North of Darkness

The Indigenous Samis of Norway

By Dave Fox

Johnny was a burly guy with a formidable beer gut and about four days of stubble. I'd had a squabble with him at the bar a few minutes earlier over who was next in line. He didn't seem the type I should be squabbling with. He was drunk, and a lot bigger than me. I didn't like the fact that he and I were the only two people in the men's room now. I especially didn't like the fact that he was trying to converse with me while I stood in front of the urinal, taking care of what I prefer to be a private activity.

He knew I didn't speak Samic. I had just talked to him five minutes earlier. But he spoke it to me now.

"Do you speak Norwegian?" I responded. I knew he did; it was the language we had argued in.

"You're from Oslo," he said, catching my dialect. "What are you doing here?"

I zipped up my fly. "Actually, I'm American."

"Don't bullshit me!" he sputtered.

"Excuse me?"

"You're not American." His eyes were wide with contempt as he stepped toward me.

I eyed the door, half proud my Norwegian had fooled him, half terrified I was about to become a dead American. "Ummm, yeah, I am," I said. "I used to live near Oslo."

"Don't lie to me."

I shrugged. "You want to see my passport?"

The next thing I knew, I had four guys around me. I had come to learn about them, but instead, they were firing question after question at me. Where was Wisconsin? How come I spoke Norwegian? And what the hell was I doing in Karasjok?

An elderly Sami in traditional dress. © Dave Fox

I was on Europe's extreme fringe – 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, in an isolated village inhabited primarily by Samis, Scandinavia's indigenous minority. For centuries, they had been persecuted. At various points in history, they had been enslaved and tortured. Governments had banned their language. Missionaries had smothered their religion. In more recent times, Chernobyl had poisoned their livelihood. But since the 1970s, the Samis had made an unprecedented cultural comeback. I had traveled to Karasjok to write about their survival. (The Samis are more commonly referred to in English as the Lapps. They consider this term derogatory and discourage its use.)

I had first learned of the Samis several years earlier, living near Oslo as a foreign exchange student. Their history played like an Arctic myth – nomadic reindeer herders who lived in fur-lined tents amid howling winds and winter temps of minus 50, in a place so far north the sun did not rise for two solid months each winter. They sounded too outlandish to be real. But I was with them now, drinking with them in their smoky tavern, caught off guard that I, not they, was the center of attention.

"Do you think we could go talk in the bar?" I asked the disheveled men who stood around me. I was happy to chat, but the men's room didn't strike me as the ideal place for a cultural exchange.

"Go ahead," Johnny said. "We'll see you later."

The road leading into Karasjok. © Dave Fox

Getting to Karasjok on my budget had been an adventure in itself. Travel agents in Oslo had stared blankly when I had asked how to get there without flying. There were no trains that far north. Bus schedules were tough to come by. Realizing I'd have to just start traveling without a solid plan, I had hopped a train – 21 hours north to the port city of Bodø. From there, I'd found a standby flight for the same cost as a boat ticket, and flown to Alta, where I had feasted on reindeer pizza and spent the night. A bus had gotten me the rest of the way to Karasjok, 60 hours after leaving Oslo.

As I emerged from the bathroom, I spotted Alise, squished with five other people into a semi-circular booth. The bar was dark. Thick velvet curtains were drawn to block the midnight sun.

I had met Alise a half hour earlier. She was painfully cute – short, curly brown hair, olive skin, and dark, haunting eyes. She had stared me down and I had smiled back shyly. As she approached me, I had stood there wondering what to say. Her opening line had nearly knocked me over.

"Are you the guy from Wisconsin?"

Karasjok was small, but was it so small that people I hadn't even met knew who I was after a day there?

"Yeah," I had answered, dumbfounded. "I'm from Wisconsin."

"Well say hi to Wisconsin for me," she had said. And then she'd disappeared into the crowd.

I invited myself to her table now.

"How's it going?" she shouted at me over a blaring Chris DeBurgh tune.

"Good," I yelled back.

She squished in further to create half a seat for me.

"How did you know I was from Wisconsin?" I asked.

She had been spying on me earlier in the day. She was a receptionist at SamiRadio. Several months earlier, I had written to the station, asking to interview their journalists. The Wisconsin postmark had caught Alise's attention. She had been an exchange student in West Bend – 90 minutes from my apartment in Madison. Earlier that afternoon, she had seen me at the station and eavesdropped on my interviews.

