The Sami--living conditions and health.

The aim of this Special Issue is to show the diversityof living conditions among the Sami and their consequences on the health and rates of disease among this population living in the Sami areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, often referred to as Sápmi. There has been a renewed interest in the Sami or Laps, as they were referred to some decades ago. Historically, relatively few studies have been carried out for a variety of reasons. In all countries assimilation policies removed the focus on ethnicity, and scientific studies often neglected the mixture of different ethnic groups in the Sami areas. In addition, the Sami in Norway still have a collective memory of when their skulls and bones were measured in the 19 0s and 19 0s as part of the eugenic theories (1). Lastly, ethnicity is not usually registered in the Nordic countries, and the national register information is not always available for scientific use. The Sami people The Sami people are an indigenous people who have been living in the northern part of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia as long as it is possible to trace cultural identity in the archaeology of this area. Recent geological research indicates that 1 ,000 years ago there was an ice-free zone from the Urals over the Kola Peninsula to the coastal area of northern Norway ( ). The name Norway means the way north, and it is possible to think that there were two ways to reach the northern coastal area: one western and one eastern. The first Norse settlement came by the western way, and the first Sami settlement may have come by the eastern way. Owing to cultural assimilation, it is difficult to give the exact number of Sami living in this area, but a good guess could be approximately 70,000: 0,000 in Norway, 0,000 in Sweden, 7, 00 in Finland and ,000 in Russia ( ). If we identify people by their languages, the Sami language belongs to the FinnoUrgric part of the Uralic family of languages, which includes the Sami, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian areas of Europe. It is customary to distinguish between 10 variants of the Sami language, but there are no deep boundaries between these variants as THE SAMI – LIVING CONDITIONS AND HEALTH