How did so many Indigenous Sámi artifacts end up in private collections and museums outside of Sápmi? And why were collectors only interested in certain types of objects? American non-fiction writer, journalist, editor, and translator Barbara Sjoholm discusses the history of ethnographic collections and the future of cultural repatriation in her latest book, From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture.
TRANSCRIPT
Barbara Sjoholm: I got interested in Sápmi after making a trip about 20 years ago up to the north of Scandinavia, and I thought, “I'm going to write some journalism on winter travel,” and from that I learned more and more about the Sámi. I had a lot of preconceptions and fantasies, like most people, of what the north was, but the more people I met who were Sámi and the more events I attended, I saw that there was really something here that I was curious about. I think if you're interested in Scandinavia, you pretty much have to be interested in Sápmi and I don't know many people who think that way, but it seems so clear to me that it's such an integral part of Scandinavian history.
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Colin Gioia Connors: Welcome to Crossing North: a podcast where we learn from Nordic and Baltic artists, scholars, and community members to better understand our world, our communities, and ourselves. Coming to you from the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, I’m your host Colin Gioia Connors.
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The Sámi are Europe's northernmost Indigenous people, and their traditional territory, known as Sápmi, extends across the borders of what is currently northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The Sámi have experienced the colonial traumas of land theft, forced assimilation, and state boarding schools, not dissimilar to the experiences of many Native Americans and First Nations peoples. The colonization of Sápmi has taken place gradually over many centuries, beginning in the Viking Age with the collection of taxes and tributes, and continuing still today with land theft and land destruction in service of extractive mining projects and renewable energy production. Sámi people have utilized a variety of strategies of resistance over centuries of colonial interactions, and they continue to prove their resiliency today. In recent decades, that resistance has often taken the form of nonviolent protest and political action, which have afforded the Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland greater personal rights, access to state funds, and control of state cultural and educational institutions.
Barbara Sjoholm is an American non-fiction writer, journalist, editor, and translator of Danish and Norwegian literature. For the past twenty years, she has been writing about Sámi culture and history from an outside perspective that focuses on Nordic relationships with the Sámi. Her books include a biography of Danish ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt, who lived with a Sámi family in the winter of 1907-1908 and who helped Sámi wolf hunter and reindeer herder Johan Turi to publish his seminal Sámi-language book on Sámi culture, Muittalus Sámiid birra [An Account of the Sámi] in 1910. That biography is titled Black Fox. Barbara Sjoholm has also translated a Danish-language anthology of Sámi folktales and legends collected by that same ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt, titled By the Fire, and she has also translated Emilie Demant Hatt's ethnography of Sámi culture, titled With the Lapps in the High Mountains.
When picking titles for her books, Barbara has had to navigate the interests of various publishers who prefer language that will be recognizable to Anglophone readers. One perennial question is whether to favor the terms “Sámi” and “Sápmi,” which are used by Sámi people themselves, or the terms “Lapp” and “Lapland,” which have a longer history of use by Nordic and Anglophone outsiders. Unknown perhaps to many Anglophones, the term “Lapp” has its origins as a pejorative slur used by Nordic outsiders to refer to Sámi people. Nevertheless, many outsiders continue to feel positive associations with the terms “Lapp” and “Lapland,” though those feelings are dependent on centuries-old racist stereotypes that confuse real human beings with racial caricatures of “noble savages,” arctic “sorcerers,” or “children of nature.” Likewise, the idea of “Lapland,” and the specific word "Lapland," bring to mind a stereotypical winter wonderland akin to Santa’s workshop, where tourists can visit for a brief time and then return home with ethnographic souvenirs to decorate their collections.
Barbara’s latest book focuses on the stories of such objects, collected from Sápmi — sometimes by force — for hundreds of years and held around the world in private collections and museums, and which only recently, in certain circumstances, have begun to be returned. In Barbara’s writing, and in this podcast, the terms “Lapp” and “Lapland” are used only when quoting from historical sources, or when their use is necessary for discussing the historical context of their colonial meanings. Here is Barbara again to explain:
Barbara: I had asked my editor at the time—Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint—can I change it to “Sápmi?”—I think I started out with it as “Lapland”—when he said, “No, because no one knows where Sápmi is, [*laughter*] and you know, everyone knows where Lapland is.” And I'm like, “Well, not really.” You know, because there is no such place. However, I decided that you know, you really need both concepts in some ways. Because Lapland is this historic word and it's this imaginative word and it's so woven in with our imagination, and Sápmi is not even a real place exactly either, you know. Lapland isn't real. Sápmi isn't, you know— it doesn't have a border around it, but it's absolutely real in terms of the imagination and the political organizing and the language and so many other things. And so I like the idea of kind of playing off both of these. They don't overlap exactly, or they overlap partly, but they mean two different things. And anyway, I mean, that's years of thinking about this. I thought they're both useful concepts.
