From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture

by Barbara Sjoholm

A cultural history of Sápmi and the Nordic countries as told through objects and artifacts

Material objects—things made, used, and treasured—tell the story of a people and place. So it is for the Indigenous Sámi living in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, whose story unfolds across borders and centuries, in museums and private collections. The objects created by the Sámi for daily and ceremonial use were purchased and taken by Scandinavians and foreign travelers in Lapland from the seventeenth century to the present, and the collections described in From Lapland to Sápmi map a complex history that is gradually shifting to a renaissance of Sámi culture and craft, along with the return of many historical objects to Sápmi, the Sámi homeland. The Sámi objects first collected in Lapland by non-Indigenous people were drums and other sacred artifacts, but later came to include handmade knives, decorated spoons, clothing, and other domestic items owned by Sámi reindeer herders and fishers, as well as artisanal crafts created for sale. Barbara Sjoholm describes how these objects made their way via clergy, merchants, and early scientists into curiosity cabinets and eventually to museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and abroad. Musicians, writers, and tourists also collected Sámi culture for research and enjoyment. Displays of Sámi material culture in Scandinavia and England, Germany, and other countries in museums, exhibition halls, and even zoos often became part of racist and colonial discourse as examples of primitive culture, and soon figured in the debates of ethnographers and curators over representations of national folk traditions and “exotic” peoples. Sjoholm follows these objects and collections from the Age of Enlightenment through the twentieth century, when artisanship took on new forms in commerce and museology and the Sámi began to organize politically and culturally. Today, several collections of Sámi objects are in the process of repatriation, while a new generation of artists, activists, and artisans finds inspiration in traditional heritage and languages. Deftly written and amply illustrated, with contextual notes on language and Nordic history, From Lapland to Sápmi brings to light the history of collecting, displaying, and returning Sámi material culture, as well as the story of Sámi creativity and individual and collective agency.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Crafts

352 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

About the author

I’m a writer of nonfiction, including memoirs (Blue Windows) and travel books (The Pirate Queen). As Barbara Sjoholm I have published essays and travel articles in The New York Times, Smithsonian, Slate, and American Scholar, as well as many other publications. My focus as a nonfiction writer has been on Scandinavia and the Indigenous Sami people of the Nordic countries (Black Fox, Palace of the Snow Queen). I also translate from Danish (By the Fire: Sami Folktales) and Norwegian (Clearing Out by Helene Uri).

As Barbara Wilson I have a long career as a mystery writer, with two series featuring lesbian sleuths, Pam Nilsen, a printer in Seattle, and the globe-trotting translator Cassandra Reilly. Gaudi Afternoon, with Cassandra, and set in Barcelona, was awarded a Lambda and a British Crime Writers Award and made into a film with Judy Davis and Marcia Gay Harden. After a bit of a hiatus, I've resumed writing mysteries with Cassandra Reilly. The latest is Not the Real Jupiter, with more to follow.

Reviews

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Ellen Kitok Anderson told Tom Svensson: ‘I have a message with everything I do: it is very important! I want to tell the story of the Sámi's hard lives and how they have striven. With my thin [birch]roots I will tell about this and that we will defend culture that belongs to us. ...I am bound to the traditional forms, at the same time I'm excited about new shapes that fit them. Along with the artisans who work in wood I want to speak through my craft. It is better to speak through things than to speak with words; things are my most important speech. There are no limits to what one can express with the objects one creates. What one can say with ordinary words is very limited.’”

TITLE—From Lapland to Sápmi: Collecting and Returning Sámi Craft and Culture
AUTHOR—Barbara Sjoholm
PUBLISHED—2023
PUBLISHER—University of Minnesota Press

GENRE—nonfiction
SETTING—Sápmi & Scandinavia & Europe
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Sámi craftwork, religion, history & culture, Sápmi, settler-colonization of Sápmi, theft, genocide, & appropriation of Sámi culture & heritage, witch “trials”, Christian fascism & missionary violence, racism & ethnography, museums & private collections of stolen material culture, the colonialist origins & initiatives of western museum collections, repatriation, rematriation, & restitution, Indigenous agency & activism

“Duodji is often defined most simply in English as "handicraft," though the word itself means an act, activity, or product. The verb is duddjot, meaning "to work with one's hands," and those who do this work are duojárs. The making of useful and beautiful things for daily and festive wear, for cooking and weaving and sewing, for herding and hunting and fishing, and for gift giving and trade goes back far into Sámi history.”

