Abstracts
Criticism of Society in Early Sami Literature
Lisa Monica Aslaksen
The first literature to be published in Sami was written by priests and missionaries. In the 1800s, priests wrote down epic yoik lyrics. In some of these yoiks we can see how there is a resistance to colonization. One of these yoiks are The Thief and the Shaman. It is about power relation between the thief and the shaman. It also contains two-level communication where one message is meant for the Sami listeners and the other for the foreign listeners. Anders Larsen Beaivi-álgu published in 1912 (Daybreak) tells the story about Abo Eira, a Sami boy who lives in the middle of the strongest Norwegianization. From poetry and novel to a nonfiction text that Elsa Laula wrote. The book Infor lif eller död. Sanningsord I de lappska förhållanderna is a political pampleth (1904). The pampleth gives a challenge to the Sami to work together an improve the situation. In this presentation I will do a short reading of the texts mentioned above. I will show how to catch criticism of society in the early Sami literature. I will ask what the purpose with the criticism is, and what was going on in the Society in the late 1800s early 1900s. These texts represent both fiction and non-fiction, and still they have the same political themes that shows how the Sami experienced the colonization and how it was to be a minority.
Depicting the Agency of Plants and Animals on Norway's Subarctic Heath Finnmarksvidda: Seeking Inspiration in Modern Biological Science and Traditional Sami Animism
Fredrik Chr. Brøgger
In my talk I discuss some of my ideas in my current project, in which I try to portray the pulsating life of some of the most typical plants, birds, fish, mammals, and insects on the sub-artic, low-alpine moors around Iešjávri, a particular part of Finnmarksvidda. My project also includes an eighty-page chapter on the Sami families that have had their permanent residence at three mountain lodges in the area, tracing their history on the heath since the end of the Second World War, but I have had to leave this topic out altogether. Given the strong limitations of a talk like this, I restrict myself to discussing only two of my dominant themes, namely the strong presence of agency in the various non-human beings on the heath and of what could be justly called their sense of aesthetics. For the same reason, I have had to limit my illustrations to three species – only two plants and one bird – among the altogether forty species my project focuses on in its portrayal of this environment. In my attempts to evoke the agency and sense of beauty that are ingrained in the very being of these creatures, I rely heavily on both scientific studies and ideas inherent in traditional Sami animism. Although radically different in terms of their world views – their ontology and epistemology – both approaches to our living world seem to arrive at some of the same insights, namely that non-humans, be they plants or animals, do not merely yield passively to human dominance, but possess a presence, an alertness and separate ability to act that must be taken into consideration in our caretaking and management of our severely threatened natural environments.
Decolonial Interruptions of Settler Time in Tanya Tagaq’s Multimodal Art
Laura Castor
In the popular imagination, images of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic frequently have produced two types of reactions: the desire to preserve knowledge about the traditions of a vanishing people, and the moral impulse to “help” members of marginalized Indigenous communities become full-fledged participants in Canadian society. In this paper I analyze three multimodal texts by Inuk throat singer, writer, and visual artist Tanya Tagaq as challenges to these frequently well-intentioned reactions: Tagaq’s 2014 “sealfie” picture of her infant daughter next to a dead seal, her 2012 throat singing musical performance to accompany screenings of Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic silent film, Nanook of the North (1922), and her acclaimed genre-bending debut novel Split Tooth (2018). For each of the three works, I discuss 18th-20th century historical contexts, the role of the reader/listener, and the specific decolonial gestures Tagaq enacts in a 21st century context. In her throat singing Nanook performance she reclaims the subjectivity of the Indigenous actors who played “authentic Eskimos” in Flaherty’s ethnographic representations of vanishing traditions. In her controversial “sealfie” post she comments visually on the relationship between the cases of missing and murdered Canadian Indigenous women on the one hand, and the widespread animal rights-based opposition to traditional seal hunting practices in the Arctic, on the other. In Split Tooth she integrates memoir, poetry, fiction, and myth to create evocative literary expressions that represent multiple uses and abuses of power. In all three texts, Tagaq fiercely asserts continued Indigenous presence as the invisible throughline in grand narratives of 18th-19th century “progress” (David W. Noble, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Treuer, Gerald Vizenor). Equally important, Tagaq demonstrates Arctic Indigenous female power as fiercely resistant to the reductive narratives of tragic Indigenous subjects who want to be healed on terms set by Canadian society.
