Sami and Gold Panning

We started our day with a lecture by Father Rauno, a Eastern Orthodox priest to the Sami. His parish consists of the 500 Skolt Sami that live in Finland's Lapland. Because they are an indigenous people they have been given special privledges to maintain their culture like gathering wood on state land and using nets to fish. An interesting aspect of Finnish law is that they collect a church tax of 1% if you are a member of a church.

Sami Church

Our fearless leader Eero had a challenge: the one flight a day to Helsinki had been moved from an early afternoon flight to 6:30 PM. How was he going to occupy our day? So we went to the Tankavaana gold district. We started with a great lunch in the restaurant (only one there). The gold rush era here was in 1870. There was some 300 gram nuggets taken from here. Today you can’t get wealthy from the gold, but they still get a thousand gold panners who spend the summer here. The Finnish gold panners competition is held here each year. They have a bucket of sand for each competitor and mix in the same number of gold flakes in each bucket. The winner is the one who finds the correct number of flakes in the shortest time. The world record is 12 flakes found in 58 seconds.Most of us gave panning a try: we started with a scoop full of sand and reduced the sand to mostly red sand with no pebbles and they completed the panning for us. Almost everyone found at least one flake.

Gold Pans

We still had time so we stopped at a husky dog farm. They have a hundred dogs here, and the young ones were excited to see us. The dogs have a mix of brown and blue eyes. Their on summer vacation since it is to warm to pull sleds.We arrived at the airport as it opened for it’s one flight.

Huskies

Finnish History

The Sami settled here about 1000 BC. This area was once part of the Viking held lands. Then in 1279, the pope declared the Northern Crusades with the objective to settle Scandinavia and turn the people Christian. From then on Finland has been controlled by Russia or Sweden for most of their history until 1917. They couldn’t get a King to come from Germany so they became a presidential republic. The Russians invaded Finland during the 1939 Winter War. After Germany declared war against the Russians, the Finns joined the Germans because they were worried that the Soviet Union would never let Finland be free again. In 1944 the Finnish turned on the Germans and fought against them in the Lapland War with the aid of Russia. They signed a treaty with Russia in 1948 to regain their independence, but ceded 10% of their territory to Russia including an area rich in nickle. 400,000 people moved back to Finland. Finland’s economy was brought back from the war using their forest resources.