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERIZATION—⭐️⭐️⭐️
THESIS & FLOW—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Ellen Kitok Andersson: ‘What I received from my mother was a precious education. I was able to see her working and to be with her out in the forest. She gave me the inspiration for my future; she's my frame of reference. That is why I have this collection of her handicraft, so that now and then I can look at it. Sometimes I can feel a little tired and have sat a long time at the craft table, then I can sit down and look at my mother's handicraft, caress these objects, and it awakens something special in me. It probably has to do with me admiring her so much for taking this up. That a woman of her generation, who worked so hard and so often lived in such difficult circumstances, could take up root craft again and turn it into something she could market; this was something special.’”

My thoughts:
This was an incredibly informative and fascinating look at both 1) the history of cultural theft and appropriation under the thin veil of ethnographic research and “preservation” perpetrated by non-Indigenous European settler-colonists and “academic” imperialists against the Sámi people, and 2) the history of Sámi material culture from Sámi historical and modern cultural and spiritual perspectives. There is also an emphasis on modern Sámi cultural advocacy and activism as well as repatriation, rematriation, and restitution of Sámi material culture back to Sápmi lands and communities.

“The collecting of objects, along with the collecting of folklore and myths, would take place against a backdrop of continued colonization of Sámi lands and resources, intensified state persecution, coerced education, language loss, and cultural appropriation and erasure.”

The first half of this book was pretty hard to read and I unfortunately found the language used to discuss genocide and Christian fascism (which were never named as such) very soft and even almost performatively “objective” to the point where an apologist reading of these actions, in my opinion, was left far too open. However I also suspect that this choice was in service in some way to the wider project of current Sámi political initiatives of which this book is only one small part and about which I personally have very limited knowledge. 👀

However the second half of this book was completely different and I feel that Sjoholm was a little more firm in condemning injustice and centering Sámi voices, perspectives, and experiences. In particular I loved the last four chapters of Part II that discussed Sámi duodji and other artforms such as joiking and how they are continuing to be created and used in a traditional context that extends seamlessly and organically into modern Sámi lifeways.

“The exhibit on ládjogahpir, arranged by Eeva-Kristiina Harlin and Outi Pieski, took place at SDG, along with a seminar on the political and cultural task of "rematriation," a term increasingly defined as a form of reclaiming ancestral knowledge and spirituality, beyond acts of repatriating objects, and used by Finnish Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen in her work on Indigenous self-determination and governance. Kuokkanen and others see rematriation as a way of bringing traditional women's voices and practices back to the forefront in Sápmi.”

This book is best read after first reading Veli-Pekka Lehtola’s book, THE SÁMI PEOPLE: TRADITIONS IN TRANSITION. I would also recommend reading Gaup’s THE NIGHT BETWEEN THE DAYS and Turi’s AN ACCOUNT OF THE SÁMI first as well because that will give you a lot of great extra context for understanding and appreciating as well as thinking critically about the material covered in Sjoholm’s book.

Final note: Thank you to the University of Minnesota Press for gifting me a copy of this book. And thank you to Barbara Sjoholm and Scandinavia House in New York for hosting a public discussion on the book as well.

“Anders Sunna, a prolific painter, muralist, and multimedia artist, is as outspoken about the class conflict long fostered by the Swedish government between the reindeer-owning Sámi and those who lost their reindeer as he is about making art in Sápmi: "I was looking for inspiration beyond Sámi art while making sure I stayed true to my historical background. If you don't dare to look outside—always with Sámi eyes, of course—there is no development. Sámi culture is no exhibit in a museum. We are a living people, and our culture needs to be alive, develop, and change.””

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

CW // racism, theft & appropriation, cultural genocide, Christian fascism (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- THE SÁMI PEOPLE: TRADITIONS IN TRANSITION, by Veli-Pekka Lehtola
- THE NIGHT BETWEEN THE DAYS, by Ailo Gaup
- AN ACCOUNT OF THE SÁMI, by Johan Turi
- STOLEN, by Ann-Helén Laestadius—TBR
- TREKWAYS OF THE WIND, by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää
- THE PALACE OF THE SNOW QUEEN, by Barbara Sjoholm (gives good background on Sjoholm’s personal journey with this subject)

Favorite Quotes—
“One of the few Sámi narrators of this cultural loss, recorded in 1745 by a Swedish clergyman was Anders Erson Snadda. He explained how Sámi spiritual and economic life had waned since the Church had dispossessed his people of their drums, burned their sacrificial sites, and publicly punished many Sámi for continuing to embrace the old ways: ‘Since they began to deviate from the customs of their ancestors, they have become scattered, and nowadays there are in the whole of the community, not more than a few, and most of them are beggars. He told about his father, that he used the drum [goabdes] and was well; he himself had now put it aside, but found himself not understanding anything else, but soon having to walk before others' doors [i.e., beg]. ...To all this, the other Lapps added their words, from which I could notice that they were of the same opinion as he.’”

