9UNP1209SD_Tom_DuBois

- Welcome to University Place Presents. I'm Norman Gilliland. Come with me and my guest for this hour of conversation as we look at a fascinating and still largely mysterious group of people, who live in a still out-of-the-way corner of the world. They used to be called the Lapps, but more recently and more accurately, go by the name of the "Sámi", and we'll find out about them from my guest today. He's Tom DuBois, Professor of Scandanavian Studies at UW-Madison... and welcome to University Place Presents! 

- Hello, I'm glad to be here. 

- Well, let's start with an image, a landscape that we'll bring here in a moment. And it will show us, I think, some of this habitat of the Sámi. 

Where is it, though? 

- The habitat. That's up on the border, between Norway and Sweden, the very far corner of Sweden, looking over the lake "Duortnos"

in Northern Sámi or "Torneträsk" in Swedish. And I think that's a good image to give just a feel of the stunning beauty of Sápmi, of this northern part of Scandinavia, of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of the Russian Federation. A place with tall mountains, with deep forests, with tundra, with lots of snow, 
[laughing]

 seven to nine months of snow in the year, and perpetual light in the summer. And, well, in the winter is pretty it's pretty dark. But, also an area where you wouldn't want to try to farm. 

- I was going to say, a beautiful landscape doesn't necessarily mean a habitable one. 

- Well, it's habitable in a different way. The Sámi have figured out ways to live there over the course of thousands of years. 

- We'll get a little bit into their history in a minute, but what do the Sámi actually look like, and what separates them, assuming something still does, from the rest of the population of Europe, and, in particular, that northern part of Europe? 

- Well, the Sámi are the indigenous people of northern Europe, and so they've been in that region, and probably more broadly than just the very north of Scandinavia, for thousands and thousands of years. Naturally, over the time, they've intermarried with their neighbors, and there's been lots of migration in and out of the area. So, there's a distinctive culture. On the other hand, Sámi look pretty much like their neighbors. And lots of people are very light-haired, blonde-haired.

Other ones are darker. 

So, there' a real variety of looks to Sámi. 

- Who was it that first actually captured the Sámi culture, the language in particular? 

- Well, for a long time, Sámi were people that others wrote about, and the Sámi didn't write about themselves, 
[both laugh]

 or really feel like anyone wanted to listen to them. But Johan Turi, who was a hunter and a trapper and a great intellectual... In 1908, he was in a cabin above that same lake, Torneträsk, and looking out, and he decided to write a book about the Sámi people to explain to the Swedish authorities what they were doing wrong. 
[both laugh]

 And they were doing a lot of things wrong in terms of the way they were treating the Sámi. So, he wrote this book, Muitalus sámiid birra, which is the first book written in a Sámi language, and it comes out in 1910. 

- I hope-- I assume it was then translated into Swedish pretty quickly. Otherwise, the Sámi were just reading about themselves. 
[both laughing]

- It was lucky that Turi had a very good friend, Emilie Demant, who was an artist from Denmark. And she had come to the north because she was fascinated with Sámi people and she wanted to be able to live in a tent with the Sámi for a year. And they met on a train, and they made a deal that she would help Turi write his book, if he would help her live with the Sámi for a year. And so he made good on his deal. He set her up with his brother, Aslak, Turi, and their family. She traveled with that family for the course of a year and learned Sámi really well. 

So then, she after that was in a good position to translate his book. And she wrote a memoir as well, which is actually published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Barbara Sjoholm did that translation. 

- So she is living with the Sámi for a year, and you already mentioned, Tom, that for six months of that year it's dark. 
[both laughing]

 How did that work for her? 

- There are wonderful moments in that text where she is very depressed and very frustrated and very cold 
[both laughing]

 and thinking, "Life in a tent isn't as romantic as I thought it would be in Denmark." But I think, on the whole, she really treasured her time with the Sámi. 

And enjoyed the way in which Sámi pared down life to the essentials and then lived those essentials to the fullest. 

- It's a nomadic life? Or traditionally is? 

- It was ... the system that the Sámi developed was a sustainable way to live on the landscape, and that was by moving often, by reducing your footprint in any one place. So, a family or a group of families, what was called a "siida", would have control of a certain territory, usually a larger river valley, or also some mountain areas, and they would travel around in that territory in the course of the year.

- Following and managing reindeer? To what extent were they controlling these herds? 

- Often, they were using reindeer as a source of livelihood to one extent or another. Some Sámi groups used the reindeer for only part of their life. 

