village will contest the mine in court but Kuhmunen said he is not optimistic.
“It’s really difficult to fight a mine. They have all the resources, they have all the means. They have the money. We don’t have that,” Kuhmunen said. “We only have our will to exist. To pass these grazing lands to our children.”
Darren Wilson, LKAB’s senior vice president of special products, said the mining company is seeking solutions to assist the Sami herders, though he would not speculate on what they might be.
“There are potential things that we can do and we can explore and we have to keep engaging,” he said. “But I’m not underestimating the challenge of doing that.”
Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional Sami reindeer husbandry.
In the summer, mountain temperatures have risen to 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and left reindeer over-heated and unable to graze enough to gain the weight needed to sustain them in winter.
Some in Sweden suggest putting the reindeer onto trucks to ferry them between grazing lands if the Per Geijer mine is built. But Skarin said that isn’t feasible because the animals eat on the move and the relocation would deny them food to be grazed while walking from one area to another.
“So you’re kind of both taking away the migration route that they have used traditionally over hundreds and thousands of years,” she said, “and you would also take away that forage resource that they should have used during that time.”
For Kuhmunen, it would also mean the end of Sami traditions passed down by generations of reindeer herders on this land.
“How can you tell your people that what we’re doing now, it will cease to exist in the near future?” he said.
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Pietro De Cristofaro in Kiruna, Sweden, contributed to this report.
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