Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum

Interview of Troy Storfjell February 15, 2014 Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma, Washington

Interviewers: Gary London; Lizette Graden

Gary London: [0:06] This is an interview for the Nordic American Voices oral history project. Today is February 15, 2014. We’ll be interviewing Troy Storfjell. We’re at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma… Parkland, Washington, actually. My name is Gary London, and my co- interviewer today is Lizette Graden. Thank you very much, Troy, for making yourself available for this interview.

Troy Storfjell: [0:38] No problem.

Gary: [0:39] We typically like to begin with your family name, its origins, and leading from that to your ancestry. So you can just talk about that.

Troy: [0:52] Okay. Well, I was going to take a look at my family tree before coming down here to brush up on some of the names. I’ve forgotten. I didn’t do that. So I can only go back a few generations. [Laughter]

Gary: [1:03] That’s quite all right.

Troy: [1:04] But Storfjell is a farm name. It’s a place name in the municipality of Ballangen, which is in Ofoten, which is in northern Nordland in Norway. It’s a neighboring municipality to Narvik- just south of Narvik. And Ballangen is a small town- a village, really, but it occupies a big area. At one time, Storfjell was out of town. Now town has spread out a little bit, so it’s on the edge of town now.

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[1:34] And it’s the farm that my father’s father’s family lived on. So my father grew up there. He left when he was sixteen. So he was born there, and lived there. And the family name, of course now we have passed this law sometime around the turn of the last century that we would move from the patronymic, where everybody just took their father’s name and added “sen,” or “dottir” and moved to keeping one name that was passed on to everyone.

[2:09] So my great-grandfather was Johannsen. He was Conrad Johannsen. He took the farm name, though, so he became Conrad Johannsen Storfjell. And about half of his children took Storfjell and half of them took Johannsen. So the Storfjell name is one of those they call a protected name in Norway, because there are fewer than fifty people with the last name of Storfjell, and in fact those of us who have it in Norway belong to two completely different families, because there is also a place in Lofoten on one of the islands named Storfjell, and they’re not related to us at all. But still together, we’re fewer than fifty people.

[2:53] So that means that nobody can change their name to Storfjell except through marriage, without the permission of everybody who already has that name. Some of the descendants of the Johannsens- the siblings of my grandfather who had kept Johanssen- back when I was a student in the nineties, there was a family there that wanted to change their name to Storfjell. Of course we let them, because they are Storfjells, but we had to all sign and say that it was okay, including the Lofoten Storfjells who aren’t related to us. They still had to give permission.

[3:29] So… Ballangen is up north. It’s well north of the Arctic Circle. It’s not a wealthy place. There’s not a lot of natural resources there other than fish and pasture land. And my father was born during World War Two. He was the third of four children. He was born in a one-room… Well, two- room house that would have fit inside this room here. And there were two German officers also stationed in the house, one of whom was just regular wehrmacht - regular army- and one of whom was a member of the Nazi party.

[4:14] So, my grandparents have told stories. There was a clear difference between the two. And so they talked about the good German and the bad German who lived there. And there was actually a prisoner of war camp right next to their farm with Yugoslavian POWs who were put to work building roads up in northern Norway. The coastal highway now is called the Blood Highway,

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because so many of these prisoners died building these roads.

[4:45] So that’s… And then I should… My grandmother came from further north, in the township of Salangen in Sør-Troms, a place called [inaudible 4:58] in Sámi, or Seljeskogan in Norwegian. She was born in a Sámi language speaking family. My grandfather grew up speaking Norwegian, but he’s of Sámi background, too. My grandfather could speak both North Sámi and Lule Sámi.

[5:19] I discovered… I didn’t know this until I had what we called a samboer in Norway- a domestic partner- for some years who was Lule Sámi. When I took her first to meet my grandparents, suddenly he starts speaking Lule Sámi. I never knew he could speak Lule Sámi. And then he starts talking back and forth about the differences between Lule Sámi and North Sámi. So that was fun to hear.

[5:39] But… So, my grandmother was from the group we call the Mark Sámi- the descendants of people who used to herd reindeer across what became the border between Norway and Sweden. So they would winter around Luossajärvi and Kiruna, and then they would summer out on the Sør- Troms coast. In the 1870s, because of the closing of many of the borders for reindeer herding, the Swedish government was moving reindeer herders around. And a lot of the people in this area lost their herds, because they just got out-competed for the reindeer pastures.

[6:16] So during the 1870s and 1880s, many of these people settled then in their summer pasture lands, which would be on the Norwegian side. But the coast- the best areas on the coast- were all farmed already by Norwegians and Sea Sámi and [inaudible 6:29]. So they settled in these long inland valleys. They raise up in elevation, and they don’t get a lot of sun, because there’s steep mountains on the side. You can just barely farm there. so that’s where they settled.

[6:40] And Seljeskogan is a place like this. That’s where my grandmother grew up. She met my grandfather sometime in the twenties, and they got married, and she moved to Ballangen. And so today I’ve got family in Ballangen and in Salangen. I’ve actually spent more time in my adult life in Salangen, up with my grandmother’s people than in Ballangen. But that’s mostly because I’ve been in Tromsø, and Salangen has been closer than Ballangen.

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Lizette: [7:13] When you were growing up here, did you go back and forth with your father and your family?

Troy: [7:22] Yeah. My father, of course, he met my mother when they were eighteen. He was going to a gymnas , a boarding school, and my mother had just finished high school and went as an exchange student to this gymnas . And they met each other, and my father followed her back at the age of nineteen, and they got married at nineteen. And they went to college here in Washington at Walla Walla College. And I was born while they were students there. They were college students. They were only twenty-two. They were quite young. And then after they graduated, we spent my early childhood… We lived both in Norway and in the Pacific Northwest.