Other ones really put all their eggs into the reindeer basket and then followed them very closely. And Johan Turi and his brother Aslak and then Emilie Demant were very much in that extensive use of reindeer husbandry group. So they followed the herd. 

- Didn't they need some green, leafy vegetables? 
[laughing]

- Occasionally they got them. There are some wonderfully nutritious plants that Sámi learned to... Sorrel, "juopmu" in Northern Sámi, is a tremendous source of vitamin C, and that was something that the Sámi figured out to use and add it to reindeer milk. It's a stabilizer, as well as a boost for the nutrition. 

- Well they had certainly the early lock on free-range meat, didn't they? 
[both laughing]

- Early lock. Yes, they had half the animals. They followed the reindeer, they harvested them in the fall usually, after rut, so the animals got to have their sexual thrills 
[both laughing]

 And then they culled, often, some of the young males and used those for meat, also for antler, and also they milked the reindeer in the late summer and the fall. 

- And for transportation? 

- And for transportation. 

They would use reindeer geldings, called "heargi", and you can... a single reindeer can pull a good load, especially if you have a harness to a sled. And so they were, they were very useful pack animals too. 

- Well, you know, Santa Claus... 
[both laughing]

 That's got to be where the idea came from. 

- He was borrowing a Sámi idea, yes. 

- So how many of the Sámi are there? You mentioned the countries they're spread across, this northern part of Scandinavia and Finland and into Russia. 

- It's a little hard to put an exact number on how many Sámi there are because there are people with multiple ethnic backgrounds. 

And a lot of Sámi or people with Sámi heritage live, for instance in the cities of Oslo and Stockholm. But overall the estimate is about 80,000. There certainly are some Sámi-Americans too, people who came to North America in the late 19th century, early 20th century. Some tens of thousands of those as well. 

- At what point do we see the people in the countries, we'll call the major populations, Swedes, Norwegians, the Finns, the Russians, getting interested in Sámi culture for its own right? I mean, to the extent that we actually start seeing photographs of the Sámi and details of their way of life? 

- Well, there's kind of waves to that interest and it changes over time. I think... we have records of an interest in the Sámi all the way back to Tacitus. And... 

there is, though, a marked shift in the interest in the nineteenth century as Europeans in general are trying to understand foreign cultures and how it is that this particular indigenous culture had come up with such a different way of living at the very top of Europe. So then we begin to see the first really systematic photographs being taken of Sámi during the winter with their sleds, also in other seasons. 

- So here is following reindeer, or using them for transportation, linked across what?... a frozen river? 

- Yeah, that's probably a frozen river in northern Norway. And what you see there is a "ráidu", or a string of reindeer with sleds. There's one leader who's driving the head sled, and he's got all of the other sleds harnessed up behind him. So they could use this to move after a herd or to move households over time.

And you could have as many sleds as you wanted in that ráidu. 

- So what kind of migration pattern do they have, if you want to call it that, in the course of a year? 

I mean, in some ways it's easier to travel in winter, I suppose. 

- Winter is much easier to travel. 
[laughing]

 The summer is harder because the snow is gone, and things are muddy, and things .. the rivers are liquid. But you could also travel by packing stuff on a reindeer as well, and you would ... 

- Like kids even. 
[both laughing]

- Kids, even kids. 

Johan Turi says that kids are good to ride on a reindeer up to about nine, and they get too heavy for the reindeer. But in this one you can see not only a child but also slung along the side of that reindeer is little kind of carrier or cradle, called a "kietkam", which is a... a car seat, 
[both laughing]

 a Sámi tradition. It's what you had infants in. 

- So what time do you think would have been the timeframe for these pictures? 

- Well, this picture is clearly towards the end of summer. You can usually tell that because of the size of the reindeer's horns. Reindeer shed their horns every winter, right after rut. 

And then, they're slowly growing them back over time. The only ones who don't shed their horns are the females who are pregnant. So that's how you can tell. 

- Well, it's fascinating. I wonder what the evolutionary reason for that is. 

- Must be so they can fight off the males 
[both laughing]

 for some of the food. In winter there's a lot of snow and it's hard to ... it's hard to survive. 

So there must've been a selective advantage to keeping your horns. 

- We have ... I assume horn keeps very, very well, horn and bone, so I assume we must have some really early artifacts of Sámi.

- Oh, absolutely. We have some really interesting archaeological finds from the early part of the Modern Era, and some Viking finds, in which we see artifacts that have

a mix of Norse, or Scandinavian, imagery and Sámi imagery. So we see that there is all kinds of back-and-forth going on in terms of cultural influences. 

