6

Hunting

Here we outline which species were hunted in the boreal forest and
how they were hunted or trapped, and which animals were hunted in
the mountains. The conditions for hunting were better in the boreal
forest than in the mountains due to differences in topography, habi-
tats, and species composition. From the sixteenth century to the end
of the eighteenth century, hunting led to extinction of wild reindeer
and depopulation of fur animals; while small-game hunting for subsis-
tence continued to be important. In the forest region, strong property
rights to game developed through the skatteland , and hunting was a
private enterprise. We suggest that the institution of skatteland was a
response to changes in Sami economy, and the transition from collective
to private hunting was a contributing factor. Hunting in the mountain
region developed in the opposite direction and was open access after the
wild reindeer was extinct. Hunting became important for social justice,
and poor Sami had access to hunting grounds.

© The Author(s) 2022 123

J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja, Self-Governance and Sami Communities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87498-8_6
124 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

Hunting in Research About Sami

While previous research has addressed multiple aspects of early modern
Sami fishing and reindeer husbandry, the focus on hunting has been rela-
tively constricted.1 This is due in part to the relative scarcity of hunting
evidence in historical sources. In much research, early modern hunting
has been described rather unsystematically, lacking in chronology and
context. As described in Chapter 2, Sami historiography was character-
ized by ethnographic perspectives until the 1970s.2 According to Hansen
and Olsen, “the Sami past did not belong to the academic responsi-
bilities of the historical disciplines.”3 Over the past four decades, the
understanding of Sami hunting has increased by highlighting the role
of hunting in Sami society and its impact on Sami’s relations with
neighboring people. However, most researchers have concentrated on
time periods before 1600, which is about the time hunting ceased to
be the backbone of Sami economy.4 One of the most intense debates
among these scholars has revolved around the question of when, why,
and how Sami society transitioned from hunting to herding, but the
changes in herding were the overriding factor.5 The focus on herding has
somewhat overshadowed how hunting continued to be an integral part
of a more complex household economy for many Sami long after the
introduction of large-scale reindeer husbandry.6 Therefore, for the early
modern period, the ethnographic descriptions of hunting dominate the
literature.7
Although hunting lost economic importance in international trading
around 1600, it played a vital role in many Sami households in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 This circumstance stands out

1 Josefsson et al. (2010), Bjørklund (2013), and Norstedt et al. (2014).

2 Tanner (1929), Tegengren (1952), Manker (1960), Phebe Fjellström (1962), Hvarfner (1965),
and Henriksson (1978).
3 Hansen and Olsen (2014, p. 2).
4 Lundmark (1982, p. 170) and Hansen and Olsen (2014, p. 230).
5 Sommerseth (2011) and Bergman et al. (2013).
6 Bjørklund (2013) and E.-L. Päiviö (2017).
7 Hvarfner (1965), Phebe Fjellström (1986), and Kjellström (2000).
8 Bjørklund (2013) and E.-L. Päiviö (2017).
 6 Hunting 125

in many contemporary sources, where the topic of hunting frequently

appears. What is lacking, and what we will contribute to, is an anal-
ysis of early modern Sami hunting from a household perspective that
advances beyond descriptions of particular practices toward a more
systematic understanding of early modern hunting in interior northern
Fennoscandia. This will allow us to integrate hunting with the develop-
ments in fishing and reindeer husbandry to better understand changes in
the economy and rights to land.
Hunting is the practice of pursuing, capturing, or killing wildlife and
can be divided into subsistence, commercial, and recreational hunting.9
Scholars studying pre-historic and medieval Sami hunting in a wider
geographical area have mainly been concerned with four themes. The
first theme deals with how wild reindeer became the most important
animal to hunt, why mobile settlements were required, and how large
pitfall trapping systems were established.10 The second theme deals with
fur trade and how Sami’s high-quality furs were the most important
factor in the establishment of the northern trade networks in the Viking
Age and Early Middle Ages.11 The third theme deals with collective
hunting, where researchers have focused on pitfall hunting until circa
1600.12 Their empirical findings were underpinned by Ingold’s theoret-
ical work.13 The fourth theme deals with hunting rituals and ceremonies,
and scholars have shown that there was a strong link between religion and
hunting in societies that depended on hunting.14 Beyond these themes,
there are other aspects of pre-early modern hunting. One example is that
small-game hunting must have been common, but lack of sources has
made it difficult to analyze.
Around the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sami society
went through several major changes: the number of wild reindeer was
decreasing, and the use of pitfall hunting declined rapidly.15 In many

9 Peterson (2019).
10 Mulk (1994), Vorren (1998), and Sommerseth (2009).
11 Odner (1983), L. Hansen (1990), and Hansen and Olsen (2014, pp. 127–131).
12 Tegengren (1952), Vorren (1978), Mulk (1994), and Sommerseth (2011).
13 Ingold (1980).
14 Korhonen (2007), Rydving (2011), Hansen and Olsen (2014).
15 Lundmark (1982), and Mulk (1994).
126 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

households, reindeer herding replaced fur hunting and gradually became

the backbone of the economy. Scholars who focused on the early modern
era thus had less interest in analyzing hunting as a collective enterprise.
We conclude that when hunting no longer played an important part in
the definition of Sami ethnicity, it became less interesting for scholars.
Instead, study of Sami ethnicity, and thus research about Sami history,
has focused mostly on reindeer herding and the Sami’s relation to the
state.16 Much of our little knowledge about early modern Sami hunting
still comes from ethnographic literature.
The ethnographic analyses have nevertheless contributed greatly to our
understanding of Sami hunting, especially when it comes to small game.
They contain detailed descriptions of how hunting was performed, which
hunting methods were used, the seasonality of hunting, and types of
hunting gear. However, they often portray Sami pre-twentieth-century
practices as rather static, practically unchanged over time.17
The transition from a hunter-gatherer economy to a pastoral economy
has continued to draw the attention of archaeologists and historians,
but the primary focus has been on reindeer husbandry, not on hunting.
An example would be two papers published in 2013 that came to very
different conclusions about the introduction of reindeer pastoralism.
Bergman et al. used archeological traces of so-called stállo foundations
(arrangements of Sami community structures) as proxy for reindeer
nomadism and argue that the shift started as early as 800 A.D.18 In
contrast, Bjørklund argues that after 1750 users started to have reindeer
herds large enough to make a living, and that there was “no paradig-
matic abrupt change through domestication from a ‘hunting society’ to a
‘pastoral society.’”19 Bjørklund believes that hunting was part of people’s
adaption to the environment up to the nineteenth century. The point we
make here is that hunting is elusive in the empirical parts of these papers.

