Menü
Night was rising from the ground.
Around my ankles, I could feel the dampness from the grass. A thinning blanket of late summer warmth still hovered over the Boarek Plain, as if the earth had breathed out to clear its lungs for another day.
The tent was drawing an arching shadow on the ground, gilded swabs of cottongrass soaking up the last rays of sun around me. Beyond its silhouette, hillsides rounded on the horizon towards the south where the plain ended.
In the dusk, a red light caught my eye. A mast on a hill near Kvikkjokk, the village where the road had ended.
For some time, I rested my wandering eye on its pulse. From the lakes on the plain, mist had begun to rise.
Then, vibrations in my jacket. Thought I had put on flight mode, I realised as I reached into my pocket.
For a moment, I stared at the name on the display. Hesitating, I then answered the call.
„Hej.“ A longer pause.
„I tried calling earlier,“ she added.
„I must have walked out of coverage hours ago.“
An evening breeze caressing the grass filled the silence between us.
„It’s good to hear your voice,“ she said.
„Same here,“ I confessed.
„Listen, I was thinking. Perhaps …“ Then, rags of words. A scrambled voice. I looked at the screen. The data signal had collapsed.
„I’ll write when I’m on the other side,“ I sent a text. After a few seconds, the last vibration in my hand.
„Yes. Please be safe.“
The screen turned black as the phone shut down. For a moment, my view rose to the red light again, pulsating on the horizon.
From its glow, I followed the distinct line that the ridge to the south was drawing into a glowing sky.
It was five summers now since I had hiked up there, in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus. In front of my tent stood the same pair of boots I had bought for that trip.
For Linnaeus, the mountains west of Kvikkjokk had been where he first encountered the alpine flora of Lapland. It was a world that whose richness and diversity was different from anything the young botanist had known til then – an encounter that defined his career.
Notebook specimen of ‚Linnea borealis‘ – a plant from the north named after the botanist Carl Linnaeus.
For me, the mountains were the site from where my view first had wandered over the Boarek Plain, towards the mountain range of Bårdde that I was now approaching.
Recalling the view of the glacier-polished ridge, I felt the urge once again that its sight had sparked five years earlier, to see what comes behind. This time, I had returned to follow it.
Notebook drawings from many summers ago.
„That’s the beginning of Sarek“, I recall the words of the guide as he pointed towards the mountains on the horizon that summer. „No roads. No bridges. No shelter.“
„That’s where the magic begins.“
I woke to clicking sounds the next morning.
As I crawled towards the door of the tent, I tried to remember the last night I had slept without ear plugs.
A few reindeer scurried away as the zipper tore through the silence. Under my knees, I felt the ground vibrating from their weight.
Near one of the lakes that dotted the plain, the herd slowed down. As the rumble of their hooves grew softer, the clicking returned – the snapping sound of their ankle tendons.
A few bits of clouds were hovering over the lake, mirroring on its surface together with the slopes of Bårdde below.
Not far from my tent, a path drew a thin line through the pasture. Further on towards the mountain range, a last sign post marked where the path into Sarek parted from the Kungsleden trail that hugs its outer border.
From the pole, a piece of paper was waving in a punched pocket. Hamberg Week, I read above the water-stained grids of a schedule.
Each year, Sámi natives and storytellers, researchers and authors, hikers and mountain guides gather for the ‚Hamberg Week‘ at an old observatory hut on the Boarek Plain more than a century ago. It was one of seven that Uppsala glaciologist Axel Hamberg had constructed at different positions in Sarek more than a century ago.
A few tents lined the path to the old observatory, a metal sheet construction that shone in sun-bleached Falun red from a birch forest, meteorological instruments blending in with the trees around like surrealist installations.
A few weeks from now, temperatures would drop below zero. A massif door protected the inside from the Arctic climate that would ensue.
Over a calf-high threshold I stepped inside. “Välkommen,” said one of the men inside. A pom-pom in blue and red dangled from a cord around his shoulder, holding a bag made from reindeer skin.
„Henrik Micael“, he introduced himself, surprised and delighted at at the unexpected visitor.
Presenting me to the others inside, he proved eager to show me around.
Since the early 1900s, Hamberg’s huts became the solitary abode of a generation of research assistants. Their mission was to gather weather data up north.
Sarek is situated a few degress above the Polar Circle. The region encompasses a diameter of roughly fifty kilometers. It is the most alpine area of Sweden, with more than a hundred of glaciers nesting on the shoulders of its peaks.
They were at the heart of the interests that Hamberg pursued across three decades of expeditions.
Browsing around, Mikael and me opened some of the historic drawers, filled with stationary and emergency flares from the previous century. In compartments below the seating benches there were newspapers that had arrived with deliveries of supplies.
The meteograph
Outside, we ventured into the forest of instruments around the observatory. Like the hut themselves, many of them had been designed by Hamberg to function reliably in extreme surroundings.
With one of the keys on his belt, Henric Mikael opened a wooden hut painted completely in white. Below of a rack of shining mirror balls – instruments used for cloud photography – was a white closet, connected to counter weights and instruments outside the hut with metal rods.
The other visitors had already gathered outside as we returned to the observatory.
Per-Ingvar stems from a Sámi family that has ancestral fishing rights on the Boarek plain. For a while, we followed him through a small forest of birch trees towards what remained of a former clearing.
Near a few decaying pieces of timber, he squatted down on a boulder.
„This was the hut of Pirkkit Amma“, he began explaining. For decades, hikers had used most of what was left for firewood, he deplored.
Facing the ruin, Per-Ingvar told the story of the man who built this hut many years before Hamberg set out on his expeditions.
„Pirkkit Amma was no ordinary man“, he said.
