A film premiere and book presentation were on the programme when a cultural evening was held at the Centre for Northern Peoples in Manndalen at the weekend. Over 100 members of the public attended.
The cultural evening was a collaboration between the centre and the Sámi political committee in Kåfjord municipality, and the event is one of several on the theme of Norwegianisation. The Truth Commission has now begun its work, and the centre will host a number of seminars and activities linked to the Truth Commission's work in the coming years.
Film premiere - Manndalen from Sami to Norwegian
Filmmaker Roger Manndal grew up in a village that was ostensibly Norwegian. In the film «Manndalen from Sami to Norwegian», he conveys through a series of interviews what happened when the Sami language and culture disappeared from the village.
- "I grew up in Manndalen myself, and I know the feeling of being neither fully Norwegian nor fully Sami," said the filmmaker.
The film, made in collaboration with the Centre for Northern Peoples, was well-received by the audience, and several of the scenes elicited laughter - and not least wonder. The interviews conducted in the film provide good eyewitness accounts of how the Norwegianisation process has affected, and how it still affects, the people in the village.
New book about Norwegianisation
Author Ellen Thorsdalen, originally from Skibotn, presented her new book «Mors døtre». This evening, the author went through her background with a Kven father and a Sami mother, and described how she had worked on the book. She also read extracts from the book. The theme of the book is the Norwegianisation and segregation faced by Sami and Kven children in Northern Norway when they start school in the 1930s. In this novel, the daughters encounter two language worlds. At home, all conversation takes place in Sami. At school, they only encounter Norwegian because the teachers have their own guidelines to follow. Some of the teachers show no pedagogical insight, not even when little seven-year-olds turn up for their first day of school. Nevertheless, some defied the loser label that the school had given them. In the novel, we follow five siblings from childhood to adulthood.
The Sami Parliament and the Truth Commission
Naturally, the Sami Parliament is following the Truth Commission's work closely, and council member Henrik Olsen gave a speech in which he described the Sami Parliament's expectations of the commission, but also how the Sami centres may have a role to play in relation to this. To illustrate his point, Henrik Olsen used a debate article from the Nordlys newspaper from the early 1900s in which a teacher in Olderdalen had stirred things up.