Colin: Barbara’s latest book is titled, From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture. It is an encyclopedic review of the collection and theft of Sámi artifacts into private collections and museums, and of the recent process of repatriation to return those objects to Sámi institutions, where they can better serve to educate and inspire Sámi people, and to revitalize Sámi culture. Amy Swanson King leads our interview with Barbara Sjoholm. Amy is a Sámi-American whose Sámi roots are in the Pite Sámi community, and she is a PhD student in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. Take it away, Amy.
Amy Swanson King: With that introduction, can you talk a little bit about the focus of your book From Lapland to Sápmi?
Barbara: Yes, I decided to start in the 1600's when the Sámi were being sort of missionized. So that the history of Sámi goes farther back than that, obviously, but after the Reformation, the Sámi began to be an object of interest to the outsiders in Sweden and Norway and Finland. And I think I got really interested just from spending time in museums—how all this stuff got into museums and how it was used to sort of prop up the stereotypes of the Sámi and tell the history of the colonizers, rather than the Sámi themselves. And so I think the focus was on the object at first, but actually the focus sort of changed, became a wider focus to talk about the relationships of Sámi people with the colonizers and the collectors and the anthropologists and the linguists. I I wanted to tell the story of the collectors as well as the collected, and what they were thinking when they collected. So it goes from the 1600's to the mid 20th century in terms of the collecting, and then after that there began to be conflict and new Sámi museums and completely different ideas about how this material should be displayed and/or returned.
Amy: The first part of the book deals a lot with the history of Sámi drums— with drums and their confiscation by the authorities, and oftentimes their destruction. What is the importance of the Sámi drum to the Sámi? What were they? And then why did they become objects of such persecution and confiscation?
Barbara: The Sámi have a long tradition of shamanism with noaidis, as they're called—the spiritual representatives of the community—and many circumpolar people in the Arctic used drums in ceremonies. In Sápmi as far as I understand, many families also had personal drums, household drums, and they would use them to predict the future or just, say, where the reindeer should go next, what the weather might be. And so there were probably hundreds, if not thousands of drums, and not only drums used by the noaidis in ceremonies of healing, say, bringing people back from illness or even death sometimes. And the Sámi continued what we would— what some people would call a pagan religion much longer than the Scandinavians. But certainly by the Reformation, the Scandinavians had long been Christianized. And so with the Reformation, the idea was that you have to forcibly Christianize the Sámi and you should get rid of these “instruments of evil.” And many missionaries like Thomas von Westen, who collected many drums in the Trondheim area, he believed that the Devil actually was inside the drum, and so that's why the drum itself had to be destroyed or confiscated so the Sámi couldn't use it anymore. And then possibly put in a museum or sold onwards. And so he collected at least 100 drums, sometimes by force. There were other places where the Sámi were forced to give up their drums, and then they were burned, both the drum and the person sometimes, to kind of wipe this out of Sámi consciousness. So a lot of the drums were curiosity objects for many people, kind of ‘curios,’ and they ended up with aristocrats and they ended up being sold onwards to museums in Germany and Spain and in Rome. There's a couple that are still existing in England as well. And they were part of that fascination with, sort of, magical acts, sorcerers, “Lappish sorcerers.” Probably the reason I focus so much on them in the early part of the book is that was the main thing that was being collected in the early days. Sometimes they would take sleds or furs or, you know, some silver, but the focus was really on the drum, and most cabinet curiosities had one of these “Lappish drums.”
Colin: For the collectors— were they worried about the Devil was in the drum? Were they worried about bringing the Devil into their homes?
Barbara: That's a good question. I don't suppose they were that worried? [*laughter*] Maybe they felt that their own Christian belief sort of protected them, or maybe the overriding desire to have something magical in in their collection or house that was precious, that was rare, that many people didn't have—that might have persuaded them that it was going to be OK in their in their attic. [*laughs*] Yeah, I don't exactly know. Very few of them actually left records of why they did these things, but I know that they wrote about them and said they were collecting them. You know, “My master, the Duke of Tuscany, is really looking forward to receiving the Lapland drum. It will, you know— And if we can get the beaters as well and the little frog thing that bounces on the top, that will be even better and we will pay very well for that.”
