Sami National Day

Today, February 6, is Sami National Day, celebrated mostly in northern Norway and Sweden, but important to the Sami wherever they live. In the Northwest, Pacific Lutheran University is hosting some events today from 4 pm on at their Scandinavian Cultural Center. 

In several Nordic cities and towns, it's Sami Week all week long. Tromsø, Norway has a busy weekend coming up: an outdoor market, reindeer racing, and lasso throwing championships in the main street. On Saturday night is a concert with world musician  Mari Boine and Norrbotten Big  Band.

The Nordiska Museet in Stockholm chose Sami National day to open their exhibit of fifteen paintings of Lapland by Emilie Demant Hatt: Memory of Lapland: Minnen av Lappland.

Look for more about this exhibit and a talk I'll be giving at the museum March 19 in the next posts.

Sami Shorts at the Nordic Lights Film Festival

Marja Bål Nango

Last weekend in Seattle the Nordic Lights Film Festival showed a great array of films from the Nordic countries. My friend Julie Whitehorn has posted detailed reviews of four Sami shorts on her blog Seattle Sami. 

All were fascinating in their different ways, and it was encouraging to see that three of them were student films made by Marja Bål Nango, a young Sami filmmaker. In reading about her afterwards I saw that she's been getting a good deal of attention in Norway and in Sapmi for her work. You can read more about her here.  I also read that she's doing a residency at the former home of the great poet, joiker, and multi-media artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää. Read more about him and his foundation here.

I'm reminded that Skabmagovat, the extraordinary Sami and indigenous people's film festival in Inari, Finland, is just ending today. Their focus this year, the 16th winter it's taken place, was Arctic people's films.

As described in the program's introduction by artistic director Jorma Lehtola:

For the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, film has become an important tool both in strengthening the identity and communicating with other peoples. The circumstances of production and the resources available vary, but the field keeps expanding. Therefore, Skábmagovat wants to have a broader look at the area.

Our special theme of the Arctic peoples covers Chukchi nomadism from the eastern corner of Russia, Inupiat drama in a Berlinare-awarded film from Alaska, the wisdom
of Inuit women from Nunavut, terror narration from Greenland, as well as Sámi stories on reindeer, bear men and mining.

I attended this film festival in 2002, in its early days, and wrote about Jorma Lehtola and the festival in The Palace of the Snow Queen. I always meant to go back, but it's not easy getting up to Inari every year. I remember the experience of sitting outside watching films projected on an icy screen in temperatures of minus 20 c. That year the focus was, as always, Sami films, and those made by filmmakers from the Brazilian Amazon. I recall how much I learned in just three days about worlds that would have otherwise been closed to me. Such is the amazing power of film.

Emilie Demant Hatt reading and slideshow in Portland January 10, 2014

 

 

 

 

The Friday Night Lecture Series

WHEN:  Friday, January 10, 2014, 7:30pm

WHERE:  Portland State University, Cramer Hall 171, 1721 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon, 97201

TITLE:  Talk and slideshow of the work of Danish artist and early ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt

PRESENTER:  Barbara Sjoholm

Emilie Demant Hatt (1873-1958) lived with the nomadic Sami in 1907-8 and later became a prominent artist in Denmark.  She helped Johan Turi write and publish his book, An Account of the Sami, which appeared in 1910 in an innovative bilingual Sami/Danish edition.  Her own book, With the Lapps in the High Mountains, is both an exciting travel narrative and an early example of participant anthropology.  Translated into English for the first time, it tells the story of her year with the Swedish Sami, and includes her own photographs.

Barbara Sjoholm is an award-winning novelist, nonfiction writer, and Danish and Norwegian translator.  Her other books include The Snow Queen:  Winter Travels in Lapland.  Ms. Sjoholm's translation, With the Lapps in the High Mountains, will be available for sale after the lecture.

*  *  *  *

The Friday Night Lecture Series is sponsored by the Scandinavian Heritage Foundation (SHF) and Portland State University, Department of World Languages and Literatures.  Lectures are held in 171 Cramer Hall, at PSU, 1721 SW Broadway.  The lectures are free and open to the public.  Refreshments are served next door in the PSU Finnish Room (Room 124, Cramer Hall) after the lecture.

For further information regarding the Friday Night Lecture Series or the Scandinavian Heritage Foundation, please contact SHF at 503-977-0275 or see SHF's website:  www.scanheritage.org.

The Snow Maiden

I often listen these days to the Classical Morning program that airs on Swedish Radio from Monday through Friday, but that's also available through the Internet. Their selection is always interesting and frequently includes women composers. The director and beguiling voice of the program is Erika Libeck Lindahl.

On Christmas Eve they featured Peter Tchaikovsky’s incidental music to Snöflickan or The Snow Maiden, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky, which premiered in 1873 at the Bolshoi Theater. 

