Season 2: Episode 5

Just Decide

Everyone's heard of Vikings—their daring North Atlantic voyages, their mysterious runes. But there's another ancient culture in Arctic Scandinavia that's much older, and just as fascinating—the Sámi. While the Vikings have been celebrated, Sámi music, language and traditions were forced underground. Why?

Read More

SáMI BLOOD

Sámi Blood was released in 2016 and went on to win major awards at festivals around the world. It tells the story of Elle Marja, a young Sámi reindeer herder coming of age in the 1930s. Exposed to racism at her boarding school and struggling to connect to her family, she fights to find an authentic identity. The LA Times review is here. 

Sofia Jannok

Sofia Jannok is one of many Sámi musicians who is reclaiming the tradition of joiking, using it to bring attention to Sámi issues and just to make Sámi people more visible in Sweden. You can hear some of her music here.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

SOUND: parade, honks

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm walking in a long parade with a couple thousand extremely happy Norwegians.

AMBI: Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

AMY: I'm in the town of Longyearbyen, which is on a Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard. It's way up in the Arctic, about half-way between Norway and the North Pole. I happened to be there on May 17th  – Norwegian National Day – and people here are celebrating in style.

AMY: I love your dress. Does it have a name?

KARI: Bunad.

AMY: What is the history behind it?

KARI: It's, ah, every part of the country has their own bunad. So it sort of shows where you're from.

AMY: This is Kari Ellingsen, she's 26, and like many of the women and girls in the parade, she's wearing an old-fashioned dress, embroidered with ornate flowers. And she says this word – bunad – applies to the outfits that many of the men are wearing too. 

AMY: So do you know where they're from, by looking at them?

HENNING: Her dress is from the north I guess.

AMY: That's Kari's boyfriend, Henning Skjetne, also 26. Almost everyone in the parade is carrying a little Norwegian flag – and not just carrying it, but waving it enthusiastically -- smiling big, and spontaneously bursting into cheers.

AMBI: more hurrahs

AMY: It's a long, jubilant river of fluttering red, winding its way through the snowy streets of this high Arctic town.

HENNING: It's springtime, and everyone's happy.

AMY: Norway has a lot to be happy about. It's beautiful, wealthy, and deeply egalitarian. The Economist magazine currently ranks Norway as the most democratic country in the world, and they've also set some very bold climate policies. For example, they're aiming to phase out the sales of new gas and diesel vehicles by 2025. And everyone I talked to at this parade, including Kari and Henning, seems truly proud of what the country has come to stand for.

KARI: I know some people may think that it's like, ah…nationalistic. It's not Norway for Norwegian, but it's like, sort of, Norway for everyone. And I think it's like a celebration of human rights and freedom of speech.

AMY: Mix in these ideals with the sheer physical beauty of this country, with steep mountains rising out of sparkling seas, and you can see why people here get a little misty-eyed when the national anthem is played.

SOUND: Norwegian national anthem (parade band)

ISALILL: What is Norway. Yes, Norway is Vikings, and farmers, and the bunad. 

AMY: This is Isalill Kolpus, and she says there's a shadow side to this story of national pride.

ISALILL: Everything Norwegian is this. And what did we decide was not Norwegian? Sámis...are a part of what was decided: that is not a part of Norway. 

MUSIC

AMY: The Sámi are the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and western Russia. Today, the Sámi are strongly associated with reindeer herding, but historically, they provided for themselves in all sorts of ways – they fished and gathered plants, hunted seals and moose. They developed nine distinct but related languages, and traded with each other across their Arctic homeland, which they call Sápmi. But when the kingdoms in the south began to form into the nations of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, borders went up across traditional Sámi migration routes, and their languages, traditions, and spiritual practices were driven underground. In recent decades, Sámi people have been finding their voices and reclaiming their culture. But at the same time, they've been trying to come to terms with a new threat to their way of life – climate change. We're going to explore all of this on the next two episodes of Threshold.

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“I am Sámi and my country is Sámi but it’s colonized.”

