I attended a lecture on the oil and gas industry in Norway which is the biggest industry in the country. We are talking about off shore drilling. Also Norway manufactures oil platforms. In the 1950s, Norway passed a law saying that all gas and oil belong to the state. They give licenses to companies to drill. They also set aside profits from the sale of the oil and gas and put it in a fund that has grown to be worth trillions of dollars. They pull out about 3% of the fund to use in the yearly national budget. The fund belongs to the people and it is there to be used as needed. Norwegian still pay taxes in spite of having the fund but their taxes go to free education, free medical, etc. They are very aware of the need for alternative energy sources. I actually saw some wind farms and they are doing quite a bit of research. The country is very environmentally conscious.

In Tromsø, we went to the University Museum where we saw an excellent exhibit on the Sámi people. These people are known as Lapps or Laplanders. They refer to themselves as Sámi. It is believed that they came to Norway at least 4000 years ago from Russia at the same time or before the Vikings came up from Europe. They were primarily reindeer herders and nomadic. Norwegians treated them in somewhat the same way we have treated Native Americans and the Canadians have treated the first nation people. It is not a pretty thing. In order to integrate them into Norwegian society, the children were sent to boarding schools. What is different is Norwegians realized that they had made a mistake. Today the Sami language is recognized as an official language. The Sami people have their own parliament which acts as an advisor to the Norwegian Parliament. Only Sami can own reindeer. There are other ways in which the Sami have been able to achieve equality within the Norwegian culture.

When learning about the Sami culture I got to thinking about how similar they are to the Kurds. The Samis extend across four countries Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The Kurds live in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Each of these cultures are definitely different from the cultures that they live in. Each was denied their own country when the countries that they live in were being created. I don’t really know much about how that went about for the Samis but I do know that the Kurds lost out because the European countries carved up the Middle East the way they wanted to. I think this is where the similarities end because the Samis are treated with a great deal of respect, they have a say in governing, etc. Unfortunately the Kurds are fighting for their lives. They are not treated as equals and especially in the case of Turkey, they are considered terrorists by the government.