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

SÁMI IMMIGRATION to the United States and Canada and the Sámi American ethnic identity movement of the past three decades can generate a host of complicated questions. What, for instance, happens to a land-based people like the Sámi when they leave that land—Sápmi—and relocate to foreign topographies? What happens to Indigeneity when it becomes migrant or diasporic? When those Indigenous to one place become settlers on the lands of other Indigenous nations? How have Sámi immigrants, most of whom read as “white” in the context of American race discourse, benefited from white privilege, and to what degree has the experience of living as white in the United States distanced their descendants from the culture of ancestors and contemporary relatives back in Sápmi? How has the Indigenous–immigrant experience differed for Sámi Americans of color? For those who also belong to a North American Indigenous people? And, not least, how tenuous a connection can one have to a Sámi ancestry and still be Sámi—or Sámi American?

Ellen Marie Jensen’s book may not explicitly answer these questions, but it does circle around several of them in promising and productive ways, while also providing plenty of material for those who would like to explore these topics more directly. As a groundbreaking text on Sámi Americans and their experiences, We Stopped Forgetting’s greatest contribution may be that it opens up the field for further research and scholarship, making visible the experiences of members of an American ethnic group that has only recently begun to articulate itself as such. It does this by sharing the stories and voices of six very interesting Sámi Americans, all of whom have also engaged at some level in collaborative work with members of other Indigenous peoples.

In We Stopped Forgetting Jensen shares her own story along with the stories of five other Sámi Americans. These often moving stories profile a Native artist of Sámi, Cheyenne, Cree, Finnish, and French ancestry; a retired college administrator from the Pacific Northwest currently living in Colorado; a campus ministry worker from Madison, Wisconsin, and his brother; an artist and activist living in Minnesota’s Twin Cities; as well as a massage therapist of Sámi, Siberian Yupik, and Croatian descent. Jensen treats each of these people with respect as she recalls her conversations with them. She also includes written works by four of her informants and reproductions of artistic works from two of them (although this inclusion might have been more effective if these texts had been included in the chapters on their respective authors, rather than being relegated to the appendices).

Despite some significant differences, each of the stories shares an aspect of cultural loss and a struggle to recover an ancestral Sáminess. This loss often arose in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts of racist colonialist assimilation policies at home that led many Sámi immigrants to hide or suppress their Sámi identity upon arrival in North America, where they often settled in communities of Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish immigrants. In other families Sámi identity may not have been a secret, but several generations of living in whitestream America had weakened the connection to Sámi culture and ways of being to the point where it was nearly forgotten. In most of these stories, though, the forgetting was never complete, and there were family members who remembered Sámi ways and stories and passed these on to the author and those she interviewed. In some cases it was belief in subterranean ulddat and gadniha beings. In others it was Sámi sewing techniques, a family Bible, traditional attitudes toward childrearing, or even naming ceremonies and yoik, the traditional vocal music of the Sámi that is in itself a way of remembering.

Jensen sketches the history of Sámi immigration to the United States and Canada, and of the Sámi American ethnic...