Eight Seasons and a Border Someone Else Drew

Our year has eight seasons. Four of them have no equivalent in your language, because they are the joins — spring-winter, spring-summer, autumn-summer, autumn-winter — and they are the ones that matter most, because they are when the animals move.

I have somewhere between two and three hundred words for snow and ice, depending on who is counting and which dialect they are counting in. This is often repeated as a curiosity. It is not a curiosity. It is a working vocabulary, the way a surgeon has a working vocabulary. Skávvi is a crust that has frozen after rain, and it means the reindeer cannot reach the lichen, and it means an animal will starve in eleven days unless we move. There is no poetry in it.

Before the states came there was the siida — a group of families with a territory that ran from the coast to the interior along the migration. There was no line across it. Then there was a line, and then four lines, and the herd stood on one side and the summer pasture on the other, and a man in a capital city explained to my great-grandfather that this was now a matter of treaties.

They took the children to school and beat the language out of them. My mother was one of them. She spoke Norwegian to me until I was nine years old, and then she stopped, in the middle of a meal, and spoke Sámi, and did not explain. I learned it late and I speak it like a man wearing a borrowed coat.

The winters are warming and the crust comes more often now. Then a wind farm, then a mine, then a road, each one taking a strip of the corridor, each one legally minor on its own. Together they are the whole thing. This is how it ends if it ends — not by decree, by accumulation.

So when someone comes and pays to stand in the snow with us for four days, I am practical about it. The money goes to the corridor cases and the fodder we now have to buy. And you will carry things, and you will be cold, and you will not be here in calving season, because nobody is.