The Art of Coping in the song Elveland
Lill Tove Fredriksen
In my home municipality Porsanger, in Finnmark, Northern Norway, there was a rich tradition of making satirical songs at the beginning of the 1900s. This tradition is now gone. There were persons who were very good at making songs about people, especially about those who occupied positions of some importance. Elveland is both a man and a song. The man was so zealous in his job as roadman, forester and river attendant that he got the rather dubious honor of having a whole song made about him. The honor was dubious because the song is satirical and ultimately does not leave him with much honor. In fact, the song is a form of revenge by the local community because he would not let them cut as much firewood as they needed, and because he was self-aggrandising and took advantage of his position of power. In this presentation I will do a short reading of the text Elveland, to catch the connotative meaning in the text. I ask if this song could be a way of coping for the local community. One of the terms for coping in the Northern Sámi language is birget: ”be able to live, manage”. Birget means coping both practically in life and existentially and socially. Birget is part of birgengoansta, coping skills, being able to adapt to different conditions and new situations. This is a value in the Sámi culture.
Vuohtádat: in order to trace you need tracing conditions – Sámi arts in a contextualized setting between 1750 and 1914.
Harald Gaski
Sámi arts as arts – according to 'Western' defintions – were not defined before the 1970s, when 'dáidda' was introduced as a concept narrowing part of the duodji-tradition down to abstract modernistic art in contrast to traditional customary art production. This may sound paradoxical and confusing; but the case is that the introduction of Indigenous methodologies as an approach to Indigenous arts in general – both customary and modern – changed the whole concept of how to view, appraise and assess Sámi visual, musical, and literary traditions. What is new, what is modern, and what are the connections to customary art forms? Is the Western canonizing of the development of arts the only adequate and legitimate way of defining the field? Why, if at all, is the period 1750 to 1914 relevant for the study of Sámi and Arctic Indigenous arts at all?
The Mosaics of an Arctic Seamstress: Ada Blackjack and the Wrangel Island Diary (1921–23)
Silje Gaupseth
This paper focuses on the narrative mosaics of Iñupiat Alaskan Ada Delutuk Blackjack, hired seamstress on an occupation colony on Wrangel Island in 1921–23. While the venture resulted in the tragic deaths of Blackjack’s four companions on the island, she became the expedition’s sole survivor and kept a diary during the last months of her stay. I read Blackjack’s narrative self-representation against some of the characteristics given to her in Canadian Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s official account of the expedition, The Adventure of Wrangel Island (1925), and his theories of the superior Arctic adaptability of Western men. By focusing on narrative elements that form Blackjack’s characteristic perception of her surroundings, it is possible to read her autoethnograpic and pluralistic narrative self-representation as a key feature of her narrative Indigeneity.
Travels with an English Teapot
Sophie Gilmartin
My paper finds its material object in a large, everyday, and slightly battered Victorian teapot. This teapot has found its way from England and Scotland to Nunavut through various adventures and convoluted ways: a Scottish whaler’s wife made sure it was on board ship before she sailed to Baffin Island; a young Inuit woman, who was a renowned navigator, guide, and one-time ethnological exhibit, made sure it came with her when she finally returned to her home on Baffin Island. The drinking of tea held an emotional charge and a practical importance for these two women, who from their separate lives, finally met and had tea together in both Scotland and the Arctic. The significance of the teapot, as a colonial symbol of ‘civilisation’ and as a catalyst to comfort and community in its passages between Britain and Nunavut will be explored in this paper and in the exhibition of this well-travelled, much-used and tannin-stained teapot.