[8:07] So we moved back and forth quite a bit, until when I was four, my father got a job in Beirut, in Lebanon. So we were there for three and a half years. And during that time we didn’t get to Norway. We would drive up to Europe in the summer, but not all the way up to Norway. And then after that, we went to Norway for a while. My father’s green card had expired, so he couldn’t come back to the U.S. until he got that sorted out. So we spent about half a year, but that was down in Elverum, where my father’s oldest brother had moved. So then we stayed with him.

[8:41] After that, we came back to the U.S. when I was almost eight. Since then, I’ve spent… The majority of time since I turned eight has been in the U.S., but we would go back to Norway quite frequently. Not quite every year, but almost every year. And I’ve spent about six years in Norway since then, too. I did several years as a student at the University of Tromsø, and most recently I had sabbatical back in Tromsø.

[9:09] So, yes. I studied also… In college I spent a year in Austria as an exchange student, so I went up to Norway for Christmas, and for the summer before, and the summer afterwards. So especially once I could travel on my own, I’ve been going back to Norway quite frequently. I would work there in the summers when I was a college student in the U.S. because minimum wage was so much higher in Norway. I could make a lot more money. And I’m a dual citizen. I don’t need a visa to work there. I can just show up and work.

Gary: [9:42] Do you have some memories of your grandparents you’d like to share with us?

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Troy: [9:48] Yeah. They were both really interesting people. Arthur Storfjell and Margit Pedersen Storfjell. Neither of them had more than a seventh-grade education. My grandfather… Of course, my earliest memories of my grandfather, he was still working. But he retired right about the time we moved to Beirut. So most of the time I knew him, he was retired. And he died in 2001 at the age of ninety-three.

[10:26] And that was really sad, because he died two weeks before my dissertation defense, so I couldn’t make it over to his funeral, because I would have had to reschedule my dissertation defense, and that was too difficult to do, I thought. Afterwards I regretted that I didn’t do that.

[10:41] He was just a typical sort of member of coastal northern Norwegian population. A little bit of Norwegian, a little bit of [inaudible 10:53], a bit of Sámi. Not highly educated. A hard worker. He grew up on this småbruk - these small farms where they farm in the summer and fish in the winter. And his father actually had mortgaged the farm to put a motor on his fishing boat in the early 1900s. And then the boat had sunk, and his father died, and so the farm was mortgaged, and they didn’t have income.

[11:18] And so my grandfather’s whole childhood was spent with the kids all working to try to scrape up enough money together to pay the mortgage on the farm. And the neighbors wanted them to lose the farm, so they could buy it. Which they didn’t. They kept the farm. Storfjell is still owned by Storfjells today.

[11:35] So he actually wanted to immigrate to the U.S., but he couldn’t, because he had to stay and work to make farm payments. When he was nineteen, he had plans to immigrate to the U.S., and his parents talked him into working there. So he stayed, and he was a fisherman. His body was like a history of the northern Norwegian industrialization.

[12:00] At the age of nineteen or twenty he got his right arm caught in one of these mechanical threshers, and it pulled it out of the socket and ripped out all the muscles. It was just held on by a little strip right here. And they reattached it, but he always had a little bit of… You know, after that his arm wasn’t quite as good. He could still use it, though. He was a carpenter.

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[12:22] And he worked, then, after the war. Up until the war he was a farmer and fisherman, and after the war, he worked helping to build hydroelectric plants. And a lot of times they would do this inside mountains. They would dig tunnels in. They would build these things, but they didn’t have elevators for the… They would carry everything up the scaffolding on their backs. So he had his one good arm, and he would carry it on his back, and he would build. And he got silicon lung because of all the dust floating around in the air. And he had to have both his hips replaced from all this walking around.

[12:56] But he was just… He had a great sense of humor. Great sense of humor. He would always tell jokes. He would mostly just… He would just kind of sit there like this and just make wisecracking comments about everything that went on, and would tell jokes.

[13:12] My grandmother Margit got very ill in the 1950s. She had a kidney infection. They put her in a hospital in Narvik for quite some time. They removed one of her kidneys. She had a scar that went… Now it’s a tiny little scar, but they basically cut her in half to get her kidney out. While she was convalescing, there was a Seventh-Day Adventist mission. They were targeting a lot of Sámi people, and she was converted to Seventh-Day Adventism. She came from a Laestadian family. So did my grandfather, but neither of them were particularly religious. But they came from this Laestadius society.

[14:02] Doctrinally, Seventh-Day Adventism and Laestadianism are quite different, but socially there’s a lot of similarities. They’re both rather conservative, marginal, peculiar church movements. So she converted to Seventh-Day Adventism, and my father was the only one of the children who did. And my grandfather was very secular, and very… It was okay with him that Margit, his wife, had converted, but he was a little annoyed at my father for converting, because… She can have whatever funny opinion she wants, but my son shouldn’t. You know.

[14:37] And so he was actually happy when I didn’t turn out to be Adventist myself. He used to think that it was great that we could have whiskey together. He said, “Oh, you’re a good heathen.” “[Speaking Norwegian 14:51 – 14:52].” [Laughter] So he was happy about that. And he was… yeah. He and my dad really…

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[15:01] My dad really wanted to get away from northern Norway. In the summers he used to stay up in Salangen, and he would always come back with a Sámi accent, and the kids at school would tease him for his Sámi accent. So he really just wanted to… He’d work on getting rid of it his first few weeks at school. He’d get back to his Nordland accent instead. He went to this boarding school in southern Norway. And then when he met my mom he went to the U.S. And he thought that everything was going to be great in the U.S., and then he discovered that he didn’t really like the U.S. either. [Laughter]

[15:33] So he was kind of… But my grandfather and my dad didn’t talk for a number… From the time he was sixteen until when I was born. So when I was born, then my grandfather wanted to see his son again. So…

Lizette: [15:50] Was there some kind of conflict?

Troy: [15:51] Yeah, over both the religious thing, and my dad wanting to leave northern Norway, and leave Norway itself, and go to the U.S. My grandfather I think was a little bit jealous, because he had wanted to go to the U.S. as a teenager, and couldn’t. So they had an uneasy relationship. But then after I was born they had a good relationship. At least a civil relationship.