- What was the relationship with the Vikings, or the Norsemen, of that time? 

- Well, 
[both laughing]

 it was a friendship of... of requirement. 
[both laughing]

 The Norse, when we read the sagas they mention often a major source of income for the Scandinavians being to go to Sámi villages in the winter and demand tribute. 

- Sounds like the Vikings I know. 
[both laughing]

- Yes, it's kind of the way the Medieval world worked, in general, you know, the stronger took advantage of the weaker. And they would demand these tributes of so many hides, so much antler, so much rope made out of walrus, or so many bear skins. But then they would also trade, and there was a lot of back-and-forth. 

And the Sámi really came to value their Scandinavian neighbors for a way to market. First, because they were great, they were great trappers, and also, a way to gain metal, because they could trade for metal. And then use that to make tools. 

- More metal, probably. What about... we're going to get into this later, I know, in a more modern context, but as long as we are talking about bone and things like that... a lot of early musical instruments were made out of bone, flutes, for example. 

- Yes, they were. And we find some little flutes like that, but the Sámi used also stems of angelica, which are these long plants that live right by the, right by bodies of water. And they would cut those and make them into flutes and use those over time. 

And then throw them away when they were done. 
[laughing]

 So they were kind of throw-away items. 

- Did they have any sort of, I want to say, cult of the reindeer? I mean, it must have been the center of their thinking, whether religious or otherwise. 

- The reindeer were an ally. They were a friend, they were... Johan Turi says that the Sámi learned a lot about the north from the reindeer, from observing the reindeer and from interacting with them over time. And having good reindeer luck, having a good herd depended on treating the animals with respect, and also negotiating with the spirits of the animals, and also with the spirits of the environment more broadly, to make sure that everyone in the spirit world was happy with what you were doing. And sometimes the spirit world wanted a reindeer sacrifice. 

They like reindeer meat, too. And so... 

- They just happened to have one to spare? 

- There would be one. 
[both laughing]

 Depending on the deity or the spirit, it might be a reindeer of one color or another, male or female, or a different age of the reindeer. 

- Here is an image that gives you a little better idea of traditional Sámi garb. 

- This is a good one for showing you the way in which Sámi dress varied from place to place. And looking at this image from the turn-of-the-century, you can see that this guy is from northern Norway by that four-cornered hat that he is wearing, and that really marks him as a Norwegian Sámi. In other parts you'd get a different, different style to the hat. 

But the overall kind of tunic he is wearing, called a "gákti", is something you find in a lot of Sámi clothing traditionally across the whole area of Sápmi. 

- I can see where they would have the ability to wear lots of furs. But what about textiles? Make them or trade them? 

- The coming of textiles was a great... it was the great innovation for Sámi. They tended to get those through trading with people right on the coast of Norway, either what are called sea Sámi, Sámi who were living on the coast and had taken up weaving as an activity, or from Scandinavians who were living along the coast. And textiles certainly were great for, especially for summer clothing. 

- And we have a maybe slightly more modern image of Sámi here. 

- This is an image from, I think, 1917. 

This image first appears in "National Geographic". It's right during the First World War, and it's a photo montage of Madonnas around the world. 
[laughing]

 "Madonnas from Many Lands", I think it is called. This is the Sámi one. It's actually a cool picture, I think, because Borg Mesch took this. And it's in the National Geographic just as "Sámi Mother with Children", but we actually know that this is Marja Sunna. We know her name from Mesch's diary and his records. And she lived in a place not so far away from Kiruna, called Bolnaluokta. And she was... 

She seems to have been very patient with Mesch. 
[both laughing]

 She was willing to let him take photographs of her, and a lot of the Sámi at the turn-of-the-century didn't like people taking photographs. 

- Why was that? 

- Well, a lot of Sámi were very fervent Christians at the time, and they felt that taking pictures was a worldly thing to do and a way of putting on airs. There may have been an older concept behind there, too. 

- Capturing their spirits somehow. 

- Capturing their spirits or how would that picture be done, be used? And I think a lot of Sámi were also kind of sensitive about pictures even today because it's always valuable when you are looking at a picture or showing a picture nowadays of Sámi to find out who that person is and to kind of reinstate their personhood. I mean, when you start to look at Mesch's pictures, he took thousands of pictures, you start to see Marja Sunna over and over again. 
[both laughing]

- Because, because she was okay with it. 

- She was okay with it and she seems to have had the kind of stoic look that he wanted. 