„He was the last shaman in this area.“
@Lutz: habe hier mal zwei Bilder zur Auswahl reingemacht, was meinst Du?
The people who still knew those who lived with Pirkit Amma (1847–1905) have long passed away. A few of them have written down what they remembered about the man who built his hut our here in the woods near the foot of Bårdde.
As a young man, so they say, he had been an apprentice of the great shaman Unnasj Per Olofsson Kukkuk (1770–1858). Around Kvikkjokk, reindeer herders turned to Pirkit Amma when they wondered where to send their herds to graze or where to poach. In the leather bag around his shoulder, so some of them rumoured, he carried the tooth and finger of a dead man, props the divination rituals he performed.
Hunting, fishing and some reindeer sustained the man known as Pirkit Amma. When the nights became darker again in August, the fire he lighted near the rapids sometimes cast an eerie shimmer over the plain. There, he couched on the cliffs with a spear, luring swarms of charr towards the light.
A few images survive of Pirkit Amma, shot by early visitors from the south who carried bulky camera gear towards the borders of Sarek. Their photographs survive on fragile glass plate negatives, stored in the basements of libraries.
One of these visitors was Axel Hamberg.
One of the more than three thousands photographs he took in Sarek shows Pirkit Amma next to another person – perhaps his sister – in front of their kåta.
It was in the late 19th century that Hamberg embarked on his first expeditions into Sarek. On the second one (1896), he encountered Pirkit Amma, who moved his herd towards the foot of the Bårdde range in summer.
On this and many expeditions that followed, Hamberg turned to him to rent reindeer which carried his gear and scientific instruments into the heart of Sarek.
Axel Hamberg, #add caption.
However, Hamberg was not the first who turned to Pirkit Amma for support in the area around Sarek.
Decades before the first railroads made Lapland more accessible from Sweden’s south, a married couple from Stockholm set out for the remoter parts of Lule-Lapland in 1868.
Gustaf von Düben was a professor of Pathological Anatomy at the Karolinska Institutet at that time. For years, he had been working on a work cataloging Sámi skulls. His institution at Stockholm held a large collection of human remains – commonly removed without consent.
It was this collection that inspired Gustaf von Düben’s deeper interest into the indigenous people from Sweden’s north. His interests resulted in two expeditions he led to Lapland. On both, he was accompanied by his wife Lotten von Düben who acted as photographer.
The images and observations from these expeditions fed into Gustaf von Düben’s On Lapland (Om Lappland och lapparne, företrädesvis de svenske. Ethnografiska studier, Stockholm 1873). The work was illustrated by dozens of illustrations of Sámi cultural objects as well as a selection of coloured tables displaying Sámi individuals.
On Lapland was a book that shaped the view on Sámi culture for decades. Many of its picture tables derived from the photographs Lotten had taken of people, landscapes, and cultural objects up north.
One of her glass negatives shows Pirkit Amma as a young man, seated in front of large boulder, a hut in the background. The couple had encountered the young man of 26 years near Kvikkjokk. Together with four other Sámi, Pirkit Amma guided them in Sarek and the neighbouring Badjelánnda.
As a photographer, Lotten was travelling with a so-called stereocamera. Equipped with two objectives, it exposed two halves of a glass plate negative to produce two slightly different images of a motif. If viewed in an appropriate viewing apparatus, the human eye combined these images to one that featured additional spatial depth.
In most of the photographs of humans, however, Lotten applied used the double-objectives to produce so-called ‚anthropological portraits‘ of Sámi individuals. For the first exposure, she closed the right objective to take a portrait picture with the left objective exclusively. After that, she closed the left objective and opened the right as soon as the person had changed pose to appear in profile.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this visual practice far from innocent.
The racial biological interests that motived the von Dübens‘ journey to Lapland informed their view on its inhabitants and how they were presented. From early on, racial prejudices were a strand dominating the comparative studies of human skulls. A smaller cranium houses a less intelligent brain, so the commonly accepted conclusion of ‘scientists’ went.
In the 1860s, Lotten von Düben was a female pioneer in photography. In the decades that followed, the medium became a key medium to both substantiate and disseminate the racist views on other human beings.
Fifty years after her journey, Herman Lundborg organised a traveling exhibition on race types in Sweden (1919), to which leading photographers contributed their pictures of northern natives. Three years later, the State Institute of Race Biology opened at Uppsala University.
Taking measurements on their heads with craniometers and and comparing their eyes to colour tables, Sámi individuals were charted with cartographic precision. At the schools they had to attend, thousands of children and teenagers had to undress themselves against their will. In the name of ’science‘, men in white lab coats took photographs and/or translated their bodies into data-sets on pre-printed forms.
The traumata of the Sámi people take many forms. Until today, the wounds caused by abuse through the Swedish state, the suppression of their cultural identity, or the destruction of their material culture have not healed.
A century after the State Institute of Race Biology was opened, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission took up work in spring 2022. The collection of skulls at Karolinska Institutet burned in 1891. Still today there are descendants waiting for Swedish institutions to return remains of their ancestors.
At Uppsala State Institute of Race Biology closed as late as 1959. Photographs and measurements of Sámi people taken without consent are still kept in library basements.
Wounds in the Land
Per-Ingvar left for the nearby lake when the group returned to the observatory hut. It was time to draw in the nets.
Grouped around a fire, we later shared pieces of charr, a trout-like fish that boiled in an iron pot.
Two men with long dreadlocks and their female companion had joined the circle, barefeet, preferring a pot of lentils over the salmon-coloured meat. I hadn’t been the only one to serendipitously stumble into Hamberg Week.
For a day and a night, the three had been exploring the borders of Sarek after a festival. That year, the annual Gathering of the Rainbow Tribe had taken place in Lapland.