16 Hultblad (1968), Arell (1977), Lundmark (1982), Kvist (1989a), Lundmark (2006), and
Sommerseth (2011).
17 Tanner (1929), Tegengren (1952), Manker (1960), Henriksson (1978), Phebe Fjellström
(1986), and Kjellström (2000).
18 Bergman et al. (2013).
19 Bjørklund (2013, p. 186).
 6 Hunting 127

Päiviö takes an approach similar to Bjørklund’s when she discusses

hunting as part of the household economy.20 To understand that
economy, she argues, one has to include hunting in addition to reindeer
herding, fishing, gathering, handcraft, trade, and transport. She uses early
modern accounts as sources and applies a broad description of hunting,
also used in this chapter, to include grabbing, trapping, pursuing, and
tracking.
Research that has analyzed people’s adaptations to early modern envi-
ronmental settings in interior northern Sweden mentions hunting in
general terms but gives few details about methods and prey. Josefsson
et al., for example, estimated the number of people that a particular terri-
tory could support and provided only a short list of animals that were
hunted for fur.21 Norstedt et al. quantified the resources controlled by
households in the Ume lappmark district.22 According to their results,
fishing was the only resource that showed any correlation to taxation,
underscoring the importance of fishing in the boreal forest. However, in
their study, hunting comprised only an estimation of the number of wild
reindeer in the region. At that time, wild reindeer were in decline, but
more important, the study downplayed the significance of other hunted
animals, including small game, which are mentioned in the sources.23

Methods and Sources

In Chapters 2 and 3 we described methods and sources, but a few
things that are specific to hunting will be touched upon here. In many
of the early modern accounts, unlike reindeer pastoralism, hunting was
described with few words and almost in passing. Bear hunting was more
meticulously described, probably because it was connected to ceremonies
that the authors found fascinating. Given the irregular and seasonal

20 E.-L. Päiviö (2017).

21 Josefsson et al. (2010, p. 147).
22 Norstedt et al. (2014).
23 Norstedt (2011).
128 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

nature of hunting, authors who paid only short visits to local house-
holds seldom had the opportunity to take part in hunts, particularly for
large game. It is therefore doubtful whether they actually witnessed the
procedures they described, and it is more likely that their reports were
based on hearsay and retelling of hunting stories. For the narrator, it was
probably both easy and tempting to choose a spectacular story instead
of a more typical one. Hence, it is possible that the accounts give us a
slightly embellished picture of hunting.
It is plausible that the visitors actually might have witnessed some of
the small-game hunting, which was done more frequently and in the
vicinity of the household areas. For example, Linnaeus described that
he had seen traps for capercaillies everywhere when he traveled in Ume
lappmark in 1732.24 Other trapping devices that must have been easily
recognizable for visitors were bird houses used for gathering eggs, as well
as snaring devices for various land fowl, which are commonly mentioned
in the accounts.
The anecdotal hunting descriptions make it difficult to systematically
assess if a certain hunting practice was common, or to what degree a prey
contributed to a household’s economy. To try to compensate for the risk
of exaggerating sketchy evidence, we have compared accounts describing
Sami hunting from several parts of northern Sweden, and combined the
information with evidence in court rulings.
A special challenge in regard to hunting regulations is that animals
wander in the landscape and can move between areas with detailed regu-
lations and areas with few or no regulations. Rules for early modern
hunting ranged from extreme control to total lack of control, or open
access. A user’s right to prey could be linked either to his or her control
over the area where the animal was killed, or to the effort he or she
put into the hunt. The issue of who possesses the game has been widely
discussed by users, courts, and legal scholars.25
In seventeenth-century southern Sweden, most hunting was limited
to nobility and resembled legislation in continental Europe, but in
northern Sweden, including the Swedish lappmark, which encompassed

24 Linnaeus (2003, p. 62).

25 Rose (1985, p. 76).
 6 Hunting 129

two-thirds of the country, hunting was available to common people.26

Availability did not mean the absence of institutions, only that rules
were created in a local context with a bottom-up perspective, i.e., users
developed their own institutions for regulating, monitoring, and imple-
menting resource use.27 The first royal ordinance that regulated hunting
in the Swedish lappmark was introduced in 1749 and was aimed at
limiting settlers’ hunting rights to one-half of a Swedish mile, or 5,344
m, from their homesteads. The ordinance reinforced that hunting rights
across the lappmark belonged to the Sami. The second ordinance, initi-
ated in 1766, also targeted settlers and made it clear that it was strictly
forbidden to hunt domestic reindeer.28 The ordinance stipulated punish-
ment for illegal hunting of domestic reindeer and looked for ways to
prevent it by introducing rules for selling and buying reindeer furs. The
ordinance required hunters to keep the ears on the reindeer pelt so the
owner could be identified. Both the buyer and seller were responsible
and could be fined if the ears were missing.

Hunting in Interior Fennoscandia

The most noticeable physical divide, when it came to early modern
hunting practices in Lule lappmark, was the ecological difference
between the eastern boreal forest and the western Scandinavian Moun-
tains. For early modern hunters, as for hunters today, ecology set the
premise for hunting, foremost by determining which prey could be
hunted, and where. In our analyses of different aspects of early modern
hunting in Lule lappmark, we used the division between boreal forest and
mountains as a starting point. In this section, we present each landscape
type and describe how the settings interconnected with early modern
hunting.

