We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sámi Americans by Ellen Marie Jensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sámi Americans by Ellen Marie Jensen Thomas A. DuBois Ellen Marie Jensen. We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sámi Americans. Kárášjohka: ČálliidLágádus. Pp. 133. The title of Ellen Marie Jensen’s readable anthology of Sámi American autobiographical writings, We Stopped Forgetting, is suggestive of its verbal equivalent, the act of remembering (muitit), an act that, in Sámi languages, is closely linked to the art of narration (muitalus) as well as—according [End Page 470] to the great Sámi writer, Johan Turi—the performance of joik. Remembering—recalling—is a way of summoning back those whom one cares about, making them present and accounted for within one’s own here and now (Turi, An Account of the Sámi, Nordic Studies Press, 2011, p. 61). In a very tangible sense, Ellen Marie Jensen’s anthology allows a set of Sámi Americans—and by extension, a larger community of like-minded people—to remember themselves, situating their experiences within a history that had, until recently, often eluded them. Jensen’s book stands as a valuable set of primary materials for the exploration of a neglected area of Scandinavian American identity and history: the experiences of those Nordic emigrants and their descendants who were culturally Sámi. Jensen presents the stories of six Sámi Americans, including herself. Informants, in addition to Jensen, include a visual artist of Nordic and American Indian heritage, a retired college administrator concerned about the appropriate presentation of Sámi indigenous knowledge in college classrooms, a college human resources specialist involved in the World Christian Gatherings on Indigenous People, a construction worker/visual artist with strong interests in indigenous rights and the environment, and a massage therapist with traumatic childhood experiences related to ambiguous racial identity. Three of the six individuals are originally from the Upper Midwest, one lives in Colorado (originally from California), and one in Washington state (originally from Alaska). Three are women. Jensen makes no claims to being comprehensive or particularly representative in this survey, but her selection is probably indicative of at least some of the norms within this relatively new identity formation within Scandinavian American life. Her informants are by and large well educated and are ready users of the Internet, which serves both as a source of information about the Sámi past and present and as a conduit for the creation of Sámi American community within the United States. As with any groundbreaking study, Jensen’s work calls out for more research. Its overview of Sámi American history, from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, provides a good background for the narratives but is necessarily brief and preliminary. Jensen moves rapidly from details of nineteenth-century immigration to the 1990s emergence of a conscious Sámi American identity, with most attention devoted to the experiences of initial arrivals and the growth of interest in Sámi culture among second-, third-, and fourth-generation Sámi Americans in the 1990s and after. Historical treatment of the events that occurred in between these bookend moments would be valuable, of course, supplementing the brief notices that Jensen includes in her concise overview. Such a history could include, for instance, the activities of the networks of folk song and folk dance enthusiasts across North America who facilitated [End Page 471] Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s concerts in the United States in 1982—concerts that helped transform Scandinavian American perceptions of the Sámi and Sámi culture; the development of programming that included information on the Sámi in events like FinnFest USA and Norsk Høstfest; the growth of genealogy as a major interest of Scandinavian Americans of retirement age; the role of colleges and universities in the United States in including Sámi materials in the curriculum; and the development of the seminal Sámi American journals Báiki and Árran. Given that many of the prime movers in these developments are still active today, some valuable oral historical research could be undertaken to supplement what Jensen presents in this volume. On a deeper level, however, a historical framework is probably inadequate for...