Classroom lesson · Wildlife · 🇸🇪 Sweden

Reindeer and the Sámi people

Sweden's Indigenous people have herded reindeer for thousands of years

A reindeer with full antlers walking through a Swedish birch forest

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

In the very north of Sweden live the Sámi - Sweden's Indigenous people, who have lived there for thousands of years. The Sámi are famous for their reindeer. They have looked after wild reindeer herds for around 7,000 years - longer than there have been pyramids in Egypt.

Tell me more

A reindeer looks like a deer with extra-fluffy fur and very wide antlers. Both males and females grow antlers - in fact, reindeer are the only deer where the females have antlers too. Their hooves spread wide when they walk on snow, like built-in snowshoes, so they don't sink in.

Sámi herders don't keep reindeer in fields like cows. The reindeer roam freely across huge areas of forest and mountain, eating whatever they can find. The herders follow the reindeer, moving with them between summer and winter pastures. The same family might travel hundreds of kilometres a year following their herd.

Reindeer have an amazing party trick: their eyes change colour with the seasons. In summer they are golden. In winter they turn blue. The change helps them see better in the long, dark Arctic winter.

The Sámi people have their own language (with lots of different dialects), their own colourful traditional clothes called 'gákti', and their own flag. They live across the north of Sweden, Norway, Finland and a little bit of Russia. There are about 20,000 Sámi people in Sweden today.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Why might it help a reindeer's eyes to change colour in summer and winter?
  2. 02Sámi families follow their reindeer instead of keeping them in one place. What would it be like to move with the seasons?
  3. 03Why is it important that countries protect their Indigenous languages and traditions?
Try this

Classroom activity

Look up the Sámi flag together (it has red, green, yellow and blue, and a circle in the middle). As a class, talk about what each colour might mean. Then design your own flag for somewhere important to you - your school, your town, or your home.