The music and culture of northern Scandinavia will be the focus of a performance and panel discussion on Wednesday, Oct. 7, at 5 p.m. in the Delkin Recital Hall in the Vivian A. Bull Music Center at Linfield College.
“Sámi and Native American Folklore, Poetry, Song & Joik” will feature guests from Arctic Norway who will present joik (a Sámi expression similar to a chant) and stories from northern Scandinavia. They will be joined in a panel discussion by Ralph Salisbury, Native-American poet, scholar and professor emeritus from the University of Oregon; Tom Love, Linfield professor of anthropology; and representatives from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The discussion will include information about joik, how Scandinavian Sámi share common threads with the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest and how these diverse cultures honor the earth and share wisdom. The panel will also touch on how poetry, chanting and oral history can sustain people and the environment.
Panelists from Norway include Stina Fagertun, who has coastal Sámi and Kven (Finnish descendant) ancestry and comes from the fjords of Arctic Norway. She has written fairy tales and has collected ancient, unique fairy tales from the Sámi, Kven and Arctic storyteller tradition. Her stories have been published as books and CDs in Norway. She is the winner of the Northern Norway Cultural Award and she and Anita Barth-Jørgensen, a Norwegian and an adopted Sámi, have been performing around the world for nearly two decades. Øistein Hanssen still lives inside a culture mixed with Coastal Sámis, Qvens and Nordic people. An engineer, instrument maker and composer, Hanssen also plays historical wind instruments. Today, he is the only one who still has the technique of making the traditional Sámi instrument Fádnu, the small “Sámi oboe.” Hanssen has also researched Sámi drums, and is able to interpret the ancient symbols on the heads of the Sámi drums and the meanings attributed to them by the Arctic shamans.
Salisbury is the winner of the 2012 River teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for his memoir, “So Far, So Good.” He is also the winner of a Rockefeller Bellagio Award, and recipient of the 2015 C.E.S. Wood Lifetime Achievement Award. His three books of fiction and 11 books of poems evoke his Cherokee-Shawnee-Irish-English-American heritage. He has devoted his life to writing, editing, translating and teaching. As the editor-in-chief of Northwest Review for six years, Salisbury has also edited “A Nation Within,” an anthology of contemporary Native American writing (Outriggers Press, New Zealand), and has co-translated two books by Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkepää: “Trekways of the Wind” and “The Sun My Father.”
This event is part of this year’s campus-wide theme for the Program for Liberal Arts and Civic Engagement (PLACE), “Air, Water, Earth and Fire: The Ancient Elements on a Changing Planet.” It is sponsored by The American Scandinavian Foundation and the Bernhard and Johanna Fedde Grant from the Grieg Lodge Scholarship Fund.
It is also funded, in part, by a grant awarded by Linfield’s Diversity Committee to explore and support the intellectual and research interests of students, faculty and staff in areas of diversity and inclusion, promoting courageous conversations about diversity and lived experiences across our college and communities. For more information about those grants, contact Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, rdutt-b@linfield.edu.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Joan Paddock, professor of music, at 503-883-2258, jpaddock@linfield.edu.
