Living with the reindeer whisperers Photographer Erika Larsen first travelled to the region in 2007, flying to Stockholm, where she rented a car and drove northward to Gällivare. "I had always known about the Sámi," she says. On a trip to Norway as a child [Larsen has Norwegian roots on her father's side] I had seen a Sámi woman selling reindeer meat on the side of the road. It had stuck in my mind. She contacted an expert on Sámi culture and he provided three email addresses, one in Norway, one in Sweden and one in Finland. "They all wrote back," says Larsen, "but the woman from Sweden, Laila, invited me to visit her. A year later I took up her offer. Today there are around 70,000 Sámi. Their nomadic lifestyle is one of the last and unquestionably the best preserved instances of the hunter-gatherer existence practised by our ancestors. Their language, which Larsen found "hypnotic," is tethered to the natural environment, with very precise words to describe land, water and snow. Unsurprisingly there is also a rich vocabulary for reindeer. Fur, antlers, sex and age can be conveyed in such detail that a single deer can be isolated from a herd of several thousand. Reindeer calves being separated from their mothers (Credit: Erika Larsen) Compulsory language policies in Norwegian and Swedish schools in the mid-20th century did irretrievable damage to the Sámi dialects, which are now protected by Unesco. Larsen, now 37, stayed with the Sámi on and off for four years. In the beginning I would go for two weeks, then I began to visit more frequently and for longer stretches of time. Eventually I took a language immersion course in Kautokeino, and this was where I spent the majority of my time, living and working as a housekeeper for a family of herders. She sewed, cleaned and cooked for the family. Reindeer meat was a staple. Blood pancakes [reindeer blood mixed with milk and flour and fried in butter] were one of my favourites, as well as cloudberries. Young Sámi Sunna Kati stirs reindeer blood after a slaughter. The blood, which is used in cooking, must be mixed for an hour (Credit: Erika Larsen) Over time, she built up an exceptional trust, waiting months, even a year before she took a photograph. "I believe many of the people were wary of me to begin with and rightfully so," she says. The Sámi I met have their own voice and their own means of telling the world who they are. I wanted to show them I was there to learn. Often I was just silent and would watch. What you see in these photographs is what they taught me. There were times when Larsen was overcome by the experience, even frightened. The landscapes were so extraordinary. When there was a white out, sometimes I lost the horizon, and it felt like time and space did not exist. But at one point, I remember waking up in Kautokeino and I felt more at home than in my own home. Larsen continues to visit the Sami at least once, sometimes twice a year. "Some of the people I stayed with have come to visit me in New Jersey," she tells me. Aside from their astonishment at the level of security, they had only one comment. Coming from a region where temperatures drop as low as minus 25 degrees, they found America "hot." Follow @telephotography on twitter