Lovisa Negga

It's time for some music on this blog! Lovisa Negga is young French-Sami electropop singer from Linköping, in Sweden. I came across her when checking out the events at Umea University's Sami week, currently in progress. Program here.

Herdswoman

 This February 6, at 3 p.m. Pacific Lutheran University celebrates Sami National Day with a program that begins with the showing of the film Herdswoman, about three generations of Sami women reindeer herders.

"Aina, Elisabeth and Lisa belong to different generations. Their stories reflect life in Sápmi (Lapland) and the transition from nomadic existence to modern society. The film relates their pleasure in working with the reindeer. They live with and for their herds. When a court case questions their ancient rights to the reindeers’ pasture their life as reindeer keepers is at risk."


I love this photograph.

At 7 p.m. Harald Gaski will lecture on  “Celebrating the Return of the Sun and the Recognition of a People: The Sami National Day in the Context of Myth and Poetics.”

For the full schedule and  more information

Mumintrolls Meet Liv and Ingmar, only in Seattle

For those who live in the Seattle area, next weekend is a time to see Nordic films on Queen Anne. I'll be there--can't wait to see a short film about the Mumintrolls (Moomins to English speakers) and a documentary about Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman, among many other fine offerings.

Nordic Lights Film Festival
January 18 - 20, 2013

"This cutting-edge cinematic event offers an immersion into the world of Nordic films, focusing on contemporary, award-winning feature-length films, documentaries, and short films from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, presented at the SIFF Film Center (at Seattle Center)."

New Emilie Demant Hatt website

I've now launched a stand-alone website about Emilie Demant Hatt. Although it's still in progress, the site has pages about her life and art and one dedicated to With the Lapps in the High Mountains, which is in production now with the University of Wisconsin Press and will be published in May.This is my translation from Danish of Demant Hatt's remarkable and engaging book of traveling and living among the Sami of Northern Scandinavia in 1907-8.

I'm really pleased with the cover, which features a painting by Demant Hatt from 1940, "Ice Bridge," and thrilled that Hugh Beach, an American professor of anthropology who lives and works in Sweden, wrote a  foreword. Professor Beach is the author of one of my favorite books of all time, A Year in Lapland: Guest of the Reindeer Herders.

I'm also delighted with some of the book's advance blurbs including this one by an anthropologist whose work I admire greatly, Luke Eric Lassiter. He's written The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, as well as many incisive articles about the art and challenge of collaborative ethnography.

“Emilie Demant Hatt’s With the Lapps in the High Mountains is an important and significant contribution to the history of anthropology and ethnography. Weaving artful description and personal narrative, Demant Hatt recounts a story that, until now, has been largely unknown to English-speaking anthropologists and ethnographers. Many perhaps know of her collaboration with Johan Turi, but this work sheds further light on Demant Hatt’s role as an observant participant involved in the daily lives of Sami people. Thanks to Barbara Sjoholm’s careful and skillful translation, Demant Hatt’s work is fortunately now available to a much larger audience.”

                                                                                                  -- Luke Eric Lassiter

Umeå--European Capital of Culture 2014

It’s not quite 2013 yet but the northern Swedish city of Umeå is preparing for its year in the spotlight of the Midnight Sun as the 2014 choice of the European Capital of Culture. Each calendar year the European Union chooses one city to organize events that showcase national cultural strengths and have a European dimension.

This coming year Marseille is the designated city and its offerings look fabulous. Umeå won’t be able to match Marseille’s Mediterranean warmth and food, but the north of Sweden (besides its beauty, light, and cloudberries) has something that France doesn’t—the Sami. Umeå is using this opportunity to integrate Sweden’s Sami heritage into its programming. For a start the whole year of cultural offerings is organized around the eight seasons of the traditional Sami Calendar, beginning with Deep Winter––Dálvvie in Sami. For offerings season by season, take a look here.

I love the sound of Deep Winter (in the Swedish-language version of the program they just call it Vinter, which doesn’t have the same ring). If I lived in Sweden I’d love to visit Umeå several times over the course of 2014 for the exhibits and changing round of festivals. I’ve never been to this university town 600 kilometers north of Stockholm, which, for the record, also has more young vegans than anyplace else in Sweden, and a rocking music scene. 2014 will also see Sweden’s first women’s history museum open in Umeå. Another compelling reason to start saving.

