Living Cultural Landscape

Living cultural landscape is a place where local communities live their everyday lives and celebrate their life events. For indigenous people, the living cultural landscape does not include only their homes and village or cityscapes, that is, the immediate surrounding of wherever they reside. In the Sámi worldview, people, nature and language are not seen as separate. The living cultural landscape and all of living entities in it need to be treated with respect and consideration. Responsible visitors leave no traces of their visit in nature. Responsible visitors behave like they wish people to behave visiting their homes and surrounding neighbourhoods. In the Sámi Homeland, you are always at someone’s home whether directly in their front yard or alternatively in their ‘backyard’. Even though there are not necessarily visible traces in nature showing that someone has been in a certain location, every place in the Sámi Homeland has a meaning for the Sámi, a Sámi name and culture-bound seasonal use for that place. What may be “wilderness” for visitors, is home for the local Sámi people, and for many, also a source of livelihood or place where they forage for subsistence food or materials unconnected to tourism.