[16:15] My grandmother, she was the kind of person… She died just in 2012 at the age of ninety- seven. She was… she had really strong opinions, and you could not convince her of anything. She would… And I remember back in 1994, I was living in Norway when there was the vote on whether or not Norway should join the EU. She was strongly opposed to membership in the EU, and oh, man, I remember… I remember a number of times visiting her, and the people had split… you know, there were different opinions. And this would turn into really intense arguments, and she wouldn’t back down at all. She was…

[17:00] But you know, when we visited her, she would be standing in the kitchen almost the whole time. Just, you know, making [inaudible 17:08], and cleaning up, and making the next meal, and cleaning up. And she’d always come out and ask if we wanted something. “[Speaking Norwegian 17:16 – 17:17].” “Just eat, just eat.”

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Lizette: [17:18] What would she make?

Troy: [17:20] Oh, she would make fiskekaker - fish cakes, fiskeboller - fish balls. Kjottkaker . Those were the three that she made most often. But I mean, she would… One time in the 1980s I was visiting, and she was very excited, because she was going to try something new and exotic, and she hoped that I would like it. It was something new. New and exotic. So I sat down, and of course it was spaghetti. I’m like, yes, spaghetti is fine.

[17:55] They moved to Elverum in southern Norway after they retired. Actually, I forgot- I spent about three months when I was ten years old living with my grandparents. My father was… is… well, he’s retired now, but an archaeologist. And he was at a dig in Jordan. My mother worked full- time in Michigan, and nobody could take care of us, so my brother went to my mother’s parents, and I went to my father’s parents.

[18:27] So then they were living in [inaudible 18:29] in southern Norway, which is the last place my grandfather had been working before he retired. They had retired, but they were still there. Then they moved to Elverum, where they lived from about the mid-80s until they both died. They’re buried in Elverum. My dad’s oldest brother lives there. And he’s retired now, too, of course. So I’ve got a cousin and her family who live in Elverum.

Gary: [18:53] How about the grandparents on the other side?

Troy: [18:56] My mom’s side?

Gary: [18:57] Mm hmm.

Troy: [18:58] Chester Stanley Lloyd was born in Tumwater, Washington. He was a fifth-generation Washingtonian. So his ancestors came out here with the first white colonizers to settle here. And he was… he grew up on a farm. He put himself through college and medical school during the Great Depression, mostly by working grounds at the brewery down there, just in Tumwater, Olympia. It is now a park. We often go down there, because he used to show us… “This is all the area that I took

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care of all those years.”

[19:45] And then he became a medical doctor. He was the first class of medical doctors that they rushed through in World War Two, and had them do it in three years rather than four so they could get more physicians out there. But he always wanted to be… He wanted to consider himself a farmer, still. So he would live… for a while he lived in Portland, but as soon as he was able to, he bought a farm outside… in Boring, Oregon. He had one hundred-twenty acres in Boring. And he had horses, and planted crops, and he grew Christmas trees, too, for sale.

[20:30] He was a general practitioner doctor of the old school. He had one malpractice suit in his whole career. That really bothered him. Physicians today get malpractice suits every day. That’s just a… [laughter] He would still, years after he retired… Oh, that one guy that sued him. That was so bad. He was very religious- a Seventh-Day Adventist as well. That’s how my parents met. It was a Seventh-Day Adventist boarding school. Very strict, very religious. Kind of a fundamentalist.

[21:05] He outlived his wife, Iris Pearl. She was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and grew up in northern Wisconsin. Her dad was a lumberjack. I don’t remember the exact town… the first town she lived in in Michigan. It was near Iron Mountain. And she said in her school she was the only student in her class who didn’t come from a Finnish-speaking family. She was the only native English speaker in her class. [Laughter]

[21:44] And during the Great Depression, her family went out to California. They couldn’t… they lost their home, and they put everything into their Model-T. Then they worked their way, picking cotton across the south. They had to stay in these camps on the border to California until they would be let into the state. So then her later teenage years and early adulthood were in California. It’s in southern California, but up in the mountains. I don’t remember the name of the place.

[22:17] But I was just visiting my mother. She lives down in the valley outside of L.A. now. She was pointing to the mountains. She goes, “That’s where your grandmother lived.” So we could see it from there, but I don’t remember what it was called. She was a nurse, and so my grandfather met her while he was in medical school. They got married in California, and they moved up to Oregon.

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[22:37] So she was… I never knew her when she was at her peak. She was involved in an automobile accident right around the time I was born, and it was quite severe. She was severely injured. And she didn’t suffer brain damage, but it changed her personality, and she wasn’t as vibrant, my mother says. She was a lot less vibrant and a lot less outgoing after the automobile accident. And then she had breast cancer in the mid-seventies. It was a big deal.

[23:13] Then in the early-eighties, she developed Alzheimer’s. And she lived for ten years with progressively worsening Alzheimer’s, and died in the 1990s. So, for the last… I wasn’t with her when she died, but the day she died I was there. She recognized me for a moment. At first she thought I was her oldest son Jim. Then she said, “Troy.” That was the first time she’d recognized me for years. We had lived with them, too. When we came back to the States in ’74, we stayed with them for half a year. So I did half of second grade in Boring, Oregon, and then we moved out to Michigan.

[23:54] But, yeah… So, sadly I didn’t really… A lot of the time I knew her, she wasn’t fully functioning. My mom came from a big family. She’s one of three sisters and has two brothers. They had a cabin up on Mt. St. Helens, which was lost when the mountain erupted. So luckily… I was fourteen, I think, the summer before it erupted. And we spent about a month. When we were in the States, we used to go there quite often. So we spent a month up at the cabin.

[24:29] They had built it themselves. They bought a plot, and they chopped down some trees, and built a log cabin. It didn’t have running water, and it had an outhouse, and a wood stove. It was great, and it was wonderful. We spent a month up there the last year that it existed, and then it was just washed away. Or not washed away… it just evaporated. [Laughter] It was near Spirit Lake. They were fun. As I got older, I got to resent my grandfather’s strict, conservative religiosity. So we didn’t have as good of a relationship later on.