We chatted now about Wisconsin, about Karasjok, about our common case of cultural schizophrenia. We had both lived in different cultures long enough to feel foreign no matter where we were. We were from different worlds, but we understood each other's sensation of being stretched between two realities. There was a bond between us. I wondered if it was intentional that her index finger was now hooked inside the sleeve of my T-shirt.

"Everyone in America thought I was a 'dirt ball,'" she said, switching to English for the two words that didn't translate right in Norwegian. "Because I smoked and I wore a leather jacket. Everyone in Norway smokes."

Another woman showed up beside me. "You're in my seat," she said.

I stood up. I felt awkward. I was hovering above everyone else now, unable to hear them above the music. I wanted to stay, but I felt segregated.

"Dave, can you see any empty tables?" Alise finally shouted at me.

I looked around. "I think I see one on the other side."

We moved – me and Alise and her friend whose seat I had stolen.

Alise and her friend headed for the bar while I guarded the table. I chatted with the guy at the next table.

Johan was a "Sea Sami" – a fisherman. He was passing through Karasjok on his way to a wedding. I was lucky to meet him. Sea Samis didn't live this far inland, and he would add another dimension to my article. I told Johan I was a journalist. I asked if I could interview him the next day.

"I'm leaving at 11 tomorrow morning," he said. "Stop by my cabin at 10."

Alise's friend returned.

"Where's Alise?" I asked.

"She's talking to her boyfriend."

Her tone had a "back off" defensiveness to it. But I hadn't known. Alise was the one who had approached me.

"Was that her boyfriend?" I asked. I had seen Alise with another guy earlier. They had been arguing.

"It's a long story," her friend said. She wasn't going to tell me any more.

I started thinking about leaving when Alise reappeared. The guy was with her.

He was friendly to me. He didn't seem to have a problem with my presence. We drank more beer. Other people came and left the table. It was 1:30 a.m. now.

Subtly, Alise was stroking the guy's knee with her index finger. It was curled, the same way it had been hooked inside my shirt sleeve, and I knew now my sleeve hadn't been an accident. She was trying to console this guy. He said goodnight to me and walked away.

It was close to closing time. People were leaving.

"There's another disco down the road," Alise said. "You should come see it tomorrow night."

"Okay," I said. "But what about that other guy?"

"Don't worry about him."

"Are he and you…."

"We broke up two weeks ago," she interrupted. "I was sick of him."

I wanted to believe her. I tried to ignore my doubts.

"Don't worry," Alise said. "He's leaving Karasjok tomorrow and he's not coming back. He's starting his military service."

"All right."

"Where are you staying?"

"I'm in cabin 10," I said.

"Okay. We'll pick you up tomorrow night at 10."

Tipsy, I walked out the door. The air was still, and it felt like night, even with the sun out. My eyes ached as they adjusted to the brightness. I wandered up the hill toward my cabin.

My home in Karasjok. © Dave Fox

What Karasjok called its youth hostel felt luxurious on my budget. The people who owned the bar and the café above the bar also owned a bunch of small log cabins. My cabin had two rooms – a small bedroom with four bunks, and a large, fully outfitted kitchen. Two of my three nights, I had it to myself.

I heard someone shout as I got to the door. Far away, down the hill, I could see Alise's boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend, or whatever. He bounded out of a taxi and grabbed her by the shoulders. I watched from a safe distance. They couldn't see me. They talked quietly, their faces close together. She got in the taxi with him and they disappeared. I went inside and went to sleep.

* * *

I ran down the hill in the morning with a sick feeling in my stomach. It was 11:30. I had overslept and found a woman sweeping out the cabin where Johan had told me to meet him for our interview. He was gone and I was sure I wouldn't meet another Sea Sami in Karasjok. I was annoyed at myself. I felt hungover, but this was my last full day in Karasjok and I needed more interviews.

I met Sara and Ivar at the Karasjok Reindeer Industry Administration. They told me about modern Rein Sami life. In 1987, fallout from Chernobyl had blown across the southern fringes of the Sami territory 200 miles south of Karasjok and contaminated the flocks. But deer in the north had been spared. It was a close call that could have eliminated the most popular Sami industry completely had the winds blown differently that day.

