Impression about Siida

Hello,

We are exchange students from RAMK university, Eun Yeong Lee from South Korea and Olga Fedorova from Russia. In 15^th of February we had a trip according the course of intercultural communication to Inary, specifically, to the Sami culture museum “Siida”. And now, we want to share our experience and impression about this place.  As you can see, we are from completely different cultures and have diverse background about Sami culture and Lapland. So, we will provide you two different views on one trip.

Eun Yeong Lee from South Korea

I’m from Korea so I didn’t hear about Sami. I already learn about Sami during lecture but I wasn’t interesting  a lot before this trip.

The 15^th of February, we went to Siida in Inari. On the way of Siida, we stopped some beautiful spot. I don’t remember the name of place, but I remember this gorgeous scenery of pure nature. When I watched this scenery I thought Finland has preserving well. Korea also has beautiful scenery, but many places destroyed by tourists. If some spot become famous, many people visit there and don’t respect nature at all. So after that, we always lost beautiful nature places. According this situation in Korea, I really surprised that Finland nature was in good keep. 

Siida is about Sami culture. So in the Siida, I could learn about life-style of Sami. When we watched exhibition, curator explained more detail about Sami and we could ask to curator and get answer also. There are some video for helping people to get to know how Sami people have been doing. Interesting explains from curator and those videos made me to become interested in Sami culture. Furthermore it reminded me museum in Korea. The museum of traditional Korean culture has lack of explains for visitors. Few curators are there of course, but visitor also need another way of explains.

And another thing that was in good keep is about Sami culture. The end of the field trip, we visited some building of Sami people. In that time, there was some meeting for Sami next leader. So I could see real Sami people with traditional clothes. In Korea, nowadays we didn’t wear traditional clothes. However Sami people wear their traditional clothes still. That was impressive to me and threw a question at me: ‘what is the preservation of culture?’

Olga from Russia

It is necessary to mention, that I’m the resident of the northern region of Russia and in my native region representatives of Sami culture are living as well. So, I was familiar with culture of this northern indigenous people through museum exhibitions and my grandmother’s stories: after second warld war she was working as a nurse in Lovozero, Sami village in Murmansk region. But in spite of this, trip was remarkable and informative for me.

If speak particularly about museum, It is completely different from what is in my region. I used to exhibitions where the emphasis is on real household items, clothing,. “Siida” seemed more interactive museum: in addition to actual household items, there were the panoramas of nature in different times of year, displays with short movies about Sámi way of life and so on. Moreover, very professional guide: it was fascinating to listen her, because, it was noticeable that she really interested in the subject of her narration. But to be honest, I expected museum to be bigger. As I know there is open-air museum, which is working only in summer time and it’s a pity that we haven’t got a possibility to visit it during our trip.

But I was really impressed with school, where people can learn traditional occupations. It is very important, that people can learn how to make items from reindeer skin and fur, sew traditional costumes, to do tools and household objects from wood – all this help to preserve culture of this indigenous people.  And I like, that it is really modern building with well-equipped classes.

And finally, I would like to say some words about nature, we can observe during our trip. We made a short stop on a hill with finish name «kaunispää». And even though I used to snow-covered landscape, I was really mesmerized with that fabulous view.

Best wishes, Eun Yeong and Olga.