From the festival website. Mini-golf in Deep Winter?

For more information about Umeå see their visitor site.

Reading Swedish

I've been reading in Swedish for the last month or two, one academic text, various articles, and for fun, two thrillers--one by Henning Mankell, Hundara i Riga (The Dogs of Riga) and En Helt Annan Historia (A Completely Different Story) by Håkan Nesser, which was absolutely fantastic.

I don't read Swedish as well as Danish and Norwegian. Often, especially after a long absence of reading any Swedish, it's quite difficult to begin.

It's as if, when I look at the page of Swedish text, all I see is a smudged glass window spattered with tiny bugs over the a’s and o’s. Through the smeary window I glimpse shapes moving––People? Cars? Bears?––but I can’t make them out. What’s the story here? What is the meaning? I try to focus on single words that I don’t know or don’t remember and look them up in the pale yellow dictionary. I calm my rising panic (None of this makes any sense) by reminding myself that I’m looking at roman characters, complete sentences with a familiar structure, and that I can and do read two other Scandinavian languages.

Norwegian and Danish are closely related to Swedish, though with distinct verb endings and grammatical peculiarities—and yes, of course, different words and often quite dissimilar spellings. It often helps to move my lips as I read a sentence. The sounds of Swedish are similar to Norwegian, but the phonetics are written with different letters. As if this sentence I’m writing reads thizz centans reeds. Sometimes when I read aloud a Swedish word I don’t recognize I find it’s just a Norwegian word, disguised. Then, sometimes if I’m lucky the meaning of the whole sentence snaps into place, the bug-speckled window begins to look less greasy and, fitfully, I see the shapes behind. No, it’s not a bear, it’s a second person. They are getting into a car and going downtown, they are having a conversation about their relationship.

  

If I’m making my way through an academic text, I begin to see the passive verbs, the cautious, repetitious phrasing, the multitude of qualifiers. If I’m reading a thriller, there are welcomes stretches of dialog and violent events that keep me focused. Wait, who is murdering whom? In English the slight different between he and she doesn’t trip me up; in Swedish I can mistake han (he) for hon (she). Reading thrillers helps me with my Swedish; I read faster and look up fewer words, guessing often at their meaning from the context. My brain no longer complains, I can’t read this—it’s Swedish for god’s sake.

I no longer notice the bugs and the window has only the light fog of mist, just enough to make the moving figures and the landscape on the other side a little hazy and romantic. Otherwise I see what the characters are doing, I can almost touch them, hear them. And the longer I read the more vivid and real the world on the other side of the glass will become, so at times I will be on the other side, in that room or city, on that boat, under those cliffs, dipping my toes in water that is cool and soft and real. The words, if I am lucky, will vanish altogether.

"Remapping the Tourist Road"

 

The new issue (42) of Harvard Review is out and I’m really pleased it includes an essay of mine, “Remapping the Tourist Road.” A few years ago the American-Scandinavian Foundation gave me a travel grant that allowed me to retrace some of the old reindeer migration routes made by the Karesuando Sami over the Swedish mountains to the summer camp of Tromsdalen outside Tromsø, Norway. The Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt went with them in the spring of 1908, probably one of the only Europeans to have ever made that difficult trek. She writes vividly of the difficulties of snow and ice, of crossing melting snow bridges over rushing rivers, and of carrying babies and puppies and trying to keep them safe.

Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Tromsdalen, Norway

In Tromsø I was able to meet Hans Ragnar Mathisen, a Sami activist and artist well known for his detailed maps of Sápmi in which he puts in all the Sami place names. His important work is part of my essay. I also write about our visit to the now-vanished summer encampment of Tromsdalen and to the Tourist Road, where Nordic and foreign travelers en route up and down the Norwegian coast used to come out to view the reindeer––and the Sami living their daily lives in the turf huts.

Here's Hans Ragnar in his art studio (note reindeer antlers). You can see more of his art and his full-color maps on his website: http://www.keviselie-hansragnarmathisen.net/