{"id":99927,"date":"2024-11-08T12:42:06","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T12:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/managing-the-sami-peoples-trust-statement\/"},"modified":"2024-11-08T12:42:10","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T12:42:10","slug":"managing-the-sami-peoples-trust-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/managing-the-sami-peoples-trust-statement\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing the Sami people’s trust – Statement"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

news could easily have initiated a debate about the criteria for the number of voters without engaging genealogists to investigate the language use of individuals’ great-grandparents. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s experience in managing the number of voters shows that older publicly available registers do not always contain sufficient or correct information when it comes to S\u00e1mi language use in S\u00e1mi families. In particular, this applies to the registration of Sami language use in areas where the Sami language should not be spoken in public due to the Norwegianization policy, and should ideally be hidden as well as possible. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s electorate is managed by the S\u00e1mi Parliament’s plenary leadership, based on the rules of the S\u00e1mi Act. Requests to be included in the number of electors are processed by the S\u00e1mi Parliament’s administration in accordance with the Administration Act. An assessment is made as to whether the person applying to be registered in the electoral roll meets the objective criteria that the person concerned, parents, grandparents or great-grandparents had Sami as their home language. If you are the child of someone who is or has been in the Sami Parliament’s electoral roll, you can also claim to be included in the Sami Parliament’s electoral roll. In addition, the person who submits such a petition must declare that the person in question considers himself to be Sami. The management of the Sami Parliament’s number of voters is based on the trust of the Sami people, the number of voters is the very foundation of Sami democracy in Norway. The S\u00e1mi Parliament is the S\u00e1mi people’s representative body, an indigenous parliament that has been established to safeguard and promote the S\u00e1mi’s rights as a people. The role of the S\u00e1mi Parliament is linked to the Norwegian constitution’s recognition of the S\u00e1mi as a separate people and an indigenous people in Norway. Therefore, it is also of great importance that the S\u00e1mi Parliament’s number of electors is correct at all times. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s electoral roll is, as is often repeated, not a complete register of S\u00e1mi in Norway, but nevertheless it is a register of S\u00e1mi who have the right to vote in the S\u00e1mi Parliament elections. It is a register based on ethnicity and must therefore be managed in line with both national and international rules. There is nothing to prevent a broad and public debate about the criteria for the Sami Parliament’s number of electors. But in such a debate it is important not to knock on open doors. Electoral research shows that a majority of S\u00e1mi who have been included in the electoral roll believe that the criteria as they are today are acceptable. A minority among Sami included in the census believe the criteria should be less strict, and another minority believe the criteria should be stricter. The criteria for the number of voters was expanded in 1997, so that the S\u00e1mi Parliament can also enroll S\u00e1mi who have great-grandparents who had S\u00e1mi as their home language. This extension was adopted to ensure that S\u00e1mi living on the coast in northern Norway and in southern S\u00e1mi areas could enroll in the electoral roll. In these areas Norwegianization was at its strongest, which meant that many Sami families lost their Sami languages, but not their Sami identity. It is important that the number of voters does not contain errors. The right to elect their own representatives to the Sami Parliament belongs to the Sami people. In the period 2012\u20132024, the S\u00e1mi Parliament has only received 2 complaints relating to 5 people included in the electoral roll. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s electoral roll is published for so-called public inspection – for reading every election year, either at municipal, county council, S\u00e1mi Parliament or Storting elections. Through this inspection, errors can be reported in the head count. Errors in the number of people can also be detected by people publicly coming out and acknowledging that they have deliberately given incorrect information to the Sami Parliament, that they do not meet the conditions. This provides a basis for overturning the decision on introduction in the number of electors. It is therefore not correct when it is suggested in the public debate that the S\u00e1mi Parliament’s management of the number of electors does not contain any control mechanisms. The proceedings relating to voter registration cases are administrative decisions where the person applying to be registered in the electoral roll is himself asked to provide information about previous generations’ use of language. It varies widely how difficult it is to find such information, and we accept a wide range of sources, everything from public registers to church books, newspaper notices or other historical sources. The S\u00e1mi Parliament has cases that are easy to assess, cases where parents are already registered in the electoral roll, in which case the children also have a right to be registered. But we also know that it can be difficult to find information about, for example, great-grandparents’ use of the Sami language. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s administration therefore provides guidance on where information about the language use of their foremothers and fathers can be found, and this guidance goes far beyond what the S\u00e1mi Parliament is obliged to do under the Administration Act. This is done because being allowed to participate in Sami democracy is an important matter for most Sami people, being allowed to both vote and be elected as a Sami parliament representative is for many a form of recognition of belonging to the Sami people. But Sami affiliation can never be dependent on whether you are on an electoral register. There are many S\u00e1mi who are not included in the electoral roll, either because they have actively opted out of the electoral roll for various reasons, or because they have never wanted to activate their vote in the context of S\u00e1mi parliamentary elections. We need more knowledge about the reasons for announcements from the electorate, it is also not a good signal if many people opt out of the electorate without the S\u00e1mi Parliament knowing the reasons for this. This autumn, the S\u00e1mi Parliament’s plenum adopted several measures to strengthen the administration of and information on the criteria for the number of electors, and more resources have been allocated to this work. The S\u00e1mi Parliament will also obtain more knowledge about the administration of electoral numbers in Sweden and Finland to see if there is a basis for increased cooperation between the S\u00e1mi Parliaments in such matters, it will be particularly interesting to look more closely at information on historical sources across the borders. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s management of the number of electors will always be the subject of a critical spotlight, and we must both tolerate and accept that. Managing the very cornerstone of Sami democracy in Norway – the number of voters – is a big responsibility that the Sami Parliament takes seriously. We manage the trust of the Sami people, and it is a task that requires humility and should contribute to predictability. That is why we continuously work to improve our own routines and spread knowledge about the number of voters in society so that everyone who applies to be registered in the number of voters will have their case dealt with in a responsible manner. Send us your opinion Want to write? Feel free to contact us at news Ytring with your post. The guidelines can be found here. Published 08.11.2024, at 12.27
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news could easily have initiated a debate about the criteria for the number of voters without engaging genealogists to investigate the language use of individuals’ great-grandparents. The S\u00e1mi Parliament’s experience in managing the number of voters shows that older publicly available registers do not always contain sufficient or correct information when it comes to S\u00e1mi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14454,106,2310,3136,9534],"class_list":["post-99927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-managing","tag-peoples","tag-sami","tag-statement","tag-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teknomers.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}