26 Korpijakko-Labba (1994) and Nyrén (2012).

27 Ostrom (2005). See also Chapter 2.
28 Stiernman (1747–1775).
130 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

Hunting in the Mountains

Hunters in northern Fennoscandia have depended on reindeer for food,

clothing, and shelter since the end of the last Ice Age. There are traces
of trapping systems in the mountains in Lule lappmark, which tell
us that wild reindeer were hunted there. According to Hollsten, who
resided in Jokkmokk parish in the eighteenth century, there were moun-
tain reindeer, forest reindeer, and wild reindeer.29 He argued that the
tame reindeer were mountain reindeer, which spent spring, summer,
and autumn in the mountains and winters in the forest, and forest
reindeer (skogs-renar ), which stayed year-round in the forest. Wild rein-
deer resided in the lowlands east of the lappmark, toward the Gulf of
Bothnia. No wild reindeer appeared to be in southern Lule lappmark
in the 1770s. However, in the northern part of the Swedish lappmark,
including Kaitum in northern Lule lappmark, wild reindeer were present
into the nineteenth century.30
In 1672, Tornaeus described hunting of wild reindeer in the moun-
tains of neighboring Torne lappmark during winter.31 In his description,
hunters departed in pairs on hunting expeditions that could last for eight
to ten weeks. They stalked herds of wild reindeer before crawling behind
a rock or snowpack, close enough to shoot a designated animal using
rifles. Further evidence of wild reindeer in the mountains comes from a
1731 court case in Torne lappmark in which a user complained about
repeated trespassing on his tax land uppåt på fjället (in the mountains)
by a user from another village.32
On the organization of hunting, Tornaeus wrote that either antingen
går hela byn gemenligen (the whole village [went] together) or only a
couple of villagers, and after the hunt, the prey was divided among the
villagers.33 However, those who did not pay tax did not get a share, so it
appears that reindeer hunting in the mountains took place on lands held
in common by the tax-paying members of the Sami village. In the court

29 Hollsten (1774, p. 128).

30 Læstadius (1832, pp. 344–345) and Ekman (1910, pp. 7–12).
31 Tornaeus (1900, pp. 55ff ).
32 Arell (1977, p. 154).
33 Tornaeus (1900, pp. 55ff ).
 6 Hunting 131

case described by Arell, the defendant had shot four reindeer of which
two had been accrued to the proprietor of the tax land.34 This suggests
that hunting of wild reindeer in the Torne lappmark mountains could
be organized on private lands with the consent of the landholder. We
did not find any evidence in the early modern accounts or in the court
rulings of reindeer being hunted in the mountains of Lule lappmark.
Other animal species also were hunted in the mountains, namely arctic
fox (Vulpes lagopus), wolverine (Gulo gulo), and ptarmigan (Lagopus sp.).
The arctic fox is native to the alpine tundra and well adapted to life
in a cold climate thanks to a dense, insulating, and multilayered pelage
that changes color seasonally between light grey in summer and white
in winter, or stays dark blue, brown, or grey year-round. When Rheen
listed Sami trade articles in 1671, he included pelts from black and red
foxes (both Vulpes vulpes) as well as skins from blue and white foxes
(both Vulpes lagopus).35 According to Rheen, who mostly described Lule
lappmark, arctic foxes were found only in the mountains.36 He more-
over described that fox hunting was more difficult in years when there
was an influx of Norway lemmings (Lemmus lemmus). In such years,
the foxes feasted on lemmings and did not as willingly seek out carrions
that hunters deployed, which suggests that traps were a common method
for catching foxes. The method seems rational, as furs certainly must
have been priced higher if they were unmarked by bullets, and as foxes,
according to Linnaeus, were not hunted for human consumption.37 We
have found only one court ruling from Lule lappmark that concerns
hunting in the mountains.38 The particular case involved two brothers
in Sirkas who disputed who had the right to the furs from two foxes
and one wolverine. The defendant argued that he alone had caught the
animals, while the plaintiff claimed they had hunted i samma wånher (in
the same traps). Since they had shared the traps, the plaintiff claimed that
they both should have a right to the prey. The court proceeding ended
by their agreeing to sell the coats and split the reward between them.

34 Arell (1977, p. 154).

35 Rheen (1897, p. 58).
36 Rheen (1897, p. 54).
37 Linnaeus (2003, p. 58).
38 HRA (1704, p. 804).
132 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

Another prey animal was the gamebird ptarmigan. The rock

ptarmigan (Lagopus muta) was native to the mountains but not the
forests. The willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus) resided in both lower
mountain terrain and boreal forest. For early modern hunters, their
feathers and meat were attractive returns. Linnaeus described how all
households engaged in reindeer herding in Lule lappmark moved to
the boreal forest in winter, and that only some of the poorest inhab-
itants stayed in the mountains to snare ptarmigans.39 He described
that hunters could snare up to 40 or 50 birds during one night.
Högström likewise wrote that poor Sami in Lule lappmark sometimes
stayed in the mountains during winter, surviving on abundant catches
of ptarmigan.40 Even so, he described that hunters had to combine
the ptarmigan diet with other meat since bird meat allegedly was not
nutritious enough to survive on. Niurenius (around 1640), Rheen, and
Tornaeus also described snaring of ptarmigans in winter.41 Both Linnaeus
and Högström described that users who owned large reindeer herds were
not especially engaged in hunting and not particularly accomplished
hunters, and specified that few of the households they visited in the
mountains owned rifles or steel bows (cross bows).42 According to them,
reindeer herders’ hunting efforts were directed toward either squirrels
with wooden bows in the forest in winter, or ptarmigans with snares.
Holm described that in the mountains of Ume lappmark there were few
bird species to eat other than ptarmigans.43 (Fig. 6.1).

Hunting in the Boreal Forest

Many more species of prey animals were native to the boreal forest than
to the alpine tundra, and early modern sources mentioned several in
accounts and court cases regarding forest hunting. Furthermore, forest
inhabitants were generally portrayed as proficient hunters, skilled in both

39 Linnaeus (2003, pp. 106–107).

40 Högström (1747, p. 97).
41 Niurenius (1905, p. 19), Rheen (1897, p. 53), and Tornaeus (1900, p. 60).
42 Linnaeus (2003, pp. 101–138) and Högström (1747, p. 86).
43 Norstedt (2011, pp. 105–108).
 6 Hunting 133

