A 2016 report estimated that in the last 60 years, Sweden had suffered a 71% decline in its lichen-rich forests, which provide essential food for reindeer during winter. At the same time, the climate is rapidly changing. With the Arctic warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Sámi find themselves on the frontlines. Mild weather and rain in winter is affecting how the reindeer graze and migrate, and unusually hot summers are leading to an influx of parasitic insects which spread disease among herds.

Story by Nell Lewis, CNN; Photographs by Sarah Tilotta, CNN

Thirteen-year-old Risten Alida is learning to mark her family’s reindeer. It is past midnight, the sun’s afterglow still on the horizon. The quiet of the mountaintop plateau is broken by the grunts and bells of some 500 animals milling about their corral as herders work through them, identifying mature females and lassoing and marking their calves.

As her mother Marja Skum holds a calf down, Risten Alida uses a knife to cut the family’s distinctive pattern into its ear. The process looks brutal and bloody, but it is part of a centuries-old tradition the indigenous Sámi people use to show ownership, which they say is integral to how they look after the animals.

“We have a contract with the reindeer — that we are put here to take care of them and then they will provide us with food and clothes and everything we need,” says Skum, 47. “That relationship goes a long way back, and it’s difficult to explain … but everything we do is to protect them, and (for this) we need land. But the land is shrinking day by day.”

In the remote mountains of northern Sweden, just 15 miles east of the border with Norway and 22 miles south of the Arctic Circle, it is hard to believe there is a shortage of land. Wide expanses of green fill each vista, a scattering of snow tops the scree-covered peaks and a chain of lakes lined with thick forest winds through the valley…..

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/09/world/sami-reindeer-herders-cnnphotos-c2e/

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