Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra in the Swedish Cultural Canon

 

 Still from The Seventh Seal 

In late August this year the Swedish government published a 300 page document titled A Cultural Canon for Sweden, explaining its rationale and listing one hundred works of art, literature, architecture, and concepts like “Allemansrätten,” the right to explore and enjoy nature on both public and private lands. 

The list, which includes the paintings of Karin and Carl Larsson, the children's book by Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, and the Seventh Seal by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, has its roots in an agreement between political parties, dating back to 2022, when the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing party, came in second in the popular vote. This party, once considered extreme, but now able to leverage concessions from the traditional parties, made it a priority to create a cultural canon that would distill Swedish culture into a list of works and activities decided upon by a committee appointed by the government. The underlying agenda, many felt, was to limit the concept of Swedishness and exclude the contributions from more recent arrivals to the country; others, especially on the right, felt it would establish criteria for assimilating immigrants by pointing out what they needed to understand about Sweden.

There was push-back from the cultural sector as well as from many Swedish citizens even before the cultural canon was published. A New York Times article from May 26, 2025, quoted Ida Ölmedal, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:

 Most of the culture world is against the idea of a canon. . . . It’s being used as a populist tool to point out what is Swedish and not, and to exclude some people from the concept of Swedishness.”

 “But even if it wasn’t nationalist, it would still be wrong for politicians to point out what is important culture,” Ölmedal added. “We have a proud tradition of the government financing culture without trying to govern culture — and this is an exception.”

Johan Turi

A friend of mine in Stockholm emailed me the report with its list of the 100 items of cultural importance; she pointed out at least one choice that would have been surprising twenty or thirty years ago. That is the inclusion of Johan Turi’s book, Muitalus sámiid birra, published first in a North Sámi-Danish edition in 1910. This title, known in English first as Turi’s Book of Lapland and in its current translation by Thomas A. DuBois as An Account of the Sámi, was first translated to Swedish in 1917 and reissued by a Swedish publisher in 1987. As far as I know, it has been out of print in Sweden for many years. The committee noted in their reason for the choice that “The oral Sami storytelling tradition has been easy to overlook in a writing-oriented culture such as Sweden's,” adding that, “This creates a multifaceted whole that transcends the sharp Western boundary between realism and magic.”

Today, Johan Turi is generally better known in Norway (he was born there) than in Sweden, where he lived in the area around Lake Torneträsk. But that wasn’t always the case. During his lifetime he was famous in Stockholm and around the world, visited by well-known figures of the time. On his eightieth birthday in 1934 he was presented with the king’s medal. Most of his archives are in Sweden, including Nordiska Museum in Stockholm, which holds his artwork and the original notebooks and manuscripts of Muitalus sámiid birra, which he was encouraged to work on by his friend, the Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt. She  translated his work and acted as the managing editor of the eventual book in 1910. A government agency in Uppsala, the Institute for Language and Folklore (ISOF: Institutet för språk och folkminnen), which studies and collects materials concerning dialects and folklore in Sweden, has recently given more attention to Turi on its website (only in Swedish).

Johan Turi on his 80th birthday

Among the eight other authors of prose works listed in the report are Gosta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf, Getting Married by August Strindberg, The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg, along with the greatest of all, Pippi Longstocking. These classics make the inclusion of Johan Turi’s remarkable book based on his life as a hunter, herder, artist and writer, even more interesting, especially since Turi takes a critical view of Sweden’s treatment of his people. The Swedish Democrats, with their emphasis on nationalism and barely disguised contempt for Jews, immigrants, and all minorities in Sweden, don’t generally have a positive view of past or contemporary Sámi culture.

So, in spite of the limits of the Cultural Canon of Sweden (as many have complained, “Where’s ABBA?!”), I can only say bravo to the inclusion of Muitalus sámiid birra. It is time.

 

 

The Art of Recalling: Art Essay in New Issue of Feminist Studies

The most recent issue of the well-respected and long-lived journal Feminist Studies has just been published and my essay about the artists Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi is included. "The Art of Recalling," illustrated by works in oil and on paper by Turi and Demant Hatt, considers the effect that Turi’s drawings for his book Muitalus samiid birra had on Demant Hatt’s own artistic career as an expressionist painter. 

