Lectures on Sami Culture & Religion in Seattle Aug 29

Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle opens a new exhibit  on Friday, August 31.
Eight Seasons in Sápmi, the Land of the Sámi People. This Wednesday, August 29, 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m,  two lectures on the Sami will be presented in conjunction with the exhibit: 

Duodji in the Sámi Culture
by Mari-Ann Nutti, director, Sámi Handcraft Foundation Sámi Duodji

Duodji (handcraft) is an important part of the Sámi culture. It is also a distinctive feature and an identity marker that the outside world recognizes. Duodji are the handcrafts made by the Sámi, based on Sámi traditions, design, patterns, and colors. Every Duodji article has a historic background and might be crafted with techniques dating back to the time the artifacts began to be used or might be ornamented with ancient design.

Today, Duodji is not only a refined artistic handcraft that is a joy to look at and that testifies to the skillfulness of artisans` hands, but it also radiates insightfulness and concern for the Sámi culture. The unbroken tradition extending through the generations preserves the expressions of design of a distinctive culture.

Traditional Sámi Religion
by Anna Westman Kuhmunen, curator at Ájtte, Swedish Mountain and Sámi Museum

Learn about Sámi religion before colonialism and the missionary work that started around 1600 and lasted almost 300 years. The main principles of the Sámi religion, the religious connection with landscape and animals, rituals in connections with different aspects of life, and the world-view of the noaidi, the Sámi shaman, will all be covered and augmented by photos of religious artifacts from museum collections.

Reservations encourgaged; to RSVP, call 206-789 5707 x10, or email rsvp@nordicmuseum.org.

We Stopped Forgetting

It was a warm evening in Seattle a week ago and what was more enjoyable than to head over from Port Townsend to the Swedish Cultural Center? In the retro bar (retro because original from the 1960s) I ordered a refreshing gin and tonic and sat at a table overlooking Lake Union. In a corner of the bar was a small group and one of the women was wearing Sami dress: gákti. A short time later Ellen Marie Jensen, raised in Minneapolis, now living in Deatnu-Tana in Northern Norway/Sápmi, got up to speak in the dining room.

She was in Seattle to promote her book, We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sámi Americans, recently published by the academic Sami press, ČálliidLágádus - ForfatternesForlag. The story she told was both personal and general. Personal because she shared her experiences growing up the daughter of a Norwegian-Sami from the coast of Finnmark without truly understanding who the Sami were or what their history had been. General because Ellen Marie Jensen shared some of her youthful confusion with thousands of descendants of Sami who immigrated to North America and found it more convenient to erase or forget their indigenous or mixed heritage and simply call themselves Norwegians, Finns, or Swedes. In many cases, as Jensen reminds us in her book, people have no idea they have any Sami heritage at all.

Jensen, however, had still-living relatives in Norway who helped her reconnect with the family tree. She took the further step of moving to Tromsø to study in the Indigenous Studies program at the university. We Stopped Forgetting is a slender book based on her master’s thesis, with additional material from some of the five Sami-Americans she interviewed. One of the Sami-Americans lives in Poulsbo, a Scandinavian community across the Sound from Seattle. Many of the Sami and their families who originally came over from Scandinavia to herd reindeer in Alaska in the late 19^th century eventually migrated down to Poulsbo and Port Angeles in Washington State. 

The photograph on the front cover is one that haunts Jensen; it currently hangs at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

Elsa Laula, Sami political pioneer

About five years ago, when I first began to look for information on the Sami politician Elsa Laula (1877-1931), I couldn’t find a great deal. I knew she had published an influential pamphlet in 1904, Facing Life or Death? (Inför Lif eller Dod?), the first written work by a Sami woman that covered a large number of important issues in just 30 pages. A fiery speaker, she was fearless in standing up to power in both Sweden and Norway. Elsa Laula Renberg (her married name) was considered a “foremother” and a “pioneer,” but according to some she’d never been given full credit for her role in helping found the twentieth-century movement for Sami self-determination.