Gary: [25:10] I noticed one of your academic interests was the construction of national identity. I’d like you to talk a little bit about the construction of your own identity.

Troy: [25:20] Construction of my own identity. Well, let’s see. It was very important for my dad the whole time we were growing up that we… He was always planning to move back to Norway. So he

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didn’t want us to be American. We certainly… We had Norwegian passports right from the time we were born. And we went to Norway a lot. He would get upset if we started doing American things. He got upset when I got a baseball mitt and started playing catch. “Oh, stupid American sport.” [Laughter]

[25:55] But we did a lot of cross-country skiing. He would take us out cross-country skiing a lot. We never… You know, after ’74, we never moved as a family back to Norway. I’ve lived in Norway. My brother has lived in Norway. My father has lived in Norway since then- since ’74- but never all of us together. My mom hasn’t lived there. My parents are divorced now.

[26:15] So that was always important for him. But he always used to say… When we were in Norway… not in Norway. When we were living in Beirut, we were up on this hill called Shatila. It was on the east side of town. It overlooks the main downtown. And we were in this four-plex, and there was a little forested patch behind it. And when my grandparents came to visit from Norway… This must have been summer of ’72- they built a goahti - a Sámi turf hut out in the back, in the woods behind the house in Lebanon.

[26:50] There were all these little… He would always do all these Sámi things. My father didn’t have a pair of shoes until he was nine years old. He just had the [inaudible 27:00], the Sámi boots. But he grew up as a Norwegian-speaker, not as a Sámi-speaker. He would occasionally… Most of the time when we were young, it was, “You’re Norwegian, you’re Norwegian. You’re Sámi, too. You’re Sámi.” And then as he got older, he really started talking more about the… “You’re Sámi. You should remember that.”

[27:22] And it took me a while… It wasn’t until I was a student in Tromsø in ’93, ’94 that it became clear to me that a lot of the stuff that I knew from my family wasn’t typical Norwegian. It was more Sámi. Because my family, of course… my grandmother and my grandfather could both speak Sámi, but they didn’t speak it around us much. I mean, you’d hear stuff occasionally, but very rarely. So there were just little ways of doing things, ways of interacting, little traditions.

Gary: [27:57] Can you talk a little about those?

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Lizette: [27:59] What were examples?

Gary: [28:00] Examples.

Troy: [28:02] I mean… yeah. There are so many. Norwegians have a saying that, “He who remains silent agrees.” In Sámi culture, it’s the opposite. If somebody says something, and you don’t respond, you’re tactfully disagreeing. It leads to lots of misunderstandings, because Norwegians are very argumentative. They love to contradict you. Sámi people are a little more hesitant to contradict. It’s much easier to not say anything. If they agree with you, then it’s, “Yes, yes, of course.”

Lizette: [28:40] So what are those expressions in Sámi and in Norwegian?

Troy: [28:40] [Speaking Norwegian 28:45 – 28:56]. Oh, I’ve forgotten it. And I don’t… I’m not a fluent North Sámi speaker. I’ve studied it. But at my best, I was at an intermediate level. So I know a lot of words, but it’s hard for me to converse in northern Sámi. And I can work with a dictionary. I know the grammar well enough that reading a text, I can take the word and put it back and [inaudible 29:16] in the dictionary and look it up. But no, I can’t converse. [Speaking Norwegian 29:22 – 29:26].

Lizette: [29:29] Because there’s a similar expression in Swedish, too, which I can’t remember now. But with… yeah, the same content. But that would be different, if it means completely the opposite, or opposite stance in Sámi. I could see the cultural tension there.

Troy: [29:48] Yeah. Norwegians are also more likely to speak directly about something. “I want,” you know. They ask you a direct, personal question in Sámi, they’re much more likely to take a long time, circling around it. Sámi culture is much more hinting, and inference, and double communication. It’s… There’s even a specific… So, when you’re sometimes in mixed settings, the Norwegians get a very different idea of what’s going on than the Sámi people, because there’s ways of complimenting people to their face where you’re really insulting them. Yeah. Things like that.

[30:39] What really was… for me, noticeable for me… In ’93 when I was studying at the University of Tromsø for the first time, there were a number of Sámi students there, and of course, numbers of

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Norwegian students, as it was a Norwegian university. There was a Sámi student union. They had a lavvu up, so I came in and sat down. I knew where you were supposed to sit when you’re coming in as a guest, so I sat there, and I talked with people a bit.

[31:17] And I was just curious. For me, the only Sámi people I knew were family before that. And it didn’t occur to me that this was a larger thing than just my strange little family. I mean, I knew hypothetically, theoretically that of course there were other Sámi people, but it was just… And my family wasn’t reindeer herders, so when you see reindeer-herding Sámi, those were different people, you know.

[31:44] But I just was curious about what was going on with this lavvu. I hadn’t seen one on a university before. I just went in and said hi. And they said, “Oh, you should join the Sámi student union.” I said, “Well, you know, I’ve kind of grown up mostly in the U.S. I don’t know how… I’m at least as much American as I am Sámi.” And they said, “Oh, no, you should join.” They were very welcoming.

[32:07] And then on the other hand, I experienced direct racism from the Norwegians. And it was suddenly clear to me that… you know, I guess there’s nothing that makes you feel like a member of a minority group as being treated in racist ways. Suddenly it’s like… Who is it? It’s either… There’s this lovely quote from a book I used to teach years ago. The thing is, there are four authors who each contributed one chapter, and I can’t remember who had the quote.

[32:38] But the idea… the gist of the quote is, one of the biggest complaints against the ruling order is not only that has oppressed us as women or ethnic minorities, or homosexuals, or working class, but that it’s also forced us to lavish so much attention on these things. Which in the long run aren’t as interesting as everyday life. So that… I found that very true.