Viktor M. Vasnetsov, 1899

There are variations of the snow girl, Snegurka, in Russian fairy tales. I remember one story from Andrew Lang’s fairytale series. Childless parents make a girl from snow, who comes to life and brings them joy. Eventually, of course, she melts when the weather warms. Another version, the one used by Ostrovsky and Tchaikovsky, has echoes of The Little Mermaid. The Snow Maiden is unable to fully love, even though she likes a shepherd. As soon as her mother allows her this gift, love makes her heart warm. And she melts.

Bodil/ Sven

Last week, hurricane-force winds and storm surges knocked around the countries of Northwestern Europe, including Denmark and Southern Sweden. A few seaside towns in Denmark were evacuated and the major bridges closed, including the Øresund Bridge from Denmark to Sweden. Trains stopped running and the Danish headlines shouted that Bodil was on its way and Bodil was here. Floods followed and the winds even toppled the tall Christmas tree in Copenhagen's City Hall Square.

Until recently Danish storms were either unnamed or named for the dates they occurred on. This past October, huge winds swept through Denmark at almost 200 km an hour, the highest wind speed ever recorded in the country. That storm was initially known as the St. Jude Storm, but the Danish Meteorological Institute retroactively decided to call it Allan, perhaps with the idea that since such storms were likely to become more frequent due to climate change, they should have their own personal names. So after Allan came Bodil.

At least Denmark called the Category Two Hurricane Bodil. The Swedes decided to call the storm Sven. This wasn't simple contrariness; in fact Swedes claimed that Sven was Sven before Bodil was Bodil.

Did the storm undergo a gender change crossing the body of water that separates Denmark and Sweden? In some places the media decided to play it safe, and the words Bodil/Sven appeared on TV screens beneath scenes of storm-tossed waves and smashed boats and submerged houses.

A Danish site observed that according to Danmarks Statistik, nine people in Denmark are actually called Bodil Storm. Additionally, 13,250 women have Bodil as their first name and 1,866 Danes have Storm as their last. Employees at the Danish Meteorological Institute said they wanted a first name that was fairly well known, so that no one would feel particularly "singled out." 

The British seem not to have worried overmuch about hurting anyone's feelings.The European Windstorm Centre, a UK-based forecaster, gave the storm the name Cameron.

Healing with Frogs

 At the SASS conference last May in San Francisco Tom DuBois, a folklorist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, presented an engaging paper on his work with a grad student, Jonathan F. Lang. The two of them had teamed up to investigate the science behind the medical healing practices that Johan Turi described in his books An Account of the Sami (1910) and Lappish Texts (1918–19). Although the practices often sound arcane, DuBois rightly supposed that many of them must have been efficacious enough to have been remembered. Lang researched these healing treatments, many of them related to ethnobotany and animals, and DuBois supplied the context for Sami folk healing in Northern Scandinavia a hundred years ago. 

Their scientific paper, “Johan Turi’s animal, mineral, vegetable cures and healing practices: an in-depth analysis of Sami (Saami) folk healing one hundred years ago” is now available online from the Journal of Ethnobotany and Ethnomedicine.

I recall when read An Account of the Sami (in its earlier translation by E.Gee Nash, Turi’s Book of Lapland), that I was struck by Turi’s references to treatments using frogs:  “The frog is a creature that, if one dares takes it in one’s hand and the frog happens to pee, that hand acquires healing power. If one only presses an affected area with such a hand, the pain will diminish at once. And the frog is also a remedy for when one has skin eruptions around the mouth: one presses and rubs the frog on the affected area.”

Eeww.

But it turns out that the Sami were on to something. As Lang found in his research and literature review:

“The ways in which Turi suggests to use frogs—i.e., either to directly rub a live frog on the affected area or to ingest a frog dried and cooked in milk—suggest the presence of bioactive compounds in frog skin. In the 1980’s it was discovered that frogs secrete antimicrobial peptides in their skin. These peptides inhibit the growth of bacteria and fungi, and induce osmotic lysis in protozoa.”

The article has many more fascinating links between science and Sami folk healing.  

Sami rapper Nils Rune Utsi

One of the things I find most interesting about doing public readings on anything to do with Scandinavia and the Sami (most recently during my promotion of With the Lapps in the High Mountains) is coming in contact with people's yearning for the Nordic countries based on family lineage, travel, and reading. In addition, people sometimes come up and tell me  that they have always dreamed about visiting Lapland or are interested in Shamanism. There's a romantic aspect to the many questions about drumming, otherworldly journeys, and especially joiking. My interest in the Sami tends to be a little more cultural/historical and political,  but I also love joiking, both historic joiking and more contemporary adaptations. Here's an example of how the Sami language continues as a living tongue through the medium of rap.

Nils Rune Utsi is a Sami rapper from Maze, a village not far from Alta in Northern Norway. There was a recent spotlight on him from the BBC, complete with rap music.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23497131