Karasjok was one of two de-facto "capitals" for Norwegian Sami. It was where many herders lived in the winter, when the animals needed inland vegetation. Most of the traditionally nomadic Rein Samis lived in houses now. And they used motorcycles and snowmobiles rather than the traditional sleds to round up the animals. But the dietary needs of the reindeer dictated that the Rein Samis still led a semi-nomadic life. The animals needed to be on the coast in the summer, and there was no economic way to transport large flocks of the animals. So twice yearly, many Samis were still living as their ancestors had for centuries – sleeping in their fur-lined goahti – dome-shaped, teepee-like homes that were easily assembled and taken down.

They had their own schools now, with classes in both Norwegian and Samic. Children were dismissed to participate in the semi-annual migrations. Sami Radio was heard throughout northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. They had even produced "Pathfinder," a full-length movie, in their own language, and subtitled it – first into Norwegian, eventually into several other languages including English after it had received rave reviews at the Cannes International Film Festival.

For the first time in centuries, this once-oppressed culture was flourishing, moving forward with technology rather than letting their old lifestyle be washed away by the 20th century. As long as there were reindeer, Ivar told me, the Samis would retain their nomadic heritage.

Karasjok was experiencing bizarre weather. Temperatures were reaching 95 degrees Fahrenheit, shattering all previous records this far north. Still, I wore long pants and a jacket. The mosquitoes were vicious.

A wind storm blew in that afternoon, stirring up clouds of dust. Power was knocked out. I was wandering back to my cabin when I heard someone shouting.

"Hey, Wisconsin!" the voice yelled. "Up here!"

I turned around.

It was Johnny, calling to me from the café window. "What are you doing?"

I told him I was working on an article.

"You should interview me," he boasted. "I know everything about the Sami people."

Johnny was drinking again. My notebook was almost full with notes, but I doubted Johnny would say much worth writing down. It seemed like a good excuse for a beer. There was nothing else to do.

"I met a guy last night I was supposed to talk to," I lamented, pulling up a chair. "A Sea Sami. But I overslept this morning and I missed him."

"Then you should talk to this guy." Johnny pointed to his friend.

"Are you a Sea Sami?" I asked in Norwegian.

He answered in English. "Yes. But not anymore. I have a bad back. My doctor said I had to quit fishing. Do you mind if we speak English? We don't get much opportunity to practice."

His name was Asle, and his English was excellent. I was surprised to find that Johnny's was too.

"Do you know how you get rid of a hangover?" Johnny interrupted. "You scare it away." He slurped his beer.

"Don't you have a worse one later?" I asked.

"Not if you keep scaring it. You just can't stop."

Asle was in his mid 40s. He had lived in England for several years and traveled the world working for a shipping company. He had a passion for Turkish history. He seemed out of place in Karasjok. But there was another side to him. He had gone to extremes to hold on to his roots.

"Do you speak Samic?" I asked. He had grown up in an era when Samis were second class citizens, and many, including his parents, had tried to hide their heritage.

"I speak it now," he said. "I learned it."

Samic was the first language of both of his parents, but they had forbidden him to speak it. They were ashamed of their background and wanted to hide it. Growing up, Asle had Samic-speaking friends, and he had felt left out among them. At age 20, no longer able to live with the cultural vacuum in his life, he had decided to learn the language in a radical way.

Asle had an elderly uncle who spoke little Norwegian. His uncle still lived in a tent year round. He was a Rein Sami.

Asle moved in with his uncle. He spent a year living in his uncle's tent. He tended the reindeer and he learned his ancestral tongue. Winter temperatures plunged to 50 below at times. "We had the dogs to keep us warm on our feet," he laughed. "I never gave up."

I asked if he had mastered the language now.

He shrugged. "I speak Samic like I speak English."

Johnny was younger than Asle. "Old enough," he told me. Mid-20s, I guessed. His childhood had been very different from Asle's.

"My mother is Sami. My father is Norwegian," Johnny told me. "But I am all Sami." He had been raised bilingually, which he said was a bigger problem than speaking only Samic. At school, his teachers had used him. Several of his classmates spoke no Norwegian, but the school would not hire an interpreter. Instead, they used Johnny.