Fig. 6.1 Willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus) with egg, depicted in 1695
(Source Iter lapponicum, Luefsta MS 92, Uppsala University Library, Sweden.
Public domain. https://www.alvin-portal.org/alvin/imageViewer.jsf?dsId=ATTACH
MENT-0137&pid=alvin-record:162152)
134 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

making traps and shooting. Högström described hunting as fundamental

for all households in the forest of Lule lappmark.44 Linnaeus similarly
described the inhabitants as skilled marksmen.45 Several animal species
were mentioned in lists of traded goods in the lappmark: otter (Lutra
lutra), wolverine, lynx (Lynx lynx ), marten (Martes martes), fox (red and
black), beaver (Castor fiber ), grey skin (or red squirrel [Sciurus vulgaris]),
wolf (Canis lupus), and bear (Ursus arctos arctos).46
The sources told us that wild reindeer were present in the boreal forest
of Lule lappmark in the seventeenth century. Wild reindeer there were
hunted with snares, spears, rifles, or bows and arrows.47 The use of bows,
snares, and spears was also corroborated by two court rulings from Lule
lappmark.48 In 1672, Graan described how seventeenth-century hunters
in Ume lappmark got plenty of food from wild game, such as wild rein-
deer, which, according to him, were hunted in the forest, rarely in the
mountains.49 The hunt for wild reindeer was described as year-round,
especially around St. Matthews Day in September, which was the rutting
season, in early spring when the snow cover was deep, and in summer. In
fall, hunters stalked herds of wild reindeer in the forest and used a tame
vaja (female reindeer) to attract bulls and kill them with rifles or bows.
The winter hunt was performed on skis; while the hunters stayed on top
of the snow, the reindeer sank into the snow, which made it relatively
easy to catch up and kill it. Hunters had the most luck in snow-rich
winters as a thick snow cover favored hunting of most forest animals.50
Lundius mentioned how a hunter in one single day had felled 16 wild
reindeer. Inhabitants in Ume lappmark were also said to have stalked
wild reindeer in the forest in summer, equipped with rifles or bows.51
However, Holm described how hunting wild reindeer in the summer was

44 Högström (1747, p. 85).

45 Linnaeus (2003, p. 138).
46 Rheen (1897, p. 58) and Tornaeus (1900, p. 63).
47 Rheen (1897, p. 23).
48 HRA (1699, pp. 76–85); RA SH (1741, p. 784).
49 Graan (1899, p. 42).
50 Lundius (1905, p. 26).
51 Niurenius (1905, p. 17).
 6 Hunting 135

not customary, since meat and skins were destroyed by insects.52 Further,
Holm’s account describes how some skatteland had many wild reindeer
and some had few.53
Aside from hunting with rifles or bows, seventeenth-century sources
from Ume lappmark described how inhabitants there used trapping pits
to catch wild reindeer.54 The pits were set up in narrow gorges, delimited
by steep cliffs or other impassable terrain, where the wild reindeer usually
passed in winter. In the midst of the gorge, several deep pits were dug and
covered with fine twigs and mosses. On top, loose snow was shuffled to
hide irregularities. The hunters either waited for the reindeer’s voluntary
passage, or actively startled them so they moved toward the pits.
After Linneaus had traveled in Ume lappmark in 1732, he stated that
“willrenar finnas sällan i Lapmarken, förnämligast finnas någre på Almän-
ningen emällan Granöen och Lyksele” [wild reindeer are seldom found in
the lappmark, mostly they reside on a common land between Granön
and Lycksele], located at the eastern border.55 He also wrote that rein-
deer herders sometimes lost tame reindeer to wild herds but that they
usually got them back the following year. The tame reindeer would then
be herded back to the flock by its owner or, if it did not comply, it would
be shot. If reindeer traps were used, they could have easily become a
hazard for tame reindeer and cause problems for reindeer herders.56 The
last evidence we found about wild reindeer hunting in Lule lappmark
came from a court case in 1741.57 The court decided that a settler who
had deployed a wild reindeer trap in the eastern part of Sjokksjokk had
to reimburse the owners whose reindeer got caught in his trap.
The distribution of moose or elk (Alces alces) is hard to interpret.
According to Lundius, there were normally no moose in Lule lappmark,
but Ume lappmark had both moose and wild reindeer in abundance.58
However, in Holm’s detailed descriptions of game in each skatteland ,

52 Norstedt (2011, p. 84).

53 Norstedt (2011, pp. 65–73).
54 Lundius (1905, p. 22) and Niurenius (1905, p. 17).
55 Linnaeus (2003, p. 44).
56 Arell (1977, pp. 99–101).
57 RA SH (1741, p. 784).
58 Lundius (1905, pp. 12, 40).
136 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

moose are not mentioned in Ume lappmark.59 Holm’s task was to assess
the value of resources of each skatteland . Since he did not mention
moose, he could not have seen it as a reliable asset for landholders. The
moose must have been absent or at least very rare. In Torne lappmark,
Tornaeus (1900:55) described that moose had existed in past times.60
The wolverine is native to both the arctic tundra and the boreal forest.
In a text about wolverines in Lule lappmark, Hollsten stated that the
animal resided in forests near a mountain with rugged terrain to which
they could flee when they were hunted.61 Wolverines have dark-colored,
dense, water-repellant greasy fur. Their coats showed up in early modern
trade lists from Lule lappmark, which suggests they were hunted there.62
According to Holm in 1671, wolverines were common in Ume lapp-
mark, but hard to catch, and were hunted to prevent them from breaking
into storage places, such as buildings and mountain crevasses.63 Holl-
sten described them as a great nuisance because they ate food people had
stocked to use during their return to the mountains in spring.64 Hunting
methods included trapping with steel-jawed leghold restraint traps that
were heftier than ordinary traps and hunting on skis with a spear for the
final killing. Lundius corroborated trapping wolverines in his account
from 1674 of practices in the boreal forest in Ume lappmark.65
Sami considered bears to be the most prominent creatures in the forest
due to their superior strength compared to other animals.66 This prob-
ably contributed to numerous rituals that surrounded bear hunts, and
the subsequent preparation and disposal of meat and bones, described
by several authors.67 Linnaeus described bear hunting in Lule lappmark
as stalking by a single man with a dog who eventually crawled close