For years, a British mining company has been gearing up to exploit a new mine. The iron ore deposit prospected at Gállok promises to be the largest in Scandinavia.
For several days, activists were coming together near the town of Jokkmokk. South-east of Sarek, they peacefully protested against the mining operations planned on an island in the Lule River, located only some dozens of kilometres away from the borders of the national parks that form the Laponia Network.
Sundays in a Week of Workdays
The lines that draw the borders between protected regions and landscapes open to human exploitation are invisible.
Sweden was the first nation in Europe to define areas protected according to the American model. In 1909, Sarek was among the first set of national parks the Swedish parliament defined that year.
When industrialising nations began declaring national parks, this also happened in acknowledgment of the impact humankind exerted on the face of the earth. Creating sanctuaries of protected nature provided moral relief in the light of lands and communities changing rapidly.
Sarek was defined an area exempt from economic use. This also applied to the Sámi, who had been driving their reindeer through these valleys summer after summer.
Only half a century after the creation of the parks their ancestral rights to live with these lands were acknowledged. When it came to Sweden’s own economical interests, the borders of the new sanctuaries proved more flexible.
A few years after the first national parks had been declared, damming operations began on the Lule River north of Sarek central massif, in an area protected as the Stora Sjöfallet (‚The Big Lake Fall‘) National Park.
To construct hydro-electrical plants on the upper Lule River, roads and railways were built that made this part of Sweden more accessible. In this context, the borders of Stora Sjöfallet were massively curtailed. Sites of cultural importance for the Sámi and of outstanding natural beauty acknowledged were destroyed – including the Stora Sjöfallet in its original form (to compensate for this irreversible loss, the Boarek Plain was later integrated into Sarek National Park).
In such light, the mine prospected at Gállok triggers more than a century of environmental conflict and unresolved trauma. At the end, it boils down to an inconvenient question:
What value does a society assign to the rights of an indigenous minority and to lands still largely unaffected by human exploitation in the light of short-term profits?
Gállok is the name of a mining site in Lule Lappland (commonly transcribed as Kallak in Swedish).
The site is located on an island in the (regulated) Lesser Lule River, about half way between Sarek National Park and the town of Jokkmokk and some fifty kilometres away from the borders of national parks in the Laponia Network.
Below the ground, so prospectors determined around the middle of the twentieth century, lies one of the largest deposits of iron ore.
In the late 2000s, the British company Beowulf bought the drilling rights to exploit the deposits at Gállok. Test drillings have been conducted while Beowulf went after permissions to begin operations on a large scale.
At the moment, plans are to operate an open pit mine over a duration of at least # years.
@Lutz: add map?
In 2014, Beowulf’s plans were stopped by a decision of the county administration (länsstyrelsen) Norrbotten. However, the decision was eventually overruled.
With this, it fell to the national government to make a decision on the Gállok question.In February 2020, it first declined the application of Beowulf to continue with mining operations. Since then, political pressure increased.
For six years, so the complaint went in 2020, the government has kept Beowolf waiting, risking Sweden’s attractiveness and credibility for investors. Not only would the mine lead to the creation of jobs, massive tax revenues, and new infrastructure in Lapland. Entering into the exploiting phase would also promise a chance to reboot the Swedish economy after the pandemic.
In the second half of 2021, a new Swedish government formed. With the Green Party leaving the coalition, the government under Magdalena Andersson reopened prospects for Gállok to proceed.
On March 22nd 2022, the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications granted a permission for mining operations to Beowolf’s subsidiary Jokkmokk Iron.
At the moment, the prospects are to begin open pit mining in 2026.
@Lutz: 1) Zitat schrift in den „Himmel“ kommt besser, 2) überlegen: Zitat ganz links an rand des Sliders, an diese position dann video?
The government’s decision met with strong protests by the Sámi, environmentalists, and the UN Human Rights Council.
Until the present day, Sweden has failed to sign the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (ILO 169). The convention would grant the Sámi control over the resources above and below ground. The rights to fish, hunt, graze, or mine on these lands would lie exclusively in their hands – rights colliding with the economical and recreational interests of many other stakeholders in Sweden.
Up north, the traditional ways of living of the Sámi have long adapted to realities of the twenty-first century. And still, for families that practice reindeer husbandry, the Gállok mine and the impact it will have on the environment – by blocking migration corridors or cutting of routes – can mean the interruption of the traditional way of living in these lands.
If not passed on, these historically grown skills of living sustainably in and with this landscape will disappear within a generation. Such a horizon of time ventures beyond any profit that Gállok may yield to shareholders or taxing institutions. While PR-campaigns advocate Gállok as part in a strategy for a green transition, nobody can predict the long-term consequences such an enterprise will have on vulnerable landscapes and communities.
If a mine at Gállok becomes reality, it will stand out as the reference case for similarly invasive projects planned all across Lapland. Until 2030, so the Swedish government hopes, their number would rise from 16 to approximately 50.
It is a goal that cannot be reached without further curtailing on indigenous rights and national park borders.
No word has passed my lips today.
The thought shot through my mind, as quick and sudden as the shadow of a bird in flight.
More than twenty-four hours ago, I had left the observatory on the foot of Bårdde behind. Pouring coffee meal on the ground, I rose from the circle to make my way around the fire. Shaking hands, I took leave from the people I met on the border of Sarek. The last words were words of gratitude.
From the observatory near the foot of the mountain range I had proceeded further up the Bårdde ridge. Pitching the tent half-way, I climbed the top ridge for sunrise.