He grew serious. His jaw tensed and his voice rose as he recalled a specific incident. He had been seven years old, playing soccer, and he had broken his leg. A helicopter had flown him to a hospital in Hammerfest, 150 miles away. Hammerfest was the closest major hospital to many Sami villages, but the staff spoke only Norwegian. So after Johnny's leg had been treated and he wanted to go home, doctors had led him around the hospital making him translate for elderly Sami patients.

"A seven-year-old kid translating for doctors and old people," he recalled angrily. "Think about that."

He was an angry man, and I was starting to understand his reckless streak. He told me he had quit worrying about what other people thought of him. He had spent too many years as a child feeling unfairly judged by people who didn't understand his background.

Friends of Johnny showed up and soon there was a big crowd at our table. They played on his soccer team. They got louder and rowdier with every gulp of beer.

A lanky guy with a scrunched up face sat down beside me. He looked at me and made popping noises with his mouth.

"He's the star of our soccer team," Johnny said in Norwegian, suddenly acting cheerful.

"He is?" I was skeptical.

"That's right." Then he switched back to English so he wouldn't be understood. "He's our mascot. Everybody knows him. We treat him well. He's lucky to live here. In the cities, people like him are not treated so well. We try to make him feel like one of us. It's better than sending him away."

The guy blended in so well with the rest of the group, his developmental disability hadn't fully registered with me.

"Nils," Johnny said, switching back to Norwegian, "this man is a newspaper reporter from America. He will go back to America and write about the goal you scored for us last week."

A smile came to Nils's face. He threw his hands in the air and shouted, "Norway!"

"The other teams know him," Johnny told me. "Sometimes they let him come play with us and they let him score."

Soccer was big up here. For the Karasjok team, winning was a matter of honor. Two years earlier, Johnny said, the mayor of a coastal town had shouted anti-Sami slurs at Johnny's team.

"Do you ever speak Norwegian when you're in non-Sami areas to avoid standing out?" I asked Johnny.

His voice rose and he turned serious again. "I always speak Samic when I am with my people."

"You know, this man knows magic," one of Johnny's teammates said to me.

"Really?" I said, expecting a card trick.

"Black magic."

I didn't believe him. These guys were all pretty drunk. But Johnny wasn't laughing. He hesitated for a moment. And then he said, "I am a shaman."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It is part of the old Sami religion. When players on my team are injured, I take away their pain."

I was skeptical. The previous day, a journalist had told me about the Sami religion. A lot of people still practiced it privately, but few admitted it.

"I didn't think people practiced the old religion," I said, testing Johnny.

"Lots of people do. But most won't admit it."

"So why are you so talkative about it?"

"I don't give a shit what other people think about me. I'm a Bohemian. I do what I want. They can't hurt me with their words."

"And you say you're a shaman?"

"Yes. This man hurt his leg in a match two weeks ago. I made it better for him. You can ask him."

I looked at the man. He nodded.

"Do all the players on the team believe this?" I asked.

"Of course they do. I heal them."

I looked around the table. Everyone was stone-faced. A couple of people nodded shyly. These guys weren't joking.

"So what can you do?" I asked.

"I can give pain. I can stop pain. It's a gift."

Asle jumped in. "Can you stop blood?" he asked.

Johnny threw him an angry glare. He didn't answer the question. He turned back to me. "People are curious, but you must not play with your powers. You must not use them for your own benefit."

The man next to Johnny interrupted. "Do you believe what he's telling you?" he asked.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know? You're a journalist. You must have an opinion."

"I'm not here to judge people," I said. "I'm here to learn."

"You're not a good journalist," the man challenged me.

"How the hell do you know what kind of journalist I am?"

I didn't like this guy. If he made it look like I didn't believe Johnny, the conversation was going to end abruptly. And reluctantly, I was believing Johnny's claim. Despite his mischievous streak, despite the way he had confronted me the night before, despite the impressive amount of beer he was swallowing, there was too much passion in what he said for me to not believe him. When Johnny was bullshitting, I could tell. Johnny told the man to shut up.

"Is there anything else you can do with these powers?" I asked.

"You can take trips without drugs. You can leave your body. The first time, I was terrified. I was looking down at myself from above. But it's wonderful. I do it all the time now."

"How?"

"I meditate."

"How did you get these powers?"