Colin: Yeah, it seems so bizarre. They're asking for all of these ritual items that are being forbidden from use.
Barbara: Yeah, some of the aristocrats were actually into witchcraft, like James VI—I think—of England. And they persecuted witches but I think they also collected things. You know, occasionally there's an exhibition in the British Museum that shows all the, kind of, strange things that people collected over the years, and you're right, you would think they would sort of think that those might harm them, but they still collected them.
Amy: Can you talk a bit more about why they found these objects so interesting? Why were the Sámi so well represented in these curiosity cabinets?
Barbara: Well, probably for some of the same reasons I mentioned that they were rare. They were—certainly in the beginning when they were collecting the drums—they wanted to maybe demonstrate how they had taken these things from the Sámi and that the Sámi could no longer use them. So in the case of Thomas von Westen, for instance, that was in the early 1700s, he sent all hundred drums that he had on to Copenhagen, and those were for everyone to look at— the scholars to look at, the king to look at— the king took some of them into his special cabinet of curiosities and it's actually lucky that he did, this king, because there was a huge fire in the center of Copenhagen in 1728 and almost all the drums were burned. So that was a significant percentage of all those drums that were collected. Later on, the ways that things were collected was different and they began collecting for anthropological reasons, and it was because they felt that the Sámi were dying out, and so they collected in the same way that people collected Native American artifacts and artifacts from South America and Asia and elsewhere. They thought that they belonged in museums and that it would also demonstrate something about the levels of development of the human race. You know, the Sámi were meant to be on a lower level and they were going to, of course, be assimilated or die out. And it showed, you know, the kind of more primitive tools, I think, that people thought that they used, the way they lived in their furs, the way that they traveled by sled and reindeer. That was all highly fascinating to these early ethnographers, so I think the ways that they collected them and then displayed them in the museums were all to show sort of the difference between the Sámi and the “regular” Nordic people who had put all that behind them a long time ago. And I think that also there was a lot of difference in the way that Norway, for instance, collected [in comparison] to Sweden. In Sweden, the Sámi were considered to be Nordic people, just more exotic, whereas in Norway they were considered to be completely ‘Other’ and there was a much more distant and punitive sort of relationship between the Norwegians and the Sámi in many cases.
Amy: And the Sámi did not often come out the better, to put it mildly. I wanted to read one passage from your book, from pages 16-17 where you mentioned a man who was put to death in the late 1600s, a man named Lars Nielsen:
‘The only man who was sentenced to death in Sweden was Lars Nilsson in Pite Sápmi. Nilsson initially handed over his drum, perhaps explaining to the authorities that his use of the instrument was only something he had learned from his ancestors and that he had no idea drums were prohibited. Perhaps, like others before him, he claimed that the drum was just a household item, something to forecast the weather or to check on the status of the herds in the mountain. Yet later, in 1691, when his young grandson died by drowning in a well, Nilsson became distraught. He found another drum and tried to resurrect the boy, as a noaidi might do. A couple of Christian Sámi men were sent to investigate this case of sorcery and found Lars Nilsson singing and drumming on his knees outside his tent. The Christians argued with him that this was the Devil's doing and he must stop; when Nilsson refused, they forcibly took the drum, after which he attacked them with a knife for interrupting his efforts to save his grandson.”
And this episode? Well, it felt like a gut punch to me as a parent— but also just as what kind of grief, what kind of tragedy must be happening in Sápmi to create these situations. Can you talk a bit more about Lars Nilsson and what happened to the Sámi who had their drums confiscated and were…were occasionally put to death?
Barbara: Yes, it was very tragic in many ways because it was really a destruction of not just the drum, it was a whole world view. And Sámi did become Christian because of this. Many Sámi actually tried to hold both in their minds. They did become Christian. They started putting symbols of churches and crosses on the drums, but they also wanted to sacrifice to the sieidi stone and they wanted to joik and keep the old ways, and they thought they should be permitted to do that. And the missionaries were having none of that. You know, they said, “You can't worship the Devil and also the Lord.” And in Lars Nilsson's case, he was actually reported by some other Sámi people who had been Christianized. And they saw him sort of grief stricken and pounding on his drum trying to bring his grandson back to life, and they reported him. And that's why he was put to trial and killed.