59 Norstedt (2011, p. 39).

60 Tornaeus (1900, p. 55).
61 Hollsten (1773, p. 232).
62 Lundmark (1982, pp. 198–203).
63 Norstedt (2011, p. 72).
64 Hollsten (1773, p. 235).
65 Lundius (1905, p. 28).
66 Rheen (1897, p. 43).
67 Högström (1747, p. 209), Rheen (1897, pp. 43ff.), and Niurenius (1905, p. 18).
 6 Hunting 137

enough to shoot the bear.68 The hunts took place in fall when bears
were busy eating berries. Rheen described a more collectively organized
hunt in Lule lappmark, where a person who had found the hibernating
bear’s den gathered family and friends to help wake and kill it.69 Killings
were performed with either spears or rifles. The bear hide was reserved
for the person who had located the den, and the meat was divided among
all participants in the hunt. Niurenius specified the time period for bear
hunting in Ume lappmark as March and April, when the bear was still
in its den but right before it normally awoke.70
The priest Pehr Fjellström wrote about the rituals surrounding bear
hunting and described a common law among inhabitants wherein the
proprietor of a skatteland where a bear had been killed got a share of
the meat, regardless of whether or not he or she had participated in the
hunt.71 If the proprietor had participated, he or she got to choose the
first share, then received the share due to each participant.
Several court rulings from Lule lappmark dealt with bear hunting and
gave a different picture. In one case from 1709, two bear hunters from
Jokkmokk were the plaintiffs.72 They claimed to have woken a hiber-
nating bear and thereafter encircled it on their own skatteland . However,
before they could kill the bear, it had run off to a neighboring skatteland
where it eventually had been killed by the defendants. In court, the plain-
tiffs demanded a share of the bear’s fur from the defendants, but since
the court was not convinced that it was the same bear, the verdict went
in favor of the defendants, and the plaintiffs were left empty-handed.
A parallel case was brought to the court just a few days later. In that
case, two men in Sjokksjokk had encircled a bear on another user’s skatte-
land and then shot it.73 Thanks to the effort of the men at the beginning
of the hunt, the court decided they had rights to one-third of the value
of the bear’s coat. Even if it was not made explicit in the verdict, it seems
reasonable that the remaining two-thirds accrued to the landholder.

68 Linnaeus (2003, p. 148).

69 Rheen (1897, pp. 43ff ).
70 Niurenius (1905, p. 18).
71 Pehr Fjellström (1981 [1755], p. 9).
72 HRA (1709, p. 343).
73 HRA (1709, p. 357).
138 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

In 1742 and 1744, two more court cases dealt with bear hunting.
The first involved a dispute between a user in Jokkmokk and a user in
Sjokksjokk.74 The second case involved a user from Jokkmokk and a user
from Sirkas.75 In both cases, the verdicts had been postponed: in the first
case, the court needed to find out who owned the land where the bear
had been killed; in the latter case, the defendant never appeared in court.
Neither of these cases seems to have been reopened, probably because the
parties reached settlements outside court.
The court rulings show that the meat and coat from a killed bear
belonged to the holder of the skatteland where it had been shot.76 Yet,
it was possible to get a share if a person had participated in the bear
hunt before the bear fell, even though it was not on his or her land.
In court rulings that explicitly mentioned the number of hunters, they
always hunted in pairs. This also goes for a case from 1707 where a father
and son from Sjokksjokk stood accused of reindeer theft.77 In defense,
they argued they could not have stolen any reindeer since they were out
hunting bear at the time.
Between 1572 and 1615, 77 beaver pelts from Lule lappmark were
sold or paid in tax to the Swedish crown.78 According to an account
from the seventeenth century, there were beavers in Ume but not in Lule
lappmark.79 In the mid-eighteenth century, Hollsten described how he
had taken care of an orphaned beaver kit and, according to him, that
beavers had been so rare by then in Lule lappmark that many older
inhabitants had never seen a beaver while growing up.80 Beavers were
favored prey for their valuable castoreum, which probably was the main
reason beavers became extinct throughout Sweden. Carl Fjellström wrote
that castoreum was so expensive in the pharmacies in Sweden that Sami
should have sold it to Swedish merchants instead of taking it to markets

74 RA SH (1742, p. 254).
75 RA SH (1744, p. 289).
76 Korpijaakko-Labba (1994, pp. 260–261) and Korhonen (2007).
77 HRA (1707, pp. 145–149).
78 Lundmark (1982, pp. 191–203).
79 Lundius (1905, p. 12).
80 Hollsten (1768, p 286).
 6 Hunting 139

in Norway.81 Because the beaver skins were already being sold to Swedish
merchants, they should have been able to offer as much for the castoreum
as the Norwegians did.
The source materials reveal little to no information about hunting
of many species of small game. Squirrel hunting was especially impor-
tant for many households in the lappmark, and we know that Sami in
Lule lappmark paid taxes in squirrel pelts, which represented the bulk
of traded furs.82 Linnaeus described squirrel traps made of logs that had
been split in two.83 He previously had described, in an account from
the mountains, how efficiently Sami handled wooden bows when they
hunted squirrels in the forest. In Holm’s account, squirrels and other
small game are listed for almost all skatteland in Ume Lappmark.84 For
some land in the boreal forest, squirrels are listed as rather abundant.85
In the court rulings from Lule lappmark, we found two cases concerning
squirrels.86 Both were from Sjokksjokk and pointed out that squirrels
belonged to the holder of the land. Coats from martens are mentioned in
early modern trade lists, and Niurenius described that martens could be
killed with arrows while they were up in trees, but that the most common
hunting method was to use fire to smoke them out of their hiding places
in mountain caves and crevasses.87 They were then caught in nets that
were tied in front of the entrance.
Forest inhabitants also engaged in hunting fowl for meat, feathers,
and eggs. The feathers were used in the household and for trade, while
the meat and eggs mostly were consumed within the household. Other
materials from the birds also were used, such as skins for water-tight
containers.
Rheen listed land fowl that resided in the boreal forest in Lule
lappmark, such as western capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), black grouse
(Lyrurus tetrix ), and hazel grouse (Tetrastes bonasia). Both Tornaeus and

81 C. Fjellström (1760, p. 21).

82 Lundmark (1982) and Phebe Fjellström (1986, p. 182).
83 Linnaeus (2003, p. 61).
84 Norstedt (2011, p. 39).
85 Norstedt (2011, pp. 89–114).
86 HRA (1711, pp. 759–760) and RA SH (1757, pp. 496–497).
87 Niurenius (1905, p. 19).
140 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