Museer er ikke nøytrale / Museat eai leat neutrálat
Charis Gullickson (panel discussion)
Public art institutions are inseparable from their social and historical context. Museums never have been neutral. Neutrality is defined as “the state of not supporting or helping either side in a conflict, disagreement, etc.; impartiality.” The myth of museum neutrality is the unspoken argument that museums cannot risk doing anything that might alienate government and private funders. Therefore, art museum professionals tend to do things a certain way and operate within noncontroversial frameworks. As such, art museums remain apolitical and impartial with regard to the political and social issues governing our society. This presents a challenge to museums today given an increased reliance upon corporate and private funding, that is, stakeholders who are grounded in marketplace ideology. If art museums do not practice or engage with critical inquiry they maintain and perpetuate the status quo. With intent to promote national identity, art museums in Norway still preserve and revere colonial values. While art museums might not necessarily declare openly they are neutral, what might happen if the art museum acknowledged to the public that museums are not neutral, and used it as a tool in practice? How can those who are not in positions of leadership, in this case curators, incite institutional change that frames the art museum as social agent? My proactive strategy to work toward change was to grow a collective – Museer er ikke nøytrale / Museat eai leat neutrálat – to undo the idea of (art) museum neutrality and develop institutions that are more relevant for artists, people in communities, and other institutions. How does this play out in practice?
Following the leads of the communities needs and not our academic agenda
Sven Haakanson Jr.
How do you decolonize colonized practices within museums? It starts with trust, listening and collaborating with communities. Anthropologists/researchers have been trained to extract knowledge and to reverse this ongoing practice take work to change these colonial ways of erasing others. Collections that now resides in museums should not be seen as innate objects, but as living cultural pieces that embodied knowledge of indigenous ways that were nearly erased by colonialism. I will share lessons from the past three decades of "decolonizing" museum practices through sharing and returning knowledge to the communities from where it was extracted. The angyaaq (pictured) is just one example of how we can reverse this process so our communities can reengage with their cultural heritages.
Drawing from Home: Inughuit Experience, Knowledge and Aesthetics
Ingeborg Høvik and Axl Jeremiassen
This paper continues our work, first presented in Anchorage in April 2022, on a series of about 90 drawings created by named Inughuit individuals in the period 1902-1920. Donated to Ilulissat Museum by Knud Rasmussen’s (1879-1933) children in 1979, these transcultural images emerged from sustained contact with Danish explorers (the Literary Expedition, 1902-04) and colonisers of Northwest Kalaallit Nunaat, in an area Rasmussen claimed and named Thule in 1910. The body of works show hunting scenes and representations of landscapes, people and animals, and present examples of Inughuit aesthetics and artistic skills and convey aspects of their knowledge of and relation to animals, nature and people in a period of increased European (especially Danish) influence and control. Our paper first examines the contact zone in which these drawings were created, with particular focus on the visit from Rasmussen and his explorer colleagues in 1902-04. We seek to answer questions about how the drawings came into existence and what happened to them afterwards – how did the transaction of drawing equipment, skills and drawings happen, who suggested or arranged for it and why? Secondly, we begin a situating of the drawings within a local, Inughuit art history, one that connects to an earlier example of Inughuit visual expression – the drawings by Qalaherriaq (d. 1856). A central question here is how the Inughuit aestheticized their relationship to animals, nature (ice, water, land) and each other.
