We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sami Americans

By Ellen Marie Jensen

What if you thought you knew about your family's roots and there was more to the story? What if your real ethnicity was kept hidden due to prejudice, immigration and assimilation? Ellen Marie Jensen traverses this territory in "We Stopped Forgetting Stories from Sámi Americans".
During the immigration period of 1880-1940 an unknown number of Sámi people (the indigenous people of Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia) left Sápmi (Samiland; “Lapland”) for North America alongside Nordic peoples. It has been estimated that there are at least 30,000 descendants of Sámi immigrants in North America, and most of them are unaware of their Indigenous ancestry. The storytellers in this book give moving accounts of the history of their ancestors, the often fortuitous events that led them to discover their heritage, and tell their own life stories of cultural revitalization. They have consciously chosen to stop forgetting their lesser known and sometimes silenced Sámi ancestry by identifying with a cultural birthright. Further, their stories demonstrate a heartfelt commitment to both historical and contemporary Sápmi and the Indigenous world in their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ČálliidLágádus/Authors’ Publisher
• Release date: Dec 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310061684

Ellen Marie Jensen

Ellen Marie Jensen Was born and raised in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota (USA.) The child of a coastal Sámi immigrant from Finnmark, she has returned to live in the land of her ancestors where she is actively engaged in the Sámi society. She has attained a Master’s in Indigenous Studies at the University of Tromsø and also studied Literature and Culture (English), with a focus on Indigenous literature. Having recently taught English at the Sámi language immersion school in Deatnu/Tana, Ellen Marie currently lives with her two children in Tromsø, where she is a freelance writer, translator, and editor. She is also continuing graduate studies at the University of Tromsø with an emphasis in Sámi and Indigenous Literature and Culture.

Book preview

Acknowledgement

First I would like to thank my family for their support and encouragement, especially my parents, Janet and Harald Jensen, my children, Niccolo (Nico) and Diane (Nini) Jensen-Connel, my brother and sister-in-law Erik Jensen and Paula Faraci and my nieces Teresa and Natalie. Also, I am indebted to my late (Great) Uncle Reidar Johnsen, who dared open his heart to tell me stories of both beauty and sorrow from our family’s past. I am also thankful for my dear relative, Aashild Johnsen, for practical and emotional support. I would also like to express my deep appreciation to my enduring and judicious partner, Omar Hamdani, who has been a supportive foundation for me in the long writing process and has helped me complete this book in innumerable ways. Finally, I am thankful to have all of my other relatives in my life, both in America and in Norway.

My heartfelt gratitude goes to the storytellers: David Lawrence Kline, Sr., Lani Abbot, Kurt Seaberg, Eric Seaberg and Mimi Bahl De Leon who opened their homes to me and shared their lives. I would also like to thank the following who provided interviews and other information during my thesis research period and later in the editorial process: Marlene Wisuri, Jim Kurtti, Donald Engstrom-Reese, Bill Wilcox, Elaine Hepner, Norma Hanson, Keith Ruona, Sally Johnson, Arden Johnson, Mel Olsen, Don Kinnunen, Anne Tormanen and John (Johan) Edward Xavier. I am also grateful to all Sámi Americans who have provided rich insight into Sámi American history and contemporary issues, especially Jennifer Wagner-Harkonen, Chris Pesklo, Vicki Lantto, Terence Kopeitz, Joan Dwyer, and Rosalie Sundin and apologies to anyone else I may have inadvertently left out.

I would not have had the courage and focus to complete this project without the insight, guidance, and clarity of focus and patience of Laura Castor, my thesis supervisor, mentor and friend. Also, thank you to Terence Brantenberg my co-supervisor and to Domhnal Mitchell for voluntarily providing editorial suggestions and feedback. Also, I would like to thank Harald Gaski for his encouragement and editorial advice. And my deepest appreciation goes to my other instructors in the Master of Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Tromsø, my wonderful 2003-2005 Indigenous Studies classmates, and the Centre for Sámi Studies (UiT).