[33:15] It was a very interesting time to be a student, a Sámi student at the University of Tromsø, because the first generation of activists, the [inaudible 33:25] generation were just exiting the education system and starting to take positions in the university. There was still… It was only four years since the Norwegian-Sámi parliament had been established. It was still the early days of that. There was still a lot of institutional hostility and racism toward the Sámi.

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[33:52] And most… At the time, I mean, there weren’t even… As far as I can tell, and I don’t know how perfectly true this is, but I’ve looked a lot... The first Sámi person to get a Ph.D. was [inaudible 34:06] in Sweden in the sixties. And I believe my dad was the fourth. And as far as I can tell, I think I’m the tenth. And I got my Ph.D. in 2001. So there weren’t… Now there are more than twenty. Now we’re closing in on thirty. So, it’s growing exponentially.

[34:24] But there weren’t a lot of Sámi in the universities back then. And what happened is, Sámi students would come from these small rural communities in northern Norway, where there was a lot of racism, and they’d come to Tromsø, where there was less. For me it was more, because nobody in Michigan ever treated me in a racist way because of being Sámi. They didn’t even know where Norway was, much less… you know.

[34:48] But the students would come there and meet other Sámi with similar experiences, and find that it was okay to be Sámi in public and not just as a private family thing. And the Sámi students really stuck together. We had the Center for Sámi Studies, which was kind of a gathering place. Students could gather there, and we would host events in the Sámi student union. And the group of friends that I made in the three years there were really wonderful people.

[35:20] Of course, I had this samboer , [inaudible 35:23] Mickelson from Hamarøy, a Lule Sámi woman. We ended up living together for three years. So through her family, I became friends with all of her extended relations. And all the other Sámi students- that group of students now, they’re the ones- that generation are the ones who are running things in Sámi institutions.

[35:45] And things are very different now. We noticed the year I spent on my sabbatical there with my family, that the Sámi student union was much less active at Tromsø. And I was asking some of my friends who are still at the university why they thought that was- what had happened to the leadership of the student union? They said it’s not the leadership’s fault; it’s the fact that the students who are coming in now are not as insecure about being Sámi, and students at the same time don’t see any problems. They don’t feel like they have to hang out with only Sámi students. They can be Sámi and have lots of Norwegian friends. There’s not as much need for the student union, at least at the beginning of the year. Then Tromsø had this really racist episode that year- the fall of 2011.

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Gary: [36:34] Do you want to talk about that?

Troy: [36:36] Yeah. In the early summer of 2011, the Tromsø city council had voted to apply to join the Sámi language administrative area, which would have made Sámi… would have made it officially a bilingual city, and would have meant a lot of funds coming from the Sámi parliament to fund bilingual education. There would be the signs. The most visible thing would be that signs would be in both Norwegian and Sámi, and the city would be Romsø Tromsø.

[37:12] It was the Red Party, which is a minor party on the national scale, but pretty… they get more than ten percent of the vote in Tromsø, so they’re players in the Tromsø city political scene. Tromsø has a long labor activist city history. So, the Red Party proposed it, but the Labor Party, which was in control of the city council, they said, okay, that’s a good idea. Let’s run with it. They took it, and they voted it through under strong objections from other members of the city council.

[37:47] And there were municipal and regional elections in the fall, and the Venstre- the liberals, the Høyre- the conservatives- and the Fremskrittspartiet- the progress party, or right-wing populist party- they formed a joint platform with twelve campaign promises, and the first one, the top one, was withdraw the application to join the Sámi language area- language administrative area.

[38:20] And that in and of itself- yes, there’s some racist ideas behind that, but that isn’t such a racist thing to say in and of itself. It’s the arguments in public space that went on over the summer and especially into the fall as the election approached. And then after the election, when this group won, they controlled the city council, and they had the mayor. You had… it started with… online. When the newspapers would print stories about what had happened, the comments became increasingly volatile. And that often happens online. People are much more comfortable saying things online, in the relative anonymity of online commentary that they would never dare say in public or face-to face.

[39:01] But then it spilled over into the print editions of the newspapers, and into speeches by the candidates. So there were a number of televised debates, and they were quite… And of course, the Fremskrittspartiet is… they’re not known… Villi… What’s his last name? Anyway, his first name is

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Villi and he’s one of the leaders of the Fremskrittspartiet party in northern Norway. And he does not know how to speak diplomatically. Or he does not want to speak diplomatically. He wants to speak provocatively.

[39:39] So there was a real hostile atmosphere in the city. People that I knew… one friend of mine who was a student when I was a student, a former… she lived in town. She had gotten death threats phoned in to her because she had spoken up in the paper about why it was a good thing for Tromsø to join. And her kids had been beaten up at school because they were her kids.

[40:12] There was this group, Slow Food [inaudible 40:18]. It’s one of these slow food organizations, of course a Sámi one. It was founded on the Swedish side, but they had their annual meeting in Tromsø that year. And so people from other parts of Norway, and Sweden and Finland came, and they were wearing their [inaudible 40:37]- the traditional Sámi clothing, and going out after the meeting. Tromsø is a party town; let’s go out. And they were harassed. People were yelling at them. And they ended up… The organizers had to send taxis out to go and collect people and bring them back, because they had no idea what was going on.

[40:58] The city really got a bad reputation in the rest of Norway because of what was going on. I personally have always been politically on the left. So Sámi activism initially in the sixties and seventies was… There were sort of two political groups that were working on that. Sámi members of the Labor Party, and then the NSR- Norwegian-Sámi National Union. Norge-Sámi [inaudible 41:35]. And they tended… there were socialists and social democrats in NSR as well, but there were also conservatives, and it was sort of…

[41:49] I had always sort of allied myself with the Labor Party group or even with… The Labor Party, as it moved toward the center, it became too far toward the center for me. Like I voted either for the [inaudible 42:03] Leftist Social Party, or the Red Party. And here, the only people who were doing anything in Tromsø when I was there was NSR, and I started… So I went to some of their meetings, and I said, you know, these are the people who really got us all our gains in Sámi Parliament and with language laws, and with the changes to the constitution. So I joined the party there, and by the end of the year, I was on this board for the local chapter- the Tromsø chapter.