“The syntax of Norwegian is similar to that of English: subject, verb, and object, with similar adverbs and prepositions. But Sámi, with case endings for all nouns and pronouns that affect prepositions and verbs, has a different rhythm and variable syntax, along with more prepositions and postpositions, many having to do with ways of moving from place to place. The locative case so frequent in Sami sentences is surprisingly adaptive. Aside from its use locating a noun (a person, animal, or thing) "at" or "in" a place, it is often used in possessive sentences. In Norwegian and English, one says, ‘Jeg har en hund’, or ‘I have a dog.’ In North Sámi one says, ‘Mus lea beana’, or ‘A dog is in my vicinity.’”

“Yet Samzelius's experience in Sápmi seemed often to contradict the premise of cultural disappearance. Not only were the Sámi alive and well everywhere he traveled, but they showed an entrepreneurship out of character with a primitive people whose culture was vanishing. Not only did they insist on continuing to make traditional craftwork, but many of them seemed to have a sharp sense of its value and to be just as interested in selling a knife to a British tourist who was taking a salmon-fishing holiday in Finnmark as to the Swedish forester who arrived by sled from the South looking for ethnographica for a museum in Stockholm.”

“As a former journalist and photographer, [Ernst] Manker saw the world of ethnography in terms of people and their stories. Manker's evident delight in the outdoor life imbues his essays and book chapters—illustrated with photos of grizzled old reindeer herders, young ladies decked with silver, and kids happily playing by the lakeshore or showing off their reindeer skills—with a sense that northern Sweden was peopled, that Sápmi was not just an empty space on a government map, and that the Sámi had cultural and emotional ties to the landscape.”

“The repertoire describes personal joiks that have been with individuals since babyhood; joiks to other people; joiks to lakes, rivers, and mountains; joiks to Norway and to ocean liners, including the Titanic; joiks of sorrow and loss; joiks of love and marriage; joiks that skewer sheriffs and politicians; and joiks to wolves, swans, and especially reindeer.”

“In the distant past, joiking was part of a religious ritual, with drum beats as accompaniment, a rhythmic chanting designed to help the noaidi travel to the other worlds. But there are thousands of other joiks, spontaneous to memorized, which conjure up the world's multitude of beings and feelings. A joik tends to the concrete. It's not a song about something; it is the thing itself, and joiking is the human action of singing, shaping, and recalling.”

“They sing to the reindeer grazing lands north of [Lake] Tjäggelvas, to the herd, swarming with a frightened gait. This is superbly recreated in the rhythm, to the reindeer calves, to the leader, a white cow reindeer. "With beautiful lowered horns she runs, lu-lu-lu—and the snow, and the snow it whirls—lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu." "Straight into the wind she dashes, the fine silk nose." They sing to one of the dogs killed by wolves, to living moose and dead moose, the latter song plaintive and full of warmth and tender sympathy; to the woodpecker, Siberian jay, scoter, fox—to the swan, hare, squirrel, lemming. In a staccato voice how the woodpecker cracks and drums. The swan's vuolle is one of the most beautiful, with the rhythm of the wing beat and soaring flight. The hare's melody is a faithful translation of its tracks in the snow, and here are the squirrel's verses: "May the boy child die, but the girl child live, she who doesn't do me any harm so that I can hop from tree to tree in peace." The melody creates the illusion of its springy, daring leap. In the same way the lemming's song sounds like how it scrabbles and takes small hops while at the same time the song has a ring of the high mountain plateaus.”

“Demant Hatt associated the joik with nature: ‘The Lapps' joiking sounds as if it were learned from nature itself, it resembles the wind moving in withered grass and shrubs. It reminds you of water babbling and insects buzzing, when there's quiet joking, barely audible, during handiwork. But it can also be hoarse and violent in its expression, like a gale in a forest, like ravens croaking and storms howling. I have not heard joking so often but I have heard both sorts, and always it's made me think of the sounds that are heard in the forests and mountains.’”

“But part of what Tirén was grasping for was a recognizable analogy for the way that joiking embodies the unique materiality of creation. He understood that the titles he gave the joiks—"To Greta Person" or "To the Ocean Liner"—were not odes but concrete poems. Beingness itself, recreated in sound.”

“The Norwegian Sámi musician and law professor Ánde Somby has written that the joik differs from a Western European song in that it has no linear structure: no beginning, no middle, no end. "A yoik... starts suddenly and stops just as abruptly. In this respect, a yoik has neither a beginning nor an end, and is therefore circular rather than linear." Frode Fjellheim, on the other hand, finds that the joik does most often have a linear structure and a musical form, "though the performance of the yoik is often not linear in the way that it doesn't always start and stop at the same place. The yoiker repeats the yoik a number of times (circle), but starts and stops often anywhere within what I actually see as a ‘linear' musical shape. Most yoikers I interview even tell me where the start and the end of the yoik is. But in a live performance they often don't start at the 'start.'"”