I've been studying Demant Hatt's life and art a good long while, but it was only when I read Harald Gaski's insightful essay, More than Meets the Eye, a couple of years ago in Scandinavian Studies that I began thinking about the ways in which Demant Hatt and Turi had a reciprocal artist partnership as well as an ethnographic collaboration.

The designer has used the same painting of the ice bridge that the University of Wisconsin Press put on the cover of With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman Among the Sami 1907-8, my translation of Demant Hatt's travel ethnography of her time in Lapland. The imagery of the reindeer going up the mountain  can now be compared with Turi's drawings inside, which also show simplified figures of reindeer ascending and descending the mountains.

The Exhibit “Memories of Lapland” at the Nordiska Museet, Stockholm

Sami Working with Reindeer, 1943. Emilie Demant Hatt, Nordiska Museet

It was about ten years ago that I first saw Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings of Sápmi, over a dozen of which are now on display at a new exhibit at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. I’d been interested in this artist, writer, and ethnographer for a couple of years by then and had begun researching her life. I’d also sought out what I could of her artwork.

Mette Dyrberg at the Skive Art Museum in Denmark was one of the first to welcome me to the world of this relatively unknown artist. This museum, near where Demant Hatt (1873-1958) had grown up by the Limfjord, had been given a number of oil paintings from Demant Hatt’s own collection, as well as watercolors and sketchbooks. I understood from an illustrated catalog, published in 1983 by the Skive Art Museum, that Demant Hatt’s style changed radically in the mid-1920s and that most of the finely painted but more realistic work owned by Skive didn’t always represent her mature, Expressionist style, which was more dramatic and whose subject was often landscapes of the far north. Some of these Sápmi landscapes, privately owned in Denmark, were reproduced in the catalog. Others were said to belong to the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm.

Nordiska Museet, Stockholm

The story went that, near the end of her life, finding no public institution in Denmark that would take her many paintings of Sápmi, Demant Hatt sent around fifty of them to the relatively new “Lapp Department” of Nordiska Museet. I was tantalized by the thought of those paintings which, according to all accounts, had only been displayed once at the Swedish museum, in 1953, along with those of six other Swedish painters who also used Sápmi as a motif.  After this exhibit the paintings went into storage and there, apparently, they’d remained ever since. 

The Nordiska has Sweden’s largest collection of Swedish cultural-historical artifacts. Designed to look like a Danish Renaissance palace, one of the museum’s most striking features is the massive interior hall, with a marble floor and many marble columns. It was finished in 1907, the same year that Emilie Demant Hatt began her long stay among the Swedish Sami at Lake Tornesträsk. Artur Hazelius, its founder, began collecting everything to do with Sweden’s pre-industrial, vanishing culture—from handmade furniture to folk art, from regional dress to actual buildings––back in the 1870s. The popular open-air museum near the Nordiska, Skansen, is where many of the buildings were reassembled.

The Sami Exhibit, Lapparna, opened 1947. Nordiska Museet

Before the Nordiska was built, Hazelius had displayed some of his treasures in the Scandinavian Ethnographic Collection in the city center. This included many objects from Sápmi—sleds, tents, and all things to do with reindeer, as well as domestic utensils and sacred drums. The Sami collection has had a long, fascinating, and sometimes contentious history at the Nordiska, with the permanent Sami exhibits reflecting the fashions and prejudices of the time. The current exhibit is short on objects and uses more multimedia to allow the Sami themselves to speak about their varied lives and memories. Some of the Nordiska’s artifacts have been transferred to Áttje, the Sami museum in Jokkmokk, Sweden.

           

In 1939 the anthropologist, journalist, and photographer Ernst Manker became the director of the museum’s first attempt at a more scholarly and organized “Lapp Department. ” A strong proponent of the Sami, Manker wrote a number of books about the herding culture, edited an academic imprint, Acta Lapponia, continued to collect artefacts, and rearranged the Sami permanent exhibit into what was, for the time, a more progressive display. Manker invited  Emilie Demant Hatt to Stockholm in 1940 to receive the Hazelius Award for her work with the Sami and particularly for her collaborative translation of Muitalus sámiid birra/An Account of the Sami by Johan Turi. The original event, an ambitious “Lappish Evening” at the museum, which would include a speech by Demant Hatt, was scheduled for April of 1940­­—but had to be postponed, when the Germans invaded Denmark. Later that year Emilie Demant Hatt did manage to get to the Nordiska, to give a much admired speech in praise of Johan Turi. Karl Tirén, who had collected Sami joiks on wax cylinders early in the century, and Israel Ruong, a Sami ethnographer and linguist, who was also a joiker, appeared with her that evening.