But I don't think we should forget that the Sámi also resisted in lots of ways. Thomas von Weston, for instance, in Norway, didn't always have the easiest luck getting the drums. People would run away. They would take their drums with them. Other people would— they would make a new drum and they would give it to the missionaries and say, “Here's your drum!” And then they would keep their old drum and no one would know the difference. They would turn them in, and people would also put them in nooks and crannies in the mountains. They would hide them. They put them in caves and some of them were never retrieved. And even today, hikers sometimes find fragments of these drums. And they're not often found, but they are sometimes found, and then they can be carbon dated. And they understand that, “Oh, someone hid this drum from the Christian missionary.” So I always try in the book to bring out the agency of the Sámi. I don't think we should forget that they were victimized by the colonizers for one minute. We shouldn't forget it. But I think it's also really important to show that they were fighting back in lots of different ways, whether it was joiking about the colonizers, whether it was about retreating into the interior, whether it was saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” but not, you know, making any changes in their lives. They were very successful, actually, at keeping the culture going for many hundreds of years after colonization, and that's the reason Sámi culture still exists today is because people never gave up, and they all always kept telling the stories and kept many things alive.
Colin: Barbara, can you explain what joiking is?
Barbara: Yes, joiking is a form of singing— vocalization, and it often is just the vocal sound rather than words. But many, many joiks also are a mix of, “The beautiful reindeer came down the mountain. Na, na, na, na, na,” sort of. And it's often very deep in the throat, so you're using, kind of, different vocal cords, but the really interesting thing about joiking is that it's, sort of, not about something. So it's not about the reindeer. It is the reindeer. So it's sort of like concrete poetry. You're joiking a person. You're joiking an animal. It's there as you joik it. So many people are given a joik when they are young and that's their joik, somehow, through the rest of their life. There are also joiks about something that happens to someone. So they're fond, personal kinds of of joiks as well. And in more recent years, they’ve become part of world music. The Sámi joikers are, you know— they've got different electronic backgrounds. They perform in a different way. They have big audiences like Mari Boine. Many people know about her. I know she was interviewed on your show.
Colin: Could you explain what you meant by joik as resistance?
Barbara: Well, they would be something, say—there's a possibility because they're in Sámi or because they're just vocalizations—that a colonizer-settler would not know that he was being made fun of. And the scholar Harald Gaski, a Sámi scholar, has pointed this out that they might be joiking about a bald-headed, stupid man. And the sheriff might be saying, “OK,” having no idea that this joik was about him. [*laughter*] So that's a form of resistance, I think—a mockery—if you're thinking about it that way.
Amy: You've also mentioned sieidi stones. Can you tell us what sieidi stones are?
Barbara: Yes, sieidi is a kind of—it can be described as an “altar,” and they are natural forms. Some of them are stones, big stones or small stones, and they would sacrifice an animal sometimes there, so there would be piles of antlers. Or they would put bear grease or even fish oil on the stone. And so like, sort of grease it, butter it, to give something back to this god, really. The sieidi stones are—they're also well, they're wooden objects too. So they're a natural object that might look a little bit like a figure, and there's still many left in the natural landscape. There were a number that were collected. Or sometimes the collectors said they wanted to buy, you know, a sacrifice stone and bring it back to Stockholm. And the Sámi would say, “OK, here's a rock. [*laughter*] You can have it.” [*laughs*] But many are still in the landscape. Then really, there's some really large ones too. They're part of the natural formations.
Amy: You talked earlier about how the Sámi were seen as dying out, as disappearing, and obviously that is not the case. The Sámi are very much still here, and their art forms are evolving, as well. And one passage that I thought was a really interesting thing in your book is when you were talking about how in the middle of the 20th century you have the museums in Scandinavia, such as in Stockholm The Nordiska Museum, are— they're collecting some art objects and they're starting to work with Sámi to collect some objects, but they're still collecting more traditional pieces or historical pieces. And I wanted to read one more passage from the book. This is on p. 142:
“Very few factory-made or imported products that Sámi people used in the 1940’s and 50’s became part of the Nordic Museum’s Sámi collection. Just like other Swedes of the time, many Sámi people in the northern provinces wore leather boots and woolen jackets, drove trucks, flew in airplanes, and used sewing machines and power tools. As more and more Sámi young people moved to Stockholm and other cities, studied at universities, lived in apartments, and took work in varied sectors of the economy, little of their daily lives was reflected in either the exhibits or the museum storerooms. The Lappish Department became, during the course of Ernst Manker's two decades as its director, a historical collection, organized and interpreted by a man who had first fallen in love with the world of the reindeer herders in the 1920’s and found it useful to keep the paradigm of the ethnographic present on view in the museum, even as that present receded further into the past.”
Can you talk a bit more about why that was so, and the effects it had, like, the effects on visitors to the museum who are having this view of the Sámi people, which is not necessarily a very contemporary current worldview?
