Our Roots
Story of our Company
I had lived in Lapland for five years before we met with Mika. Mika is indigenous Inari Sámi, and has lived in Lapland his whole life.
Our eldest was born in the autumn of 2022. That same winter, he experienced his first reindeer roundup, fishing trip, and hunting trip. That was also the winter when this company was founded. Our youngest child was born in autumn of 2025. By the age of two months, he had already joined his first moose hunt and had been fishing many times.
We're raising our children within the Inari Sámi way of life and culture as much as possible. Inari Sámi culture is practically based on fishing, hunting and foraging. We use the Inari Sámi language every day as much as we can, but we have lost the most of the language.
We teach traditional skills such as hide tanning, nalbinding, plant dyeing, making traditional utility items, and identifying and using wild plants and mushrooms through both online and in-person, but we also run small-scale tourism experiences and do practical work such as clearing vegetation under power lines in the summertime. That's what entrepreneurship looks like in a small community in Finnish Lapland.
We are located in Pelkosenniemi, near Pyhä, but we also offer our Services in nearby municipalities Kemijärvi and Sodankylä.
How we met
The way we met is one of my (Tiia) favorite stories, so let's go with that. Welcome to our world!
Our first date happened around the opening of waterfowl hunting season, and we headed straight into the wilderness for four days. We hadn’t met before, so we stopped for coffee at a service station in Kittilä just to make sure our chemistry worked in real life too (we had met online, as modern people often do).
Mika had Ukko with him, and I had my two dogs, Shelly and Onni, plus a foster dog, Nuutti the Husky puppy.
So off we went to wilderness of Porttipahta.
The road to our campsite was absolutely terrible — the kind of road that can challenge even a proper off-road vehicle. We drove there in two cars because I wanted to keep an escape route open in case everything went horribly wrong.
A couple of days later, I needed to leave for a work trip in Kolari. Mika offered to lend me his Subaru because it handled rough terrain much better than my Nissan Qashqai.
That way, he said, I'd have a safer and a faster drive from Porttipahta to Kolari and back.
On the way there, Nuutti had diarrhea all over the trunk of that car.
I still remember standing in the drizzle at some cold gas station, washing everything that had been in the trunk — including the dogs — with water scooped from puddles, then calling Mika with tears in my throat to tell him what had happened. I was absolutely convinced our date (and probably the entire relationship) was about to end right there.
Mika simply said:
"Okay. Well, these things happen."
And that was it. I knew I had found a good one.
