trip08: The Whole Point
Excerpt from a PATREON post from OCTOBER 27, 2022
I was on the road by 9am on Monday (October 17th), driving the hour from Gällivare back to Vettasjärvi. The car was again covered in a layer of icy-frost, which meant the roads were, too. I scraped the windows like I've done every winter since I learned to drive. I was grateful that the spikes in my tires really did work. I filled-up the tank with gas and made my way east into the morning sun.
My mind was full of anticipation and the car was full of the sounds of foreign radio. There are stations in Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish and specific programs in Sámi on the public radio station. Sámi language changes by region. Considered separate languages, not dialects, there are about 10 in total across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. North Sámi is the language spoken in the regions I have traveled through. I can decipher Norwegian from Swedish. I know the difference between Sámi and Finnish, and can hear the distinctions (and the connections) between the two when spoken - but the only language I have even the slightest hope of understanding is Finnish. I would love to gain a deeper understanding of how Finnish and Sámi languages are historically related. When I listen to suomenkieli (Finnish language) on the radio I can pickup words and the general topics they are discussing, even as the specific details that determine the point of the conversation elude me. Listening to Sámi is the next layer of this murky way of listening. I hear words and phrases and vocal intonations that I understand in relation to Suomea (Finnish) ... but not much beyond that. The sensation brings me right back to my year in Oulu, sitting around tables listening to conversations in Finnish, and generally dazing-off to the background music rhythm of their talking ... the radio is like that, too.
When the road shifted to gravel, I changed the radio to the classical music station. As I entered the final stretch before reaching Vettasjärvi, Jo Jo Ma came on, playing Bach's Cello Suite no1 - a piece I used to play on the cello in high school. The music danced through my ears as my eyes took in the forest and lake and sky - the rolling landscape of my foremothers and fathers, realizing that these are the exact lands they traversed, not merely a concept. The closer I came to Lennart's place, the closer I came to real-life connection with the real roots of Wilhlemine's bloodline. This wasn't just imagining anymore. The music helped to wake my cells and my muscle memory; remembering how my own fingers could play these notes on the strings of my own cello, pulling the sound out with my bow. My body rocked with the music, now, as it was required back then to play this piece - especially the climbing notes at the end. I met the sound with my entire self; memory and tactile knowledge from the past meeting this moment in time, merging my own way of knowing in my body with a new branch of memory I was awakening to. With the final resolving note, I turned the radio off and finished the drive in silence. I was ready.
Lennart is a respected and masterful maker of Sámi Doudji - traditional Sámi handicraft. He mostly makes knives these days, but also made cups from wood and smaller carved items out of reindeer antler. Lennart is the first and only Sámi relative I have met on this trip.
I parked down by what I assumed was his shop, which is closer to the road. When I stepped out of my rental car and began walking up to his house, I could hear him before I could see him. A door opened and his feet moved along the floor in the screened porch space outside the main entrance. I was nervous in all the ways one should be when meeting new relatives from lines that were buried for generations, but also in a primal way that any living creature experiences when encountering another living creature. "Can I trust you?" If I'm honest, I sensed it in him, too, in those first moments. And then we spoke our names and greeted each other in Finnish/Meänkieli and all was safe and open and inviting.
He showed me the knives he is actively working on: mostly sheaths made from reindeer antler, some mixed with wood, all revealed intricate patterns carved into the antler with a knife and eventually 'filled' with a specific tree’s shavings. I admit I didn't fully grasp this part, or the material, but the dark parts are not burned, but filled - carvings filled with a natural color that is darker than the antler. Two of them were knive-handles+blades. He used to also forge the knife blades, but now he sources them in order to focus on the carved parts.
He showed me some cups that he made in the past. I have a carved wooden kuksa from the time I lived in Finland. Kuksa is the Finnish word. Guksi is the Sámi word. The Sámi guksi differ from the Finnish kuksa (at least the one I have and the ones I've seen) in an important way. Kuksa are carved out of wood, a smooth drinking cup with one or two (or more) holes carved out for your fingers to hold it. Traditional Guksi are made from a specific kind of growth on birch trees called burls. The growths occur when the tree has been stressed (by insects or bacteria) in a way that causes a swirling growth pattern in the burl. Gugksi are carved from these burls and the ones I saw had different handles - shorter, flat handles that are sometimes lined with carved antler - likely because of the way they are extracted from the trees. The burls are carved out to be smooth and the cups are free from cracks that are more likely when carving from straight-growth wood.
I asked (for me and for our relative Julie) if he had any items for sale and he exhaled while shaking his head. He only works on pre-ordered/commissioned items these days. He told me that when he was younger he might have made hundreds of knives in one year, but he has slowed down now and works at his own pace on the pre-orders. The maker-turned artist in me understood these decisions well.
We had coffee and pulla and discussed family connections and lineage. He shared books that have been compiled of Sámi family genealogy. The Fanni line is the one my ancestors stem from and Fanni took-up many pages, a fat section, of the book. I found the page and there were their names but I didn't really see how far it goes forward. My mind was full of questions I have been gathering over the past year and half, all stemming from the main question: "Is this family line Sámi?" Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I can answer that with a YES - the proof is in the records, in the books, in the churches, in the oral history .... and still it is not that simple. I could feel, in ways I cannot fully articulate, that it is not that simple there either. And maybe, that is why it's complicated in the US, too?