Barbara: Yes, and that's the Nordiska— the Nordic Museum in Stockholm is a perfect example of this, because Ernst Manker actually was the director of the “Lappish Department,” as they called it, and he was quite pro-Sámi. He was a photographer. He was an ethnographer. He had many Sámi acquaintances and friends, and he believed that the Sámi culture was really worth saving. But he was kind of stuck in earlier views, and I think that's partly because the Sámi were sort of a brand by that time. This is what the Sámi looked like, and he had taken, you know, lots of pictures of the reindeer caravans, for instance, crossing the snowy. And they're really beautiful. And I think that he felt that that's what people want to see about the Sámi. This is the, kind of, “core” Sámi representation: is this long string of sleds led by reindeer and with a Sámi at the head. And so he took many, many pictures like that, and he took far fewer of Sámi, sort of, getting into an airplane and flying, you know, across the lake. And so some of how the exhibit that he arranged in 1949 is— It reflects his own personal view and his taste. It does not necessarily reflect, you know, what he was seeing out in the field as the 30’s and 40’s and 50’s sort of progressed. So I think we've got the role of the curators, we've got the role of the collectors, but the, you know, the people who arrange these exhibits were also thinking about, again, where do the Sámi belong in our culture, and what do people want to see, and what should we be showing? People didn't want to see Sámi driving around in cars, for instance. They wanted to see them as this kind of small, quaint, ethnic group in the north. And that was partly tourism—that people wanted that always represented. And in some ways they still kind of do. People go up to the north sort of looking for the reindeer and looking for the Sámi. Or they'll say to me, “Oh, I want to go up to the north and live with a Sámi family,” you know, “I want to live with them and see how they live”—their “exotic life” essentially is what they're saying. And that doesn't mean that the Sámi don't still herd reindeer, and it's actually a very important part of the culture and it's part of the history too. But the way that it was represented in museums and still is represented in many museums is historic. It's not necessarily the present reality. So there's a lot of complications in terms of museums and, sort of, the national problem, national issue in different countries of who the Sámi are and how they're going to be integrated into this society. And Norway, for instance, took a very strong, stern, assimilationist attitude in the late 1800's, and it's called “Norwegianization.” And they felt that the Sámi really needed to start conforming to Norwegian values and ways of life. And so they thought it would be easier for the Sámi if they assimilated completely and that therefore they all had to speak Norwegian. So they were forced to speak Norwegian in schools, or they were sent to boarding schools, much like in the United States and Canada, and a couple of generations lost their language, as you probably know. And in other ways they weren't allowed to own land unless they, you know, spoke Norwegian. And they were still, kind of, considered “lesser than.” But they were also being forced to assimilate. Whereas in Sweden, that didn't really happen. The Sámi were kind of glorified a little bit more and their way of life was very special, and it was also Swedish. And they didn't have an easy time of it with the authorities, who are continually sort of reducing the amount of land they had for the herding. But they weren't persecuted in quite the same way as they were in Norway.
Amy: Can you talk about ways in which Sámi have taken agency for telling their own story? Like, we're looking at these curiosity cabinets and the Nordiska Museum's collection efforts. We see a lot of people who are not Sámi telling the Sámi's story. But we are having much more of Sámi telling their own story with, like, Sámi-owned museums. And can you tell me a bit about when Sámi started having their own museums and telling their own stories?