           

From this evening, a friendship between Manker and Demant Hatt grew up, and it was Manker who invited her to donate photographs, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and field notebooks about her Sami ethnography to the Nordiska. He also welcomed the gift of the paintings, though the Nordiska was not properly an art museum, but one of cultural history. The paintings, while preserved as part of the substantial Sami collection at the museum, were likely destined never to be exhibited after that first show in 1953.

           

Some ten years ago, I was doing some journalism and working on my book The Palace of the Snow Queen and had various occasions to be in Stockholm. I decided to see if one of the curators at the Nordiska would let me have a look at Demant Hatt’s paintings. I was invited to meet an art curator, Maria Maxen, at the entrance hall; she led me downstairs and along a corridor. Through the doors of cage-like storage rooms I glimpsed swords and pewter tankards and painted chairs, multitudes of objects from Swedish culture that had come to rest here. One of these small storage rooms held the paintings of Emilie Demant Hatt. They were upright in storage shelves and we took them out one by one and leaned them against the walls and shelving so that I could take digital photographs.

I loved the paintings from the start. They were much larger than I expected, most of them, and the colors hadn’t faded, but glowed through a light dust of time in hues of vivid scarlet, warm topaz, and an icy northern palette of blues and grays and greens. I tried to grasp the immensity of what I was seeing: over fifty landscapes of jagged mountains with the swirling Northern Lights behind and women in red koftes boating around a deep blue, glacier-powdered mountain lake. Firelight spilled like molten lava from tents shaped like small brown volcanos and reindeer herders stood around bonfires warming their hands during a coffee break in the middle of a vast winter wilderness. Reindeer trudged over ice bridges and grazed in the midst of snowfields. And in many paintings were small scruffy dogs, sometimes staring up at the sky, witnesses and working companions.

           

Later I was glad I had spent more time photographing than simply staring, open-mouthed, at the unexpected riches in storage. The digital pictures I took that day have long been friends to me and I’ve called them up regularly on my computer screen to admire them and to describe them in my writing about Demant Hatt. 

Emilie Demant Hatt, 1910

I remember saying to Maria Maxen that day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if these paintings could be displayed? It was a question I was to put with some wistful regularity to curators at the Nordiska in years to come. I was able to visit the physical paintings twice more; by 2013 when I was there last, Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings, along with thousands of other objects, had been moved to a vast state-of-the-art, off-site building in a Stockholm suburb. All the canvases had been mounted on huge, heavy screens, so it was possible to see them all and all at once. I had an hour or more of communion with the work I’d come to know so well over the years and it was heaven.

On February 6, the Nordiska opened an exhibit titled Minnen av Lapland, “The Memory of Lapland,” which shows fifteen of these paintings. I’m honored that I’ve been asked to come to Stockholm and speak at the museum March19 about Emilie Demant Hatt’s life as an artist and ethnographer among the Sami of northern Sweden. My old friend Hugh Beach, a professor of anthropology at the University of Uppsala, will introduce me and say a few words in Swedish about Demant Hatt’s importance as an early woman anthropologist, and curator Cecilia Hammarslund-Larsen will speak about the exhibit. I’ll show slides, too, and give thanks. It is always an occasion for joy and gratitude when something you wish for—in my case the chance for a larger public to see some these marvelous, vivid paintings—actually comes true.

Most of the links in this post are to Swedish language sites, but Google Translate (on the Nordiska's site) will give an approximation of the content. A version of this blog post, along with more reproductions of Emilie Demant Hatt’s art, appears on the website emiliedemanthatt.com.

I’ll also be giving a talk about Emilie Demant Hatt at Kvinfo, the women’s library, in Copenhagen, March 24. Both my talks will include slides of Demant Hatt's photographs and paintings.

“The Art of Recalling,” an article about the influence of Johan Turi and Sápmi on Emilie Demant Hatt’s art will appear in Feminist Studies, summer 2014.

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.