The Sami folk high school started in 1942 as a school for young Sami that needed more education that the Swedish folk school or nomadic school offered its pupils. The school was managed by the Swedish mission society, an organization within the Swedish church. The school was successful but struggled with financial problems. The result was that a foundation with Sami representation managed the s...

BACKGROUND Previous research has shown that the health transition and demographical pattern of indigenous people has followed a different path compared to non-indigenous groups living in the same area with higher mortality rates and shortened life expectancy at birth. OBJECTIVE This paper draws attention to the development of life expectancy for the Sami and nonSami during the colonization era ...

Background The Sami in Norway have a legal right to receive health services adapted to Sami language and culture. This calls for a study of the significance of language choice and cultural norms in Sami patients' encounters with mental health services. Objectives To explore the significance of language and cultural norms in communication about mental health topics experienced by Sami patients r...

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 ...

OBJECTIVES The Sami people constitute an ethnic minority in northern Norway. The objectives of this study were to compare municipalities with a majority of Sami in the population and a control group with regard to socioeconomic factors and health outcome. METHODS Original data from Statistics Norway and Directorate of health on socioeconomic factors (education, unemployment, disability, pover...

The paper sets to investigate the amount of variation between the North Sami speakers living in two different majority language contexts: Finnish, spoken in Finland, and Norwegian Bokmål, spoken in Norway. We hypothesize that the majority language is a significant factor in recognizing variation of the North Sami language. Although North Sami is the biggest of the nine currently spoken Sami lan...

OBJECTIVES To summarise knowledge about substance use among young indigenous Sami living in Norway. STUDY DESIGN Data from the North Norwegian Youth Study (NNYS)--a longitudinal questionnaire study conducted in 1994-1995 and 1997-1998 that represents the main source of information in the 1990s. METHODS The 1994-1995 sample included 3,000 ethnically diverse high school students (response rat...

BACKGROUND Like other indigenous peoples, the Sami have been exposed to the huge pressures of colonisation, rapid modernisation and subsequent marginalisation. Previous studies among indigenous peoples show that colonialism, rapid modernisation and marginalisation is accompanied by increased stress, an unhealthy cardiovascular risk factor profile and disease burden. Updated data on the general ...