This paper was originally presented at an international conference in 1975, and later published in the proceedings Norwegian Influence on the Upper Midwest, edited by Harold Næss (Duluth, University of Minnesota, Continuing Education and Extension Division, 1976). Rudolph was later largely responsible for the term Sami being accepted as normal English usage.
What does it mean to be an ethnic? Aren't we all Americans, and why should some of us consider ourselves Norwegian at a time when our immigrant subcultures have dissolved in the great melting pot? Not too long ago Harry Golden told us that we are all homogenized, and now we are reviving our interest in our particular ethnic heritage. Is ethnicity mere nostalgia, or does it have some value for our troubled days? And might there be something in our Norwegian immigrant heritage that can have meaning for the future? I have been puzzled to account for my personal interest in a Norwegian identity. We have been led to think that ethnicity established a type of bias. Michael Novak in his book The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnic (New York: Macmillan, 1972) tells us that Americanization has meant a kind of WASPization. We believed that we had to assimilate, and that this meant that we had to become like the Anglo-American. There is nothing wrong with being an Anglo-American, except that we now realize that the Anglo-American is just another ethnic, and that his historic memory is not ours. And we know that Americanization can have a broader meaning. For Indian people, and Vine Deloria calls them American Americans, it means just being themselves, and for immigrant Americans there are various cultural backgrounds. Bogardus, in his book Immigration and Race Attitudes, published in 1928, told us something about the immigrant, that he is ". . . more than clothes and a bundle on his back and a satchel in his hand he is a culture medium, and a part of all human life that preceded him.1 Our family came through Ellis Island as Norwegian immigrants in 1917 when I was yet an infant. I recall years later, when riding street cars in Duluth, that my mother would admonish me to "speak English, people will think we are foreigners." The Norwegian American is now fully acculturated and no longer represents a small foreign enclave. He actually knows little about modem Norway, which is quite a different country than the land which his forefathers left some generations past. Yet he tends to think of himself as Norwegian.
I don't feel that the new ethnic interest is a revival of nationalism. Many of us have had quite enough of the modem nation/state with its endless wars, its racism and its aggressive violence. I look upon the present Norwegian monarchy as a rather quaint anachronism, and I don't find Norway's parliamentary democracy to be a perfect model. A recent trip to Norway convinced me that politics in Norway can be as absurd as anywhere. And I vividly recall some of the long conversations heard during my childhood in which our immigrant neighbors over coffee and lefse would complain about things in the old country, especially about the herrefolk, and a recent book by that title suggests there might still be such attitudes surviving in modem Norway.2 My background is North Norwegian (nordnorsk) and Sami (Lapp) and in Norway we were considered to be a minority people, some kind of primitive naturfolk, l attended the International Summer School in Oslo in 1949 and my landlord was a member of the Board of Directors of the Norwegian Folk Museum. When I asked him why there were no Lapp exhibits in the Norwegian Folk Museum he told me, "but they are not Norwegians!" Happily Norway now considers the Sami to be Norwegian and the Sami materials have been transferred from the Ethnographic Museum to the Norwegian Folk Museum. From a Sami viewpoint my interest in things Norwegian is ancient, goes back beyond the national period, and I feel that the foundations of the new ethnicity are also prenational, older than the nation/state.
I must admit to being somewhat embarrassed by the Vikings. This very remarkable civilization had some great achievements, but their martial exploits and piracy seem less than admirable. When the Nazi occupation forces came to Norway during World War II they expressed unbounded admiration for the Vikings, not only because of their alleged racial purity, but also because of their fiery, war-like qualities: All this makes good reading for the adolescent hero-worshiper, but what does it offer us today? Yes, Norway may have a great past and an inspiring history, but this was not part of my Minnesota school curriculum, and my ethnic interest does not rest upon this foundation.
Nor is my ethnic interest tied to the Norwegian State Church. Lutheran Christianity started in Germany and now belongs to many people around the world and it is not uniquely Norwegian. We ought also to recall that some immigrants left the old country for religious freedom, to escape from the thought-control of a doctrinaire religious establishment. We are reminded of this in the Swedish film The Emigrants and in the books by Wilhelm Moberg. A person can be a Norwegian without being a Lutheran, and it is well to recall that the Norwegian immigrants to Minnesota also founded Unitarian churches, one in Hanska and another in Minneapolis. Ole Rølvaag in his book 'Omkring fædrearven' note that Lutheranism itself is not part of the Norwegian heritage.3 Ethnicity is not tied to a commonality of religious views, and Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines ethnic as "heathen, pagan" and "relating to the Gentiles or nations not yet converted to Christianity." It may be that our religio-ethnic heritage pre-dates not only Martin Luther but Christianity itself.