Up there, on a plateau at 1825m, Hamberg had another of his observatories built. For months, two-men teams carried out meteorological observations, weathering the Arctic winters behind metal sheets and cottonwood insulation as the rest of Europe fell apart in the war.
@Lutz: hier auflösung bitte besser und schwarz schleier raus
For the first time, a view opened up from the Bårdde range to what came beyond. Glaciers nest among the highest peaks, embracing their tops like a crescent of ice.
The sight brought to my mind an image from readings before my departure, comparing them to „rooster combs“ rising „black from the glaciers‘ dead white“. It was a line that stemmed from a piece of nature writing by Dag Hammarskjöld.
Long before his time a Secretary General at the UN (1953–1961), the Swede had embarked on several tours into Sarek. In a number of articles, Hammarskjöld had tried conveyed his experience of place and the meaning a remote region like Sarek took for him – experiences that would nourish him throughout his later career.
In one of them (‚Four Campsites‘), Hammarskjöld roughly sketched the route his party took, paying significantly more detail to aspects such as plants or the changes of weather and light, the fragrance of thawing snow, or the stillness of place.
„It is to be one of those quiet days with low-flying clouds,“ Hammarskjöld commented for example a day on Bårdde, „where the light in the moist air gets a silver hue, reducing and harmonising colours, and it seems that even sound has been deprived of all sharpness.“
Hammarskjöld’s prose is remote from the narratives of conquest and male endeavour that dominate the travelogues of his time. Today, we would refer to much of what he wrote as Nature Writing – a series of pieces that speak with deepest humbleness about a place like Sarek.
@Lutz: Abstände wirken noch etwas groß hier um das Zitat, ließe sich das reduzieren?
Beyond the glacier of Bårdde, a notch in the mountain chain opened up a glimpse towards the range that came beyond. It were the valleys that led towards the heart of Sarek, a journey translating several days of hiking.
My view wandered down the glacier, towards the tip of its tongue. Pock-marked lands widen where the ice had receded, a thin line running through their middle cutting them in half. It was one of the rivers I had to cross.
I remembered the outdoor guide at the campfire the day before. In a mixture of inquisitiveness and concern, he asked about the route I planned to take.
Unfolding my map, I led him through possible campsites and river crossing that I had marked with a waterproof pen. Blowing away some steam from his cup, he took a sip of kokkaffe.
„You know that most people who die in Sarek drown,” he added. Our eyes met, briefly.
I nodded.
Sarek is a surrounding that is not hostile to life and human presence. Yet for a guest to these lands, it means preparation.
Those who have lived with these surroundings for centuries have done so by learning to live with the plants and animals thriving up north, and making this part of the culture they built around them.
For the occasional visitor, Sarek is world without signposts or maintained trails, without cell-phone signal or shelter. All food and equipment has to be carried on the back. In case of injury, the next road may lie a week’s walk away.
It is a matter of time until the term ‚last wilderness‘ comes up when preparing a crossing of Sarek. And still, calling these lands wild reveals less about themselves as about our view on a world that feels so different from the one we live in.
Crossing the border into Sarek means exposing oneself to a vulnerability we are not in touch with. A long time ago, we have hidden it behind infrastructure and supply chains – and much of an earlier state of human nature with it.
For some, places like Sarek mean one of the few places to feel closer to such a state, to truly experience oneness and geborgenheit in nature. In this sense, these lands are far from wild – they are not subdued to our standards of convenient access and economic use.
Throughout his life, Dag Hammarskjöld longed after forms of nature where experiences of these kinds could happen. And even when they were out of reach during his later obligations at the UN, memories thereof continued to nourish the poetry he wrote his entire life.
Yet what does the building of new roads and the arrival of urban culture mean for experiences that necessitate solitude, vastness, silence?
This was a question Hammarskjöld illustrated in his article Our Last Great Wilderness in 1946. Back then, he did so in the light of a tourism that was about to advance into the remoter areas of the Swedish fjäll in the years after the war.
There is a responsibility, Hammarskjöld argued, to consider non-profit concerns in these areas for the sake of coming generations. Preserving an ‚inner sanctum‘ of such environments – accessible only in long trips, without the support of tourism facilities – was one of them. And among such pristine areas, Sarek stood out most prominently for him.
transition: spiritual experience
vulnerability
the luggage on your bag and on the inside
towards an idea of something pristine
A blue object, among the green pasture.
I found an ear mark. Reindeers.
Ijvvárlahko means Valley of Ijvvar. It is the name of the high plateau passed a meadow. For herders it provides pasture.
I waited for a few of them to cross, moving across the knee-high vegetation like beads pulled on a string. Behind them, the ice of Bårdde Glacier seemed to ooze towards the pasture. Rain clouds had begun to veil the peaks, and fog was sliding down the glacier tongue as if elicited by the ice.
To its right, the notch in the mountain range still seemed clear of fog. It was there that the Lullihavágge began, the stony valley leading up to the pass I had chosen towards the heart of Sarek.
A stream led over the reindeer pastures towards the notch in the mountain range. Where its flow thinned out, their green soon yielded to fields of rocks. Beyond, where the valley began to curve, ripples which the ice had carved thousands of years ago cast their shadows.
Stones scattered the ground of the valley trough, a few lichens adding humble dots of colour to the grey expanse. I had already reached the first fields of snow when sunlight broke into this world of monochrome. A few rays that pierced the clouds at the entrance of the valley, yet strong enough to strike the fragment of a rainbow, as if making a last effort to recall colours that had gradually faded away.
In the other direction, towards the pass on 1355m, the clouds had pulled together, forming a dome without contours. Shades of blue shimmered on the slopes below their grey, where two small glaciers had their brim.