Niviatsianaq’s Amautiq: Archival Photographs from Kivalliq, 1903-1909
Renée Hulan
This presentation will focus on photographs of Niviatsianaq by Geraldine Moodie, the first Canadian woman to own her own portrait studio. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Moodie recorded the names of her subjects using phonetically spelled Inuktitut, handwritten in white ink under each photo, and her photographs of Niviatsianaq, whom the whalers nicknamed “Shoofly,” are well-known Arctic images (see King and Lidchi). As the “country wife” of the American whaling captain George Comer, Niviatsianaq managed the sewing and mending done by the Kivalliq women for the whalers, and she is reputed to be the first Inuit woman to use a sewing machine. She created beautiful, intricately beaded clothing, including her amautiq, was featured in portraits taken by Moodie and others and was later deposited by Comer in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (Eber 115). After tracing the fate of Niviatsianaq’s amautiq and briefly examining the controversy surrounding the 2017 exhibition North of Ordinary: The Arctic Photographs of Geraldine and Douglas Moodie at the Glenbow Museum, the presentation will explore the entangled histories of photography and museum acquisition, the complex interactions of women like Moodie and Niviatsianaq in the contact zone, and the challenge of reclaiming archival materials.
References: Eber, Dorothy Harley. When the Whalers were Up North: Inuit Memories from the Eastern Arctic. McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989; King, J. C. H. and Henrietta Lidchi, ed. Imaging the Arctic. London: British Museum, 1998.
Documenting Their Best Shot: The Construction of Early Arctic Heroism Through Muskoxen Slaughter
Dolly Jørgensen
European explorers to Greenland encountered muskoxen as a resource. But more than just filling their bellies with muskoxen meat, they also filled their heroic narratives with tales of dangerous and exciting encounters with the arctic animal. Behind the barrels of both guns and cameras, muskoxen were deployed to connect the trials of the explorers to their audiences distant from the harsh polar landscape. Although the umimmak was not unfamiliar to indigenous Greenlanders, the ice cap explorers attached more significance to the animal than the locals had. Exploring the combination of image and text of muskoxen in widely circulated books on polar adventures from 1886 to 1911, this talk argues that white heroism on Greenland was bound up with the slaughter of indigenous muskoxen.
The monopoly trade and Greenland’s colonial archives
Nanna Katrine Lüders Kaalund
When the Royal Greenlandic Trading Department (KGH) was established in 1774 with a trade monopoly from the Danish king, the company was also given an almost complete control of the colonial administration in Greenland. In effect, the KGH was the main employer, the bank, the law, and the gatekeeper of knowledge. As was the case for other colonial trading companies, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the East India Company, the KGH supported and organized scientific research with the expressed aim of extracting more valuable resources for the imperial metropole. Agents of the KGH surveyed, collected, classified, and catalogued Greenland, and transferred objects and information to consumers in Denmark. Two of the significant gatekeepers were the Director of the KGH Hinrich Rink and his wife Signe Rink, who collected and archived knowledge, objects, and images relating to Kalaallit Inuit, including Aron from Kangeq and Suersaq (known as Hans Hendrik). In doing so, Hinrich Rink and his wife Signe Rink exercised a significant level of control over what data and which objects were incorporated into the body of knowledge about Greenland, and what was excised and suppressed. Taking Hinrich Rink and Signe Rink’s collecting practices as a starting point, this paper examines the impact of the KGH’s monopoly trade on the colonial archives of Greenland.
«Animal diffractions. What can we learn from reading Anthropocene science, early natural history, and Indigenous stories through each other?”
Sigfrid Kjeldaas
This paper takes as its starting point a recent scientific article (Tape et al. 2021) in which the dam building activities of the North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) is presented in terms of a new and dangerous disturbance enhancing the already detrimental effects of climate change in the Arctic. Noting how the article simultaneously makes the beaver an accomplice in anthropogenic climate change and part of a physical environment that must now be monitored and managed, I argue that it expresses a form of ‘Anthropocene’ environmental thinking detrimental to more profound understanding of the cultural and historical developments that could lead to climate change. Using the beaver as case study, the analysis presented responds to Anthropocene scholars’ recent claim that the crisis of climate change becomes comprehensible only by juxtaposing the history of capitalism with “the history of life on this planet” (the way different life-forms connect to and depend on one another) (Chakrabarty 2009, 217; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017). Applying the feminist methodology of diffractive reading (Barad 2007; Haraway 1997), I read current ‘Anthropocene science’ on the beaver through 1) the history of the capitalist fur trade on the North American continent; 2) early natural history descriptions of this animal; and 3) Native American myths and narratives about it. Focusing on the creation of difference and the drawing of boundaries, my analysis highlights the (metaphorical) kinds of knowledge and the (relational) perspectives lost, deemed irrelevant, or perverted as local and historical knowledge became transferred into emerging scientific and capitalist frameworks. Contemplating the cultural and material effects of such losses, I return to the present to discuss what possible value they might have held for animals (and humans) now doing their best to (understand and) adapt to ongoing climatic changes.