Recently, when I went searching for her again on the Web I found that she was in the news in northern Scandinavia. A new one-woman play about Elsa Laula opened in Trondheim, Norway in February as a joint production of Nord-Trøndelag Teater and Åarjelhsaemien Teatere (a Sami production company). It will be shown again in the fall of 2012 and at a string of festivals as well. A video on You Tube shows snippets of Cecilie Persson’s performance (in Swedish).

There’s also a recent short video about Elsa Laula, in Swedish and Norwegian.

Elsa Laula, Sami political pioneer

Born in 1877 in the south of Sápmi, Elsa Laula went to Stockholm to further her midwifery studies. There she came into contact with Swedish feminists, including the progressive Ellen Key and the editors of the journal Dagny, which published news of Laula’s efforts on behalf of the Sami. Laula’s political work always included Sami women and in 1910 she founded the first Sami women’s association. She saw the contributions of women as essential to changing society. But she had begun her organizing as early as 1904, when she gathered a group in Stockholm to found the first association of Sami, which had its own newspaper. In 1908 she married the reindeer herder Tomas Rehnberg and moved to Norway, where she eventually had six children. But she continued her political work, giving speeches, writing articles and letters to the authorities, never giving an inch in her pursuit of justice for the Sami. In 1917 she helped convene the first Sami National Assembly in Trondheim. Elsa Laula died in 1931, from tuberculosis.  

"More Than Meets the Eye"-- Johan Turi's Art

Johan Turi, untitled

The Norwegian-Sámi scholar Harald Gaski has published a fascinating article, “More than Meets the Eye: The Indigeneity of Johan Turi’s Writing and Artwork,” in the most recent issue of Scandinavian Studies, a special issue devoted to Johan Turi. It’s the first time that Turi’s drawings and paintings have been given a close look. Gaski writes:

“I also hope to dispel the notion that Turi’s drawings and paintings were somehow naïve or simplistic; they are in fact, sophisticated contemplations that tread a fine line between realism and expressionism, depicting...more than would be possible to see from a single vantage point and reflecting Turi’s understandings of the world and of the activities that he sought to present in his book.”

That book is Muitalus sámiid birra, newly reissued in a Sámi version, and retranslated into English as An Account of the Sámi, by Thomas A. DuBois by Nordic Studies Press.

The illustration above is from the Sámi version and also appears in black and white in Gaski’s article.

Reading Emilie Demant Hatt in Helsinki in 2002

Queen Christina, by Sebastian Bourdan

I first read Emilie Demant Hatt's narrative about her time with the Sami in northern Sweden and Norway in 1907-8 in February of 2002, while sitting in one of the most beautiful libraries in the world: the University of Helsinki library in Senate Square. It was founded in1640 by Queen Christina of Sweden, though the main building dates from 1832. For almost a week I went to this library every day and sat in a book-shaded nook reading With the Lapps in the High Mountains in Danish. I'd just come down from the far north, my first winter in Lapland, and my mind traveled easily back to the dark and snow above the Arctic Circle. 

 In describing what I read years later in The Palace of the Snow Queen,  I wrote about her visual acuity: her painterly eye saw in the snow  "hyacinth blue light." I was at the beginning of my search for more information about Emilie, whose name I'd heard for the first time up in Alta in December. So far I'd seen none of her paintings. I sat dreaming in the library of one day translating her book into English. Finally I found the time in 2008 to concentrate more on this project, though it proceeded slowly. 

Now I'm preparing the manuscript for the University of Wisconsin Press, which will publish it with my introduction, notes, and a foreword by Hugh Beach in about a year. By that time it will have been eleven years since I spent many happy hours in the library (rotunda above). Most good things in life take patience; my time with Emilie has been and continues to be rich and absorbing. I've never had any doubt that it was work worth doing.