- Now we have here the image of an artist, and this gets us into that Sámi, I suppose unique to Sámi, audio art form known as "joiking". 

- Yes, this is Jorgen Stenberg, who is a reindeer herder, and he is a great joiker, he is a great performer of what is called the Northern Sámi "luohti", or these kind of verbal portraits of the world. And for years and years, people said that he should enter this big national competition that happens around Easter weekend every winter, called the Sámi Grand Prix. 
[both laughing]

 The Sámi Grand Prix. And he said, "I'm too busy, I'm too busy." And then one year in 2013 he had a snowmobile accident, and then he had time on his hands, so he said, "I'll enter, I'll enter." 

And he joiked, performed a luohti about reindeer grazing and what a herd looks like when it's content and there's no predators around and things are good. 

- And this is what it sounds like. 

§ §

[Jorgen Stenberg singing,joiking a luohti about reindeer grazing]

§ §

§ §

§ §

- Is a joik an improvised thing? Is it eventually written down, handed down somehow? 

How ephemeral is it? 

- Well, that's one of the fascinating things about the joik tradition, is that there's a stable core to the musical piece. It's a portrait, but as a person or thing changes, the piece changes as well. And it also is important who is joiking what. So, if I'm friends with someone I'm going to joik them differently than if I don't know them. And so the joik expresses the relationship between the joiker and the "joikee", 
[both laughing]

 the person who is being portrayed. And it will change over time sometimes there are words within the joik sometimes you can leave the words out... 

- Spoken words? 

Or is the joik just a vocalization? 

- It's often a vocalization. Sometimes you'll... A joik performer will put in some words. In some parts of Sápmi, there's longer texts to the joiks. In the earlier texts we have longer, kind of poetic texts to them as well. So it varies, but the joik is a combination of the music, the quality of the voice, the tempo, the rhythm, and to some extent, the words. 

- So if you were to joik a mutual friend of ours, I could use your joik, or would it be more proper for me to come up with my own? 

- Once a person has a joik, it's usually... that's kind of the standard that everyone shares. 

So, it's important, when a child is growing up, that someone in the family, if they're a family that joiks actively, someone will make up a joik for them, compose a joik, and then that is kind of the one that people come to know. 

- So the first one usually is the standard? 

- Well, there's kind of a childhood joik version. Children's joiks are a little bit simpler, and then it grows more complicated over time as a person grows up and gets more... 
[laughing]

 characteristics. 

- Well, speaking of the passage of time, let's go back and see if we can actually find out in this age of DNA tracking where exactly the Sámi came from. I mean, you're talking northern Europe here, which was under ice until about 12,000 years ago, but the Sámi go back almost that far in northern Europe. But they had to come from somewhere before that. 

- Had to come from somewhere before that. 

Johan Turi has this statement almost at the beginning of his book. He says, "
[Speaking foreign language]

," or one never hears that the Sámi have come from anywhere, just that they have always been. This is where we have always lived, in the Sámi homeland. But with archaeology and with linguistics it's possible to look back at when the people who were the ancestors of the Sámi first arrived in the Nordic region. And it seems to go back almost as soon as there is ice off the shores of the Arctic coast. So the first area of settlement is probably way up on the Arctic coast. Already about 10,000 years ago, we find this monument stone or sacrificial stone, called "Ceavccageadgi" at the base of the Varanger fjord in northern Norway. 

- And is there any inscription on that? 

Or how do we know what its significance is, or if it connects to the Sámi? 

- There's no inscription, but it is ringed around, circled by, other stones under which there's all sorts of different animals that have been sacrificed. And from DNA studies of those remains it's possible to date the sacrificial use of this stone. And right into the 20th century Sámi have called it Ceavccageadgi, which means "Fish Fat Rock." 
[laughing]

- Of course, of course. 
[laughing]

 Great common-- name, I'm sure. 

- Of course. 

And they used it as a place to make sure that the spirits that ensured fishing luck were happy with them. So, they would grease this stone with fish fat before they were going fishing. And so that's already, that's like 10,000 years of cultic continuity in any place, so 5,000 years before Stonehenge, and 7000 years before they come up with Rome. 
[both laughing]

 You have this culture doing it. And that original population spoke a language which has disappeared, but the words "ceavcca" and "geadgi" are both part of that, what's called "Paleoeuropean" language. So that original population intermarried with other people who came further, from further from the east, Finno-Ugric people, who moved in about 5,000 years ago. 

- Finland, Estonia, and more distantly, I guess, Hungary. 

- Yes, absolutely. 

