The Art of Recalling: Lapland and the Sami in the Art of Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi

Abstract

356 Feminist Studies 40, no. 2. © 2014 by Barbara Sjoholm Barbara Sjoholm The Art of Recalling: Lapland and the Sami in the Art of Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi In August of 1904 two Danish sisters visited Lapland on the newly openediron-orerailwaythroughtheSwedishmountains.OnewasEmilie Demant Hatt who, at thirty-one, felt uncertain, even depressed, about the direction of her art career. After ten years of studying drawing and painting, she’d experienced little public success. Her technique was adequate ,hersenseofcolorattractive,hersubjectsportraits or lamp-lit parlors. Her pen-and-ink drawings showed a wilder side—knobbly, leafless trees in winter, storm clouds passing over the moors—but generally her work was, as she put it herself some years later, gammeldags—old-fashioned. It was on the train returning from the high mountains to the Swedish mining town of Kiruna that the sisters met Johan Turi, a Sami wolfhunter and trapper who had a dream—to write a book about his people.1 This chance encounter would affect Demant Hatt’s life profoundly, in time 1. The Sami, an indigenous people of Northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Kola Peninsula of Russia, number at least 80,000, with the majority living in Norway. Although the Nordic Sami now live everywhere in Fenno-Scandinavia , including the capital cities, those who still own reindeer and speak Sami are concentrated in the north of Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Their name for themselves has always been Sami, in a variety of spellings (there are multiple Sami languages). Until the last few decades, however, they were known as Lapps and also referred to themselves in that manner when writing and speaking to a larger public. Here I use “Sami,” which is both noun and adjective, and refers both to the people and their language, but “Lapp” Barbara Sjoholm 357 turning her into a Sami-speaking ethnographer and leading her to help Turi produce an early work of collaborative ethnography, the marvelous Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami), an innovative bilingual edition of which appeared in 1910 and made both of them well known.2 Three years later Demant Hatt would publish With the Lapps in the High Mountains, her own lively narrative of her time among the nomadic mountain Sami in 1907 and 1908.3 But the unexpected meeting would have other consequences for both Demant Hatt and Turi as visual artists. With Demant Hatt’s encouragement , Turi created drawings for Muitalus sámiid birra that today’s scholars are beginning to look at anew: not just as ethnographic sketches, but as art. Demant Hatt, in turn, was affected by Turi’s imagery and worldview. In transitioning from nature tourist to participant observer and collaborative ethnographer, Demant Hatt also shifted her focus from realism to a form of expressionism. Her sketches, linoleum prints, and particularly her late canvases of Lapland landscapes express an original mode of seeing, influenced by the animism, legends, and music of the indigenous people of the North. Her firsthand experiences as a household member and frequent traveler in Sápmi (the Sami word for their homeland) allowed her to sidestep or actively resist some of the conventional genre painting of Sami subjects, as well as the primitivist imagemaking of her day, and at the same time to make use of what she’d learned from Turi as an artist, writer, and folklorist. when quoting from older sources and Demant Hatt’s written work and painting titles. 2. Johan Turi, Muitalus sámiid birra/En bog om lappernes liv, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Emilie Demant (Stockholm: A.-B. Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1910). The first English version, Turi’s Book of Lappland, was translated from the Danish by E. Gee Nash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1931). In 2010, Muitalus sámiid birra was published in a new, large format Sami edition, which also reproduces many of Turi’s artworks, edited by Mikael Svonni (Karasjok, Norway: ČálliidLágádus, 2010). The title spelling was revised in 2010 to reflect an updated Sami orthography. A new English translation by Thomas A. DuBois, from the Sami, was published as An Account of the Sámi (Chicago: Nordic Studies Press, 2011). (DuBois accents Sami by...