Finland’s northernmost habitat has been moulded through the ages by the convergence and interaction of several cultures. Lapland shares a border with
Sweden to the west, Norway to the north and Russia to the east. These borders did not exist until the nineteenth century, when they were drawn up by the sur-rounding states to further tax collection. The borders created at that time split the land into separate sections, but in Utsjoki, the river Teno, which forms the northern border, has never separated the people of the North. On the contrary, it still unites them today as a resource and a travel route. People visit relatives or commute daily across the border, and many are trilingual or even quadrilingual in northern Sámi, Finnish and Norwegian dialects.
The Sámi are a rare group of aboriginal peoples from the Fennoscandian area. Today the area they live in spreads from Jämtlands Län in Sweden through northern Norway and Finland to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. For a long time they were more or less disconnected from European civilization. Although they are often referred to as Lapps, they prefer to be called Sámi because this is the name they themselves use for their country.
Utsjoki is the only municipality in Finland that has a Sámi majority.
Therefore, the socio-cultural context of the Fire Fox project is unique even in the Lappish context. In Nordic countries, the definition of Sámi is based on lan-guage. Sámi languages belong to the Finno-Ugric family and their closest rela-tives are the Baltic-Finnic languages (Finnish and Estonian). In Finland, Norway and Sweden the main Sámi language is North Sámi, which is also the mother tongue of the Utsjoki Sámi.
Sámi people have always settled thinly across a large area, making their liv-ing mostly from huntliv-ing and fishliv-ing. Families used to own large huntliv-ing areas.
Connections with other peoples were rare, although they had a strong sense of community thinking when it came to dividing hunting and fishing areas be-tween families. Marriages were arranged bebe-tween people in nearby regions. This appears to be the major reason why there is not one but several Sámi cultures and languages. These cultures have been formed by different environments, liv-ing conditions and cultural contacts, for example, Germanic culture in Sweden and Norway, Finnish culture in Finland and Russian and Karelian cultures in the Kola Peninsula (Lehtola, 1997, p. 8; Huuskonen, 2004, p. 29–33).
It is widely agreed that when the Nordic countries divided their territories into states, they failed to take the existing Lapp villages, or siidas, into account to allow them to develop naturally. Instead, Sámi people were forced to adapt to the cultural systems of each country. The poor treatment they have experienced
in recent history still affects their relations with majority populations. Although the rights of minorities are acknowledged and protected by law, prejudices and tensions exist on both sides. The coexistence of cultures occasionally comes to a head, even in Utsjoki, where the Finns form a minority. Utsjoki’s fabulous sub-arctic nature, rich cultural heritage and multicultural environment presented a special challenge for the Fire Fox project. This project set out to develop activi-ties in which the unique multicultural environment would function as a unify-ing, rather than a differentiatunify-ing, force.
Patricia Stuhr (Stuhr, 1994, pp. 171–178; Stuhr, 1995, pp. 196–197) states that there are many types of multicultural art education programmes. According to Stuhr, ‘social reconstructionist’ programmes educate minority students to be-come analytical and critical thinkers capable of examining their life circumstanc-es and the social stratifications that keep them and their group from fully enjoy-ing the social and financial rewards of a community. At the same time, they help members of dominant groups to become critical thinkers who are capable of examining why their group exclusively enjoys the social and financial rewards of that community. This approach teaches students how to use social skills to par-ticipate in shaping and controlling their destiny (Grant & Sleeter, 1989, p. 54).
Utsjoki’s Fire Fox facilitated art activities through which people of differ-ent cultures and age groups could express themselves, regardless of background or status. We wanted to concentrate on activities that as many people as possible could identify with that also afforded room for local cultural practices. We start-ed with levels of environmental understanding that were common and meaning-ful to everyone. First, we concentrated on the ‘objective’ environment with its visible aspects that were commonplace for everyone, such as the northern lights, stars, darkness in winter, snow and ice. Second, we examined the ‘subjective’ en-vironment and the way this landscape engaged with peoples’ emotions, experi-ences of work, free time and memories. Third, we opened up the cultural context to include stories and myths. At this textual level, artwork was linked with issues and values that concerned the local community, such as their livelihood, herit-age, tourism, ecology and social activation.
The Sámi concept luondu (luonto in Finnish) refers to nature, which forms the basis and root of the entire Sámi culture. The language of nature is best un-derstood by those Sámi who still live off the land and sea. As Jérémy Michael McGowan, the English language editor of a collection of Sámi myths, has said:
In the Sámi context, knowledge, language and belief are closely tied to the land, and the land exists as a vibrant, living landscape. This living landscape is im-portant for the Sámi as a physical resource and is a fundamental part of their society. The land also reflects a mythical landscape, housing the symbolic ele-ments central in the secular and sacred lifestyles of the Sámi. If Dreamscapes is experienced as a landscape, then like a walk in nature, this is an adventure of constant change. (Helander, 2004, p. 3)
Reindeer, salmon and game still mean a great deal to the people of Lapland, re-gardless of their ethnic background. The traditional form of livelihood of both the Forest Sámi and Finns was different combinations of hunting, fishing, rein-deer husbandry, tending cattle and agriculture. Life in the North still closely interacts with its surroundings, the changing seasons and related activities (Pen-tikäinen, 1995, pp. 83–88; Huuskonen, 2004, p. 32).
The operating environment for the Fire Fox venture was winter, stars and northern lights. The project combined the viewpoints of luondu, the culture, tra-ditional fables and scientific research. Northern lights and the starlit sky became the theme for the first phase of the project. Their scientific and mythical dimen-sions were studied using scientific and artistic methods. Our aim was to arrange art activities jointly with villagers in everyday settings and working environments like the schoolyard, the Village House Café and a care home for elderly people.
The roots of this idea can be found in the 1960s public art movement in the United Kingdom, when visual artists produced work specifically for the out-sides of public places like museums. The artworks were displayed ‘democrati-cally’ with the aim of making fine art available to everyone in society. The con-cepts underpinning community arts were individual and collective change com-bined with a notion of cultural democracy that held that everyone should have the right to produce and participate in the production of a living culture (Lacy, 1995a; Lacy, 1995b; van Delft, 1998).
However, none of these ideas fully capture the whole picture of communi-ty-based art education, which has to fulfil educational objectives in addition to the objective of common cultural democracy. It cannot be simply ‘art for art’s sake’.