“If you tell people you’re Sámi, you have to be a representative of the whole people.”

“I always get the question, ‘Are you really indigenous?’ because I’m white.”

“We see ourselves as the culture carriers because the reindeer is the backbone of the entire Sámi culture.”

“We need the fish. We need food. We can’t eat the oil.”

“They killed our culture and our language. Or they tried at least.”

[04:37] SEGMENT A

AMY: Is it just me, or have Vikings become really popular lately? 

AMBI: Vikings TV show

AMY: I mean, for a while, it was all zombies, zombies, zombies. But now it seems like you can't throw an axe without hitting a Viking. There's the TV show – that's what you're hearing in the background – but also movies, Halloween costumes, it seems like everywhere I look it's Odin, Thor, runes. 

SOUND: Man from TV show roaring

AMY: The Vikings were Germanic people who immigrated into the southern part of the Scandinavian peninsula. Their culture flourished and expanded over a period of about 300 years, starting around the year 800. That seems like a very long time ago to us now. But way before that era, another culture had already taken root in Scandinavia – the Sámi. Their ancestors were likely among the very first people to enter the peninsula when the great ice sheets retreated, more than 10,000 years ago. So, when the Vikings got in their ships and began exploring the long coasts of present-day Norway, Sweden, and Finland, they may have heard the voices of Sámi people ringing out from the forests as they sailed by. Voices that might have sounded something like this...

KRISTER: (singing) Umeå River joik

AMY: This is Krister Stoor. He's Sámi, and this way that he's singing is called joik.

KRISTER: My name is Krister Stoor, I'm 58 years old.

AMY: We'll be going back to Norway in just a bit, but I'm talking to Krister in Umeå, Sweden, a university town about 400 kilometers, or 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle. And this is an Umeå River joik, meant to evoke the river flowing just a few miles away from us. 

SOUND: Krister singing 

AMY: Krister says you don't joik about something or to something – you just “joik it”, you connect, or almost commune with something, through song. 

KRISTER: You have to be the river. To joik it, you have to become that thing. 

SOUND: Krister singing

AMY: Everything in the Sámi world has a joik. Trees and creatures, villages and mountains. And people, too.

KRISTER: So every person, even you, have your own song. But you cannot create your own song. So if I knew you better, I could say this is you, describing you. As long as you have your own joik, and people still know how to joik you, you're alive.

AMY: Even if you're not physically alive. Joiking blurs the hard line between life and death – it doesn't only pay respect to those who have passed on, it evokes them. And the joik can bring other things close, too.

KRISTER: Take the swan. (singing swan joik) There you must feel how the wings come when he comes at spring. [swan joik] And if you don't sing that the swan will not come, so when the swan is coming, then the spring comes. It's not the other way around.

AMY: The joik brings the swan, and the swan brings the spring. It's powerful. This may have been partly why the Vikings respected the Sámi or even feared them. Even though Vikings are now usually portrayed as aggressive, bloodthirsty people, like the Sámi, their culture was centered around intimate connections with the natural world, and both groups had lots of stories of beings who shape-shifted between human and animal form. Most scholars agree that Sámi and Vikings co-existed in relative peace for hundreds of years. But when Christian emissaries began arriving in Scandinavia, things changed. At first, both the Vikings and the Sámi resisted the new religion, but within a few hundred years, the Vikings had more or less surrendered to Christianity. The Sámi continued to resist. In the 1600s, the church decided joik was a form of sorcery, and banned it, along with Sámi drumming.

KRISTER: It was still considered a sin in my home area. So you didn't really hear people do it officially, but when they were alone or if they were drunk. 

AMY: Krister grew up north of here, near Kiruna, Sweden, and every so often, he heard people around him singing in this special way. But when he asked questions about joik, some people wouldn't talk about it. Others said, “no, I don't joik,” even though he had heard them do it. So he kept asking questions, and eventually, he became one of the first people ever to write his doctoral dissertation about joik. He's now a senior lecturer at the Department of Language Studies and the Department of Sámi Studies at Umeå University. But even after all these years of research and reflection about it, he can still get the feeling that joiking is wrong somehow.