Rheen listed several species of water fowl that were present in northern
Fennoscandia during summer, such as whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus)
and various species of geese and mallards, such as common golden eyes
(Bucephala clangula), Swartor (probably velvet scoter [Melanitta fusca]),
black-throated divers (Gavia arctica), red-throated divers (Gavia stellata),
and goosanders (Mergus merganser ).88 Several methods were used in bird
hunting. Linnaeus wrote that he had seen traps for capercaillie along
paths all over Ume lappmark and that these traps were deployed in fall.89
At least in Ume lappmark, traps were also used to catch water fowl, such
as geese and swans.90 Moreover, both Ehrenmalm and Lundius described
that inhabitants hunted forest fowl with rifles.91 Ehrenmalm specified
that Sami in the boreal forest shot plenty of birds in spring. Linnaeus
described how he nearly had been hit by a misdirected bullet fired by
a bird hunter when he was out picking wild strawberries in the moun-
tains in northern Norway, just across the border from Lule lappmark.92
Sources also mentioned that water fowl were caught in nets but did not
specify if hunters were trying to catch birds or if it happened as a bycatch
in fishing nets.93
We have not found any particular bird species mentioned in court
rulings from Lule lappmark. However, bird hunting in general can be
affirmed, for example, in a case where plaintiffs and defendants used bird
traps.94 Bird hunting was also stated in several disputes over rights to use
specific tax lands, where the court saw long-term use of bird traps as a
valid argument for the bird hunter to obtain continuous user rights.95
All cases regarding bird trapping in Lule lappmark that we found had
unfolded in the boreal forest. We learned that users in the mountains
snared ptarmigans, and probably trapped other birds, although it is not
noticeable in the court records. The lack of court cases regarding bird
hunting in the mountains is probably because there were fewer bird

88 Tornaeus (1900, p. 60) and Rheen (1897, p. 53).

89 Linnaeus (2003, p. 62).
90 Lundius (1905, p. 17).
91 Ehrenmalm (1743, p. 128) and Lundius (1905, p. 18).
92 Linnaeus (2003, p. 118).
93 Tornaeus (1900, p. 60).
94 RA SH (1777, pp. 45–46).
95 RA SH (1772, p. 485).
 6 Hunting 141

species there than in the boreal forest in the winter, thus less hunting.
Also, and maybe more important, because the institution of skatteland
was more widespread, providing the opportunity for more disputes over
rights.96 Court records from Lule lappmark by and large described trap-
ping of birds, whereas only one court ruling mentioned fågelskjutande
(bird shooting).97
Aside from bird hunting for meat and feathers, Sami also gathered
birds’ eggs. There were specially built nesting places for gathering eggs.98
These bird houses were made of hollow trunks with a manmade hole in
the middle and ends plugged with moss. The bird houses were attached
to trees, and as soon as the birds laid their eggs in them, they were
emptied. Hunters also collected swan eggs on mires and tufts after the
birds had been snared.
The only evidence we found that revealed anything about the extent of
hunting in Lule lappmark came from a court case in 1737. The defen-
dant, a man from Sjokksjokk, was charged for unlawfully using a tax
land. The right to the land had originally belonged to the father of the
current user, and he had given the defendant provisional rights to hunt
there, but only until his son, the plaintiff, had come of age to use it.
The court decided that the defendant no longer could use the land, and
thus approved the plaintiff ’s demand. As a consequence, the defendant
wanted to be compensated for traps he had deployed on the land. This
was approved by the court, and he was compensated for a total of two
hundred traps, divided equally between flakar (log traps) and giller (cage
traps). The traps were described as well functioning, and therefore worth
a total of 12 daler copper coins.99 It was obviously problematic to remove
the traps, and subsequently reasonable for the plaintiff to reimburse the
defendant for their worth. Although this evidence concerns one specific
case, it suggests that one land parcel could contain hundreds of traps.
Besides the 200 traps, the defendant might have had other, less compli-
cated traps made of wires and ropes that easily could have been removed
and might have hunted small game with bow and rifle.
96 Hultblad (1968).
97 HRA (1709, p. 352).
98 Tornaeus (1900, p. 60) and Lundius (1905, p. 16).
99 RA SH (1737, p. 682).
142 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

Small-game hunting seems to have been a particularly important

income source for the poor. This was highlighted in a court ruling from
1701 where the plaintiff, a man from Jokkmokk, accused two maids,
who were also sisters, of having destroyed a couple of fågelflakar (log
traps for birds) and the floor of an akkja (sledge) that belonged to
him. According to the sisters, it was instead the plaintiff who had acted
unlawfully, both by destroying several of their bird traps, and by striking
them with rods and twigs. All in all, the court argued that the offense
was minor but that the plaintiff nevertheless had a greater liability. The
court’s main argument was that the plaintiff had acted unjustly toward
two simple-minded women, and that he should have been able to handle
the situation differently. Moreover, the court stated that since the two
sisters lived in great poverty, the plaintiff should compensate them with
six daler copper coins, or a vajren (female reindeer). They also had the
right to continue using bird traps on his land. The court emphasized
that the plaintiff should icke förtaga dem deras närings och lifsuppehälle
(not take away their livelihood and life support) and that the sisters,
for their part, had to show respect and good manners toward the plain-
tiff.100 From Pite lappmark, Öhrling wrote that those who were very
poor sought their livelihoods solely from hunting and fishing.101

Ecological Differences
With regard to ecological settings, the most important natural conditions
that impacted decisions regarding hunting in Lule lappmark between
1660 and 1780 were the differences between mountains and boreal
forest. While the forest had many species of mammals and birds, the
mountains did not. The same observation was made by Holm in his
account of Ume lappmark in the 1670s.102 The compositions of species
of prey animals in the two regions were stable during the study period,