Barbara: Yes, the Sámi have been speaking out for a long time, all through the 20th century. Some of the first initiatives started in the early 20th century with the Sámi Central Organization in Stockholm, and a newspaper, and then a pan-Sámi conference that happened in 1917 in Trondheim in Norway, followed by another one the next year. And particularly in Sweden, they never really stopped organizing—it was more disrupted in Norway by the war—but things really started getting going in the 1960’s and 70’s with younger Sámi people protesting. Hunger strikes in front of the Norwegian Parliament to bring attention to the dam that the Norwegian government wanted to build in Alta in the far north. And that was really a rallying cry and changed a lot of things. But for the first time, the Norwegian public kind of became aware of how cruel some of the policies were against the Sámi. So that was kind of the same time, the 1970’s, that people started talking about, “Why don't we have our own museum?” And there was a meeting, a kind of a pan-Sámi meeting between Finland and Norway and Sweden. And the Russians weren't involved at that point. I know they have not been able to always participate in some of the pan-Sámi organizations, but people started collecting material in the 1970’s and in Karasjok. They had actually collected it before the war, but when the Germans came through, they burned the building where the material was. But I think that Karasjok is one of the first Sámi museums— 1979, probably. Though Inari, Finland had also had an outdoor museum that later became a full-fledged museum in the 1980’s. So the 1980’s were really a big period for people saying, “We want our own museum. We want to have our own exhibits.” And in Norway, these museums also began to be gathering spaces, and they had kindergartens there, and they had libraries, and the same thing happened in Jokkmokk in Sweden, that the museum there—It had been the Jokkmokk museum, and then it became retitled Ájtte and they have a big library there. It's next to the Sámi Educational Center where they teach duodji and filmmaking and cooking and the Sámi languages. So these museums were not just sort of museums that you visit and leave, they actually were places of contact. They were places of communication. They were sort of the first centers that the Sámi had ever really had that were their own. And naturally, a whole dialogue started operating of, “We need more of our objects back. We don't want to just, you know, start from scratch. And why does the Nordiska Museum in Stockholm, for instance, have thousands and thousands of spoons and knives and clothing, you know, that are all warehoused? You know, we can't even get in to see them.” So they started talking about repatriation. And that's been a long time coming. At first the governments were, “No way.” And the museums were, “No, we have the climate-controlled rooms, and we don't know you, and we don't think you could take care of them.” Of course, they didn't always say that straight out, but that was the sort of idea that, “everything is safer with us” here in Stockholm and Oslo. And it's really changed. And it started really in, at first, in Norway in 2012, when the curator of the Norsk Folkemuseum, the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo at Bygdøy, Leif Pareli, that's his name, he and some other people said, “We need to start this now. We need to, you know, include Sámi people, and we need to think about how we're going to repatriate.” And by that time there were a number of Sámi museums, usually kind of community museums outside of Trondheim, in Snåsa, and up in the far north in Varanger, and also Karasjok, and one in the Tysfjord on the west coast in Drag. And so they had someone to talk to, and some of them did have climate control, and they did have trained staff members. And they just started all discussing how this was going to happen. And it was a long process because many of the objects that have been collected, especially the clothing and the furs, have been treated with pesticides. So they didn't want to just give those back. They wanted to detoxify them first. They also didn't really know where things came from a lot of the time. So who should they give them back to? There was not just one Sámi museum. They wanted to tie it to the place, so if they thought it came from the Varangerfjord in the north on the Barents Sea, they would, you know, be talking with the curators there and trying to identify it. So that was really an interesting, long process, very typical of the Norwegians where they want to do everything by consensus and they want to do the right thing. But is it the right thing? So there was a lot of discussion. So finally things started moving and it's still in process. But in theory now everything belongs to the museum or the Sámi Parliament, which is kind of in charge of the museums. In Finland, it happened really differently and it happened really quickly. The Finns had had for a long time— almost everything was at the National Museum in Helsinki, and they said, “No, no, no, we're not going to do this.” And there was only really one museum where it could go to in Inari up in the north. And then they just said, “No, let's do it. So, here it is!” You know, within one year they gave something like 2000 objects back and, but they did kind of rebuild the museum so it could receive all of this. In Sweden, it's very slow. The Nordiska Museum has continued to say, “No, we don't want to.” But they have been kind of putting a lot more things out on loan to different museums and especially the drums in Jokkmokk and another museum in Lycksele now have drums there. So it's only a matter of time when Sweden will also begin returning. Because none of the Scandinavian countries really do anything by themselves. They're all looking at the others to think, “Uh oh, they're having a little bit more moral courage than we are, and we need to maybe get with the program.” And this is all happening at the same time. There are truth-and-reconciliation committees going on in all three countries, so there's been a lot of collecting of stories, publishing of the stories— I don't, you know— They haven't gotten really to the reconciliation part, but they're getting a little bit more to the truth.
Colin: You mentioned that in a lot of these collections there's very little information on the provenance where these items came from. Are they serving a research or education purpose in foreign museums?
Barbara: I think they serve a purpose for the Sámi museums. I'm not always sure if they serve a purpose for the national museums because—and this is true of museums outside the Scandinavian countries, too. So Germany has about 1000 Sámi objects. And for instance, in Berlin, in the huge museum there, I think they only have one Sámi object displayed out of the 1000. And maybe they have 600 there and the rest are in other museums, but very tiny percentage. And they have no staff that knows anything about it. And so the Germans, to their credit, are really taking this on board and there's a big project going on now between researchers in Norway and Sweden and Finland to go to Germany and to start identifying these things. And they can do that because in lots of ways, some of these things are still being made in the same places where they were first made. So the patterns are the same, the materials are the same, the ways of doing things are the same. And it's been kind of an interesting community project, collective project. So there are curators, there are artisans, there are scholars, there are people looking in old books, there are people who are saying, “Yes, these are the kind of fish hooks we used in Lofoten for the cod fishing,” for instance, “these were the Sámi hooks.” And it's also going along with naming of things, the old names for things. So I think they are— It's been an educational process for everyone, for the big museums as well as the small ones and the specialty regional ones and the Sámi museums, yeah.