KRISTER: I know my history. But still I can feel that, yeah...somewhere behind it, ‘oh this is not correct.’

ISALILL: So I think a lot of the kids attending this school are Sámi, without either realizing it or without wanting to realize it.

MUSIC

AMY: Isalill Kolpus is 27 years old, she teaches at a high school in the Arctic city of Tromsø, Norway. And I just want to flag here that although we're bouncing back and forth between Sweden and Norway, there are also Sámi people in Finland and Russia. Isalill says the experiences of the Sámi were different in each country, but there are some common threads. And one of the big ones is this pressure to assimilate. Sámi people are white. They don't necessarily stand out visually in the dominant Scandinavian and Russian society. And this is one of the complexities of being Sámi, she says. You can hide your identity if you want to. And on the other hand, if you don't want to hide it, you sort of have to make a point of it. And that can be uncomfortable, so Isalill says she understands why many of her students either don't know they are Sámi, or don't want to claim that identity.

ISALILL: And I try to say to them, if your family is from northern Norway more than two generations back….a Sámi might have snuck in there.

AMY: For hundreds of years, the Sámi were considered inferior, first by the church, and then by the state. She says in the 1800s the pressure on the Sámi really ramped up.

ISALILL: There was this thought that to create a nation you have to have one language. Like, one language, one nation, one people. That means if it's not Norwegian it doesn't really fit our project right now. It's like, ‘it's not that convenient that you have a double identity. You have to choose one, and please choose the Norwegian one.’ And then they were concerned about loyalty, for the Sámi people, or a lot of them were nomads, crossing the borders. And so they were like, you have to choose. You have to choose one. One nationality. Because we're building a country over here. Please join.

AMY: Hundreds of years later, Isalill herself felt that pressure to choose. She says when she was growing up, no one in her family talked about the fact that they were Sámi.

ISALILL: Yeah, ahm, it's such a weird thing because I've always known, because my last name, it's Kolpus, and that's an old Sámi name. And so I've always known, and I've always, like, I've heard my grandmother and my grandfather talking Sámi, but I didn't really realize it or understand it until I was like 18.

AMY: That was when Isalill's cousin received her first gakti, the traditional Sámi dress.

ISALILL: And I was like – oh! Oh, that's right. We're... we're actually Sámi. It's not just like some of us are, but we all are. And I started exploring more and I got my first gakti.

AMY: An elderly relative passed the garment on to Isalill.

ISALILL: It's, it's the most beautiful piece of clothing I've ever seen.

AMY: Isalill says it was transformative to make her Sámi identity visible – not only to the outside world but to herself.

ISALILL: Like when I put on the gakti, or when I had my first Sámi conversation with my grandmother, it was just it was like coming home or something. I even get like, teary-eyed thinking about it, I just went, oh my god, I've been missing this my whole life. This should have been my mother tongue, I should have been wearing these clothes every like 17th of May, and just feeling that I belonged there. Not that I don't feel I belong in Norwegian culture, because I feel a hundred percent Norwegian too. But it was just...it just felt so right, those little first steps. And then I went OK. I have to go all in now. I have to commit to this. I don't know, I just just felt right. Yeah, it was strange.

AMY: She started sharing pictures of herself wearing the gakti on social media and sometimes writing posts in Sámi. Lots of people were supportive, but not all. A cousin told her that some aunts and uncles didn't approve.

ISALILL: I don't know how, like, how annoyed they are, or if it's just like a comment in passing, like, ‘oh she's Sámi now,’ or something like that. Which you hear a lot when you when you're a part of the Sámi population who are reclaiming, you hear a lot of, ‘oh, you're Sámi now.’ And you go ‘no, no, I've always been Sámi.’ But I try not to think so much about it, I try to focus on the other side of the family who is really supportive, and a lot of my cousins on that side has also started to wear the gakti.

AMY: There are now Sámi parliaments in all four countries, and Sámi people are increasingly making themselves seen and heard in all sectors of society. For Isalill, this process has happened in tandem with becoming more politically involved, especially around environmental issues.

