Kittilä

Kittilä lies in the river and forest country of northern Finland. Forest Sámi families lived here by hunting and fishing, moving between seasonal resource grounds. Kaukonen was a Sámi settlement and a seventeenth-century market and meeting place on the Ounas River.

The area belonged to Kemi Lappmark. The first Finnish farms appeared in the seventeenth century, and settlement expanded during the eighteenth. A small church near an old Sámi winter village was built around 1605; later Kittilä residents used the church at Sodankylä. New farming communities and church administration changed an already inhabited landscape.