I'm certainly not Norwegian because of blue eyes and blond hair. The racial myth is a biological vanity that we can ill afford, even if we foolishly desire to believe it. I am also related to the Sami, and no one knows exactiv where they came from. The Sami are the ancient inhabitants of Fennoscandia, and my birthplace, Finnmark, has been the home of the Same since the last lce Age. Some of us in North Norway sought to emigrate in order to escape from racial discrimination. I don't see racial exclusiveness as the cement of ethnicity. We can be ethnic without being ethnocentric.
Language can be considered an ethnic tie, something that binds a people together, but we can no longer claim that the Norwegian language ties Norwegian Americans together, because many of us, certainly our sons and daughters, no longer speak Norwegian. I am not trying to give a comprehensive definition of ethnic, but if "ethnic" is thought to describe a group of people with a common language, race and religion, then it becomes a rather meaningless characterization of the Norwegian Americans of today. I like the definition of an ethnic group given by Michael Novak, "... a group with historical memory, real or imaginary. One belongs to an ethnic group in part involuntarily, in part by choice. Given a grandparent or two, one chooses to shape one's consciousness by one history rather than another. Ethnic memory is not a set of events remembered, but rather a set of instincts, feelings, intimacies, expectations, patterns of emotion and behavior, a sense of reality; a set of stories for individualsand for the people as a wholeto live out."4
What is it we seek when we probe our ethnic background? Yes, it means looking backward because we feel that somehow we may have gotten on the wrong road, that technological society is in trouble, and we want to go back far enough to find the place where we may have taken a wrong turn. It is not that we want to revert to a previous stage of culture, something which is quite unrealistic, but we want to recall some of the older values that helped people to survive for so many centuries. Technological man himself is a cultural orphan, conceived by a computer and punched out by a machine, identical and replacable. We are not products of a machine but bearers of an ancient and honorable history. "Ethnic" from the Greek ethnos means tribal, and the new ethnicity is best thought of as a form of neotribalism.
It is interesting to note what an earlier generation of immigrants considered to be the Norwegian American heritage. Ole Rølvaag in 1922, in a book entitled 'Omkring fædrearven', notes various things he considered to be the immigrant heritage. You will observe the heritage he talks about is also very old. As a people we existed in a tribal stage of culture for a much longer period than we have existed as a nation/state. Now Rølvaag does not identify our heritage as tribal, but he begins with the eventyr. He tells us that we received in our cradle a gift of Norwegian consciousness beginning with the folk tale. We learned at an early age the Askeladden philosophy that we can indeed accomplish the impossible.5 He points out that we are heir to a profound respect for nature, which has become part of our folk character.6 (The footnotes will quote Rølvaag in the original Norwegian, and I am supplying a free translation.) This respect for nature is an old peasant and tribal value, something we share with other peasant and tribal cultures, especially with the American Indian. To be ethnic is to probe our racial memory and find deep in our consciousness lifestyles and attitudes that can help us to survive as inhabitants of planet earth, values that proved their survival potential through centuries of folk experience. Respect for nature is one such value, and along with it Rølvaag mentions love of home, love of one's valley, district, and community.7 If we find roots in the land we will respect it and hopefully act to preserve it. In this way our ethnic heritage can have meaning for our lives and our future.
Along with respect for nature and love of home and community Rølvaag mentions the strong feeling for democracy that runs through the Norwegian peasantry.8 To illustrate this he tells the folk tale of Mora Ting and the farmers who were not afraid to speak to their king. He quotes them as saying, "Now we farmers want the King to do what is right in the eyes of reasonable people. Our forefathers cast seven kings into that swamp by Mora Ting because they wouldn't listen to what reasonable people had to say." It is part of the Norwegian folk character to feel equal to any and all, and little progress can be expected of people who have learned to feel themselves inferior or unworthy. Norwegians have in their heart a respect for democratic procedures and fairness and offer stout resistance to tyranny.
According to Rølvaag, Norwegian hospitality is also part of this heritage. He speaks of the festive holiday rituals held in the Norwegian home, the open hospitality.9 How can one properly translate hygge or kose seg med en kopp kaffe? These are things we share with our broderfolk, the Swedes, Danes, Finns and Icelanders. Again, I feel that this type of hospitality is tribal, something lacking in our isolated, urban society and in our nuclear families. Whatever our ethnic background may be, we need to go back to peasant or tribal society to find a real celebration of community. Rølvaag doesn't mention ethnic food, which brings to mind lutefisk. Coming from an immigrant childhood I still feel a bit awkward when people mention lutefisk, somehow akin to how black people feel when they hear the word "watermelon. There is also sild og potet, and we could go on to mention lefse med gjetost, reinstek. rype, laks, får i kål, lapskaus, multebær, akevitt med øl, torsk med lever og rogn, and rømmegrøt. This listing might help us to appreciate what ethnic means, not an attempt to prove to ourselves or to anyone else how great we are, but rather a celebration of life!
