The University of Wisconsin Press publishes many fine books and encourages authors to write about their own projects on publication date. Here's the link to mine about Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, which came out earlier this month, along with the text below.
It was more than idle curiosity to
begin with, but not much more.
Up in the far north of Norway, on a
lamp-lit day in December, 2001, the Norwegian writer Laila Stien told me the
story of Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi. Or at least the little that was known
then of their story:
In the early twentieth century, a
Danish woman artist had visited Lapland and encountered a Sami wolf-hunter, by
chance, on a train. Later she inspired and helped this man write a book—Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami)––now considered
the first classic work of Sami literature.
I immediately had questions, but
for a long time, few answers. Who was this woman, Emilie Demant Hatt? How did
she end up in Lapland, or Sápmi, as the region is now called? What kind of
artist was she? And what was her relationship with Johan Turi?
I read her engaging travel
narrative in Danish, With the Lapps in
the High Mountains, from 1913, and Turi’s equally marvelous book in its
1931 English translation, Turi’s Book of
Lapland. And I included what I knew about the pair in my own travel
narrative, The Palace of the Snow Queen:
Winter Travels in Lapland. Each time I went to Scandinavia I made time to
do more investigation. I visited the museum in Skive, Denmark that owned some
of Demant Hatt’s artworks, and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, which held a
collection of fifty Expressionist canvases of Sápmi, all painted when she was
in her sixties and seventies. The Nordic Museum archives also possessed many of
her papers, including intimate letters from Turi, and her field journals from
the ethnographic trips she made to Scandinavia in 1907-1916. In Copenhagen I
visited the Ethnographic Collection at the National Museum, and pored through
eight boxes of letters, sketchbooks, and photo albums. But not until 2008,
after the Danish State Archives had put records of their holdings online, did I
realize how much more there was: several dozen boxes of material by and about Demant
Hatt were available. I’d suspected the woman was something of a packrat, and
now I knew that for certain.
By the time I realized the extent
of Demant Hatt’s archives, it was too late for me to feel properly frightened
or inadequate. I was enthralled. Each challenge—deciphering her handwriting in
letters and journals, learning all I could about Sami history, and culture,
meeting scholars in many fields, walking the same streets Demant Hatt had
walked––led me further. I translated her book With the Lapps and wrote an introduction. Then, because I was
deeply fascinated with another of her relationships, an adolescent romance with
the composer Carl Nielsen, I wrote a novel, Fossil
Island, and a sequel, The Former
World. Eventually I felt I knew enough to begin a full-length biography, a
project that would lead me deeper into the same questions I began with years
ago––Who was this woman, Emilie Demant Hatt? How did she end up in Sápmi?––but
which grew increasingly complex:
Who was Johan Turi, as a writer and
artist? How did Demant Hatt represent him and promote him as an indigenous
author? Was their work together ethnographic collaboration or something else?
How was Demant Hatt affected by the racial biology movement, much of it
directed against the Sami, in Scandinavia? How did her year in the United
States with her husband Gudmund Hatt, in 1914-15, and their contacts with Franz
Boas and other Americanists shape her ethnographic thinking? Why is her
pioneering fieldwork among Sami women and children and her folktale collecting
so little acknowledged? What was the impact of Sápmi on her visual art and how
were her Expressionist paintings and graphic work received in Scandinavia?
Every life has its mysteries and
one of the roles of the biographer is to dig them out through the careful
reading of letters and the charting of personal connections with other
historical figures. But even more important in writing a person’s life,
especially a life that is both significant and neglected, is a biographical
approach that looks at the context of the subject. Demant Hatt, born in 1873 in
a rural village in Denmark, traveled widely in her lifetime, not only to
Northern Scandinavia, but to Greenland and the Caribbean. She was a
self-identified New Woman, one of the generation of women artists allowed to
study at the Royal Academy of Art, who took advantage of changing times to
travel alone, far off the beaten path, and to marry a much younger man. She
lived through two World Wars, including the occupation of Denmark by Germany.
Her historical time period, particularly as it relates to changes in Sápmi, is
a crucial aspect of her life. She came to know Sami nomadic herders during a
time of transition, and she bears important witness to the injustices the Sami
suffered from their neighbors and respective states and to their efforts to
claim agency over their lives.
Demant Hatt didn’t live outside her
era and some of her attitudes may strike us now as patronizing. She was both
insider and outsider in Sápmi. Her friendship with Johan Turi was both loving
and conflicted. Yet it’s also possible to understand how unwaveringly admiring and
actively supportive she was of the Sami. In lively, insightful narratives, in
fieldwork notes, in folktale collection, and in her paintings, she’s left an
important record of a nomadic people and a northern world that continues to educate
and enchant.