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[42:37] And I think that… it changed for me, you know… Not how important Sámi identity was- because that had been really hammered home in the nineties- but my approach to it. I realized that also, it came with a philosophical change, because when I was a grad student, I was really working with postcolonial criticism. And I was analyzing… I wrote my dissertation- it was a colonial discourse analysis of how the Sámi had been represented in text. How knowledge about the Sámi has been constructed- colonial knowledge. And then different ways Sámi have tried to sort of undermine that or resist it.

[43:19] I don’t find that useless. I haven’t rejected that as a legitimate approach. It’s useful. But what you end up doing so much is focusing on the colonizer. And you focus on… And only to the extent that you focus on Sámi text, you focus on how they deal with the colonizer. And at some point you have to move past that. So what I’ve been working with… And this started before we moved to Tromsø for my sabbatical.

[43:48] I started working on indigenous methodologies, which is sort of an emerging field, of how to do academia from an indigenous perspective. How do you make space in academia for indigenous modes of knowledge, or ways of knowing? And some of the… well, I shouldn’t say “some of”- the leading academic Sámis who are a part of this group- this movement- are in Tromsø at the university. So I was working a lot with them there while all of this was going on, too.

[44:19] That changed a lot of the… just sort of… Before then, it seemed to me like I didn’t need to tell my students I was Sámi. It shouldn’t matter what I was; it just mattered… the truthfulness of what I was saying, and the validity of my research. Nowhere in my dissertation does it say that I’m Sámi. This is… these are the facts. This is the critical analysis that I’m bringing.

[44:43] And indigenous methodologies… one of the first things they say is that we can’t be objective. And none of us can, not just we who are indigenous. Nobody can be objective. And our personal relationship to the material is important. And you need to be honest about it, and need to even… It’s not just a liability; it also grants you authority. You can say, “I know this in part from this perspective.”

[45:13] So, it’s changed. I had students who would go through four years of classes with me who

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didn’t know I was Sámi. I wasn’t keeping it a secret. I wasn’t ashamed of it. I just didn’t see how it was relevant for me to tell them, unless we were at a specific… If there was a Sámi event, and I was there as part of it… And students were like, “What are you doing here?” “Oh, I’m Sámi.” “Okay.” You know. But since then, now I make that very clear in all my classes and in approaches to things.

[45:40] And it’s led me to be working here at PLU now to… we’re working on a project to submit a proposal for an interdisciplinary program in Native American and indigenous studies. That’s in part because… Well, I ended up sharing, I guess, my dad’s dream of going back to Norway with I guess probably the same results of not going back to Norway.

[46:10] When Kiana and I started dating, she had just come back from her second year of studying Denmark. She’s not of Scandinavian background. She’s… Weinschenk is a good German name. Her family is from… She was born in Hawaii, but her family is from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Her dad is from Pennsylvania, and her mom is from Wisconsin. She grew up mostly in Wisconsin and we met at the University of Wisconsin.

[46:37] But she had just come back from her second year in Denmark. She had been at the University of Copenhagen. She spoke fluent Danish. So when we started dating, we hung out with a lot of her Danish friends. And that was when I finally got to understand spoken Danish without having to struggle.

Lizette: [46:56] Depending on where you’re from in Denmark. [Laughter]

Troy: [46:57] [Laughter] Well, if they were from Copenhagen, I could understand them. And the first few nights that we were going out, they were talking, and I was just like, “What the hell are they saying?” And then suddenly something just clicked. Oh. You just take Norwegian, and you kind of twist it like that, and oh, it makes sense. You know.

[47:12] When she got pregnant, and we were talking about what do we want to do, and we were talking about names, we thought, well… I was close to being done with my dissertation. I was going to apply… My goal had always been to get a job at a Norwegian university. And so she thought that was fine. We made the decision that I would speak Norwegian to our son, and she would speak

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English, but it would work, because she could understand Norwegian. And we gave him a Norwegian name: Espen Michael. And we wanted a first name that would be easy for Americans to pronounce.

[47:49] Initially, we made lists of names, and it didn’t have to be Norwegian, but it had to be easy for Americans and easy for Norwegians to pronounce. It should not have sort of a negative connotation in the other language. Like, we wouldn’t want to name somebody “Odd.” That would be Odd. Something like that. No names like my dad’s. Bjernard would just not work in the U.S. So nothing like that. But the idea was that we’d move back to Norway.

[48:19] I applied for positions, and didn’t get them, and applied for positions. Nothing was opening up at the University of Tromsø, which is where I really wanted to work. Most of them were at the University of Oslo, and those are very competitive, and I was a brand new Ph.D. What happens in Norway is the people at the University of Oslo go out and teach for fifteen years in Bergen or Stavanger or Tromsø, and then when a position opens up at Oslo, they want to go back. So, who’s this guy with his American Ph.D. who just got it a year or two ago versus these known names- big names? Yeah, so of course I didn’t get those.

[48:49] But while we were at Tromsø on sabbatical, a position opened there that was perfect for me, and I applied for it, and they offered it to me. They didn’t offer it to me until after we’d come back. My sabbatical was over. So it was the middle of fall semester last year that they offered it to me. I was like… Not only was it where I wanted to be, and I could do what I wanted to be, I could be part of the university there, and local Sámi society, and working with indigenous criticism and indigenous methodologies in a meaningful way, but they were also going to pay me about fifty percent more than I make here, too. So, that was exciting, too.