100 HRA (1701, pp. 406–408).

101 Öhrling (1970 [1773], p. 11).
102 Norstedt (2011, pp. 105–107).
 6 Hunting 143

but some important changes occurred that impacted hunting strategies

and outcome.
The sixteenth century saw an increased demand for expensive furs
and a trade that flourished until it peaked in the 1570s. Fur trade
declined rapidly in Lule lappmark in the beginning of the seventeenth
century.103 Lundmark suggested that it was caused by an overharvest of
fur animals, but another possible explanation was that new trade patterns
had emerged that increased the fur import to Europe, first from Russia
and later from North America.104 However, it is likely that the slow,
long-term decrease occurred for three reasons: (1) Furs continued to be
sought-after goods in local trade even after they lost importance in inter-
national trade. Hunters could easily see how incomes from fur trade
would improve the household economy, especially in the boreal forest
where fur animals were abundant at the time. (2) The human popula-
tion increase in the eighteenth century led to increased hunting pressure.
(3) Some wild animals were a nuisance to people—stealing their stocked
food or attacking their domestic reindeer—and were therefore killed.
The developments surrounding wild reindeer are more lucid than
for other wild game. It is difficult to pursue reindeer herding in areas
with wild reindeer. Vorren established a temporal correlation between
the decline of wild reindeer and the emergence of reindeer pastoralism
in the Finnmark region of northern Norway during the first half of
the eighteenth century.105 Lundmark argued that a similar development
occurred in Lule lappmark and that the extinction of wild reindeer was
intentional.106 It began in the mountains and ended in the easternmost
boreal forest of Sjokksjokk, where wild reindeer were rare by the mid-
eighteenth century. We know relatively little about how wild reindeer
were distributed in the mountains in early modern Lule lappmark. In
fact, wild reindeer were mentioned in only one source from 1608,107
and their presence was indirectly confirmed by the remains of pitfall

103 Lundmark (1982, p. 120).

104 Lundmark (1982) and Brook (2008).
105 Vorren (1978, 1980).
106 Lundmark (1982, pp. 162–163).
107 Lundmark (1982, pp. 163).
144 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

systems.108 When inhabitants with access to mountain grazing devel-

oped reindeer pastoralism, wild reindeer would have had no place in the
mountains, explaining their rapidly decreasing numbers. According to
Holm, there were no wild reindeer in the mountains of Ume lappmark
in 1671, although they were abundant in some of the skatteland in the
boreal forest.109 Pitfalls thus became useless and hazardous for domestic
reindeer, and from the mid-seventeenth century, at the latest, wild
reindeer must have been extinct or at least very rare in the mountains.
Some court rulings from the first decades of the eighteenth century
contain information about wild reindeer being present in the forest in
Lule lappmark. The last one was dated in 1741 and mentioned a trap
for hunting wild reindeer. According to Hollsten, wild reindeer were rare
in Lule lappmark but remained in the forests between Lule Lappmark
and the farming districts in the east.110 The disappearance of forest rein-
deer coincided with the introduction of large-scale reindeer pastoralism
around 1750.111
Small-game hunting for international trade lost importance in the
seventeenth century. However, small-game hunting for subsistence was
still important. It reinforced the boreal forest as the primary arena for
hunting. The boreal forest offered an abundance of animals, while the
mountains offered relatively few. Hence, households in the forest had
more opportunities to hunt.

Importance of Prey Animals

The source materials give insights into the major reasons why house-
holds in Lule lappmark hunted in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. First, people needed fat and protein from wild animals for
consumption. Second, households needed products for trade and paying

108 Mulk (2005, p. 48).

109 Norstedt (2011, p. 38).
110 Hollsten (1774).
111 Hultblad (1968).
 6 Hunting 145

taxes—for example, skins from a wide range of animals, such as squir-

rels, foxes, bears, and martens, and feathers from wild fowl. Third, people
wanted to prevent predators, particularly wolverines, bears, and wolves,
from damaging their stored food and tame reindeer.112 Besides these
three practical and functional motives for hunting, there was surely a
fourth, intangible motive: the feelings of excitement, joy, and reward that
continue to entice modern-day hunters.

Property Rights
Two central questions are: Who had the right to hunt? and Where could
they hunt? The answers for forest hunting were connected to proprietor-
ship of skatteland , meaning that rules for access were well defined among
users. In the mountains, on the other hand, distribution of tax lands was
less clear, and users often had open access to hunting.
In the forest, users were more dependent economically on hunting,
and having as much control as possible over the resources was key. There
was a strict division into skatteland on which individual households had
private rights to grazing land, fishing waters, and hunting grounds. The
boundaries between them were usually well known, and if not, the local
court helped to set the borders. As soon as a wild animal dwelled on a
skatteland , it was seen as private goods, and the property of the propri-
etor of that land. Ownership of the animal shifted when it strayed to
another person’s skatteland . In Lule lappmark, all but one of the hunting
disputes taken to court took place in the boreal forest. Hultblad showed
that most of the forest in Lule lappmark was divided into skatteland .
Arell conveyed that most court cases regarding hunting in Torne lapp-
mark dealt with uncertainties over boundaries in relation to the natural
resources that were disputed.113
The formation of hunting rights in the forest followed many of
Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable use of CPRs.114 Well-defined

112 Högström (1747, p. 85) and Linnaeus (2003, p. 138).

113 Arell (1977).
114 Ostrom (1990, p. 90).
146 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

user groups and resource areas made it possible to control the amounts
of resources that were withdrawn from each land, which in turn reduced
the risk of overuse. If the use of a resource was contested, or if tres-
passing occurred, the local court functioned as a collective-choice arena
that mediated between users, clarified boundaries between lands, and
penalized someone who violated the rules. Clear boundaries between
users’ lands made it easier to monitor regulations, even though very large
skatteland still might have been difficult to control fully.
Small-game hunting favored lands that were used individually for two
reasons. First, hunting small game often entailed traps, which in turn
became investments in the land; for example, fixed log traps took time
to construct and were difficult to move. A household could have had
several hundred such trapping devices on its land. Second, small-game
hunting required users to have great knowledge about the whereabouts
and behavior of prey animals in order to deploy the right trap in the
right place. The traps also had to be monitored regularly, which required
hunters to deploy them near their living grounds. Many aspects of
hunting were thus facilitated if users had detailed knowledge about and
easy access to land. If a skatteland was used by more than one house-
hold, each household had its own traps, and the prey animals accrued
to the household that had deployed them. Trapping is for the most part
an extensive hunting method and many traps are required for it to be
rewarding. The probability of catching a prey animal increases if the
hunter has large numbers of traps deployed in as many strategic places as
possible. Therefore, the division of skatteland into smaller units, which
became common in the eighteenth century, was disadvantageous for the
hunting economy. It decreased each households’ catch area and eventu-
ally made trapping economically inviable. The smaller land units affected
the household fishing economy in the same way.115
Large prey animals in the boreal forest also accrued to the proprietor
of the skatteland where it was felled, but this rule could be set aside
by mutual agreements between involved parties. If someone had been
instrumental in the pursuit of a bear prior to the killing, it was possible
for him or her to get a share even without belonging to the household

