Ivalo

Ivalo lay within the older Inari Sámi country, where fishing, hunting and seasonal residence long preceded the modern village. The Ivalo River was already a resource used by local Sámi households when new farmsteads began to appear in the eighteenth century. Its history cannot be reduced to the arrival of a single Finnish settler on unoccupied land.

In 1758 Henrik Michelsson Kyrö and the Inari Sámi taxpayer Henrik Henriksson Kuuva presented a proposed farm by the river to the Inari court. A dwelling and cowshed already stood there, and the applicants had obtained cattle. The court considered fifteen years of tax exemption appropriate for developing the holding. Other Inari residents expressed concern for their existing fishing rights, which the applicants said they did not intend to remove. Kyrö received the foundation document that July. This recorded negotiation shows farming settlement developing alongside Sámi land use, while the more intensive expansion of new holdings came only in the 1830s.