ISALILL: Like, a lot of people say, ‘oh you're indigenous and you must be in touch with nature.’ Yeah maybe. But I hope that I would care about the same issues even if I wasn't Sámi. But it's a fact that a lot of Sámi culture is intertwined with nature and a lot of our expressions are based in how we used to live very close to nature, and some of us still do. Me, I'm like what you call a city Sámi, or like an asphalt Sámi, is like the derogatory term. But, ah, we have a lot of issues that affect us as a people, as a culture, at the same time it affects nature. We see that it affects the way we want to keep our culture alive or the way we want to live. In that way my Sámi identity and the part of me that cares about environment is two sides of the same story.

AMY: Isalill says Sámi communities are fighting the expansion of mines, railroads, and logging operations on land that they consider to be their ancestral home. And she says many Sámi people are very concerned about what's going on in the ocean, too. Norway owns vast offshore oil reserves, and it's that oil which has made Norway one of the richest countries in the world, ranking right up there with Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Just a few days before I met Isalill, the Norwegian government had opened up more than a hundred new areas for offshore oil exploration.

ISALILL: I don't get it. It's such a bad choice. Why should we just keep pumping up oil and being...pretending to be moral superior to everyone, going, like, ‘oh we're the happiest people in the world while we're drowning in oil.’

MUSIC

AMY: Norway doesn't actually use much of that oil – they export what they drill, and supply almost all of their domestic energy needs through renewables. But Isalill says that doesn't make up for the fact that the oil and gas Norway is drilling is still going to get burned, somewhere, and that heats up the planet.

ISALILL: If there's one country in the world that can afford to be green it has to be us.

AMY: She thinks Norway is trying to have it both ways – a reputation for environmental leadership and the fossil fuel wealth. And she says it's time to make a choice.

ISALILL: If we just make the decision, and just go no, no more. We don't open any more oil rigs now, no more fields, no more areas. Then we are forcing ourselves to look in the other direction.

AMY: I think that's why I'm so interested in this contradiction that Norway is facing because it is the same contradiction that the whole world is facing it's just sort of concentrated in more easy to see – I mean, humanity has to make a definitive decision.

ISALILL: Yeah. We just have to decide right? When is it enough information, and when do you have enough knowledge to know that this is a bad idea?

AMY: We'll have more after this short break.

MUSIC

Break

[18:21] SEGMENT B

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and we're going to spend the rest of this episode in Sweden. Like Norway, Sweden is a world leader when it comes to climate change policy. In 2017, their parliament voted to become a completely carbon-neutral country by 2045. As in, net zero emissions. Sweden also has a very strong social safety net and is a recognized leader in human rights. So, if there's anywhere you would expect a minority group to be welcomed, it's Sweden.

CHARLOTTA: So it's really important for me to say that I am really grateful that I belong to the state of Sweden of course, because that's a privilege to belong to this kind of country.

AMY: Charlotta Svonni is a PhD student in education at Umeå University.

CHARLOTTA: But the problem is that when you're Sámi you are discriminated. And this is a big issue.

AMY: And that's not just historical, that's continuing?

CHARLOTTA: That is continuing. 

AMY: Charlotta grew up in the north of Sweden, in a reindeer-herding family. But she says:

CHARLOTTA: We also have to to remember and recognize that that it's not just reindeer herders that are Sámi, they are just Sámi all over Sweden, and it's just a minority of us that have reindeers.

AMY: Charlotta made a point of mentioning this to me right as we started our interview because throughout Sápmi, there's a tendency to simplify the Sámi story down to reindeer herding and nothing else. And in Sweden, this actually became law – the Reindeer Grazing Act of 1886.

CHARLOTTA: The state of Sweden decided that the only true Sámi were the ones that was reindeer herders in the mountain area. If you were a reindeer herder in the forest, or if you were a fisher, hunter, or just whatever, then you had to be Swedish.

AMY: So this huge portion of the Sámi community was basically de-Sámi-ized. Or they tried to.

