Author: Fanny Malinen / Source: Positive News
Anne Berit Anti’s designs are inspired by the remote Norwegian landscape. Through fashion, she also aims to raise awareness of her people: the indigenous Sami
North of the Arctic Circle, the Norwegian landscape is snow-swept, vast and crossed by few roads.
It is also home to the Sami, one of the northernmost indigenous people of Europe.A short drive from the town of Karasjok, which hosts Norway’s Sami parliament and the Sami National Museum, lives Anne Berit Anti. She is Sami, and tells stories of her people through her fashion brand, Abanti.
Anti graduated in 2011 from Norway’s top fashion school in the capital, Oslo. “After an education like that, people usually go to London or Paris,” she laughs. “I was a bit weird: I went home to a region of 3,000 people. But if we don’t live here, there will be no culture.”
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She is well aware of her people’s troubled history: the Sami have been discriminated against, abused and threatened frequently. They now number somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000, the majority living in Norway but also in Sweden, Finland, and a few thousand in Russia. In the past, states have sought to incorporate the Sami into their economies through heavy taxation sometimes nomadic reindeer herders were forced to pay out to multiple countries at once as borders fractured their homelands.
Even relatively recently, only those who spoke Norwegian and had a Norwegian family name were allowed to own land.
Improvements in Sami rights have come about only through struggle, including protests against…
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