Larsen among the Sámi, Part 1

I first met professional photographer Erika Larsen when I was on an assignment for Fortune – Small Business magazine in February 2008. She and I, and our videographer, FSB photo editor Katy Binder, went to Walker, MN, to spend time with about 17,000 revelers at the annual Eelpout Festival, a huge mid-February party minimally disguised as an ice-fishing contest. That story ran in the last issue of FSB this December, and you can read it on-line here (it’s now content for CNNMoney.com).

The second day in Walker, out on the 36-inch-thick ice of Leech Lake, the temperature at daybreak was -20 F. I was wearing every thermal layer I posses and a snowsuit rated to -40 F. I was doing o.k., but it was not easy, and all I was doing was interviewing people. Larsen often took off her gloves and face-covering to operate her fabulous 4×5 field camera. She showed such aplomb about her work in those conditions that she seemed to possess a deep Nordic endurance.

So I was not surprised to find out that she is half Norwegian, and I was also not entirely surprised but gladly impressed to learn back in 2009 that she had won a Fulbright grant to venture to Sweden to live among Sámi reindeer herders.

I managed to catch up with her, on-line, while she took a break from her fieldwork in Sweden, and we conducted an interview via e-mail. (Note: All photos here copyrighted to Erika Larsen Photography.)

1. What first generated your interest in the Sámi?

 I wanted to live with an original hunter-gatherer-herding society in order to understand the primal drive of the modern hunter today. I also wanted to learn about natural plants, foods, and remedies that existed in the arctic landscape.

 I should specify I am living exclusively with Sámi reindeer herders and my Fulbright project is only focusing on that part of Sámi culture. About ten percent of the Sámi are herders. There are also coastal Sámi, who fish, and Sámi of other lifestyles who also speak a different language.

 2. In the beginning, with your Sámi host family, did you experience  any moments of culture shock?

 Not really. I think I was very open to learning about the Sámi culture and lifestyle and never went expecting things were going to be anything like my life in the U.S. There was an inevitable period of comparing and contrasting what I was accustomed to, in terms of lifestyle, but this has greatly tapered off.

 3. What is the town or territory in which you have your home/base of  operations? What’s the terrain, environment, and climate like there?

I am staying primarily in those parts of Sweden occupied by Sámi, north of the Artic Circle, with a few jaunts into Norway to visit with herding Sámi there. Fjords, valleys, glaciers, mountains, and rivers make up the “Sápmi,” that being the generalized name for land that the Sámi occupy across Norway and Sweden, and into Finland and Russia. The Finnmark area, the specific part of Norway where the herding Sámi live, is a plateau that contains marshes and lakes as well as fjords and large regions of tundra. It is very, very cold in the winter, getting down to -35 F, and less cold in the summer.

 4. What are your photographic formats? How did you have to adapt them or improvise while in the field in Sweden?

 I shoot stills with a 4×5 field camera and color negative film, as well as a variety of smaller-format digital cameras. I am also shooting video with digital cameras. The main adaptation I had to perform, before I left the U.S., was that I had the lubricants taken out of my 4×5 lens to help avoid freezing while shooting photos on the tundra.

5. What are the origins of the Sámi? What is their history with the other people of Norway and Sweden? (I know this is a dissertation topic – just give a basic sketch, if you can.)

 Sámi are the indigenous people living in the Arctic Circle region of northern Scandinavia and Russia. The total number of Sámi is approximately 70,000 and they have their own language that belongs to the Finno-Uralic language. For several thousand years the population of this area lived by hunting, fishing, and food gathering. Around 4,000 years ago there was a split in the people, and some began to live more sedentary lifestyles as farmers, and these people moved to the coast and further south. The other part of that original group continued to live a nomadic existence.

The latter group continued with the Sámi language, and by approximately the 16^th century became reindeer-herding nomads. In 1751 Norway and Sweden established their borders. Early on, the rules established that the Sámi would have the right to continue their seasonal migration over and along the borders, but as time went on new boundaries were set and restricted many of the rights of movement, or have forced the Sámi to adapt and change progressively throughout the centuries.

Colonization of the Sámi follows same pattern as in much of the rest of the world. Priests were sent to the north in the 16^th century to begin Christianizing the population. The process was slow but by the 18^th century the church villages in the north began schooling the Sámi children. The children became versed in the Bible and were also taught the Swedish and Norwegian languages as a means to assimilate them in the culture of the majority. By the end of the 19^th century, Sweden and Norway passed a law that prohibited children from using Sámi language in school. 

 Not until the 1950’s was Sámi allowed as a language of instruction again. But, still, in the last sixty years the assimilation process continued, and the racism of the Swedish and Norwegian majorities caused many Sámi to hide their origins and lose their mother tongue.