"Everybody has them."

"I have them?" I asked

"Everybody has them. But very few people know how to use them. You must learn how to use them."

"How did you learn?"

"I studied for several years. You see that man over there?"

Across the room was a thin, elderly man talking to some younger people. "He's taught me a lot. There was a man at the beginning of this century. He was the best. His name was Johan Kåven. He could pick things up without touching them. He could even stop cars from going."

"Can you do anything like that?" I asked. I wanted a levitation act or something, but Johnny wasn't about to put on a side show. He looked annoyed.

"No."

"So you can give people pain, and you can take it away. And you can leave your body. Is that everything?"

" I can do other things, but I shouldn't tell you."

Asle chimed in. "Dave, what we've told you, it's the truth. You won't find it written anywhere. You have to come here. To the source. You can write what you want. You can take out what you want. But we tell you the truth."

"And what we're telling you," Johnny added, "we wouldn't tell to some other journalist from Oslo or America."

"So why are you telling me?"

"I can tell you care about the Samis. You're not just doing this because it's your job. And you speak English to us even though you have to practice your Norwegian. I appreciate that. We don't get to practice our English very often. But if you were older, we probably wouldn't be telling you these things."

I nodded.

"I'll tell you something else. But you must be careful what you write." Johnny said.

"Do you not want me to write this?"

"Be careful."

I didn't know what he meant. His expression was foreboding.

"Okay," I said.

"I can also see the future."

"What can you see?"

"I have seen some very good things. And some very terrible things."

"Like what?"

"I cannot say."

A burly sailor came over and pulled my chair back – with me in it – so he'd have room.

I looked at him, annoyed.

"He is one of the best Sea Samis in Norway," Johnny said.

The man didn't say anything. He took a huge slurp from his beer bottle, and let the overflow dribble down his chin. He wiped it with a hairy arm.

"He's also one of the best Sami musicians, Johnny continued. "He plays guitar. And that guy there plays drums."

The drummer was a short, heavy-set guy with long, greasy hair and a thin moustache.

"We call him Muppet. Does he look familiar?"

I squinted. "I don't recognize him," I said.

"Have you seen The Muppets?" Johnny asked.

And then, it clicked. He looked like Animal, the beasty drummer from The Muppet Show.

"Oh, yeah!" I said.

Everyone laughed.

Muppet snatched my notebook.

"Hey, I need that."

He started writing in it.

"I need that back!" I said. My entire story was scribbled in those pages. I lunged for it, but he pulled his hand away and kept writing. Finally he gave it to me.

"Muppet, one of the Sami Musicians came here," he had scrawled, thinking I was writing my story as we talked.

Ten people sat around the table now. Two hours had passed. They were getting drunker. I was getting hungrier. I'd been so absorbed in everything, I hadn't eaten in nearly 24 hours.

The winds outside had settled and the power was back. I went to my cabin for a dinner of bread and cheese, yogurt and orange juice. Afterward I grabbed a fly swatter and went on a mosquito killing spree. I cleaned the cabin, shoving my dirty laundry into my backpack. I had a date to get ready for. I showered and put on my last clean T-shirt.

I walked back down to the restaurant to pay my bill. I had an early morning bus to catch. Johnny was still there, looking rushed now.

"I'm going to Finland," he said. A car was waiting outside.

"What are you doing there?"

"I will drink and fuck."

"Oh... well, good luck."

"I don't need luck," he said. "I have charm."

It was 9:30, and I sat in my cabin waiting for Alise. I was jittery. I could hear the music down the hill. The bar was livening up.

Ten o'clock came. Then 10:15, and 10:30.

At 11:30, I went to bed. I'd been stood up.

I wasn't surprised. Things had been strained the night before. I had to leave in the morning anyway. If Alise had something going with this guy, it wasn't my place to intrude. But I was sad I never got to say goodbye.

In the morning, I caught my bus to Hammerfest – the northernmost city in the world. A herd of reindeer strolled past the bus stop as we pulled into town. Nobody seemed to notice but me.

A week later, I was back in Oslo, back in a place that felt real. I had strayed so far from my own reality, Karasjok had seemed fictitious before I went. Now that I had been there, it was no more than a surreal memory. Just as the Samis' existence had seemed a myth before I went, so did the memory that lingered.