What Is Mecci? Understanding the Sámi Relationship With Nature

To understand the Sámi culture, you’ll have to understand the Sámi relationship with nature. We shall refer to nature and everything related to that with the Inari Sámi word “Mecci” in the text, because it tells so much more than just “nature”.

Mecci is the second home

It is a place where you want to go and where you want to stay. It is not some scary or extra exciting place where you go for your adrenaline kick, it just is.

When you stay in Mecci, you feel calm, focused and curious and you get to forget all the responsibilities and difficulties that you face in your normal, everyday life. You get to focus to your basic needs: food, warmth and shelter, and that makes a massive shift both in your priorities but also your state of mind. Everything outside the basic needs start to feel meaningless.

In Mecci you get to be who you are, with all your personality traits, challenges and strengths. You don’t need to analyze others, read between the lines or mask that you are more social than you naturally are.

The reason we don’t hike on marked trails or bring our guests to tourist traps

You can find bulk junk tourist attractions and activities anywhere in Lapland, you don’t need us for that. We don’t go ourselves or take our guests to places, that are built for staging the tourism industry and is represented as “arctic wild nature”. We want to take you to sceneries that are actually still as natural as possible and where we go ourselves when we want to stay in mecci.

If you go to the nature or a place that is staged, you are going to meet some other people. It is never possible for you to be truly yourself, because you have to be polite and engaging in all kinds of social interactions.

You have to stand in line, make room for others and take in account every persons feelings. When you go to the true mecci, you can drop all that and just be.

Children in mecci

Mecci is the place to be for any child. There are endless possibilities for play, curiosity, knowledge and adventure.

Staying a bit longer in mecci will make you use your creativity in solving problems like, “how to prepare food” or “how to make fire” or “how to dry your clothes after they got wet in pouring rain”. The mecci gives you everything you need. You can cook food on a top of a rock if you need to. You can even build an ephemeral sauna in the middle of nowhere if you need to.

Ownership of Mecci

There is some kind of feeling of ownership concerning mecci, even if you don’t own the land itself. Before the time of the man-made artificial ownership, people had their own fishing-, hunting- and foraging areas that they shared with others, and the one that had luck got the resources (and then maybe paid something that they needed with those said resources or changed them to other resources that someone else had gotten).

Nowadays it is only rarely that you can do this, and it is quite normal that you pay with money to someone who owns the land to use the land. We have everyone’s right in Finland, so that it is possible and allowed to anyone to pick mushrooms, berries and some herbs. Be warned though, there are a lot of poisonous ones also. You can also fish with a traditional fishing pole almost anywhere.

However, for hunting you always need a permission from a landowner, and you also should ask for the permission (and probably pay) if you take groups to the forest or use the community campfire places. Many of the activity organizer don’t do this, and it’s one of the biggest reasons of conflicts in between locals and the companies that work in the area. We do, by the way, always agree with the local landowners when we take our guests to enjoy mecci.

Relationship with nature

Relationship with the nature nowadays is far from the relationship that was before. Before it was quite normal, that you took from the mecci what you needed for yourself and you went to mecci when you needed something. The relationship with nature wasn’t, that you go to the broken stages of nature that was before. Nowadays everyone takes more than they need.

The discussion about the ethics of hunting, fishing and using nature is a controversial theme also in Finland. However, we do think that it is the most important thing to cultivate the culture and the way of living that was before. The Inari Sámi people were not as much reindeer herders as they were hunter-gatherers, and that is also a part of the culture that we want to cherish and teach our children.