“In a strongly phrased article in Museum News in 2015, [Lars Magne] Andreassen spoke of the gap between well-meant intentions and lack of follow-through, particularly about what was necessary to bring Sámi museums up to the same standards as Norwegian museums. He quoted the then president of the Sámi Parliament, Aili Keskitalo: "Norwegianization and oppression is our common history, and as long as that is made out to be only a Sámi issue, that will make evolution more difficult."”

“For many in the core communities of the Sámi homelands, the point of the Bååstede project is to bring what was created in Sápmi back to Sápmi, so that the Sámi themselves, in coming to the various museums, can see and study the objects made by their ancestors. At the same time, most Sámi are aware of the symbolic power of repatriation as a step in the process of acknowledging and righting historic wrongs.”

“Rauna Kuokkanen, a Finnish-Sámi scholar, also has taken a more skeptical view, asking whether such commissions will result in meaningful structural chance: "Settler states often define reconciliation as the venting of individual psychological traumas, rather than the eradication of structural causes of injustice."”

“The patterns of imagery in the belt correspond to traditional Sámi worldviews, and there are about thirty unique words connected with the weaving materials and tools. When Nystad and others who know this technique teach, they are passing on not only a skill but a whole vocabulary that could be lost if not renewed and shared. Education in duodji that pairs handiwork with language is becoming increasingly common, sometimes within the structure of a "living museum" and sometimes in more informal workshops.”

“Repatriation means restoring artefact collections from museums and other institutes to source communities. But it can also mean returning knowledge, so that the knowledge connected to the artefacts is retrieved to the community, by getting to know the production method and the materials of the artefacts in museum collections or the history behind the objects. Repatriation aims to transfer control of the cultural heritage to the source community. By exploring the history of collections, their origins, and by sharing this information with the community [sic] can, at best, enable objects to be actively involved in empowering and healing processes. A process where numbered objects revert to cultural belongings. These belongings carry the knowledge of the ancestors, they are the database, the language that opens to the descendants and they carry and evoke emotions at both a private and collective level. Like the ládjogahpir, the heritage within the objects breaks away from the museum vitrines and flows into the source community to create new meanings in addition to the old ones, thus undergoing a process of rematriation.”

“Eeva-Kristiina Harlin also interviewed many of the women on audio. Later she and Pieski wrote, "The rehabilitation of lost elements of heritage is not an easy process. Collective work helps in this, as well [as] in terms of healing, which for Indigenous societies is an essential part of survival and flourishing."”

“Like many Indigenous people, the Sámi were and are exhibited in the ethnographic present—which often means they are hardly present at all, except as sorcerers of the North with their magic drums or as nomads crossing the frozen wastes in reindeer caravans. Rarely do the museums include the stories of how the Sámi objects arrived at the museum or make the collecting process and early collectors an integral aspect of the history. This is not always the fault of past curators, who worked with what they had, but it shows a lack of curiosity on the part of present-day curators who have access to new databases and scholarly historical research.”

“The making and using of new vocabulary is part of the artistic practice for many Sámi artists, writers, and scholars. Sometimes the language chosen is English, to bypass Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish altogether and to connect more readily with an international audience. Increasingly, the vocabulary comes from one of the Sámi languages, as in the use of the word dalvedh from South Sámi, for a long-running art and research project initiated by Norwegian-Sámi artist and filmmaker Sissel M. Bergh, with the collaboration of the musician Frode Fjellheim and a variety of historians, archeologists, and other Sámi scholars. Dalvedh is a verb meaning "to appear again, after a long absence."”

“While political resistance and moral acknowledgment and reconciliation play a role in the resurgence of Sami visibility and agency in the Nordic countries and on the world stage, the fact is that the Sámi people never disappeared. They have remained. They've continued to make objects, tell stories, travel through new and traditional homelands, celebrate, pray, and joik landscape, animals, weather, and loved ones.”

[John Benson · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I began this book, I was unsure if I should have picked this book as it brought out how museums in the 1800s displayed and misappropriated Sami cultural artifacts. As the book progresses, the author shows how the Nordic governments and museums changed how they saw the Sami people and began to allow them more agency in how they would share their culture to their Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish neighbors. The book is much more focused on Sweden, but it gives a good overview on the interactions between the different Nordic cultures and how they grew to understand the Sami culture in a much more accepting way. A thoughtful, well-researched book with many graphics to help one get a good feel for the artifacts and people that she writes about in the book.

[Becky H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this book was incredible! I learned so much from this book about the Sami people. It was fascinating the stories that items have as time passes. It was interesting to read how much a place can change over time. This was a book I couldnt put down although there was alot of sadness and few glimmers of hope. A very informative read and one that was so thoughtfully written. This book would be perfect for a historians collection.

[Välke K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting story of duodji