6. What are some of the tougher aspects of herding reindeer?

If you’re born into it, you are a reindeer herder 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for your life. It’s a very physical, very tough existence. Following and herding the reindeer is a constant factor, and everything is tough and demanding about it. (Reindeer are smaller than the North American caribou, but genetically roughly the same; there are a number of subspecies.)

A Sámi family will manage its own herd, so a certain number of reindeer belong to each family. They know this by the way they mark their reindeer, with cuts made to the calves’ ears. This is a crucial factor, and it leads to one of the most demanding aspects of the herding life. Marking is done during round-ups, and the Swedish and Norwegian Sámi differ in their methods of reindeer round-up.

In Norway, for the calf-marking, several Sámi families spend a week herding their reindeer into a spot where they have built movable fence within a corral and separate the reindeer calves that way. We stayed there for seven days, marking and marking, as more and more reindeer are let into the corral.

They do this in summer, with as many as eight families working at one corral site. They set up a tent-like shelter called a “lavvo” as a base camp, and then you’re there for seven days, working 24 hours, grabbing maybe two or three hours sleep, then you get up and mark more claves. After that’s done, each family pushes off with its individual herd to a summer place.

In Sweden, herding is a good deal different. The families maintain a main summer community, on a lake. Everyone has houses there, and all families go there in summer. Then for two months they’ll go out into the wilds, build a lavo as a base, bring their herds with the calves down from the hills, and mark their calves.

Fall, winter, and spring are all different in terms of families moving around, tending to their reindeer herds.

In the spring are the herd migrations, when a single family will separated its reindeer into male and females, and take the females away so they can give birth to their calves. Moving just one family’s deer is a process of several weeks, so you’re moving the lavvo every couple days or maybe every day, and moving with the deer over tundra to the summer place. Several members of one family tend to the male reindeer, while other family members are moving the pregnant female deer.

Men do most of the herding tasks, but some families will have female family members on the tundra, often a younger sister who’s with her family men.

Herder Sámi can’t own land, due to a law that the governments made in the early 1900s. Farmer Sámi can, however, own land. All the herder’s land is government owned so that the government could further control it and the Sámi. The herder Sámi have the right to use the land, they just don’t own it.

7. Do the Sámi live on mostly a meat-based diet?  How much reindeer did you eat?

In the families I stay with, we eat reindeer at least five to six times a week, maybe seven. But in town, there are grocery stores, so people eat all types of stuff. If you’re working out on the tundra, then you’re taking mostly reindeer meat, bread, and butter out there. Fruits and veggies don’t last on the tundra — the cold shrivels them to nothing. You can serve reindeer meat in a lot of ways. Smoked reindeer would pass as a delicacy in a New York restaurant. The Sámi consider reindeer eyeballs boiled in the skull a delicacy.

8. Describe what “joiking” is and why is was suppressed for so long.

 Joiking (“yoiking”) is a kind of singing, in the Sámi language, with spontaneous lyrics, very personal spontaneous lyrics, and has been described as the “art of remembering other people.” But you can also joik a landscape, or an animal, or many other aspects of existence. In my understanding, missionaries tried to convince the Sámi that joiking was a Satanic act, because in the old Sámi religion the joik was the function of the Noaidi, the spiritual leader. Joiking was suppressed by Christian efforts. There are Sámi well known for their joiking, and who have put out CD’s of their joiks.

 9. What are your favorite aspects of Sámi culture?

 I like blood pancakes (pancakes made with reindeer blood), reindeer tongue heated on the fire, bark bread, drinking Sámi coffee, and the colorful ribbons in Kautokeino, a main northern town in Norway that I’ve been through. I like how well you sleep when you are physically exhausted from work and weather, the smell of fire, the way the snow glistens like glitter in the sunlight, the long days of darkness. I like the way everyone knows who their relatives are as well as who everyone else’s relatives are. I like the storytelling, going to see the reindeer, Sámi knives, the way it feels to wear the shoes made of reindeer rather than boots, the dogs, and the smell of smoked meat.

10. Sámi knives, eh? What are they like? 

I like the Sámi knives simply because they are strikingly beautiful and extremely sharp. 

You can in generally divide Sámi knives into two groups: Northern Sámi and southern Sámi. The northern knife has a sharply curved sheath. The handle is made of wood combined with horn and birch bark, and has ornamentation that speaks of the designer’s local or family origins.  

The southern Sámi sheath is not as sharply bent, and the knife handle is often made of piece of horn, and it is engraved with different types of plaited patterns. 

Most Sámi knives are signed by the maker.

[Larsen Among the Sámi, Part 2]