The northern Finnish city of Oulu begins its European Capital of Culture year in 2026 with a programme that gives unusual space to Sámi musicians, filmmakers and craftspeople. The timing is striking.
Across the border in Sweden, new mining plans threaten grazing routes that reindeer herders rely on, turning a festive cultural badge into something more fraught for the region’s Indigenous people.
A Culture Year at the Edge
Oulu2026 brings together 39 municipalities across northern Finland, using concerts, exhibitions and residencies to pull visitors away from the usual tourist maps. The official programme highlights Northern cultures as a central theme, with Sámi theatre, yoik singing and duodji craft projects woven into the year.
For many residents, this is the first time Sámi work appears not as a decorative side event, but as part of the core narrative. That matters in a region in which Indigenous presence has often been treated as folklore rather than contemporary life.
The Sámi are estimated to number between 80,000 and 100,000 across Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. They form the only Indigenous people recognised in the EU, but their languages and livelihoods still sit under constant pressure from extractive industries, climate shifts and assimilation.
Mines on Reindeer Land
Across the border in Swedish Sápmi, proposed and expanding mines add fresh stress. Sweden holds around 60 per cent of the continent’s identified iron ore deposits and has been responsible for about 90 per cent of its iron ore extraction in recent years. Most active sites lie in the north, in Sápmi.
Projects such as the Kallak iron ore proposal near Jokkmokk sit directly on winter grazing areas used by the Jåhkågasska reindeer herding community. Reindeer herding occupies roughly 40 to 50 per cent of Swedish territory and employs around 2,500 people, many of them Sámi.
New pits, roads and power lines fragment that landscape, making traditional migrations harder to maintain. Swedish ministers present extra mining as essential for batteries, wind turbines and the wider green transition.
For many herders, the same policy looks like a familiar story: southern priorities laid over northern land, with consultation arriving late or in limited form.
Art as Quiet Resistance
In Oulu, the culture year cannot solve mining disputes in another country. It can, however, offer visibility that court hearings rarely provide.
Concerts, installations and film screenings give Sámi artists room to speak in their own languages about land, ice and memory. Some works planned for Oulu2026 focus directly on reindeer, snow and seasonal rhythms.
Others approach land in more oblique ways: sound pieces built from wind and river recordings, or textile works that fold traditional patterns into new materials. For visiting audiences, these projects can act as a first encounter with a culture that predates modern borders.
For Sámi participants, they offer something different: a chance to set the tone themselves, instead of appearing only as plaintiffs in legal disputes over pasture. In that sense, culture becomes a kind of soft resistance, even if organisers prefer more neutral language.
Arctic Warming Faster than the Rest
All of this unfolds in a physical environment changing with unusual speed. Scientific assessments indicate that the Arctic has warmed about four times faster than the global average since 1979, reshaping snow cover, ice stability and vegetation across northern Fennoscandia.
For reindeer herders, that does not remain an abstract statistic. Freeze-thaw cycles lock lichen under ice, forcing animals to travel farther or rely on supplementary feed.
Forest access routes that once held steady through winter now turn slushy more often, complicating movement. During new mines arrive at the same time, pressure accumulates.
Each cut in the landscape, from a road, a pit or a power corridor, may be small in isolation; together they eat into the flexibility that pastoral life relies on.
What a Culture Title Can and Cannot Do
European Capital of Culture titles often act as branding exercises for mid-sized cities. Oulu’s year contains some of that, with hopes for new tourism, investment and creative industries. For Sámi communities, the calculation is less straightforward.
There is value in appearing in festival brochures, on stages and inside new cultural centres. It can support language projects, attract funding for arts education and encourage younger Sámi to see their traditions as living and adaptable rather than as museum pieces.
At the same time, visibility does not guarantee power. Decisions about mines, large infrastructure and land rights still rest with national parliaments and ministries. Most of those sit far to the south, physically and politically.
For many Sámi families, daily life will continue to be shaped more by snow conditions and permit hearings than by any single year in a cultural calendar.
After the Spotlight Moves On
During the Oulu banners come down at the end of 2026, the question will be what remains in the north. If the culture year leaves behind stronger Sámi institutions, better-funded art schools and more fluent language speakers, it will have done more than entertain visitors.
For audiences from outside the region, the experience may work in smaller ways: a new sense of where their electricity, steel and batteries come from, or a better grasp of why Indigenous land claims in cold landscapes matter as much as those in tropical forests.
The mining debate in Swedish Sápmi will continue. So will similar arguments over wind farms, roads and pipelines across the Arctic.
Against that background, a year of concerts and exhibitions may sound modest. But for a people whose presence has often been treated as a footnote, seeing their work at the centre of a northern cultural map still counts as a shift in perspective.
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