- So do we have a sense, then, of... 

well, to the extent... we're talking originally in Europe, let's say, where the Sámi would have come from? 

- Well during the Ice Age there were two refugia, or areas that were free of ice, and one of them was at the base of the Iberian Peninsula. So this Paleoeuropean side of the Sámi culture must have come from there. 

- Wow! So, they are actually Spanish! 
[both laughing]

- You know, genetically, the closest relatives genetically descended are people from the Iberian Peninsula. Yeah. 

- And that's been confirmed with DNA? 

- DNA, particular the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA have allowed for a lot of really interesting research on where people came from and so forth. 

- Yes, The Basques, in particular, apparently connect to the Welsh, for example. We're learning a lot, aren't we? 

- Yeah. There were such small populations at that time and, you know, you find somebody to love and... 
[both laughing]

- Somebody from outside the immediate tribe there... you would have to cast your net pretty wide... 

- That's also exciting. Yeah, yeah. And that's probably where the Finno-Ugric side of the Sámi tradition came, too, because there was another refugium further to the east, and the Finno-Ugric people came from that one in Central Asia and migrated out, following probably the reindeer, as the ice receded in the north. 

- Does the Sámi language, then, have all kinds of words for reindeer? 
[both laughing]

 Specialized words? 

- All kinds of words. Especially for reindeer herders, there are literally hundreds of words: for the coloring of the animal, the sex, the age, the quality of horns, the shape of the horns. Because when you are wanting to identify which reindeer you are wanting to catch or lasso, you want to say, "That one, not that one." 
[both laughing]

 And so there's really fantastically, confusingly accurate and precise terminology for reindeer. As there is for snow... 

- I was going to say... snow would be another one. 

- Snow is... there's hundreds of words, actually, for different snow conditions: for tracking conditions and for all the kinds of things that were really important for Sámi traditional life. Hunting, as well as herding. 

- And trapping? 

- And trapping was really important. Sámi developed all sorts of cool, innovative traps for catching animals. 

This is an ermine trap. It's sprung so that you put a little food there underneath that movable piece and the ermine will come in, especially in winter they will be attracted to this when their fur is white and they are very valuable. And spring that little trap and... CLOMP!! 
[both laughing]

 ... sandwich them in and you get your ermine. 

- Then you can trade that ermine to the Norsemen from farther south. 

- You can trade it to them or forfeit it for tribute. 
[both laughing]

 But anyway, there's a lot of... there's a lot of in-law terminology that comes from the second century that's clearly borrowed from Scandinavian languages. 

- Really? 

- So a lot of this trading that went on for the Vikings to get these furs also led to intermarriage. 

- Now were any of these habits or traditions of the Sámi... altered, suppressed as they came in to be integrated more with the southern parts of Scandinavia, Finland, and so on? In other words, were they told, "You can't trap, you can't herd in this part of the country, etc.?" 

- Well, in the southern parts of Scandinavia, the agriculture and Christianity certainly get rooted, and the Sámi and their older way of doing things is pushed further and further north. Or it remains in the north and is kind of pushed out in the south. But the Sámi way of using the north was actually far superior than trying to farm 
[both laughing]

 in the far north. And so already in the 1400s and 1500s when Scandinavians are moving to the north, they end up assimilating into the Sámi way of life, rather than the reverse, because it's the much more sustainable and workable. 

- Well, we know the Norse, the Vikings, again, were very good at assimilating, very good at kind of going native. 

- They were good at adapting, yeah. 

- They didn't do so well in the northern hemisphere over here in Greenland, 
[laughing]

 but otherwise they were very adaptable. 

- Yeah, yeah. Even in Greenland they maintained their settlement for a couple hundred years anyway. 

Yeah, yeah. 

- What about skiing? We haven't talked about skiing. 

- Skiing is something that archaeologists argue about: who invented the skiing, but Sámi know that they did. 
[both laughing]

 And we find really early archaeological remains of skiing, and we also start to see the Vikings describing the Sámi with this term "skridi," which would mean skier or slider, referring to their skis. In 1555 Olaus Magnus is the last Catholic archbishop of Sweden. He's been exiled to Venice, the poor guy, 
[both laughing]

 and he sitting there trying to convince the Pope to have a holy war and take back Sweden, which at that time includes what is today Finland and parts of Estonia. 

And so he describes all the wonders of that land. And he describes very carefully Sámi way of life and describes skiing. And then there's some Venetian woodcarver, woodcutter, who has to try to make sense of his description and 
[both laughing]

 make a depiction of what skiing looked like. 

