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The Inari Sámi – The first people of Inari |
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| Lake Inari |  |
In the 16th and 17th
centuries, Lapland was divided into villages called Siitas. The largest Siita within
current Finnish borders was around Lake Inari. Siitas were social and economic units with a complicated network of family relationships and an organised administration. The families in the Siitas spent the winters grazing their animals within winter villages and in the summer they went to grazing pastures in villages by the lake. The most important livelihood for the Sámi around Lake Inari was fishing. There was plenty of fish, enough to be sold in the winter to the visiting fur tradesmen. Reindeer herding by the Inari Sámi was quite small until the 1800s. Reindeer were used mainly as beasts of burden and as animal bait. Outside contact was made with the Northern Sámi culture when their reindeer herding spread out into the open fells around Lake Inari. In the 1600s, the Inari Siita winter village was at Pielpajärvi, where the first parish church was built in 1646. There is a strange-looking, steep high island called Ukonkivi at Ukonselkä on Lake Inari, about 11 km from the village of Inari. It remained a place of worship for the people of Inari long after the church was built. Sacrifices of food, game birds, horns, and even jewellery were all taken to Ukonkivi, the dwelling place of thunder, to ensure good hunting. The villages were given rights to the land by paying taxes to the crown over hundreds of years. In the 18th and 19th centuries, new statutes were introduced that slowly did away with the village structure in Lapland.
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