“It Breathes Norwegian Life”: Heritage Making at Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum

Huddled together in an immigrant log house constructed within the main building of Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and furnished as it would have been in the 1850s, a couple dozen children and the occasional parent hold hands and circle around a Christmas tree. The tree is amply adorned with garlands of Norwegian flags, paper doll chains in the shape of nisser,¹ woven paper heart baskets, and straw ornaments. Kari Grønningsæter, then-instructor of Norwegian language at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, is the center of everyone’s attention, leading the lively group in rounds of Norwegian Christmas carols, stopping to offer translations and directions for choreographed movements between songs. The children listen attentively with their blue-and-white Vesterheim visitor stickers plastered to their chests. Some are sporting bunader (traditional Norwegian costume), busseruller (traditional work or everyday over-shirt, historically worn by men), or Norwegian sweaters, but many of the children are still clad in their winter coats and hats despite the rising temperature of the crowded room. It is the first weekend in December of 2015, the event is Christmas at Vesterheim located in downtown Decorah, and the visitors in this room are taking part in the Juletre celebration. I am standing with my back to one wall of the log house with my one-year-old son in my arms, watching my four-year-old daughter holding hands with Kari’s granddaughters, circling the tree, eyes carefully tracing Kari’s movements and imitating them as best she can. When the singing and dancing conclude, a jolly man in a false beard, red cap, and busserull, Norwegian sweater, woolen knee socks, and a burlap sack slung over his shoulder makes his way into the room and hands out small trinkets to the children. The julenisse² has arrived, and, after patiently waiting for her gift, my daughter quickly breaks away from her friends to weave her way over to me and show off her treasure.

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Having grown up in Decorah, Christmas at Vesterheim has long been one of my favorite events of the holiday season. To myself and many others, it encapsulates heritage making in action, and it is one type of annual gathering that Vesterheim has built a reputation for offering over the years. The term “heritage making” or “heritage work” is complex, but effectively described by critical heritage studies scholar and archaeologist Laurajane Smith as “an embodied set of practices or performances in which cultural meaning is continually negotiated and remade, and is, moreover, a process in which people invest emotionally in certain understandings of the past and what they mean for contemporary identity and sense of place” (Smith 2015, 459–60). As Gradén and O’Dell assert in this issue’s introduction, heritage is not any one thing. Vesterheim is largely a museum built around the material culture of Norwegian immigrants and their descendants in America, but the collection in itself is not heritage. Heritage is, as Smith and others argue, both tangible and intangible (Smith 2006; 2015), and, according to Vesterheim’s current curator, the museum has long been aware of the important role its material collection serves in education and in promoting heritage work (Gilbertson 2012, 7–8; 2016, 6).

Many times over, Vesterheim has shown itself to be an innovative institution, combining considerable investment in creating a unique and impressive collection of Norwegian immigrant material culture in America with maintaining and supporting cultural traditions, routinely using its own collection of objects as inspiration for the continuance of Norwegian folk arts in America. In this article, I will call attention to some ways in which Vesterheim’s approach has continued to align itself with evolving views of heritage, not only in its role in collecting and preserving material culture, but also in terms of community events and celebrations. Vesterheim has shown awareness that, as Smith writes, “the real sense of heritage, the real moment of heritage when our emotions and sense of self are truly engaged, is not so much in the possession of the [thing...