Is sovereignty the criteria for being treated fairly?

The current woke/leftist position in Canada on this is "yes", broadly.

Eh... I think that position is largely derived from treaties guaranteeing that, and a local history of severe mistreatment. I don't know a terrible amount of how the Sami have been treated in the nordic countries, but I doubt it's a particularly similar situation.

Oh it very much has been. Things like forced assimilation were very much employed against Sami, as well as (in the UK) Celtic peoples, (Ireland) the Irish, France (Bretons) and others, seemingly mostly in Eastern Europe. And, while not indigenous, Jews and Romani have faced centuries of on-and-off slaughter, forced assimilation/conversion, expulsion, etc., culminating in the Holocaust. And that's just off the top of my head.

Looking at history is not that relevant to the discussion at hand. As far as I know, the Saami today are no longer being forcibly assimilated or otherwise genocided. Is there anything related to how the First Nations are treated that the Finns should apply to the Saami? Perhaps some regional autonomy could be better, if that's not really happening.

The other examples (Irish, Bretons, Welsh etc) I would argue live significantly better and have significantly more practical rights today than First Nations people do in Canada.

As for the Jewish people and Romani, the fact that they are not indigenous people makes it impossible to apply any lessons from Canada. It's not possible, or even desirable in any way, to create any autonomous Jewish/Romani regions, because that would imply forcibly displacing people. These people generally live intermingled with others in the states they inhabit, at most living in concentrated neighborhoods part of larger cities. And otherwise, their languages and cultural practices are already legally protected in the EU (with some major tensions around one particular Romani cultural practice, child marriages). This is not to say that there isn't anti-Roma and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe, unfortunately there is plenty, but the situation is so significantly different from the First Nations of Canada that there are few, if any, lessons to learn.

Not being treated fairly is a pretty good criteria. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001d059

In Sweden they have a separate parliament.

In Finland as well, although it's not really sovereign like national or municipal parliaments. The constitution does grant Sami and Roma people sovereign rights on their languages and culture.

You have to shoehorn the Sami into this comparison because they really only colonized the Nordic countries contemporary with the majority "European" populations. They weren't, in the same sense, indigenous, just... less western.

No. What you are refering to might be in regards to Uralification, while 50% of Saami undeniably have been indigenous population and were there before Uralics arrived there. And Nordics encroached on lands where even partly Uralized Saami were first. No one is arguing that Saami are indigenous to Oslo, but they were first in 80% of Scandinavia.

I don't think that 80% is true in either the geographic [1] or more practical sense. It's maybe 50% by landmass.

But more significantly, it's not the arable or densely inhabited parts; the vast majority of Scandinavians do not live on land where Sami ever lived. This is just a vastly different than Canada where every square inch was native land at one point. For example, Vancouver has Squamish-owned and developed land right in the middle of downtown, it's a big controversy!

I'm not trying to dispossess or trivialize the Sami or the injustices they did suffer, it's just a very different relationship.

[1] https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/the-sami-side-of-trom...

At least in Finland Sami lived in the southern as well, some still in the 17th century. Most southern Sami probably assimilated with the Finns.

Sami are part of the uralic people although they arrived to Fennoscandia some centuries before the Finnic. There were people in the area before the uralic people came but very little is known about them.

They got some sovereignty in Sweden with their own parliament etc (but its jurisdiction etc is limited). Can't really say if better or worse than Canada because I don't know enough about the laws in Canada.