I am most indebted to my dear friends, Annika Lundkvist and Lisa Marika Jokivirta for proofing and giving editorial feedback on the entire manuscript. Also, I am grateful for Harald Jensen, and Arden Johnsen who also proofed earlier versions of the manuscript. I am thankful for my dear friends and 2004 travel companions Májja Smuk Solbakk and Trond Are Anti and also Erika Sarivaara, Lena Susanne Kvernmo Gaup, Priscilla De Wet, Marry Somby, and Heidi Guttorm Einarsen—all of whom have provided emotional, creative, and logistical support in the completion of this project. Finally, to the the whole publishing team at ČálliidLágádus: thank you for providing a space for the voices of Sámi Americans.

Forward

Over the years people have asked me why I choose to identify as a Sámi American or why I have chosen to stop forgetting the Sámi part of my mixed heritage. The answer is quite simple: love and justice. I write this book out of a deep sense of love and respect for the multicultural home and family that continue to shape and nourish me and out of a sense of justice for those who have been silenced in our history.

Childhood friends used to make perplexing comments about life in my home that never really sunk in until adulthood, comments like: You’re so lucky, your father talks to you like you’re a human being. Friends and classmates from troubled homes were always welcomed and sheltered in my home. They were never treated as a burden, but as human beings deserving of something more than the indifference or hostility they experienced elsewhere. My parents would often look the other way when friends from abusive homes snuck in late at night, and I would hear them through the ventilation rafters mumbling, Make some extra breakfast, we’ve got another young refugee with us. In contrast to perhaps typical Euro-American patriarchal family life, my family life could be described as egalitarian, or more aptly, complementary. While the family life that I enjoyed was not the norm in my neighborhood, when I traveled to Northern Norway to my father’s home place for the first time, I saw at once the cultural milieu that shaped my father’s values, the values that were instilled in me—the norm in the North and in my home. Despite never having heard the word Sámi as a child, I can say that I was raised in a home imbued with the values of all my cultural ancestors, including my Sámi ancestors. These values I hope to instill in my own children. This book is dedicated to all of them—my cultural ancestors, my parents, and the generations to come.

This work has taken many years to complete and has gone through many revisions, both at the insistence of my editors and also from coming into new knowledge or perspectives. As a result of my own discoveries and new ways of thinking I was led to change some of my own ideas on the topics I will be presenting here. Since the beginning of this project, I have moved six times, both cross-Atlantic from America to Sápmi, and moved within my new home in Sápmi twice. New ways of thinking are always a feature of new surroundings and coming into contact with the diversity of people everywhere. Several times it was necessary to set the whole project aside only to take it up again when time and emotional and intellectual energy permitted. I have written or revised parts of this manuscript in disparate places in both North America and Sápmi: at the University of Tromsø library; in airports while in cross-Atlantic transit; along the banks of the Deatnu/Tana River in Finnmark; on a beach of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin; and in my favorite coffeehouse—the Spyhouse—on Eat Street in Minneapolis. But through all the upheavals in life I have never wavered in my commitment to do justice to the story of Sámi Americans, and especially the Sámi woman at Ellis Island, whose beautiful image is featured on the front cover.

Part of this book is based on my Master’s thesis in Indigenous Studies from the University of Tromsø, (Norway) entitled, "We Stopped Forgetting": Diaspora Consciousness in the Narratives of Five Sámi Americans (2005). The title is intended to be a window into the ways that life stories reverse the process of assimilation through memory because assimilation depends greatly on forgetting. To stop forgetting is to remember the importance of all our cultural ancestors in our lived lives which leads us to a better understanding of our contemporary selves. Through sharing stories with other Sámi Americans over the years, I have come further in my own understanding of what it means to remember in North America. All of the people who have shared stories with me are important to this book and to building a Sámi community outside of Sápmi. For over a decade, I have had a deep interest in a photograph of a Sámi immigrant woman that hangs in several places at the Museum of Immigration at Ellis Island, New York City. I have followed up on a personal commitment to research the circumstances around how her photo came to be there. Through this research I have come to understand her importance in Sámi immigration history and have reflected on what she represents for the collective and individual stories in this book.