- Without ever having seen it. 

- Yeah, yeah. He gets the idea, well, it must be like barrel staves and then he sharpened the ends, and so we have this image from 1555 of the Sámi. 

- What about pointed shoes? You know, we think of Santa and his elves with those toes that point up. 

Was that also a Sámi innovation? 

- It was a Sámi innovation. It was a very pragmatic way to keep your skis on because you didn't have to worry about bindings. Usually the Sámi skis have kind of a broad, rounded binding. You can just slip your boots into those and go! So, it was really very effective, and that pointy toe was to hold the ski on. 

- And we have another woodcut image here. What's going on here? 

- Yeah, that's a really fascinating one because Olaus also mentions that the Sámi are often making a living for themselves or supplementing their living by selling wind knots to sailors. 
[laughing]

 So here we see a guy with a supply of knots and some sailors buying them. 

- Okay... 
[both laughing]

 ...wind knots. 

- Wind knots. In the age of sailing, if you don't have a wind, you are in trouble. And so you could buy these knots and then when you were becalmed on the sea you could undo one of those knots and a wind would come... a wind would come up. So, and sailors all over Europe were knowledgeable about this fact that the Sámi are suppliers of wind knots. 

And even Shakespeare mentions the Sámi. He says "Lapland sorcerers", so he's heard about this idea of buying magic winds from the Sámi. 

- That reputation of being sorcerers, though, could also play against them. 

- Absolutely. And that happens particularly in the context of the late 1600s when the young king of Sweden is being taunted by his German counterparts... said, "Oh, you had success because you have Sámi wizards are helping you out," and stuff. 
[laughing]

 So he commissions a professor at Uppsala University, Johannes Scheffer, to write a book about the Sámi, and that book is the first... Lapponia, the first real careful documentation of Sámi culture. And it also goes into great detail about Sámi pre-Christian traditions, which then make it imperative for the state to try to suppress those traditions now that they know about them. 
[laughing]

 And so that book also begins a very dark chapter in Sámi history of suppression of culture and traditions. 

- Where does that word "Lapp" come from? 

- No one is quite sure whether it's clearly a word that was used by the Scandinavians or the Finns, originally, about the Sámi. It probably means people who live on the edge or people who live in the wilds. And it gets used in very negative ways over time, so Sámi today prefer the word that they have always used for themselves, which is Sámi or Sápmelašh. 

- We talked about flutes a while ago, but drum would be another obvious early instrument. 

- Drums are a really important instrument for Sámi because they were clearly an instrument that you can hear the sounds of the drum in the joiks, in their kind of syncopated rhythms, but it also is a religious object. And with... the Sámi "noaiddit", or shaman, used that drum to communicate with the spirits and to send his spirit off on travels, to help the community to get information to heal people. 

And already in... This is a drum that was confiscated from a Sámi elderly man named Anders Poulson in northern Norway. He was 100 years old in 1691 when he was arrested for witchcraft. And he said, "I'm not a witch, I am a Christian, but I help people... 
[laughing]

 ...and I use this drum to do it." And they confiscated that drum, and he was eventually executed for 
[laughing]

 what he... 

- He took it seriously, then. Well... 

- He took it seriously. It was the era of... trials 

- Seventeenth century, yes, of course, I mean they were hanging witches in this country in the seventeenth century. 

- They were, definitely. Yeah. 

- ...had some dark sides to that. 

But at the same time, a book like Lapponia would preserve or record a lot of details, assuming it was accurate, of the Sámi culture. 

- Oh, yeah, it's a fantastic source of information and really interesting. Also its own cultural history because it becomes almost immediately translated out of Latin into all sorts of European languages: into German, into English, into French. And one of the things that is fascinating about Lapponia is that it also preserves the first two pieces of Sámi joik, or Sámi song. 

- The lyrics? Quotes the lyrics, or how did he do that? 

- The lyrics of two songs that... Scheffer asked one of the divinity students who was in Uppsala, who'd come from Kemi region, which is today part of Finland, but it was part of Sweden at the time, to write down about Sámi music. So he writes down two songs, and those become wildly popular in Europe. 

- Really? 

In what form? 

- They are read in the Latin, but then translated into the vernaculars by Johann Gottfried von Herder, by Goethe, by Longfellow.

- Oh, "A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

- That's right. That's one... 

- That's a refrain of one of Longfellow's most famous poems. 

- That's the refrain of one of those songs by Cearpma Ovlla, or Olaus Sirma. He never realized that his songs became so famous because he went back up to Kemi and became a minister and kind of disappeared from history. But his songs, it's fascinating to think about, become probably the best known examples of any Scandinavian literature in any language during that period, in the 1700s. 

