Máret Ravdna Buljo

Sámi duojar, food-artist and traditional knowledge keeper and practitioner

For Jiennagoahti Máret Rávdna has created “Čohkkát-gáma”, an amazing duodji piece taking the form of an enlarged Sámi footwear. It becomes a unique “listening furniture”. 

Máret Rávdna has prepared the reindeer hides, sawn the gámas and filled it with reindeer hair, wool (from Røst), bladder-sedge (Carex vesicaria (rievdnelukti)  or  Carex aquatilis (gámasuoinlukti), traditionally used by Sámi peoples to keep feet warm and dried when prepared traditionally). The gámas is also filled with a particular type of moss the Sámi used in the Sámi cradle board; the Gietka. The gámas is representative of all Sámi peoples, even if there are local variants and different skin/hide used for different regions (seal-calf/reindeer hide), and was the last piece of clothing to be visible among the Sámi in the many hundred years of colonization and the final “Norwegification period”.

Máret Ravdna Buljo (b. 1977) is a Sámi chef, food- and cultural communicator and runs the reindeer farm Boazovázzi in Lødingen in Nordland with her husband. Buljo was the first Sámi recipient of the Ingrid Espelid Hovig Food Culture Prize in 2019 and is particularly focused on communicating Sámi knowledge about sustainability and ethics in regard to animal welfare and resource utilization.