The Sámi flag is the flag of Sápmi and the Sámi (Saami) people, one of the indigenous people groups of the Nordic countries and the Kola Peninsula (Russian Federation). The first, unofficial Sámi flag was designed by Sami politician and activist Marit Stueng from Kárašjohka in 1962, using a blue, red, and yellow color pattern commonly used on gákti, the traditional Sámi garb. In 1977, Sámi artist Synnøve Persen from Porsáŋgu made the artworks “Forslag til Samisk flagg” (Blueprint for a Sámi Flag) and “Sámiland for Sámi”, both of which used a design similar to Stueng’s flag (Persen also credited other Nordic flags and traditional Sámi designs for her proposal). Persen’s work became a symbol of the Alta protests over a dam on the Altaelva: after being featured locally and internationally in multiple media and exhibitions, Persen’s artworks were acquired by the National Museum in 2018, and today her flag is usually introduced as “the first Sámi flag” without reference to Marit Stueng. The first ‘official’ Sámi flag was recognized and inaugurated on 15 August 1986 by the 13th Nordic Sami Conference in Åre, Sweden: it was the result of a competition among more than seventy proposals, and the winning design was submitted by the Coast Sámi artist Astrid Båhl from Ivgubahta/Skibotn (Tromssa/Troms county, Norway). It retained the basic structure of the first Sámi flag, to which Båhl added the colour green, popular on many South Sámi gáktis. These four colours have been known since then as “the Sámi (national) colours”. She also added a motif derived from a sun/moon symbol appearing on many shaman’s drums, the motif on the flag drawn in both blue (representing the moon) and red (representing the sun). The Pantone colour formula used is: red 485C, green 356C, yellow 116C and blue 286C. In 2003, the Sámi flag received official status in Norway, the country with the largest Sámi population: it is now compulsory for municipalities in Norway to fly the flag on February 6, the Sámi National Day. The Sámi Council earlier had full ownership to the flag and other national symbols, but since the 18th Sámi Conference they now share that ownership with the Sámi Parliamentary Council. The logo of the ‘Sámi Parliament of Sweden’ features a circle in the four Sámi colours, while the ‘Sámi Parliament of Finland’ features a circle with the three colours of the first Sámi flag, and the ‘Sámi Parliament of Norway’ does not incorporate elements of the flag in its current logo. Finnmárkuopmodat, the autonomous entity established by the Finnmark Act has a logo that according to the entity’s website “gets it colours from the Sámi and the Norwegian flag, as a symbol that the Finnmark Estate feels related to and responsible for both Sámi and Kvens, as well as ethnic Norwegians. […] The circular shape… refers both to the Sámi flag’s sun-symbol and to the solid and safe envelopment of a circle. […] It is opened up to allow the Northern Lights a gateway into the Norwegian and the Sámi flag’s colours. As per the “Russian Sámi Organs”, the elected ‘Council of Plenipotentiary Representatives of the Sámi of Murmansk Province’ uses a symbol heavily inspired by the flag: two reindeer horns joined like a crescent, the upper half red and the lower half blue, with two stripes in yellow and green between the halves. The official ‘Centre for Indigenous People in Murmansk Province’, under which the official ‘Council of Indigenous Peoples’ under the [Provincial] Government operates, also uses a logo inspired by the flag: a circle, left half blue and right half red, at the centre of which is a brown lávvu (a blue line symbolizing water), and a multicoloured line symbolizing the Aurora Borealis, the colours of the latter being from left to right red, yellow, green and blue.