In 2006 the library on Senate Square in Helsinki became the National Library of Finland and this stamp commemorates it:

 

 

Driving a Reindeer Sled for the First Time

I've finished going over my translation of Emilie Demant Hatt's narrative With the Lapps in the High Mountains and am now working on footnotes. There are many passages I love in this book. Here's one that seems to capture her mix of humor and bravado. It takes place in the late autumn of 1907, when Demant Hatt was on a series of short migrations with the Sami family she lived with near Kiruna, Sweden.  

  "Finally, around November 17, we started moving away from Puollamåive toward the mountain of Tavanjunjes. It was the first time I would attempt to drive a sled pulled by a reindeer. Before we left, Sara ordered me to wear a heavy fur parka. Nikki said when he saw me, “Now you look like other people.” The dogs obviously felt the same; they no longer squinted distrustfully at me, and I didn’t need to do what I had before—to arm myself with a stick before going to the other tents. Lapp dogs have, like other dogs, a sharp eye for clothes, and as long as I wore woolen clothes (summer clothes—the fur parka was so heavy that for the longest time I tried to avoid it) here in winter time, I was suspect.

 "We had to walk the first part of the route away from the tents. Only nine inches of snow had fallen and tussocks and rocks two feet high stuck out everywhere. It was enormous work to plod forward in the snow and bumpy terrain with the physical weight of the fur on me. I felt my body inside this tremendous envelope like a thin pole that’s been loaded too heavily. 

 "In Sara’s string were two driving sleds, one for her and one for me, and when we came to more or less smooth sledding conditions, I was given permission to seat myself in the sled, if I couldn’t make progress any other way. This had to happen while the caravan was moving and the heavy parka didn’t allow me to be quick or graceful. I got myself placed in the little vehicle but the smooth conditions soon ceased and the ride went in uneven jerks between knolls and stones and dense willow thickets, where I felt like a cat whose fur is being stroked the wrong way. To make things even merrier, I had a barrel of salted fish in the tip of the sled to struggle with. It rolled around and pinched my legs while I, with my hands outside, had to hold the boat-like sled on a straight keel. Every once in a while the sled rolled over and Sara laughed when, after a short involuntary stroll, I tried to recover my place inside it with the fish barrel. She consoled me with the fact it could be much worse; once little Nilsa had gotten the sled on top of him, like a lid, and was pulled along under it. Such misfortunes are naturally common and always a subject for hilarity."

Translating Danish

I’m just now surfacing from a long happy period of writing and reading to find myself in 2012. I’ve had good news that the university press interested in my translation of Emilie Demant Hatt’s With the Lapps in the High Mountains, first published in 1913, is soon to make a final decision on bringing it out in English. The two readers’ reports have been positive and encouraging. This has sent me back to checking and polishing the translation of this wonderful narrative line by line.

It’s been a while since I read most of text thoroughly—and many of the changes are simply to insert a comma or a tiny missed word. But here and there I find an embarrassing mistake, for instance writing “apron” instead of “scarf” because I obviously was dozing off when I translated forklæde for tørklæde. Sometimes I decide that I’d like to change the English syntax a little or just use a more interesting word—a great chance to pore through my old Thesaurus. Perhaps it’s just that I’m more familiar with the material, but sometimes I think that my Danish actually has improved (Could it have been all those Leif Davidsen spy thrillers I read during the fall?).

I started out originally as a Norwegian translator. The written languages aren’t so different, but some things still trip me up in Danish—the same word but a different meaning (rar in Danish means pleasant; in Norwegian, rar is strange or odd). Danish seems to me to have longer, more Germanic sentences, a different rhythm. While Norwegian has a staccato speed of shorter or half sentences broken up by lengthier phrases. Demant Hatt’s book is full of paragraphs of independent and dependent clauses and a forest of semi-colons, many of which I transformed into shorter sentences. I tried to keep her wit and marvelous descriptive passages in English. I hope I have. It’s certainly been a pleasure to try.