- Here's our quintessential Sámi image, it seems to me. 

- This is a wonderful image that shows some of the continuities of life that went on right into the 20th century. This is a picture done by a really wonderful photographer called Marja Vuorelainen, who lived in the Rovaniemi area of Finland. And she did a lot of traveling and became very good friends with Sámi people because she took very respectful pictures and she always made note of who she was taking pictures of. So this is Iisko Näkäläjärvi and his son Juhan Andde. And they are crossing... this is... you can tell by the horns, 
[laughing]

 late summer. It isn't icy yet. 

And they're taking these reindeer across the river, probably to pack them and get them ready for a migration. 

- So, what do they do in the winter? And can you give us a forecast for the first of January in the Sámi land? 

- It's cold and it's snowy. And there's different kinds and amounts of snow, but one of the really essential things in that environment, where textiles and modern synthetics just don't cut it, is to have a really good reindeer hide kind of parka, or almost like a poncho. It's called a "beaska" in Northern Sámi. Here's a guy called Gárena Biera. And he was also well known to Marja Vuorelainen. And he was a healer, and so he continued on old traditions of healing. But here he is wearing this kind of really snug, warm beaska. 

And he's got these massive gloves to keep your hands warm, and he's got the shoes that are well adapted to sticking your skis in. So he's there getting ready for his roundup of the reindeer.

- Here's another bit of winter passion. 

- Yes, this is Inkeri Juuso in, I think this is late 1980s. A wonderful picture that shows you just how much some of those traditions of dress continue on with Sámi. She here is probably getting ready for some special occasion because Sámi will wear traditional dress at really important moments like confirmation, weddings, graduations. So she must be going out to a cool party. 
[both laughing]

 But you can see she's got the beaska, she's got the big gloves, she's got the traditional shoes there. So there are some things that continue for many centuries. 

- I'm guessing that animals make great joiking subjects. 

- Oh, yes, absolutely, because you need to talk to the animals and tell them that you respect them, that, you know, that we're sharing the earth, and that we're negotiating about how to divvy up property and resources. The bear was certainly an animal that there are tons of really wonderful joiks about. Different ones, talking about different bears. And there are hundreds of different words for the bear... 

- Oh, are there? OK. 

-... yeah, so you would never say the proper word because that one would summon the bear and potentially anger the bear's spirit. But if you call them, for instance, "bierdna", which is borrowed from the Scandinavian... 

- I was going to say... something Swedish... 

- It sounds like "bjorn", yeah. And then it's just Swedish, so what does it matter? 
[both laughing]

 They would use those other terms But then they could also talk to the bear through the "louhti" or "vuolle", the joik. 

- So here we are evoking the bear in a joik. 

- Yeah, this is Jonas Steggo, Jonas Edvard Steggo's joik of a bear. 

§ §

[Jonas Edvard Steggo sings in Sámi language]

§ §

§ §

§ §

- Well, that was a pretty easy one to follow. 
[both laughing]

- Yeah, it sounds like a bear. 

- Sounds like a bear, yeah. 

- And you can really hear how he's using his whole body to summon that, that image of the reindeer-- of the bear. 

And it's something that I think is really wonderful to hear how you can use the quality of the voice and convey the kind of rolling gait of the bear. And when I play that example for my students they always know it. "That must be a bear." 
[both laughing]

- Yeah, I think they could probably guess that pretty quickly. Some of them not so quickly, though. As the Sámi become more mainstream, inevitably, as communication, transportation become easier and more global, you have Sámi going out, having experiences in the greater world, and then coming back to the homeland and joiking? 

- Oh, yes, absolutely, absolutely. The joik continues to be today a resource for Sámi to describe their world, which is a wider world than it was in the past. 

And so, there are joiks about Texas, 
[both laughing]

 joiks about airplanes... 

- We'll hear that in the sequel to this hour. 

- Sequel, yeah. And there are joiks that combine modern sounds and that reflect the fact that Sámi people aren't just people of the past,

they're also people of the present and the future. And their arts and their ways of doing things are evolving, as the environment and the culture changes, as well. 

- So I think we have joik here by somebody who actually participated in World War II, a Sámi? 

- Yes, this is... 