American culture is boastful, brash, proud. We wear our affiliations on our chests. We claim sports teams like they are clans - rivaling is normal. Non-sports people do it, too, with brands and logos and even our diet culture is pushed on us as a way of claiming something about our identity. In a way, we need these markers to know our identity. We crave them and buy them and consume them because we are starved of our own histories. This force is not just American, because humans have always migrated, but this pattern in the United States continues to this day because I see it happening with my husband’s family - who came as refugees from Laos when he was 9 years old. Sometimes by choice, immigrants trade tradition, connection, and belonging for opportunity or simply to survive from hardship back home. As I work to uncover this family story, I feel the price of those trades. I feel the loss of that culture. I know the emptiness of the trade-off. Whiteness. Whiteness in the US allows us to brazenly claim or adopt identities ... because we don't see/understand the roots that others have in other parts of the world. We don't acknowledge the roots of Native Americans that settlers continuously hacked away at in order to claim “America” as "young."
So, I feel this youth in me while in my ancestral places in Swedish Sápmi. I think that is the easiest way to describe it. A more nuanced way to talk about it is by describing the slow and soft way Lennart communicates with me. I try to embrace the silence between conversation, to not fill it, to wait for him to begin or share ... instead of me asking one question after another. I learn by noticing what he shares, how he responds briefly or more in depth when I ask something. He holds much in and seems to only release some. He shares about speaking North Sámi with his grandfather, how he could speak and understand everything then. I get the impression he doesn't speak as much now, though he teaches me the words for the 4 seasons - then says, "But, you know we have eight seasons"
He pours me coffee and shows me that you must pour coffee towards your own body, hold the pot in a special way so that it pours towards you - not away from you. This is important and I feel it in the way Souliyahn's family in Laos move through ceremony with the same diligence. Everything means something, every movement tied to past meaning. Small details like this tell me that old Sámi ways continued, without speaking, under the radar of the church and state forces. He talks about his own kids (who are around my age) and their modern lives and the lack of interest in the Sámi ways, but how there seems to be an increasing interest from even younger people in reconnecting to the culture. These generational patterns and variations make sense to me, but what is different here is the presence of history ... the knowledge that this is the land, unconsumed by mines, where the generations lived. The deep knowing and disinterest reside in the same place, not floating or displaced, and both sensations have the same roots. So, the trees and the water and earth remember, too, even if I cannot translate their messages, I feel them. This is why I came.
After coffee, we took the short drive down to the Rantatalo - "house near the lake" that I had photographed the day before, unknowingly. Maybe I heard the land without realizing it? I change into my new KERO beak boots, handmade leather boots made by a Sámi family in Sattajärvi near Pajala. I wanted my first steps in them to be in Vettasjärvi.
Rantatalo, as Lennart referred to it, is the oldest home on the ancestral land where Wilhelmine’s father was born and where his grandfather Hans Mickelsson Prunu settled after losing his reindeer. Lennart pointed to some older buildings across the yard and said they were likely from Adam's era. I did not get a clear sense of how old this house was, but Adam was born in 1834. The long barn from the picture Julie sent me is no longer there. The house is owned by someone in a city somewhere (not a relative is what I understood) and it is not being maintained very well as you can see. Just up the hill behind the house is where the Heiva family lived and that is why Hans settled here, he came to the place his wife's family lived. Luckily I had intuitively taken drone footage the day before because it would have been too much to try to do then.
After our little excursion down the road and back, Lennart made me a lunch of meatballs and potatoes and gravy . I couldn't help but reflect the long distances I had traveled on this trip and how this ancestral place has called him back after living in other places earlier in his life. I showed him some of the artwork that I am making and I am not sure if he understood but I shared just the same. I left two small prints of one of my favorite studies on paper. Being there, and seeing his work (and especially after the time I would spend in Jokkmokk following my time with Lennart) I can see how elements of my work are expressions of "Sámi-ness" for someone who did not grow up knowing about Sámi culture. AND after seeing (and learning even more in the coming day about the roots of) traditional Sámi duodji, I can see how my work is really something else, too.
I am not expressing tradition, but speaking to it. In many ways I am having a conversation about the complexity of it all and trying to capture the emotions involved with that complexity. Those emotions are old and new, historic and modern, the pain is felt and the promise remains, too.
I said goodbye to Lennart mid-afternoon as I still had a 2hour drive ahead of me. I left Vettasjarvi for the second time, feeling like I knew the roads, knew my way. I headed towards Jokkmokk by way of Purnu - the name-sake-place of Wilhelmine's great grandfather, and established and acknowledged Sámi family in this area. I felt chased by the sun, didn't want to be driving back roads at dusk when the moose and reindeer move more, but also had to acknowledge how inadequate my planning was for this portion of the trip. I hadn't had any contacts until I was already on the road. I accepted it for what it was, knowing full-well that I can come back and spend a lot of time here, connecting with real people in the future. So, I took some pictures and drone footage of the area of Purnu - where Hans paid taxes on land for reindeer to roam. He would have lived in a mobile/moveable Laavu and so in many ways, I didn't need to find a house. I know the place now. I can still feel it.
The drive to Jokkmokk took me along more unpaved roads that seemed more remote for some reason. I encountered my last reindeer herd on the road in the middle of nowhere. They just really can't be bothered by cars. I admire it. Some move out of the way, some just stand there looking at you, others seem to move to the side only to dart back across to zig and zag in front of the car. They are a wonder to me.