Norwegians are a law-abiding folk with a genuine respect for the law of the land, according to Rølvaag, and he tells us that this also goes back to the distant past, before the introduction of Christianity.10 Along with respect for law, he tells us that we are heir to a tradition of respect for parents. These things are tribal, and sound a bit odd in our day, and we need to examine the rationale for this claim. Rølvaag tells us that our parents lived on the land which their ancestors occupied for many generations, but this hardly holds true for us today.
He says that through our father and mother we are introduced to the Norwegian home, with its distinctive spirit, and through our parents we can reach back to the Saga times and beyond and know that this also belonged to us.11 Although these sentiments, respect for law and lineage, seem to have little force today, they could add meaning to our lives.
Rølvaag includes as part of the ethnic heritage an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a strong feeling for the arts, and he sees this in the saga literature, which also pre-dates the national period.12 The Viking voyages were not only for plunder and trade, Rølvaag tells us, but these journeys were also undertaken for the purpose of gathering information. He suggests that the initial voyage undertaken by the young Viking was something like going away to college! He sees in the lines of the
Viking ship evidence of an expression and understanding of art, and this can also be seen in architecture of the stavkirke and in the rosemaling of the peasantry. There is poetry in the skalds and sagas and literature in the folk tale, and Rølvaag identifies Ibsen as the greatest writer of the nineteenth century. This type of heritage is worth cultivating, and I feel that Rølvaag himself is a prime example of the influence the immigrant heritage has had and can continue to have upon our country.
The Norwegian is also seen by Rølvaag as heir to a long-standing devotion to freedom, and to self-government.13 Our Norwegian ancestors seemed to need the largest possible amount of individual freedom, consistent with law and the rights of others. He also sees as part of this inheritance a strong inclination to religion, and this also dates far back into heathen times.14 Rølvaag tells us that this strong religious feeling actually made people psychic, and that they felt things so strongly that they could actually see such creatures as trolls, huldre and the draug.15
I am impressed with Rølvaag's insight into folk character, and with the way he traces it back into the tribal past. I find reinforcement here for my thesis that ethnicity is tribal. I find further reinforcement from Edward Shils, as quoted by Andrew Greely. Greely speaks of the "ethnic collectivity" as "an attempt to keep some of the values, some of the informality, some of the support, some of the intimacy of the communal life in the midst of an impersonal, formalistic, rationalized urban industrial society. . . . Edward Shils has called these ties primordial and suggests that, rooted as they are with a sense of 'blood and land,' they are the result of a pre-rational intuition.16
I am trying to establish that our Norwegian ethnic interest has little relationship to contemporary Norway and that it in no way conflicts with our American nationality. The ethnicity that we seek to preserve is pre-national, and we are very much American nationals, although of a Norwegian immigrant ancestry. We no longer constitute an ethnic voting block in American politics and we do not operate ethnically as an economic pressure group. As a people we have been sufficiently assimilated into American political and economic life that we do not need to think ofourselves as ethnic in the political or economic arenas. There are a number of ethnic groups in the United States who feel themselves disadvantaged in American society, who are segregated and discriminated against in various ways, and it is legitimate for such groups to establish ethnic pressure groups to right such wrongs. Our ethnic group is not politically or economically separate from American life, but this does not mean that we need to also abandon our unique cultural identity. America does not expect us to deny our mothers and fathers and lose our soul. It has been argued that the abolition of ethnic identity better suits the needs of modem technological society, but such a society has no need for us either as Americans or as Norwegians.
If we feel alienated and rootless in our technological society, many people in modem Norway feel the same way. Although people in Norway do not think of themselves as etnisk in their own country, they may also be looking nostalgically to the past for peasant and tribal values missing in contemporary life. To be ethnic is to seek out those values from the cultural heritage which may have relevance today. We seem to need an ethnic identity, something we would lose in a science fiction future. Within a cultural tradition lies a strength that can help us to survive wars, depressions, or natural and ecological disasters. We need some bond of community, a tribal relationship, in order to survive.
Just as our race is genetically determined before birth, much of our ethnicity is impressed upon us during infancy and childhood. In these early years, before we start school and before we learn to read, culture is communicated to us orally by parents, relatives and neighbors, and some of it is actually nonverbal. It is interesting to note that tribal culture is also preliterate, and we can speculate that our childhood recapitulates the tribal period of our race. This is not to suggest that we can or ought to re-tribalise as Norwegian Americans. There is such a movement afoot among Indian people in the United States, and among the Sami in Norway. I am certain that we can't reconstitute the tribe as a political or economic unit among the Norwegian Americans. However, neotribalism as a social and cultural phenomenon does exist. We find strength in the cultural collectivity which has helped us survive as a people since the lce Age. We need to draw upon this kind of primordial strength, upon our ethnic and tribal traditions, in order to secure our future.
This viewpoint is Sami in that it does not focus on the relatively short-lived national period of our culture but upon the much longer prenational period, a time when we lived closer to nature and in closer harmony with the ecosvstems that sustain life.