[49:32] But the thing is, Kiana has a really good career here in education as an educator. She could teach in Norway, but she wrote her master’s thesis on the re-segregation of the inner city American school, and she works with… Her specialty is working with high poverty schools with a large number of English language-learners. And she’s good at that. She does a really good job. And that doesn’t translate to anything meaningful in Tromsø. She can teach- she can be employed, and work with kids, but, you know…

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[50:06] She was a substitute at the school that our kids went to that year. She said, “They don’t need me here. These schools are just amazing. They have everything they could possibly want.” [Laughter] You know, they have… Nikolai’s class had fourteen students it. It had two teachers in the classroom, plus an assistant. You know, why do they need her? They don’t need her. So she really didn’t want to give up her career here, and I get that. Nikolai had not enjoyed his year in Tromsø. Espen really had. Epsen really enjoyed it. Niko had not so much. Now he thinks he did. Now he reinterpreted it. “Living in Tromsø was amazing.” [Laughter] While we were there, he was not enjoying it.

Lizette: [50:53] Those are hard decisions.

Troy: [50:54] So in the end, I turned it down. I turned down this position. But before I turned it down, I went to the provost here. I said, “Look, this is what they’re offering me.” I said, “Yeah, it may look like…” And I said, “Here’s why I would like to take it.” And I said, “On the other hand, there’s family reasons for perhaps staying, but if I stay, I want to do something as meaningful to me here as being there would be.”

[51:15] And he said, “Well, we don’t have the budget to give you that kind of money here.” And I said, “I realize that. I’m not asking for that kind of money, because I know you can’t do that.” But I asked him about… what about this dream of developing a Native American and Indigenous Studies program here, and doing it in a way grounded in indigenous methodology. So, working hand in hand with local indigenous communities. Because to me it’s absurd to do indigenous studies… And I want it to be global, not just Native American. But to do indigenous studies in this place without paying special attention to the people who are indigenous to this place. It’s done many places, but…

Lizette: [51:54] It’s not successful.

Troy: [51:55] Yeah, and it’s not consistent with indigenous methodologies. You have to acknowledge where you are, and who’s native here. We’re working with the Puyallup tribe, and with the Muckleshoot tribe, and with the Seattle Indian Health Board. He’s given me funds, and course releases. He’s excited about that. So that’s meaningful for me to do here. And it comes out of this

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[inaudible 52:20] approach- that I don’t want to just teach about the Vikings, and about masterpieces of Scandinavian literature. And I’ve got nothing against the Vikings, and masterpieces. Those are worthy things to study.

[52:30] But I want to be able to do meaningful things in my academic work that tie into my own background and ideology as well. I’m happy to step in when they need somebody to fill a course. I’ve enjoyed teaching the Vikings. I’ve enjoyed teaching Ibsen and Strindberg. I’m happy to do that occasionally, but I also want to do this other…

Lizette: [52:50] That’s important. I was going to say, do you think your choice of career… if there’s a connection between your background and the choices you’ve made working in academia?

Troy: [53:03] Yes. Academia… Well, both of my parents have Ph.D.s. And I grew up most of my life on different university campuses and college campuses. I was born while my parents were college students. I’ve sort of grown up as a university brat. So it’s not odd that I looked at higher education as a possibility. It’s really… How I ended up in Scandinavian Studies is an accident, but of course connected to my background.

[53:35] I did my undergraduate at Andrews University in Michigan, where my father taught. They didn’t have any Scandinavian program. It never occurred to me that Scandinavian languages and literatures were something one could study. For me, Norwegian… the first language I spoke was Norwegian. My mom always spoke English at home, but we were in Norway when I started speaking, and so I heard more of that, and I started speaking Norwegian. And you know, eventually English became my primary language, and Norwegian was always a secondary language. But I’ve had fluency in it since I could talk. But I didn’t go to school in Norway.

[54:13] I had taught myself to read, but I couldn’t write very well. And I taught myself to read after I had already learned to read and write in German. And then I was working in Norway in the summers when I was going to school, and I was like, it’s ridiculous that I can read German, and I can’t read this language I’ve been speaking my whole life. So I started with comic books, and worked my way up to newspaper articles, and then I started reading westerns, and detective novels translated from English- sort of pulp fiction, because those had exciting plots that you could follow, and I

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would sound out the… I would read them out loud. Then it made sense.

[54:48] So I got my degree. I had double-majored in history and German, and minored in journalism, and I decided I was going to be a journalist, and I was working at a newspaper. I got married to a woman that I started dating in college. She was from Mexico, from [inaudible 55:08]. And we lived in the town of Holland, Michigan, where I was working for the Holland Sentinel as a newspaper reporter. And she was working as a PR person for the hospital there.

[55:20] So we were opposite sides of the same profession. She put out the PR things, and I took them and interpreted them. Not necessarily hers, but I took PR releases from other people and always was asking follow up questions and trying to see through whatever message they were trying to sell, and see what they were trying to hide. And she was packaging those kinds of messages. So we used to laugh a lot, and talk about that. But both of us after a couple years realized that we wanted higher education. And we didn’t want to stay in these careers.

[55:52] Journalism, already back then in the late eighties was… newspaper journalism- I was realizing that it was really not… It was really corporate-controlled. Not in an overt way. Nobody came in and said, “You can’t do that because our advertisers won’t like it.” No. American journalists… at least then. I don’t know what they’re doing now, because they seem to have forgotten all about journalism- what we learned in journalism school. But… They were proud of their independence, but there were so many ways the paper was structured to serve the interests of the owners. And I just realized that I couldn’t live with that. I wanted something where I could be more critical.

[56:32] She got a scholarship. We started applying to graduate programs, and she got a full ride to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. So we thought, okay, we’ll move there. I thought, I will… I looked into the university there, and they had a really good German program, and they had a really good history program. And they had comparative literature, which we didn’t have where I went to school. Comparative literature seemed really interesting to me.

[56:56] So I looked into the regulations, and I thought, well, I’ll apply there. But I was looking at it, and out-of-state tuition was really high. So I looked at what you need to do to be in-state. Well, you need to have lived in Wisconsin for a full year before you even contact the university. Once you

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contact them, your status is frozen. So if you contact them… So, well, okay. So she started school there, and I waited tables for year, and then I applied. Or I thought I was going to apply.