References: Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke U.P.; Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso; Chackrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35: 197-222; Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_witness@second_milennium. FemalemanÓ_meets_OncomouseÔ: Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge; Tape, K. D., J. A. Clark, B. M. Jones, H. C. Wheeler, P. Marsh, and F. Rosell. 2021. “Beaver Engineering: Tracking a New Disturbance in the Arctic.” NOOA Technical Report OAR ARC: 20-09.
Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition: Frederick Whymper and the Native population
Lena Klein
In the summer of 1864, Frederick Whymper (1838-1901) was the official artist of the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition crossing the Eastern half of Vancouver Island. His artistic output of these months was quite large and includes numerous watercolours and sketches of frontier settlements, landscapes, scenes of the travel, the work crew, and the Indigenous population. He also summed up this exploration travel in his travel account Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, formerly Russian America–now ceded to the United States–and in various other parts of the North Pacific (1868). In my presentation, the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition serves as the basis for an examination on how the relationship between the Native population and the expedition looked like. What did the explorers think of the Native population? What did the Indigenous population of Vancouver Island experience through this expedition? What is there to learn from the cultural encounters taking place in this “contact zone” (Pratt 2008)? By analyzing Frederick Whymper’s visual and textual output of this expedition on Vancouver Island, these questions will be examined.
Reweaving worldviews and networking the people who live with whales: a practice of artistic project “Ordinary Whales”
Sakura Koretsune
As a visual artist, Sakura Koretsune seeks to reweave the stories between humans and cetaceans through embroidered images on textiles with texts in the form of journals and poems, which are combined into her artistic project/booklet series “Ordinary Whales.” For the past six years, she has visited various places that have relationships with whales and dolphins. These places are both inside and outside Japan: Ishinomaki and Kesennuma (Miyagi, Japan), Taiji (Wakayama, Japan), Abashiri and Tomakomai (Hokkaido, Japan), Point Hope (Alaska, USA), Shinnecock Nation (New York, USA), and more. Inspired by the notion of "super whale" proposed by anthropologist Arne Kalland, she has been trying to reweave rich stories of whales in different regions to find stories that counterbalance images of the "super whale" created by media and the imagination of people who are not close to living cetaceans. As Koretsune traveled and studied local beliefs toward whales in Japan and compared them with other places overseas, she realized that the reality is more complicated than the image of "Japan as a whaling country" suggests, the image she had been raised with. The experience of untying the imprinted image eventually led her to reweave the worldviews that existed in coastal communities before the modern-whaling era and contact with the Western society. She continues her practices to find rich layers of worldviews in local communities around the world by gathering stories, re-interpreting museum collections, and creating artworks. Through her activities she aims to bring a network to lands and people connected by the sea, as if guided by whales and dolphins.
