The Downy Birch in Saami religion and daily use.

The Saami people are an indigenous arctic culture that was nearly repressed/absorbed by the more aggressive Christian Europeans in the last two centuries. Their traditional way of life survived only as a few reindeer herding groups in the end of the 20th century. Especially in Norway and Sweden, their religion and language was banned and has only now experienced a resurgence as the people attempt to reconstruct their heritage. King Harald the 5th recently apologized for this repression which is generally known but had been long ignored.

The Downy Birch (Betula pubescens) also known as European white birch is a species of birch native to the Eurasian higher latitudes and prevalent in the Saami lands of northern Scandinavia. The downy Birch is distinct from, but very similar to the Silver Birch more commonly known outside of the circumpolar region. Birch is used in crafts, including ritual drums and handicrafts (duodji), as food, both from its sweet sap for drinks and flavorful bark for flour, and traditionally, in the Saami religion, as a tool to bring the nature of plants into a ceremony (Karsten 113). The birch is also a host for the critical reindeer lichen, the staple food of browsing reindeer herds.

The Saami religion was a loose collection of stories and concepts centered around nature, with each animal seen as a person.
Animals are believed to have essentially the same sort of animating agency which man possesses. They have a language of their own, can understand what human beings say and do, have forms of tribal or social organization, and live a life which is parallel in other respects to that of human society (Hollowell 7).

Perhaps most important to the Saami religion, and in similar religions around the circumpolar area, is the Bear ceremony. In the Saami tradition, a bear is hunted and ritually killed, but before it is butchered the man who was chosen to kill it strikes the body with birch branches and calls himself the bear’s master. A ring of birch is made which he wears on his belt to symbolize this relationship. Other rings are made and the women of the group can only look at him by looking through such a hoop. The bear was apologized to by the group, and then the meat was divided amongst them, symbolically representing the transference of the power of the bear (Karsten 117).

Hallowell,Irving. Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. American Anthropologist: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1926 Karsten, Rafael. The Religion of the Samek. Leiden: Munich, 1955 All images listed as Open Source

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