CHARLOTTA: Yeah, yeah. 

AMY: Thousands of Sámi families in Sweden were just suddenly not Sámi anymore – at least in the eyes of the state.

CHARLOTTA: So in my point of view, it would be like, ok, if you don't own a cow, you're not American. Could you have that kind of law? It doesn't make sense. People are people and you shouldn't be defined by an animal. And I don't think any other people would say, well, I belong to this if own a pig. Well. (laughter) 

AMY: The logic behind the reindeer law seems to have been to control the Sámi by trapping one part of the community in amber and erasing all the rest. This mindset was summed up in the slogan: “a Lapp should be a Lapp.” “Lapp” was the term outsiders used for the Sámi, and northern Scandinavia is still called Lapland. For the Swedish-speaking majority, this slogan  – “a Lapp should be a Lapp” – basically meant “a mountain reindeer herder should stay a mountain reindeer herder.” All other Sámi people should assimilate.

CHARLOTTA: There is what we see today a conflict within the society, caused by the government – divide and conquer strategy, I think. 

AMY: More divisive laws followed. Special schools were set up for children of Sámi reindeer herders, which again, singled these families out as somehow more authentically Sámi than anyone else. But these schools offered a lower-quality education because the Sámi children were assumed to be less intelligent. Then, in 1922, the story takes what might be its darkest turn. This is when the Institute for Racial Biology was established in Uppsala, a university town near Stockholm.

CHARLOTTA: I’m not sure if this is true or not but they say that Hitler was really impressed by the research that Sweden had in Uppsala. We had this racial measuring and stuff, they came up here and they were, you know, measuring the heads of little kids, they have to stand there all naked, like, you know, like animals. And ah, they were not treated with respect at all. And this is my grandma's generation. What they were thinking was that if you had some kind of, type of skull, you were more stupid. And if you had this more skull that was more longer, you're smarter.

AMY: All of this is complete nonsense, with no scientific basis whatsoever. But this was no obstacle for Herman Lundborg, who helped to found the Institute for Racial Biology and remained its leader until 1936. He contributed significantly to the eugenics craze of his day. This period in Swedish history was dramatized by film director and screenwriter Amanda Kernell. Her first feature film, Sámi Blood, was released in 2016 and went on to win major awards at festivals around the world. It tells the story of Elle Marja, a young Sámi reindeer herder coming of age in the 1930s.

AMANDA: But of course, many of the scenes in the film could just as well have been today in many ways. 

AMY: Amanda says like the protagonist in her film, she sometimes hid her Sámi identity when she was growing up. She wasn't ashamed to be Sámi but she didn't want to be forced to serve as some kind of Sámi ambassador to the rest of the world all the time.

AMANDA: If you tell people that you are Sámi, then you have to be a representative of a whole people. And you have to be a teacher, and you have to be a historian, you have to also be a very good, you know, almost a lawyer, right? You would have to start to defend some things. And I think most people then are not prepared to do that every day. 

AMY: And Amanda says another thing that happens when you tell people you're Sámi is that you get asked to joik.

AMANDA: And of course, I've had that experience a lot of times.

AMY: Where people have said, ‘joik for us!’

AMANDA: Yes of course. I mean, that happens all the time. And sometimes I'm proud to do so and sometimes when I was younger you feel...different. In not a good way.

AMY: Like, ‘perform your otherness for me.’

AMANDA: Yes. 

AMY: She put this experience into her film too.

AMANDA: There's a scene where she's at a party in Uppsala in the city down south and with all these Swedish students and they study anthropology and some of them and they really want her to joik, to sing in Sami. 

FILM CLIP: Sámi Blood, joiking scene, students talking

AMANDA: And she doesn't know if she should do that or not.

FILM CLIP: Sámi Blood, joiking scene, students talking, moment of pause

AMANDA: And then when she does there's a strange ambiguous feeling of they kind of appreciate it but they don't understand it. 

FILM CLIP: Sámi Blood, joiking scene, Elle Marja singing

AMANDA: And she ...suddenly she doesn't really fit into the group, but she's a curious... you know, she's kind of a circus animal. 