As I write this, the memories of Finnfest 2008 in Duluth, Minnesota are on my mind. Sámi Americans gave presentations on Sámi culture and issues facing both Sámi people in North America and in contemporary Sápmi. The Sámi Siida of North America had their biennial Siidastallan gathering there and Sámi Americans exchanged stories, grieved the passing of leaders and elders and had the opportunity to meet others who share in a common heritage. People were wearing gákti, we sang the Sámi national song, and there was a Sámi camp with lavvu and reindeer. In a way, it was not much different from a family gathering in Sápmi, except that the main language is English and people often do not wear the right ancestral gákti or wear them in the right way—that is, in the way that the Sámi in Sápmi would wear them because they have more uninterrupted traditional knowledge of dress culture. Sámi Americans, like other Americans of European, African, or Asian descent, cannot claim cultural purity or linear cultural continuity from the motherland. Many Sámi Americans’ ancestors emigrated from places where few people would identify as Sámi today, yet they still seek to build or renew their Sámi cultural connection to those places. It is a birthright to know and relate to one’s cultural heritage; Americans of Sámi descent have a particular message about this right because to a great extent our history is hidden in immigration narratives in Europe and North America.

In many ways, I am not representative of most Sámi Americans. The majority have great-grandparents who arrived through Ellis Island or the other Manhattan-based immigrant processing station during the great immigration period of 1880-1920. For me, it was my father who emigrated from Finnmark, the northernmost province of Norway, part of Sápmi. He did not arrive in North America on an immigrant passenger ship over the turbulent Atlantic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but in the 1960s and always with the understanding that we could visit and maintain our ties there. As a first generation Sámi American, I have no connection to Ellis Island nor do I have any such connection on my mother’s side, yet what it represents in immigration history captures my imagination. When the great-grandparents of most Sámi Americans were arriving in North America and undergoing immigrant processing, mine were likely fishing in the fjord or tending their small farms on the west coast of Finnmark.

Yet despite these seemingly strong ties to Sápmi, my story of uncovering and developing a relationship with the Sámi part of my heritage shares common themes with other Sámi Americans; it was through connections to other people of Sámi descent in North America that I began my own cultural awakening. Sámi American identity is not simply having the abstract knowledge about one’s heritage, like an ethno-puzzle with all the pieces neatly in place. Identity also affects how we act, speak, and walk in the world. Cultural identity also comes with obligations and being a member of the Indigenous world comes with particular obligations; I write this book with those obligations in mind.

This book is both a documentary of many unique stories but could also be read as an expression of a collective story shaped by multiple voices, images and reflections. There are five life stories which are augmented with material in the appendix. David, Lani, Eric, Kurt, and Mimi shared their stories with me in 2004 and 2005 and their stories have not been updated or revised since that time; however, the storytellers have had new experiences since that time, in other words, their stories are continuing. Since then, two of them traveled to Sápmi and met relatives for the first time; one of them returned to Sápmi for the third time; and one of them has lost their spouse. The material in the appendix contains the writing or other artifacts that the storytellers produced which relate to their Sámi ancestry and cultural consciousness.

I remember a Bambuti (Pigmy) man who once said It takes a lifetime to tell the story of a people.¹ It is my hope—as both author and storyteller—that after reading this you will have more knowledge but will also see that the collective story in this book is never complete. My intention is neither to provide a fixed or exclusive definition of a Sámi American nor to claim to speak with an unequivocal voice about individual identities. Rather, the story begins with a retrospective of the Sámi woman in the photo at Ellis Island with an eye towards considering the following questions in what follows: What does it mean to be the diasporic (scattered seed) descendants of Sámi immigrants in North America? What do the stories of Sámi Americans tell us about Sámi and American history and about Indigenous identity? I hope this book will tell a more inclusive story of immigration and enrich our understanding of the history of Sápmi by providing a space for the voices of those who have been silenced in historical grand narratives.

Through the stories to follow, I hope to broaden the narrative of immigration to America, to make the story more balanced, more reflective of different pasts and the people who have always been a part of the story, but who were not often invoked. My own story is