Not far from their ice, I pitched the tent on a rare patch of organic material – I wouldn’t want to be out in this terrain when the rain arrived. Lighting up the stove, already wrapped in my sleeping bag, I took a last glance from the vestibule, down the valley to that stretch which to me was still unknown.
And as if a hand had wiped across a fogged-over pane, a window opened up towards the valleys that came beyond – one brief moment before the curtain of leaden clouds dropped down again.
I could feel when the clouds moved up the mountain pass later that night, a blanket of mist that lowered on the tent.
After sunset, the little warmth inside had trickled away in the rocky ground that I felt below me. Until now, I had hardly slept.
All senses now seemed dampened inside the cloud. A muffled sound arrived from the stream springing from the nearby glacier. It was still late August, and the sky had not lost its nightly shimmer yet, now diffused by the mist.
The screen of my phone lit up the dim haze that embraced the tent. I had turned it on, for a few songs robbed from the battery.
On the playlist I had carried into the silence were old companions. Songs that spoke to me from an earlier point in time.
A few weeks ago, we had shared ear phones and music of this kind together, under leaves that scattered the summer sun on the hill of Observatorielunden. We had come there after the library.
And I thought of the ### in the innermost of Asplund’s libary building, the noise of Sveavägen far outside. There, on the soft carpet of the Fairy Tale Room, we had curled up on the carpet floor, our view wandering over the dream world that unfolded on the frescoes above.
Belonging. Early memories.
„Where do you want to be buried,“ she had asked? I thought of the Linden trees, the grave of grandma. The sense of belonging.
„Here, among the trees of the Skogskyrkogarden,“ I replied. „This was the last place I felt home.“
playlist plays
And I thought of the silence in the abdytum of the library, dampening the noise of Sveavägen.
We laid down on the carpet floor, under John Blund. The dream world. Belonging. Early memories.
„Where do you want to be buried,“ she had asked? I thought of the Linden trees, the grave of grandma. The sense of belonging.
„Here, among the trees of the Skogskyrkogarden,“ I replied. „This was the last place I felt home.“
You know what memories can bring,
The bring diamonds and rust.
Noajdde means ‘shaman’ in Sámi language, and perhaps, it was into this solitude that Amma and those who had taught him retreated, filling the slopes with sound as they beat their drum in ecstasy, widening their vision to realms beyond.
Overlooking the banks where Amma may have retreated, I thought of the man whose life now was little but a faint echo.
When he passed away in 1905, one of the last exponents of the Sámi shaman tradition died.
Originally, the Sámi had orally passed on their skills and the stories that defined their identity. This made them a people, so scholars from the south of Sweden judged, that possessed no ‘real’ history, no scope of civilisation, no vision to ‘develop’ the lands they occupied.
The best fate of the backward natives, so many concluded at that time, lay in being assimilated into Swedish civilization.
In the nineteenth century, Swedish scholars more and more had engaged in musealising a culture that was already on retreat. Linguists at Uppsala catalogued Sámi dialects. And at Stockholm and elsewhere, the newly founded national museums collected the colourful dresses from the north and the few drums that had survived the missionaries’ zeal.
Sarek is a place luring with the aura of something pristine, something original that has disappeared – that we have made disappear – from our human lives; experiences bought at the price of a vulnerability unknown and physical hardship. Much of the energy to embark on such a journey and putting food for weeks on the shoulders springs from a genuine human hope:
Could there still be a place out there – one capable of reconnecting us with faint and yet concrete memories of places and earlier states of beings we carry somewhere inside us, with outer and inner landscapes that left their mark on us as humans long before we began to change them?
From the top of Bårdde – the mountain range I had climbed from Hamberg’s hut on the Boarek plain with Hamberg’s hut – the first 2000m-peaks became visible, the glaciers of Sarek hugging their shoulders.
Down the slopes polished by the last ice age, I traced the route of the next days towards the mountain passes.
The terrain shone in a pock-marked brown. It seemed a barren lands and stony land from above – and yet, one through which I felt the promise of the next horizon already pulling, up the stony valley of Lullihavágge towards the next mountain pass.
Most of what we know about Amma and his teacher Unnasj Per Olofsson Kukkuk (1770–1858).
When he was young, so people say, the great shaman Unnasj made him his apprentice, teaching him how to beat the drum and to find suitable trees to craft it from.
The spreading of Christian belief in Sweden’s north coincided with the destruction of Sámi cultural identity. Linnaeus described the ruthlessness that missionaries applied to obliterate their religious rites and the instruments involved:
<blockquote>
<fn label=“[The missionary] laid hold of one of the Laplander’s arms“>Carl Linnaeus, <em>Lachesis Lapponica, or, A Tour in Lapland</em>, transl. James Edward Smith (London 1811), vol. 1, p. 364. At the moment, Staffan Müller-Wille is preparing a new translation to replace the old English translation of the <em>Journey</em>.</fn>, slipped up the sleeve of his jacket, and so contrived at length as to open a vein. The Laplander was near fainting, and, entreating him to spare his life, promised to bring the drum required; upon which the arm was bound up immediately. This plan has been frequently pursued with success.
<cite>
CARL LINNAEUS, <em>Journey to Lapland</em> (1737), 1811 transl.
</cite>
</blockquote>
When Pirkit Amma died 1905, one of the last exponents of the Sámi shaman tradition passed away. By that time, their culture has been defined.
In 1891, Amma had sold the small drum to a collector in Jokkmokk, together with a drumstick (<em>niuorris</em>), elaborately carved from reindeer horn. Its drumskin shows no pattern, yet the metal rings and something on the inside produces a distinct sound when shaken.