There's a really wonderful joik that's done by Ulla Pirttijärvi, and she's joiking one of her husband's relatives called "Uhcca Niilas." And he had been in the war and when he returned from the war, he must have been kind of shell shocked because the words to the joik say, "There has to be dead silence. because Uhcca Niilas is back from the war. He needs a lot of room on the mountains because Uhcca Niilas is back from the war." 
[Ulla Pirttijärvi-Länsma sings "Uhcca Niilas" joik in Sámi language]

 § Jápmaráfi galgá leat § 
(There must be dead silence)

 § Go Uhca-Niillas suodis boahtá§ 
(When Uhca-Niillas returns from the war)

 § Várit galget nallasi § 
(People must give him room on the mountain)

 § Go Uhca-Niillas suodis boahtá§ 
(When Uhca-Niillas returns from the war)

 § Jápmaráfi galgá leat § 
(There must be dead silence)

 § Go Uhca-Niillas suodis boahtá§ 
(When Uhca-Niillas returns from the war)

 § Várit galget nallasi § 
(People must give him room on the mountain)

 § Go Uhca-Niillas suodis boahtá§ 
(When Uhca-Niillas returns from the war)

 Thank you! 
[applause]

- In this country, well, in a lot of places where you have an indigenous population that gets in the way, if you will, of the mainstream population conflicts regarding land-use and that kind of thing, did that occur with the Sámi also? 

- Oh, absolutely. And Johan Turi is writing at the beginning of the century of the fact that the Sámi have been pushed out of so much land that at some point they have to just kind of stop and take a stand. But it's really in the 1980s that Sámi start to do that and they... particularly a dam conflict is what spurs them to act because there's a wonderful river, the Alta River, that runs from the town of Guovdageaidnu out to the Arctic coast. And the plan was to build a big dam on that river for hydroelectric power that would be used down south in Oslo 
[laughing]

 or down where the industrial areas of Norway are. And the Sámi said, you know what, this is the last wild river in all of Europe, and it's got some-- it's a very important corridor for our reindeer, and if you flood that valley, it will disrupt our life tremendously. And they stage a really important set of protests right at the end of the 1970s, beginning of the early 1980s. 
[quick laugh]

 The dam gets built anyways... 

- Oh, does it? 

- ... but the Norwegian government takes it to heart and looks into the issue. They start a commission and realize that the Sámi ought to have recognition as indigenous people, and that there should be some way in which the Sámi can express their views on what's happening in their region and be able to have a sway over the way in which the north is governed and developed. 

And eventually, then, the Norwegian Constitution is changed so that the Sámi are given a Sámi Parliament, a Sámidiggi, which is today in Karasjok. It is a really wonderful building that was built, that is made to remind the viewer of the old Sámi tent form, the "goahti". But also it is a completely modern parliamentary building with electronics and everything else. And once Norway does that, then Sweden follows suit and Finland, as well. So today there are Sámi parliaments in Karasjok and also in Kiruna in Sweden, and in Inari in Finland. 

- Has the joik seeped into pop music, then? It would seem inevitable somehow that it would. 

- Oh, absolutely. Musicians always combine things and they always find new ways to do things. And that certainly is the case with Sámi musicians performing the joik. 

The whole idea of performing the joik on stage, even if done very traditionally, it's kind of a new thing because joik is about expressing the relationship between two people or two things, two beings. So, putting it up on a stage is changing that. Who owns the joink? ...and what's the propriety of that? And who gets the profits from that joik being popular? 
[both laughing]

 So... but as in the 1980s Sámi begin to experiment with this idea of performing joik on stage, they also start to innovate in all sorts of ways. And Ulla Pirttijärvi has a wonderful band called Ulda that she sings with that does some wonderful adaptations of Sámi music. 

It's just one of many, many bands that have emerged since the 1980s in Sápmi. 

§ §

[Ulla Pirttijärvi-Länsma sings joik in Sámi language]

§ §

§ §

§ §

- Well, Tom Dubois, you've taken us pretty quickly through about 10,000 years of Sámi history. 
[both laughing]

 We've missed a few points along the way, but perhaps for another time, we can cover those. You know, there is so much to this culture and, of course, we want to find out sometime how they are faring in the nuclear age and the age of the shrinking world. 

- Oh, absolutely. You know, the thing is that all cultures are connected today, and we are a global world, and Sámi people certainly see that in terms of the environment, in terms of culture, and in terms of indigenous rights worldwide. So, lots to talk about. 

- Well, it's been a great hour. Thank you very much, Tom DuBois. 

- "Giitu." 
[Sámi for Thank you]

- I'm Norman Gilliland. And I hope you will join me next time around for University Place Presents.

I'm Norman Gilliland.