But it’s the islands that are the richest of all resources, in part because of the access they provide to sea, shore, and land in close conjunction, but primarily because summer arrived here first and stayed here longest. They’re each their own warm, quiet ecosystem. Sheep were kept on some, others used for hay, but the greatest number were devoted to a practice central to Sámi life – the gathering of berries such as cloudberry, lingonberry, blueberry and crowberry.

It was the tasks related to all these spaces that shaped Sámi conceptualization of them. The Sámi term meahcci is usually translated either with a word that misleadingly associates it with ideas of “the wild” (e.g. “wilderness”) or of specific cartographic spaces (e.g. “landscape” or “outfield”). But the Sámi language is incredibly rich with action-oriented terms (I picked up a small book full of such terms that relate to other species: specific words, with diagrams, for actions seals and porpoises perform). There are many such meahcci-related words. Muorrameahcci is where firewood is collected, for instance, while guollemeahcci is where lake fishing happens. Names connected to places come from relationships with resources that are seasonal as well as geographical. There’s no possibility here to fall into the distinctions between nature and culture that do so much damage elsewhere. As in many other Arctic languages, the verb that means to ask or request (in northern Sámi bidvit) also means to hunt, snare and fish. To use the resources of the coast is to negotiate respectfully with other conscious, morally sophisticated, beings. No actions in forests or at sea are ethically neutral – all of them are part of dynamic relationships through which the human place in a powerful world is made. Christianisation didn’t change this worldview: as one current Coastal Sámi Youtuber puts it “I’m still more afraid of an angry cow than I am of the wrath of God”. Boats themselves are items of duodji - the deeply practical vision of Sámi art which, in making the finest artworks things of everyday use, further breaks down distinctions present in English-speaking cultures. This also gives boats, like reindeer sleds (the earliest instances of which were adapted from Sámi boats), a status and prestige they lack in many places.

The advent of modern states in northern Europe did great damage to Sámi society. Where Sámi living standards had been high, the changes forced by the four nation states whose borders crossed Sápmi led to a drastic decline in quality of life. According to oral histories held at Mearrasiida, much of this decline happened in the sixty years after 1860. Drastically discriminatory practices of Norwegianisation, which sought to force Sámi into the modern state, were accompanied by new forms of economic exclusion. National schemes to provide modern fishing boats, for instance, relied on credit institutions, structures of land ownership, and facility with Norwegian-language bureaucracy that were foreign to Sámi communities. And the presence of modern boats transformed the nature of fishing for everyone. The first world war ended the exchange of goods with Russia, forcing many Sámi into a monetary economy, commercial markets, and the global food system - the same unsustainable ways of life as urban Europeans. Many communities lost their boats, fishing gear, and other elements crucial to survival in their attempts to pay tax during this period.

Today, the Mountain Sami life, formed round reindeer herding, is the means by which most of the Sámi who live in traditional ways pursue their livelihoods (although even this is under severe threat from climate change). In many people’s minds, Sámi and reindeer herding have become synonymous. It’d be easy to forget that boats and the sea were once central to Sámi life. Today, there are still people who practice their beliefs at the Coastal Sámi sacred sites round Porsanger Fjord (and there’s much resistance to making signposted trails to them, which would shift the sites from active sacred space to tourist attractions). Recent revivals of Sámi art and activism provide new forms of resistance to the processes that have eroded Sámi societies. In my view, it’s deeply important that modern states (and their citizens) do everything possible to make sure worldviews like those of Coastal Sámi flourish: those perspectives have more to offer the future than the outlooks that currently shape most attitudes to coasts & seas. My next task is to immerse myself in Sámi reading, and build my experience on the water into a case, which might hopefully persuade even those yet to set foot on the shores of Sápmi, for the perspectives of Sámi seafarers as ones we’d all benefit from listening to.