Fragments of the World: Photography and the Laestadian Heritage
Sigrid Lien
The legacy of the Swedish revivalist preacher and natural scientist Lars Levi Læstadius (1800-1861), still looms large in Sápmi. Not only does the Læstadian movement that he established still hold a strong position within many Sámi communities. Læstadius also left behind a large corpus of texts within different genres and forms: theological texts and works within natural science - but importantly also an introduction to Sámi mythology. Laestadius’ work among Sámi peoples was honoured already in his own time. Some of the first genre paintings from the Sámi areas were produced in 1839-1840 by the French artist François-Auguste Biard (1798-1882). Encouraged by king Louis-Philippe of Orleans (1773-1850), Biard joined a scientific expedition to the Northern areas of Norway and Sweden. One of his paintings from this expedition represents pastor Læstadius preaching to a group of Sami people. Biard paints them as they are about to move out of their simple dwellings, deeply seated in a sublime, frosty landscape of snow and ice. In an elevated open space in the foreground, they are facing the civilized Christian world in the shape of the Lutheran pastor with attentiveness, respect, and curiosity. Biard’s painting was produced just after the introduction of photography (1839), and Biard himself was an artist known to have experimented with the new medium (Matilsky 1985, 86). In his fictional exploration of the Laestadian heritage, Koke Bjørn (2019) the Finnish author Mikael Nemi draws attention to the role of visual observations and representations in general, and more specifically also on the use of photography, in the Laestadian universe. Picking up on the issue of the role of photographs in such contemporary historical interventions, this paper will address not only the way photographs are addressed in Niemi’s fictional construction, but also how photographs are being used in a contemporary art photography project by the Norwegian artist Bente Geving. Inspired by Laestadius’ Fragmenter i Lappska Myhtologien, as well as drawing on her own Sámi family background and their connection to the Laestadian community in Kirkenes, Geving has recently produced a series of photographs that will serve as the pivotal point of the paper’s discussion on photographs and Laestadian heritage. What kind of photographic inscriptions are at play in these new approaches to Laestadius’s worldview? How do they speak through dimensions such as time, scale, presence, and materiality? How do they address and challenge conventional practices of history?
Illustrating Neutral Nature: Fish and Fantasies in Scientific Images
Katarina Wadstein MacLeod
This paper addresses how agents of empire in the early 19th century illustrated their scientific surveys of Arctic nature and its animals. The case study presented for this conference is visual material from the French flagged expedition on board La Recherche which sailed to the Arctic 1838-1840 on a mission to produce knowledge on Arctic nature, animals, and people through interdisciplinary research between scientists, writers, missionaries, and painters from France and Scandinavia. The expedition will be researched as part of a three-year project Illustrating Neutral Nature and I am particularly interested in the tension between cultural production and objective observations in historical scientific illustrations. For this paper I propose to focus on the scientific illustrations of animals such as birds and fish, as well as images of fantasy creatures, which featured in the collected material. The aim is in investigate how fantasies and facts are intertwined in historical illustrations of science and what viewer perspectives are implied. In other words, to what extent a western paradigm can be connoted through an illustration of a fish from the Arctic Ocean. I will discuss the context in which the scientific documentations were produced on the voyage and the role of the indigenous people hired to help navigate through the landscape and its climate. By investigating the ideological and colonial underpinnings of seemingly neutral images of nature this paper deals with how, during the first half of the 19th century, Europeans visualised Nordic and Arctic nature and animals in ways which still resonate today.
Sophie, Sophy, Sophia: Tracing an Influential Greenlandic (Kalaallit) Woman Through Anglophone Travel and Exploration Literature of the Nineteenth Century
Eavan O’Dochartaigh
In the mid-nineteenth century, ships of ‘exploration’ made their way along Greenland’s west coast, often stopping to rest, re-supply, and trade at Danish/Greenlandic ports before entering the Northwest Passage. The visits were a welcome respite for ships’ crews before wintering in the High Arctic and the social interaction that sometimes accompanied the stops was a significant part of expedition life, indicating an Arctic that could be warm and sociable in sharp contrast to the ‘sublime’ Arctic that is commonly associated with exploration during the period. This paper follows the appearance of one woman from Qeqertarsuaq (Disko Island), known as ‘Sophie Broberg’ in English and Danish-language documents, and tracks her influence and agency through textual and visual sources including letters, private journals, periodicals, published narratives and documentary images. By attempting to follow Sophie through the archives, we learn more about her family circumstances, social relations between Greenlandic women and British expeditions, and how the balance of power in the contact zone could be destabilised. The archival research is ongoing at this stage and the paper’s focus is on the primary sources themselves, highlighting the richness of such sources and their potential to reveal the agency of Indigenous women in the contact zone.