Amy: You mentioned in the book how some museums are also now commissioning new objects, new pieces of art and handicraft from Sámi. And in some instances, these commissions that are being crafted by Sámi artisans—Sámi duojárat—they are art that is being rethought and recreated, taking traditions in new ways. You mentioned a piece that the amazing duojár Anna-Stina Svakko made for the Nordiska Museum at their request in 2007, and it's a bag, and it has a lot of traditional elements to it, but it incorporates in addition to wool and reindeer leather and salmon leather and silk—it incorporates plexiglass. And I thought that was just an amazing example of how these traditions are being taken into new directions and new ways and being rethought, but also incorporating those traditions. And I liked that the Nordiska Museum and hopefully the museums, too, are commissioning these pieces, for in this case, their permanent collection. Can you tell me what museums are commissioning new pieces from Sámi artisans and what sort of directions do you see Sámi duojárat as going with their artwork? Their handicraft?
Barbara: That's a great question. Well, it is happening and it's happening in conjunction with sort of the Sámi duojárat—the “artisans”—also questioning, “Should my work be in an art museum, or should it be in a craft museum, or should it be in a museum that will display it as part of the ethnographic history of the country?” And many of them don't want to be put in compartments anymore. And so part of what's happening is that, you know, some of the artisans work in a very traditional way. They are really into the craft. And they are interested in reproducing, say, a milk bowl, which is a familiar object in Sámi duodji, just in the most beautiful way possible with, sort of, inlaid woods. And it's no longer actually used as a milk bowl and hasn't been for a long time because they don't milk the reindeer anymore. So it's kind of a large cup-looking thing with a handle. But some of those are really beautiful, and they've just taken it a step further into sort of artistic artisanship, and the same with baskets. You know, people don't use some of these large baskets anymore for cheese making. They might use them for bread or they might put them on the wall. But some artists have moved pretty far away from making duodji, and so they're using some of the same material, like reindeer skin and bones and fish skin. But it's for another purpose completely. So there's quite a famous piece of art that's by Máret Ánna Sara. She is a young artist who is getting quite well-known internationally, was invited to the Venice Biennale, and the last time I was in Oslo in January, February, I went to the new National Museum there. And they've got this piece by her hanging in a very prominent place when you first come in that shows reindeer skulls, sort of, hanging from fiber, and it's meant as a protest to the reindeer culling that affected her brother, who is a reindeer herder, and her family is a reindeer herding family. And so that's something you would never have seen in a Norwegian national art museum, but it's there now, along with a few other pieces. And they're not handicraft in the same way. And they're not ethnographic works that represent the Sámi’s daily, beautiful craftsmanship. They are something new. And a lot of people now know Britta Marakatt-Labba’s—they know about this tapestry that she made that is 76 feet long, and it's not hanging in a museum at all. It's hanging in Trømsø at the sort of student union building by the cafeteria. And it goes along a wall and it represents a lot of Sámi history. And she's sewn the whole thing on white linen and it's beautiful. It's just the most beautiful thing. It's called “History.” She uses the techniques of Sámi sewing. Sámi are great sewers and embroiderers, and they, you know, the colors and the imagery. But it's not a work of craftsmanship in exactly the same way. It's not used for anything. It's an art piece. So I see a lot of hybrid kinds of things going on. Some things are in art galleries, some things are in museums, some things are sold in jewelry stores and some things are in public places now.
Amy: You mentioned duodji. Can you explain what duodji and dáidda are and what the differences are between them?
