Fosen Peninsula, Norway – A herd of reindeer running through thick, white snow sounds a bit like thunder.

It is a spectacle that has been replayed for at least the past 10,000 years on eastern Norway’s Fosen Peninsula and one that Maja Kristine Jama, who comes from a family of reindeer herders, is deeply familiar with.

Like most Sami reindeer herders, Jama knows every inch of this terrain without any need for a map.

Instead of going to kindergarten like most other children in Norway, she was raised living outdoors alongside the migrating reindeer. Reindeer husbandry in Norway is a sustainable activity that is carried out in accordance with the traditional practices of Sami culture. Reindeer also play an important role in the Arctic’s ecosystem and have long been a symbol of the region

“Reindeer herding defines me,” Jama says. “We are so connected to nature, we have respect for it. We say that you don’t live off the land, you live within it. But we see our lands being destroyed.”

Europe’s oldest and last remaining Indigenous people are under grave threat as a result of borders, land seizures, construction projects dedicated to the extraction of natural resources and systematic discrimination.

Yet, that creeping sense of suffocation has made the Sami reach out to another set of Indigenous people nearly 4,000km (2,500 miles) away, whose fight for survival they identify with: the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank.

Their own struggle for Indigenous rights and self-determination has turned the Sami into vocal advocates for the Palestinian cause.

“There is an instant urge to stand up for people who are being displaced from their homes,” Ella Marie Haetta Isaksen, a Sami activist and artist widely known for her singing, tells Al Jazeera.

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