FILM CLIP: Sámi Blood, joiking scene, Elle Marja singing

AMY: Elle Marja sings tentatively, and then suddenly stops, and walks away. All of the complexity of being exoticized by these people is written on her young face. Amanda says after film screenings young Sámi people often come to talk to her...

AMANDA: And the first thing they talked about was like this joik scene, like, that has happened to me so many times. I'm so happy I'm not alone with this. You know I don't know how to handle that.

MUSIC

AMANDA: This internalized colonization, and racism, and this colonization of our mind. We all have that. But we don't even know it.

MUSIC

CHARLOTTA: That is also how, how lots of us have always got that feeling that we are not as smart because that is how people, you know, look at us.

AMY: Charlotta Svonni. 

CHARLOTTA: …and you get that picture of yourself. 

AMY: It gets in deep.

CHARLOTTA: It's really deep. And you don't even, we don't even think about it. I think it was in my thirties, maybe just eight, 10 years ago. One day I was like...well I'm not uglier than everyone – my people is not uglier than everyone else. Why have I thought that? One morning. It's like, what? I have never even talked about it. We have never talked about such things at home, or.... But it's just not me as a person. It was so sad to realize. I have thought for so many years -- oh you see my tears coming again – that we are uglier than everyone else. Yeah. And I'm glad I realized that before I died. But ah, yeah. That is what we are taught that we have not talked about.

KRISTER: (singing love song joik)

KRISTER: I can do a love song from my home. The lyrics are: beautiful as angels, and a voice like a loon.

KRISTER: (singing love song joik)

CHARLOTTA: When I'm out skiing you know and you feel the wind, and the powers, like I can just stand there in the forest and start to joik, that feeling or that environment.

AMY: Charlotta says she didn't grow up joiking, but now, sometimes she does it. She says joik is hard to explain how it happens. And she's good with that. 

CHARLOTTA: Why should we always have to explain, what I am, what we are, what we think. Well if you don't can explain it does it then exists? Well...But I also got one argument that was interesting, that I heard a lot when I was younger, it's like, but if the reindeer herding doesn't contribute to the BNP, why is it important?

AMY: BNP is Swedish for GDP – gross domestic product.

CHARLOTTA: And as a young person I was like, oh I don’t know, maybe. I couldn’t answer that but today I think, well is that the only way of thinking, if you can't contribute with BNP then it can't exist. Is that the kind of world we want? And especially today when we have this huge problem with the change in the climate. So maybe we should back off from that kind of perspective to save this planet. 

MUSIC

AMY: In our next episode, we're going to meet a Sámi family in Norway who are contending with the effects of climate change on their reindeer herd. But before we leave the subject of joik behind, I have to mention Sofia Jannok. She's one of many Sámi musicians who are reclaiming joik and using it to help make Sámi people and Sámi issues more visible. This is one of her songs, called We Are Still Here. 

MUSIC: We Are Still Here playing

Credits

NICK: This season of Threshold was created with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Park Foundation, and our listeners. Our production partners are Montana Public Radio and PRI's The World.

AMY: Threshold is made by Nick Mott, Rachel Cramer, Cheryl Skibicki, and me, Amy Martin, with help from Frank Allen, Jackson Barnett, Josh Burnham, Michael Connor, Rosie Costain, Matt Herlihy, Rachel Klein, Zoë Rom, Nora Saks, Maxine Speier and Zach Wilson. Special thanks to Susanne Amalie Langstrand-Andersen, Lars Magne Andreassen, Kjersti Myrnes Balto and the Markomeannu Moms, Michael Gundale, Anne Henriette Reinås Nilut, Lars Östlund, Shanley Swanson, Line Vråberg and Nordisk Film. Our music is by Travis Yost. You can find links to the film Sámi Blood, to Sofia Jannok's music, and a whole more at our website. And if you'd like to be part of the community helping to get this show made, you can do that at our website too. Just go to thresholdpodcast dot org, and hit donate.

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