115 Chapter 5.
 6 Hunting 147

of the landholder. Opposite to the rest of Sweden, where pest animals

could be killed and claimed by anyone, in the lappmark they belonged
to the landholder.116
There were no such strict regulations regarding access to hunting or
to whom a felled wild animal belonged in the Lule lappmark mountains.
However, where wild reindeer were present in Torne lappmark during the
seventeenth century, the hunt was regulated by the villages. Since there
were fewer species of wild animals in the mountains than in the forest,
hunting played a less important role in the household economy. Early
modern sources were vague when it came to the organization of hunting
in the mountains, but there was no clear evidence of it being tied to
skatteland in Lule lappmark, and it seemed as if users were allowed to
hunt freely.
Hunting was often described as a collective enterprise organized
and regulated by the Sami village and where the wild animals were a
CPR.117 However, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources told us
that hunting in the forest was organized individually or at the house-
hold level, and that wild animals belonged to the holder of a skatteland
where they appeared. Hunting in the mountains, after the disappearance
of wild reindeer, was also organized individually, and wild animals were
most likely seen as CPRs.
As discussed in Chapter 2, earlier research assumed that skatteland
represented an older organization, predating their first appearance in the
sources from the seventeenth century.118 Other scholars did not perceive
tax lands as originally Sami, but rather as the result of the Swedish
government’s desire to organize taxation by connecting all inhabitants
to specific lands.119 The origin of skatteland is complex; however, the
organization of land into well-defined user parcels makes sense when we
consider the organization of fishing and hunting in the boreal forest from
the mid-seventeenth century to the second half of the eighteenth century.
Norstedt argues that skatteland were created “to achieve a satisfactory

116 Korpijakko-Labba (1994, p. 263).

117 Ingold (1980), Mulk (1994), and Bergman and Ramqvist (2018).
118 Holmbäck (1922).
119 Hansen and Olsen (2014).
148 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

division of predictable and dense resources” and points to fishing as the

determinant factor.120 Well-defined tax lands made it possible for land-
holders who relied on fishing and hunting to gain control over resources
that were fundamental for their survival. The idea of hunting as a collec-
tive enterprise or of wild animals as a CPR does not fit with the way
land was actually organized in the early modern period. Hence, it is
likely that the organization into skatteland was a response to changes
in the Sami economy, and that changes in the organization of hunting,
from collective to private, was one of the contributing factors in that
development.

Participation in Hunting
Before 1600, hunting in the lappmark was described, albeit from sketchy
evidence, as a task performed mostly by men. Men left home to hunt
wild reindeer or bears and returned with the prey and shared it within
a group of neighbors and relatives. It is probably an exceedingly one-
dimensional description of medieval and pre-historic hunting,121 but
due to the sources, and the dominating portrayals of hunting therein,
little else is known about who actually hunted historically. The shift
from portraying hunters as main characters to not describing them at all
coincided with the expiration of wild reindeer hunting and the increased
importance of reindeer pastoralism, which led to the portrayal of Sami
after the sixteenth century as foremost reindeer herders.
The fundamental change in hunting in the early modern period, from
producing a surplus of furs for trade to a subsistence mode, might have
changed who participated. In the early modern accounts, young boys, for
example, were said to have practiced squirrel hunting with bows from an
early age. And it is fair to conclude that the authors’ own views of gender
division of labor, from childhood to adulthood, relatively uncritically
transferred into their descriptions of Sami customs. Men moved around,
chasing and hunting large animals, and women were mostly invisible

120 Norstedt (2018, p. 65).

121 Mulk (1994).
 6 Hunting 149

or stayed at home. An example would be accounts that present a vivid

picture of men being part of ritual bear hunting,122 although Kuhmunen
has shown that women participated in the rituals when the bear was
brought home.123 The use of weapons— rifles, bows, and spears—were
associated with men.
Accounts and court rulings gave plenty of evidence of small-game
hunting that took place close to the living grounds, and it seems reason-
able that both men and women participated. Common tasks were to
build, place, and monitor the traps to catch small game. Since one house-
hold could have had several hundreds of traps, it would have been a
time-consuming endeavor and thus a shared responsibility for several
household members. For most species of small game, there was also
a seasonal variation in the number of prey animals, and during the
high season all the available work force in the household must have
been needed, regardless of gender or age. Catching water fowl must
have required the same workforce whenever households had to opti-
mize harvests of meat, eggs, and feathers during the few summer months
before the birds migrated. Moreover, many of the work tasks related
to fishing and reindeer husbandry were performed by both men and
women.124 This was true also for many of the household chores, such
as food preparation and cooking. There was thus a tradition of sharing
labor. Small-game hunting became the major hunting activity and was
more predictable than large-game hunting. Hence it contributed to
subsistence. Hunting was not gender neutral, but women’s and children’s
roles in early modern small-game hunting have largely been invisible.

Social Justice
Small-game hunting for subsistence played an important part in
upholding social justice among inhabitants in Lule lappmark. Poor
people could, for example, stay in the mountains in winter to hunt

122 Tornaeus (1900, p. 59–60) and Niurenius (1905, p. 14).

123 Kuhmunen (2015).
124 Chapters 5 and 7.
150 J. Larsson and E.-L. Päiviö Sjaunja

ptarmigans, where users had open access to hunting. Despite this, there
was probably little risk of overharvest since there were few hunters on
relatively vast lands. Hunting by poor people was not limited to the
mountains; they also could hunt small game on tax lands in the boreal
forest. If landholders claimed that people’s hunting was an intrusion, the
court could decide that they had rights to continue hunting because they
were underprivileged.125
Small-game hunting likely increased in importance in the early
modern period, even though the scarcity of information from previous
centuries makes it impossible to prove. Small-game hunting was possibly
motivated by a growing population that made people search for alterna-
tive incomes, especially inhabitants who in the beginning of this period
did not participate in reindeer pastoralism. The larger picture implies
that the gap between wealthy and poor inhabitants in Lule lappmark
increased during the early modern period due to population growth
and expansion of reindeer pastoralism, which yielded great surpluses
for pastoralist households.126 Hunting was one way to alleviate poverty
for those who remained on the wrong side of the gap, and to prompt
social equity, the poor’s right to hunt was often confirmed by the local
community via the local court.

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 6 Hunting 155

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