Barbara: Duodji is “craft,” generally. Though, it actually has a larger meaning than “craft.” It also encompasses the collecting of the material and the lifestyle, really. It's a way of living and doing, so that if you're a duojár—an “artisan”—you pay a huge amount of attention to, you know, you go out into the forest and you take the roots from the cedar tree and then you soak them and then you strip them and then you wind them around the willow stick and then you bind them together. That whole process is duodji. It's not just the final object, the basket. Dáidda is a kind of newer word and it means “art.” And until the 1970’s, I believe the Sámi did not actually have a separate word for “art.” So it's kind of a loanword from Finnish, but it's become very important because now there is a whole tradition of Sámi “artists.” And starting in the 70’s, there was a group of artists that formed together to create the Sámi Artists Society. One of them was an abstract artist, so she wasn't a duojár at all. And Synnøve Persen I think her name is. And she just wanted to get rid of the ethnographic in art. She just wanted to be a painter. So she was one of the important, the key people in starting this organization. And that's kind of continued and I don't know how Sámi artists always think about themselves. Some of them probably think of themselves as one thing or another and some of them think maybe, you know, I'm both. There's a fantastic internationally known artist in Finland, Outi Pieski, and I've written about her quite a bit in the book because she uses a lot of forms from duodji and references older historic objects, but she turns them into something else. She's a sculptor as well as a, you know, a two-dimensional artist. And one of her most incredible creations, I think, is the whole entryway— the Nordiska Museum in Stockholm has a new entrance on the backside. And she took a spoon design that's sort of a geometric pattern as her inspiration, and she created a whole ceiling and sides that the geometric pattern echoes the spoon, so that's pretty striking. And she's done a lot of things like that where she looks at some piece of duodji, and especially something that might have to do with women's lives, and she kind of transforms it into art, or dáidda.
Amy: And now, Outi Pieski, she was one of the people who really helped resurrect the ládjogahpir, the “women's horn hat” from the northern and, I think, northeastern Sámi areas. Is that correct?
Barbara: Yes. And I do write about it towards the end and show a photograph of her, sort of, teaching a workshop. But yeah, it's this wild hat called the “horn hat,” and I think [*laughs*] when you look at it, you think that must have been quite something to carry around on your head. And yet it was very popular for women and for a long time until the late 19th century. And it's kind of this wooden structure. It's sort of like Athena’s helmet, sort of, goes forward. And then it's covered with fabrics and ribbons and things like that, and then there’s, sort of, a bonnet that ties around the chin. And there are not many of them left. Many were thrown in the fire, not only by outsiders, but by the Sámi themselves who had been sort of Christianized and made to feel that this was probably a bad thing. You know, some people said, “Oh, the devil is in the horn.” And so they tossed them in the fire or got rid of them in some way. But yeah, Outi Pieski was really key in getting people to start making these again. And she uses them quite a bit in her art.
Colin: And is she working with collections that have been repatriated?
Barbara: Yes, sometimes. She started working with the collections before they were repatriated, especially in Finland. She's Finnish, too. And but now they're closer to home. So I think she lives in Utsjoki, which is way up in the north. And so the museums are closer. They're far away for many tourists, but they're closer to where many people live in Sápmi.
Colin: What great examples for repatriating items [*laughs*] and the value that they can have for living traditions and for artists to draw on and do new things with them.
Barbara: Exactly, yes. They're much easier to have access to. Many of these museums, actually, the storeroom is right there at the museum. And there are tables and places where you can actually, sort of, put on your white gloves and kind of see, “Oh, this is how it was made. These are the stitches. This is the material.” It was harder to do that when they were in Oslo [*laughs*].
Colin: Or in Germany, I suppose. [*laughter*]
Barbara: Right! [*laughs*] Well, repatriation is in the air. You know, I think everywhere museums are being called upon to return things. And I think there's been resistance. But there's now a greater understanding of it. And I think museum staff are looking for ways to make it happen in a safe, positive way.
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Colin: Crossing North is a production of the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Today’s episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Colin Gioia Connors. Special thanks to Amy Swanson King. Find Barbara Sjoholm’s books mentioned in this episode at the University of Minnesota Press and the University of Wisconsin Press. Today’s music was used with permission by Kristján Hrannar Pálsson. Complete transcripts for every episode of Crossing North can be found at scandinavian.washington.edu, where you can learn more about the podcast and other exciting projects hosted by the Scandinavian Studies Department. If you are a current or prospective student, consider taking a course or declaring a major. All members of the public, including high school students, are now eligible to enroll in individual summer courses offered by the Department of Scandinavian Studies. You can find complete course listings for the Scandinavian Studies Department and Baltic Studies Program at scandinavian.washington.edu. Once again, that’s scandinavian.washington.edu.
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SHOW NOTES
Release date: June 5, 2024.
This episode was written, edited, and produced by Colin Gioia Connors. Special thanks to Amy Swanson King.
Find Barbara Sjoholm's books published by the University of Minnesota Press and the University of Wisconsin Press: From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and returning Sámi Craft and Culture (2023); By the Fire: Sami Folktales and Legends (2019); Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer (2017); With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman Among the Sami, 1907-1908 (2013).
Theme music used with permission by Kristján Hrannar Pálsson.