Attention to Absence: An Exhibition on the Return of the Sámi Drums 2020-2023
Jelena Porsanger
The exhibition on the return of the Sami drums at The Sami Museum in Karasjok (Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat, RiddoDuottarMuseat) is titled RUOKTOT. In Sámi this means going or coming home. Three-dimensional images of five Sámi drums make up the core of the exhibition. One of these drums has already returned to Sápmi. Four other drums are still kept or owned by non-Sámi museums in Sweden and Germany. Bringing back three-dimensional models and exhibiting them in the Sámi community, draws attention to the absence of these significant cultural and spiritual objects. The exhibition presents the drums with respect, as persons. Their life stories are told as biographies. The traditional Sámi conceptualization of máhcaheapmi – return of something stolen or taken away without permission – is coherent with the need to return the sacred Sámi drums to Sápmi. This presentation elaborates the rationale for this exhibition, the development process since 2020, and the key subjects, from an Indigenous perspective.
Colour My/Your Past: Returning Photographs of Sámi People Taken by Sophus Tromholt in 1883 to Today’s Audiences
Roswitha Skare
The Danish-Norwegian teacher and northern lights researcher Sophus Tromholt (1851-1896) is remembered today for his portraits of the Sámi people in and around Kautokeino in 1883. Tromholt’s photographic heritage is spread across several institutions and collections in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and France, but also made accessible for today’s audiences in printed publications (Fjellstad & Greve 2018). His photographic archive consists of glass-plate negatives and a photographic portfolio with positive photographs on paper. He also published a written account of his journey, richly illustrated with his own photographs: Under the Rays of The Aurora Borealis: In the Land of the Lapps and Kvæns (English and Danish edition, 1885). In 2017 Per Ivar Somby found a photograph of his great-grandfather among Tromholt’s portraits and started a project called “Colour my/your past” where he re-publishes repaired and coloured versions of these over 100 years old images. The new versions have been published in a book (The People Under the Northern Lights, 2019), made available as exhibition, and finally in social media like Facebook and Instagram. This paper seeks to investigate what happens to the images in this transformation from black and white into colour, from one context into several new once. The importance of making these images available for a larger public will also be discussed.
The Greenlanders' conversion to Christianity – an Act of European Violence or Inuit Agency?
Kirsten Thisted
Up through the 18th century, virtually all West Greenlandic Inuit converted to Christianity. In a Danish context, this has become a tale of Danish benevolence towards the Greenlanders, with the Christian missionary Hans Egede (1686–1758) as the main hero. In a Greenlandic context, this narrative is now being challenged as part of the desire to decolonize Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). It seems obvious to see the conversion to Christianity as an act of violence: something that was imposed on the Greenlanders and which forced them to abandon the Inuit's own faith and philosophy. The Greenlandic oral tradition, however, tells a different, far more nuanced and much more exciting story about internal Greenlandic power struggles, strategic considerations and the “youth rebellion” of the 18th century. Thus, in the Greenlandic oral traditions, the Inuit appear as the active subjects of history. In general, the Greenlandic narratives assign the Europeans a rather subordinate role during the first phase of colonization, which is probably a more realistic representation of the power relations between the ethnic groups in this part of the Arctic at this point of time. The paper is based on oral narratives written down and illustrated by Aron from Kangeq (1822-1869).