When Gustav Hallström later inspected the set at Stockholm, the curator discarded Amma’s drum as a <em>falsarium</em> made from a milking vessel. At Uppsala, K.B. Wiklund concurred. The linguist declaried that Amma must have made up the word <em>niuorris</em> – it seemed to make little sense to his understanding of Sámi language.
Today, the drum is one of the many presented at Stockholm.
Reconciliation narrative?
It is a combining feature Sound of wind,
what faded away
the rocks with lichen
There is an author I read before I came here.
Dag Hammarskjöld.
The tent.
What drives us?
Notebook.
Sense of belonging.
I thought of the days I had spent in the library. We had met hnear Odenplan, I had taken her into the rotunda.
We had lain down on the soft carped.
„Where do you want to be buried,“ she had asked? I thought of the Linden trees, the grave of grandma. The sense of belonging.
„Here, among the trees of the Skogskyrkogarden,“ I replied. „This was the last place I felt home.“
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#describe scenery: wake up near a lake, get water, water along the ice
The wind caressed the ground of the mountain plateau. Further on, I saw the red door of my tent fluttering. The flapping sound brought to my mind a line about those who for ages had travelled these lands with their herds:
Long did the wind talk
with the tent’s canvas.
In the early morning sun, I saw several tracks converge in the direction of my tent, their imprints filled with shadow.
Up here, no human trail has drawn a mark on the ground. The Dielma plateau lies off the main routes through Sarek.
Over many seasons, grazing reindeer have plotted their course across the ground like an unravelled braid. The bundle of tracks did not seem to yield a meter to the slightly descending plateau, as if hugging the contour lines of an invisible map.
When Axel Hamberg began his expeditions into Sarek in 1895, he relied on military maps executed two decades before. The creators of the Generalstabens karta had left work to finish.
It was one of Hamberg’s declared missions to correct the mapping of its inner region, its more than hundred glaciers in particular.
As for glacier names, some 19th-century cartographers had suggested not to bother at all and to simply distribute rising numbers instead. Hamberg proved more meticulous.
Surveying Sarek, Hamberg collected the original names of glaciers and other places, in an effort to both correct disfigured spellings and to include hitherto unnamed features on the map he wanted to produce.
A grid survives on glassine paper, a decal of the mental space that was Sarek in the imagination of the Sámi.
In his logistical and linguistical efforts in Sarek, Hamberg built on support by Sámi indigenous. For two of his contacts, he could rely on men he had met a few years earlier.
In 1883, Hamberg had participated in A.E. Nordenskiöld’s second expedition to Greenland. One of the goals was to advance deeper into the island, exploring if there were an ice-free inner region.
As expedition leader, Nordenskiöld had decided to make two Sámi part of his team, Pavva Lars Tuorda and Anders Rassa from the Sámi community of Tuorpio.
Anders Rassa and Pavva Lars Tuorda setting out for their journey into the ice. Photograph by C.G.O. Kjellström (1883). From Alvin Database, alvin-record:56069.
Their knowledge about moving on ice and snow was essential for the expedition. For 18 days, the expedition ventured deeper into the ice sheet.
On 22 July 1883, Nordenskiöld decided to capitulate to the adverse conditions. From a camp located only little more than a hundred kilometers from their point of departure, the two Sámi were sent out on skis.
The mission of Rassa and Tuorda was to probe deeper into the island. After 57 hours on unmapped terrain, they returned to the camp. Skiing for more than two days, they had crossed a total of almost 450 kilometers. They had made it back safely from their journey across the white expanse – yet with no evidence that hinted at an ice-free inner region.
FUSSNOTE SAREK 37f. On this Nordenskiöld, Den andra Dicksonska expeditionen till Grönland, pp. 197f., 227–32.
Pavva Lars Tuorda as a man of 24 years. Photograph by Lotten von Düben (1871). From Alvin Database, alvin-record:269717.
From early on, Rassa and Tuorda were among the Sámi that opened up their world to Hamberg. Both stemmed from Turpio community and had excellent knowledge of the wider Sarek area.
Extraordinary physical stamina was merely one factor to make it back safely. How the Sámi perceived the world around them in language, so some scholars argue, was another key. It features words and structural elements that „allow[] them to describe topographical features so precisely that other Sámi could find, say, a lost reindeer or go to a place solely on the basis of an oral description“.
FN: online article: https://www.laits.utexas.edu/sami/dieda/anthro/time.htm
A deep silence fills the inner valleys of Sarek.
What sound have human beings carried into these valleys?, I wondered as my view roamed over the Sárvesvágge, ‚The Valley of the Reindeer Bulls‘?
During the brief months of summer, herders let their reindeer roam along its green banks and up here, on the higher plateaus, as they make their way into the grazing grounds of Badjelánnda.
Though close to the Heart of Sarek, human presence is rare on the Dielma Plateau. A few reindeer raised their antlers as I passed them at a distance, chestnut figures against the mighty pyramid peaks rising behind them.
For a while, I stopped.
Dry stalks shivered in the wind that grazed the pasture between us, too gentle to rustle up a sound. Their eyes locked in on me, distinct yet not concerned.
I was a passersby in these lands, a respected guest, so it felt. And still, no step could close the distance.
During the ages they have lived with them, the Sámi had shaped their own forms to feel and express their connection with these lands. Singing was one of them.
The joiks of the Sámi that filled these valleys have no beginning, no end. #add description.
„Every stunted bush, every little rolling hill in the terrain, everything in nature would wake up and want to yoik along. The reindeer would prick its ears and raise its head; it seemed to pick up the pace. The tapping of its hoofs kept the beat. At every pause in the yoiking it was as if nature shouted: „juigga, juoigga – that is our song, yoik as much as your lungs can take, and we will yoik along.“
Per Hætta, Sámi artist (1912–1967)
@Lutz: hier machen wir einen scroller! 😀
I followed the lead of the reindeer tracks that morning.
