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In this presentation, I want to explore the relation between ‘domestic’ reindeer and the notion of ‘migration’. My regional perspective is the Kola Peninsula, which is the Russian border with the Nordic countries. I introduce three contexts in which reindeer are ‘migrants’. The first and most obvious context is the annual migratory cycle of this species, which can vary according to territory and landscape. In a mountainous terrain, reindeer can travel to open mountain tops some 20-50km in search of summer breezes that protect them from mosquitoes, and come down in the forest for the winter, where lichen, their winter fodder is abundant. In tundra areas, reindeer migrate thousands of kilometers in the summer to reach the sea cost, and back in the lichen-rich interior in the winter. 

The second context is the scale of tameness of domestic species, on which reindeer occupy a particular place. Reindeer can be tamed to a large degree and harnessed to sleds, and ridden like horses, if taught from a very early age. At the same time, if the connection with humans is not constantly reinforced, they quickly change their behavior and become fully independent. Feral is a category that captures this state when previously domestic reindeer left on their own live like wild reindeer despite their genetic differences from the latter. Can this be seen as another kind of migration, among domestic and wild (or at least feral) states of being? 

The third context are state borders, which can divide both humans and reindeer. Reindeer, in contrast to humans, however, have no concept of borders and do not voluntarily abide them. As a direct consequence of their migration between subjection to human will and freedom from it, reindeer sometimes escape human control and migrate across state borders. I discuss one example within the trilateral natural Europark Passvik-Inari, which includes one protected natural territory in Russia, two in Norway, and two in Finland. While on the Norwegian side, Indigenous Sami herders graze their reindeer within the Europark, Indigenous people had been excluded from the Russian nature reserve, where a fortress model of conservation has been the norm since Soviet time. Norwegian Sami reindeer, which occasionally cross the national border of Russia, are thus treated as migrants who destroy protected ecosystems and biodiversity in the reserve. In the final analysis, I will argue that migration is an important feature of reindeer ecology and reindeer can be an important species in problematizing and reworking dominant theories of migration and ecology.