Alaska Native and Indigenous Ceremony and Music in the 18th-20th Centuries: Reframing and Refocusing the Colonial Lens
Maria Shaa Tláa Williams
European explorers wrote about their encounters with the Indigenous people of Alaska through ships logs, portraits, sketches, and even transcribed some of the music into western notation. The material is valuable even though most of the writings are ethnocentric and written from a Western European perspective of superiority. The sketches, portraits, and in some cases, detailed writings of the social structures, the political organization, the material culture, and ceremonial practice provide a fascinating window in the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and illustrate the degree of change and adaptation that Alaska Native communities were subject to via the colonial process. Initially the Russian Imperial government claimed Alaska and in 1867 “sold” it to the United States. The paper will specifically focus on the ceremonial and shamanistic practices described by explorers such as Zagoskin in the 1840’s, Veniaminov in the early 19th century, and Spanish and French explorers, such as La Perouse and Malaspina. The ceremonial practices disappeared almost completely by the mid-20th century, but in examining the documents created by the above named explorers, it provides a window into rich and complex ceremonial practices.
Animal societies in the Arctic. On Otto Sverdrup´s New Land. Four Years in the Arctic Regions (1903)
Henning H. Wærp
Otto Sverdrup: New land. Four Years int the Arctic Regions: This illustrated account of Polar exploration was originally published in Norway in 1903, and in English translation in 1904. It tells the story of the four years spent by Otto Sverdrup (1854-1930) and his crew in surveying and charting the seas and coastlines of the Arctic. In June 1898, Sverdrup took the ship Fram and a crew including several scientists to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, where they overwintered for four years. It is claimed to be a scientific expedition, and they do have scientists aboard. What the scientific results were, in fact we do hear very little about. The last chapter ends with a political statement: ”So the Fram ́s second polar expediton was at an end. An approximate area of one hundred thousand square miles had been explored and, in the name of the Norwegian King, taken possession of”. – Arctic imperialism, no doubt. In the now classic book Arctic Dreams (1986) Barry Lopez dismisses previous conceptions of the North-American Arctic as an empty space awaiting colonization and modernization. Lopez wants to give the reader a deeper understanding of the land itself; a true image of the Arctic can emerge only when a sensibility toward indigenous people and animals and the way they conduct their lives is coupled with an acknowledgement of the particularities of the Arctic ecosystems. Early British explorers have seen Arctic as a wasteland. When present in their narratives, animals are generally described in terms of nuisances, threats, or as obstacles to their colonial projects. They show, according to Lopez, no interest in the movement of animals. Sverdrup’s low interest in the Inuit culture he comes across is striking. Placenames are often given according to the animals Sverdrup has spotted at the place – Geese bay, Walrus fjord, Reindeer Bay, Bear Sound, Woolf fjord and so on – but the Inuit culture is invisible on the map he draws. It might be said however, that Otto Sverdrup do not fail to recognize the animal societies in the Arctic. My paper will look into this matter.
Encounters in the Contact Zone: Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra (1910) (An Account of the Sami) and Knut Hamsun’s Markens grøde (1917) (Growth of the Soil)
Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp
This paper focuses on two texts, and the relationship between them: A Sami classic – Johan Turi’s Muitalus sàmiid birra – En bog om lappernes liv (1910) (An account of the Sami), and Knut Hamsun’s Markens grøde (1917) (Growth of the Soil), both world classics: Muitalus sàmiid birra was the first book about the Sami written by a Sami in Sami (the Danish translation was published in parallel with the Northern Sami version). Markens grøde is Hamsun’s Nobel Prize novel. The two books originated in the cultural contact zone between the nomadic Sami people and North Norwegian farmers, in Sàpmi/Northern Scandinavia, and both were explicitly intended as critical comments on the current situation for the respective cultures (North Norwegian farming (Hamsun) and Sami reindeer husbandry (Turi)): the marginalization of the culture and the states’ neglectful management of resources. Moreover, Hamsun’s novel can, as I argue in “Hamsuns Markens grøde (1917) som sideskrift til Johan Turis Muitalus sámiid birra – En bog om lappernes liv (1910)” (“Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil (1917) as a counterpoint to Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra – An Account of the Sámi (1910)”), Edda no. 4, 2021, be regarded as influenced by Turi’s book, as well as a counterpart to it. In this paper, it is my intention to take a closer look at the conflicts presented in the two books and the books as parties to a conflict, in the light of the concept of contact zone (Pratt 1995, 4).