Hear the voice of a young indigenous people

A session about why podcasting is so important to underserved groups (and made our boss cry)

Hear the voice of a young indigenous people

Salje Solbak, Host, Gouzid alde, YLE, Finland, Jo Raknes, Producer, Gouzid alde, YLE, Finland Modertor: Peter Niegel, General Manager, Podcast Day 24, Denmark

Jo is a producer for NRK, there is a Sami department within the NRK and welcomed Sajje who told us about the podcast.  It means awake, but it isn’t easily translate, it means really awake, really aware.  We are playing with the woke culture, we have one topic which is taboo with the Sami culture and start the conversation with a guest.

The Sami people are indigenous people who live in the countries Norway, Russia, Sweden and Finland and is called Sapmi.  They don’t see borders and have 11 different Sami languages, the podcast is in Northern Sami.  

Whilst at NRK Sajje worked on a project about why young Sami don’t want to get involved in public debate, because if we don’t have a live debate we don’t have a democracy.

Jo went through some findings that were important to Sami youth - they said they experience a culture of silence and they are cared about painting the whole of Sami in the view of the public.  They also said there is no room for expression as there are only Norwegian platforms.

Feedback from the beginning was great.  Sajje said she felt that it needed to be in Northern Sami, we were asked to have it in Norwegian, but we said no, it needs to be on our terms in a language in which we feel safe to talk about these issues.  There are less than 5 Sami language podcasts.

In order to reach a wider audience, the podcast was made visual as the majority of the Sami people don’t speak Sami.  First and hopefully last the podcast has been compared to Joe Rogan!  

A clip was played about a 20 year old girl who is a reindeer herder but windmills were put in their reindeer herding district and the reindeers don’t go close to the reindeers so are in a much smaller space.  Her family had battled the installation of the windmills, and the podcast gave her a platform to talk about how she felt.  There have been a really wide range of subjects.