The Sami are an indigenous people living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Historically, national states have made strong efforts to assimilate the Sami people into the majority populations, and the Sami have experienced stigmatization and discrimination. However, after World War II, there has been a revitalization process among the Sami that was pioneered by the Sami Movement and gradual...

OBJECTIVES The Sami are the Indigenous people of the northernmost parts of Sweden, Finland and Norway, and of the Kola Peninsula of Russia. The present review summarizes the main results from studies on cancer morbidity and mortality among the Sami and discusses these results in relation to exposure of known risk factors. STUDY DESIGN Literature review. METHODS A systematic search over the ...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the experience of suicidal expressions (death wishes, life weariness, ideation, plans and attempts) in young Swedish Sami, their attitudes toward suicide (ATTS), and experience of suicidal expressions and completed suicide in significant others and to compare with Swedes in general. METHODS A cross-sectional study comprising 516 Swedish Sami, 18-28 years of age toget...

OBJECTIVE The main purpose of this work was to identify the prevalence of self-reported stomach symptoms after consuming milk among Sami and non-Sami adults. STUDY DESIGN A cross-sectional population-based study (the SAMINOR study). Data were collected by self-administrated questionnaires. METHOD SAMINOR is a population-based study of health and living conditions conducted in 24 municipalit...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to investigate symptoms and predicting factors of depression and anxiety among reindeer-herding Sami in Sweden. STUDY DESIGN A total of 319 reindeer-herding Sami (168 men, 151 women) were compared with urban and rural reference populations comprising 1,393 persons (662 men, 731 women). METHODS A cross-sectional questionnaire study on mental health,...

OBJECTIVE To assess the population burden of angina pectoris symptoms (APS), self-reported angina and a combination of these, and explore potential ethnic disparity in their patterns. If differences in APS were found between Sami and non-Sami populations, we aimed at evaluating the role of established cardiovascular risk factors as mediating factors. DESIGN Cross-sectional population-based st...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the prevalence of self-reported experiences of ethnic discrimination and bullying among Sami and non-Sami adults. STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey. METHODS SAMINOR is a population-based study of health and living conditions that was administered in 2003-2004 in 24 different Norwegian and Sami populated municipalities within central and north...

We describe our work towards developing SamiTalk, a robot application for the North Sami language. With SamiTalk, users will hold spoken dialogues with a humanoid robot that speaks and recognizes North Sami. The robot will access information from the Sami Wikipedia, talk about requested topics using the Wikipedia texts, and make smooth topic shifts to related topics using the Wikipedia links. S...

OBJECTIVES To summarize knowledge about suicidal behaviour among indigenous Sami living in northern Norway. STUDY DESIGN This summary is based on data from a register-based follow-up study (Study I) and the North Norwegian Youth Study (Study II)--a longitudinal questionnaire study conducted in 1994-1995 and 1997-1998. METHODS The cohort from Study I included 19,801 persons with Sami ethnic ...

Aims: The objective of this study was to investigate suicidal expressions among reindeer-herding Sami in Sweden. Subjects: A total of 315 reindeer-herding Sami (167 men, 148 women) were compared with geographically matched reference populations comprising 1354 persons (652 men, 702 women). Methods: A questionnaire measuring different aspects of suicidal behaviour, such as exposure to suicide an...