Monthly Archives: May 2014

Out with a bang

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I was meant to be in Tallinn yesterday, but due to an official document snafoo, I was here in Helsinki.
Which, as it turns out, wasn’t such a bad place to be. Because I was here, anyway, I opted to go to Professor Markku Henriksson’s retirement lecture, and I am so happy I was there.
There were many high points to Professor Henriksson’s hour-long lecture. It was well thought out, illustrated, and it was presented with flair. He emphasized how much he loves his job — and the packed auditorium, full of international scholars as well as local ones — were evidence of that love. The take-home message, though, was a sad one. The metaphor he used throughout his speech was a corn flower, or in other words, one of these:

purple_coneflower_large

The culmination was to quote the surrender speech of Chief Joseph, who was a leader of the Nez Perce people of North America:

“I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

 

(Chief Joseph surrender speech, from October 5, 1877; see http://www.inthebeginning.com/articles/joseph.htm)

This is when I started crying — I blamed it on allergies — but it was his speech, I admit it. I admit it only because I later found out that others in the audience had the same reaction, so I have to ‘fess up.

Professor Henriksson’s point was that, despite all of international contacts, awards, accolades, influence, mentoring, attention (etc., etc., etc.) his 40 years of service have garnered, his efforts and program have not gained support or recognition from his home university or the Ministry of Education here in Finland. This was a terrifying and saddening truth, and one that, considering I work in the same university, really struck me. At the age of 64, Henriksson could put in another four years before mandatory retirement, but he is exhausted from trying to a fight a battle he will never win.

Perhaps the saddest point is that, despite his courage to speak out, there were scant university officials there to hear his words. That, in and of itself, only drives his point home further.

Thanks to the the Maple Leaf and Eagle organizers for a wonderful event. I met new friends and caught up with old ones. Thanks to Professor Henriksson, too, for creating this wonderful community and atmosphere. I sure hope this won’t be the last of it all.

“Material heritage” and other new concepts

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Today at the opening plenary at the 15th annual Maple Leaf and Eagle conference, hosted by the University of Helsinki, I learned for the first time about this fascinating project, headed by Dr. Laura Peers: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/blackfootshirts/
Although Dr. Peers is a historian who works with physical objects rather than language, there were plenty of terms and ideas from her work that I could apply to my own work on disenfranchised populations. Here are a few examples:
*history/museums tend to be the articulations of “dominant societies”
*there is a need for “alternative” histories
*she talked about “oppositional histories”
*she said that museums in places like Britain, where she works, tend to have “cultural amnesia” about the artifacts they hold and the histories behind them
*the notion of “re-membering,” vs just remembering; in other words, the process of re-experiencing the past and becoming invested in it (I think she attributed this idea to Boas)
*she said that artifacts like the Blackfoot shirts she was talking about are elements of cultural survival; the people who made them put “what they knew into the objects they made.”
Although Dr. Peers is in a completely different field than me, her presentation was very tangible and relevant.

Scandinavians in 19th century Utah

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1928BDAY

“…one may hear the various changes in Danish from North Jutland to Copenhagen, and listen to Norwegian as spoken in Christiania, Trondhjem and in the mixed-German Bergen, also to the worst Skane or southern Swedish, and to the best as spoken in Goteborg and Stockholm, or hear the different varieties of Swedish from Upsala to Ystad, and yet not hear anything quite like the mixture which is called Danish, Norwegian and Swedish in Utah.”
(Edward Anderson, 1890, cited in William Mulder, Homeward to Zion: The Mormon Migration from Scandinavia, University of Minnesota Press, 1957)

If this quotation is accurate, imagine what mix of Scandinavian languages would have existed in the late 1800s in certain settlements in Utah, a newly settled part of the United States. There were some 26,000 Scandinavia who came to Utah between 1849 and 1930, making it the first major influx to the U.S. (predating the Midwest and other locations by a few years). Was there any other region in the United States that had such a mix of Scandinavians in one location? What kind of koineization or accommodation would have occurred in their languages? What kind of dialect features came with the settlers and stayed? What a fascinating language contact situation, and how little we know about it.