Across the valley in which the Sárvesjåhkå flowed lay slopes polished by the last ice ace. During the long winters, all this was a world covered in deep snow. Each year, when the brief summer came, the melting snow had carved furrows into mountain slopes that arched like elephant backs.
On the # plateau, I followed in the same direction as the Sárvesjåhkå down in the valley, towards the heart of Sarek. At a river junction called Dielma it meets the Ráhpaädno, the central river through Sarek.
More than thirty glaciers feed into Ráhpaädno. Dielma is the place where chances are best to wade over its icy waters.
Ancient sites where the Sámi sacrificed animals dot the banks of Ráhpa. In summer, rain and melting weather can turn it into a raging river.
The sun had changed.
This is the heart of Sarek.
A peaceful place, remote.
need: transition to hammarskjöld
nature inspired him
Story of Vägmärken, manuscript.
Taken him back to nature, back to Sarek.
The latest entry dates a few weeks before his plane crashed over today’s Zambia, retracing a hike near a peak.
I came to Tielma Ford.
I descended through a birch forest. I felt late summer again at the bottom.
I crossed over the river.
Through the milky water I couldn’t see the ground. I left my boots on for safer crossing. Probing the ground with my poles, I leaned into the river. The current jerked my knees to the side, leaving the rest of my legs numb with cold. In my breast, I could feel the cold blood accelerate my heartbeat.
On the opposite bank, I yanked off my shoes and trousers. Spread out on a rock in the sun, I dozed off next to my drying gear, the feeling returning to my legs. Two hours later, I woke up from a chilling breeze. Clouds had moved in again.It gathered cloudberries,
For some time, I ventured into the thick birch forests that seamlessly covered the stretch between the river banks and the steep slopes of Låddebákte behind.
Cloudberries grew on the swampy ground, so ripe that they almost burst between my fingertips. Filling up my water, I crawled forwards on the sandbanks. I was still lying on my belly when I noticed movement in the margin of my vision. Near the birch forest, a moose and her calf moved out of the thicket. As if in slow motion, they approached the river, lowering their heads to drink.
As the mother rose her head again, our eyes met. All movement froze. Still not moving. , and singing, the words started to flow.
svasti-prajābhyah paripālayantām …
The moose turned their ears in my direction, listening calmly as long as the mantra lasted. As the blessing fell silent, mother and calf slowly retreated into the woods.
I came with my calves to water.
On the other side from the swamp where the bears roam, and the two-legged animals that arrive when the snow has melted.
From behind the thicket we watched him wade through the turquoise river, its waters bulging around its belly. And we watched it spread out its limbs in the sun on the smooth rock near the river.
It was gone as we watched the thin fur that lay drying in the sun, patches of water forming under the outer hooves.
It was not there when we passed through the river
and as we bowed to drink, we heard a song, that ancient hymn:
We heard the song of the ancient again
#translation
There had been a time, Indian legend has it, that Sanskrit was the language of the universe, understood by all beings in it.
There is a claim hovering over the ranges of Sarek – one that tells more about our sensibilities than the actual place.
There lies something ennobling in this term – something that inspires awe, implying a rare place far from the forces of human society.
The center of Sarek lies several days away from the next road. And ever since it was declared a National Park, it has remained a place without official trails and signposts, without bridges and shelters. It is forbidden to approach Sarek by any other mean that foot.
Sarek is a place luring with the aura of something pristine, something original that has disappeared – that we have made disappear – from our human lives; experiences bought at the price of a vulnerability unknown and physical hardship. Much of the energy to embark on such a journey and putting food for weeks on the shoulders springs from a genuine human hope:
Could there still be a place out there – one capable of reconnecting us with faint and yet concrete memories of places and earlier states of beings we carry somewhere inside us, with outer and inner landscapes that left their mark on us as humans long before we began to change them?
From the top of Bårdde – the mountain range I had climbed from Hamberg’s hut on the Boarek plain with Hamberg’s hut – the first 2000m-peaks became visible, the glaciers of Sarek hugging their shoulders.
Down the slopes polished by the last ice age, I traced the route of the next days towards the mountain passes.
The terrain shone in a pock-marked brown. It seemed a barren lands and stony land from above – and yet, one through which I felt the promise of the next horizon already pulling, up the stony valley of Lullihavágge towards the next mountain pass.
It is a combining feature Sound of wind,
what faded away
the rocks with lichen
There is an author I read before I came here.
Dag Hammarskjöld.
The tent.
What drives us?
Notebook.
Sense of belonging.
I thought of the days I had spent in the library. We had met hnear Odenplan, I had taken her into the rotunda.
We had lain down on the soft carped.
„Where do you want to be buried,“ she had asked? I thought of the Linden trees, the grave of grandma. The sense of belonging.
„Here, among the trees of the Skogskyrkogarden,“ I replied. „This was the last place I felt home.“
rudimentäre Bearbeitung mit Affinity Photo – Lizenz für dich können wir for free beantragen bei der Uni. (538kb)
keine Bearbeitung (733kb)
There is a claim hovering over the ranges of Sarek – one that tells more about our sensibilities than the actual place.
There lies something ennobling in this term – something that inspires awe, implying a rare place far from the forces of human society.
The center of Sarek lies several days away from the next road. And ever since it was declared a National Park, it has remained a place without official trails and signposts, without bridges and shelters. It is forbidden to approach Sarek by any other mean that foot.
Sarek is a place luring with the aura of something pristine, something original that has disappeared – that we have made disappear – from our human lives; experiences bought at the price of a vulnerability unknown and physical hardship. Much of the energy to embark on such a journey and putting food for weeks on the shoulders springs from a genuine human hope:
Could there still be a place out there – one capable of reconnecting us with faint and yet concrete memories of places and earlier states of beings we carry somewhere inside us, with outer and inner landscapes that left their mark on us as humans long before we began to change them?
From the top of Bårdde – the mountain range I had climbed from Hamberg’s hut on the Boarek plain with Hamberg’s hut – the first 2000m-peaks became visible, the glaciers of Sarek hugging their shoulders.
Down the slopes polished by the last ice age, I traced the route of the next days towards the mountain passes.
The terrain shone in a pock-marked brown. It seemed a barren lands and stony land from above – and yet, one through which I felt the promise of the next horizon already pulling, up the stony valley of Lullihavágge towards the next mountain pass.
It is a combining feature Sound of wind,
what faded away
the rocks with lichen
There is an author I read before I came here.
Dag Hammarskjöld.
The tent.
What drives us?
Notebook.
Sense of belonging.
I thought of the days I had spent in the library. We had met hnear Odenplan, I had taken her into the rotunda.
We had lain down on the soft carped.
„Where do you want to be buried,“ she had asked? I thought of the Linden trees, the grave of grandma. The sense of belonging.
„Here, among the trees of the Skogskyrkogarden,“ I replied. „This was the last place I felt home.“
rudimentäre Bearbeitung mit Affinity Photo – Lizenz für dich können wir for free beantragen bei der Uni. (538kb)
keine Bearbeitung (733kb)
Outside, the visitors had grouped around Per-Ingvar. He stems from a Sámi family that still owns fishing rights on the Boarek plain.
For a while we followed him deeper into a small forest of birch trees.
Near a few decaying pieces of timber, he squatted down on a stone.
Over decades, hikers had used most of the abandoned hut for firewood, he explained. Facing the ruin, Per-Ingvar introduced to the people living on the plain, and to the man who built this hut in the decades around 1900 more than a century ago.
Hunting, fishing and some reindeer sustained the man who came to live out here in the woods.
What we know about Pirkit depends on oral tradition. Those who knew the men who still remembered Amma have passed away. At night, fires Pirkit Amma lighted cast an eerie shimmer over the plain. Near the rapids, he couched on the cliffs with a spear, where the light attracted swarms of charr.
The strongest memories, perhaps, survive in the form of legends of his visionary powers. When herders around Kvikkjokk wondered where to send their herds and where to poach, they turned to Amma.
When he was young, so people said, the great shaman Unnasj made him his apprentice, teaching him how to beat the ritual drum and to find the trees to craft it from. In the leather bag around his shoulder, others rumoured, he used to carry the tooth and finger of a dead man – props for other divination rituals he performed.
FOOTNOTES: On Pirkit Amma see the overview by Tor Lennart Tuorda on his blog kvikkjokk.nu and his recent brochure Pirkit Amma. Legend i kulturlandet, published in 2019 together with the Region Norrbotten and Länsstyrelsen Norrbotten.
Most of what we know about Amma and his teacher Unnasj Per Olofsson Kukkuk (1770–1858) depends on oral tradition. Those who knew the men who still remembered Amma have passed away.
A glass negative from around 1910 shows the man who built the wooden cabin. It stems from one of the many expeditions Hamberg led into through Sarek.
The picture shows Pirkit Amma as an older man, together with his sister near a simple hut he built nearby his cabin, on the Boarek Plain.
Hamberg rented reindeer from the man.
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Lotte von Düben
Lotte von Düben published a book of her own on the Lapland journey: Lotte von Düben, I lappland,
On Lotte von Düben and the history of early photography in Lapland see with further references
– edition, – digital
Gustaf von Dueben Lapland
For a modern edition see #.
Race Biology
Footnote Broberg
Lotte von Dueben’s glass negatives
The collection of glass negative originals by Lotte von Düben was donated by her descendants to the Naturgeografiska institution at Uppsala in 1925. They can be explored in the Alvin Database (alvin-record:84831).
Beowolf
On 19 May 2020, Lars Hjälmered, a Moderate Party Member in the Swedish Parliament, put a written question to Mr Ibrahim Baylan, Minister for Business, Industry and Innovation, asking why mining hasn’t started at Gállok.
For six years, so the question was summarised by the company, the government has kept Beowolf waiting for the final permit to start mining at Gállok. Sweden were risking its attractiveness and credibility for investments, the document stated. Jobs are not being created in an area of ageing and declining population. Tax revenues up to one billion crowns are not being realized.
The mine at Kallak, so the summary argues, would boost the development of new roads and railways to ports in Norway and Sweden. Switching from the prospecting stage to the exploiting phase at Gállok, so goes the conclusion, would promise a unique opportunity to reboot the Swedish economy after Covid-19.
A follow-up letter sent by the CEO of Beowulf Kurt Budge on 3 June 2020 stresses that the company „is ready to play its part in Sweden’s economic recovery”, concluding that „[b]enchmark iron ore prices have risen above US$ 100 per tonne this week and investors with cash are looking for investment opportunities, such as Kallak, and towards mining jurisdictions that function effectively.“
For Beowulf’s presentation of the project see the company’s homepage.
Sarek government hopes
See the report Sweden’s Minerals Strategy, produced by the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Engergy and Communications, p. 11.
Hammarskjöld
After his death in 1961, the articles on his wanderings that Hammerskjöld published in various Swedish journals were collected in Från Sarek till Haväng, Stockholm 1962.
A selection of these texts has been re-edited in English translation by Kim Loughran together with magnificent photographs by Claes Grundsten as Swedish wilderness. The mountain world of Dag Hammarskjöld, Stockholm 2007.
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