[57:26] By then she was a year into her master’s studies in anthropology, and I had lots of friends who were master’s students in anthropology. And one of them told me… I said, “I’ve got to wait a whole other year before I start studying… I can’t… I want to do this now. I want to be part of the same exciting thing that she’s part of.” And one of her friends said, “Well, you can do it. They have this thing called special student status, where you’re a non-degree-seeking student. And there’s an office. You just go to them and you tell them why you want to take these courses for personal reasons, and you can take them.”

[57:52] And so I was like, “Well, I actually have a personal reason. I’m not sure if I want to do German or comparative literature.” Which one I want to do. So I went down there, and said I’d like to take a German class and a comparative literature class, and see which one I want to apply to. Okay. And it was much cheaper tuition because they’re not counting for a degree. If you later are accepted into the degree program, you can pay the tuition difference and apply the credits if you want, or not, if you don’t want.

[58:18] So I did that, and I did my semester and I took a German literature class and a comparative literature class. And I said, oh, it’s definitely comparative literature. And then I went to register the spring semester, and I was not eligible to register. And so I went back to the office, and I said, “I was trying to register for more classes, and…” And she said, “Oh, you wanted to compare the two, and you got to do that. So unless you have another reason for wanting to study this semester, you don’t have a reason to be a special student.”

[58:46] On the spot, without even thinking about it, I had discovered that there was a Scandinavian Studies program there. And I said, “Well, I’m a dual citizen of Norway and the U.S., and I’m bilingual in Norwegian and English. But I’m barely literate in Norwegian, and I think it’s important for me to learn to master reading and writing in Norwegian. So I want to take some Norwegian classes.” I didn’t really care, but I wanted to be in school. For a semester, okay, I’ll take some Norwegian classes. I did want to learn to read and write. It wasn’t a lie. It was something I always thought it would be fun to do. Now’s my chance. Okay, I’ll do it.

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[59:26] And in that semester… And I was worried, because that was spring semester, and so I couldn’t start with first semester Norwegian. I would be starting with second semester, and what would I have missed? So I went up to the Norwegian professor, Harald Ness. I knocked on his office and introduced myself. I explained that I wanted to take Norwegian, and I had spoken it all my life, but really could only sort of read it and couldn’t really write it at all. Did he think it would be okay for me to go into 102 without having taken 101? And of course, I did it all in Norwegian.

[1:00:06] He says, “Well, sure, but you might be too advanced for 102.” [Laughter] So he put me in 202. He said, “You would frighten everybody.” So I started in fourth semester Norwegian, and I was there for two class periods before the teacher said, “You’re intimidating all the other students. You need to go to 302.” And 302, what we did was, we read literature and wrote essays on it. Oh, man. It was fun… the reading was fun, but the writing was so hard. I couldn’t write. I didn’t have the basic grammar I needed from 101. So I ended up hiring one of the grad students as a tutor and just getting private grammar lessons.

[1:00:48] But the reading… We read Hamsun; we read Ibsen; we read [inaudible 1:00:58]. I can’t even remember. Cora Sandel. We read some really… And we read some modernist stuff, too. I was a big fan of modernist literature in German. I was like, “This is fun.” I was having such fun that I applied to Scandinavian Studies, instead of to comparative literature. And I got in. and I ended up getting a Ph.D. minor in comparative literature. The next year, my advisor said, “You know, your writing is workable, but you’d benefit from some years at a Norwegian university.” And we had an exchange program with Tromsø, so I went over.

[1:01:38] In that time, my wife and I had split up, too. So I didn’t have anything keeping me back in the U.S. So I went over to Tromsø, and that’s where it all began. So yeah, it’s connected, but was not so much of a conscious choice. It was maybe a subconscious choice, perhaps.

Lizette: [1:01:53] When you start looking at that, yeah. Well, is there anything else that you want to tell us that we should know? Or is it time to wrap up?

Gary: [1:02:02] I’m actually interested in something that is on your homepage…

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Troy: [1:02:10] [Laughter] My homepage is so out of date. I haven’t updated it for years.

Gary: [1:02:13] I am especially interested in how we are positioned by prevailing ideologies to support the power dynamics of the status quo. And in finding ways to expose this process in the hopes of opening up space for resistance. I’m interested in knowing what you’ve done to try to open up space for resistance of the status quo.

Troy: [1:02:34] Yeah. I’m not trying to avoid answering that, but I just want… We have a very complicated webpage managing system that was introduced since I put my webpage up. And I haven’t figured out how to change that, because that’s the stuff I first wrote when I got here, when I was still operating very much in the postcolonial criticism mode.

[1:02:56] I agree with that; I think it’s valid to do. So, opening space for criticism for me has ultimately meant moving to this new critical approach. What I’m trying to do now with… And it’s not just me. I’m not the only one working. I’ve got a working group of other faculty and staff who have expertise in the field, and are enthusiastic about doing this as well- working with me and we’re working with some educators from Puyallup and Muckleshoot as well to help design this program. It’s not a solo operation.

[1:03:27] But my work to it is trying to open up a space for criticism. What was behind that was this idea of critiquing ideology, and this idea that everything that we sort of take for granted as common sense is ideology. It serves a purpose, and you need to take a critical awareness to it in order to expose it as not just natural. These things that we take for granted are socially constructed. They didn’t just grow up out of the soil.

[1:03:57] That’s not to say that they’re necessarily wrong, but how can you think critically about them unless you first identify the fact that they’re… gender, for example. Nationality. The fact that I’m a man is only marginally connected to the fact that I come with a certain set of body parts. It’s all what socially, we’ve decided it means to be a man, and how I’ve been conditioned to behave that way. And it’s contested. There are different ways I could end up being a man, and I am a man in different ways at different times.

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[1:04:25] So to try to expose students to this sort of thinking- the things we take for granted, the things that are common sense are the prevailing ideology. You can’t question it, and you can’t even see ways that you’re conditioned to participate in your own oppression unless you can see how these things work. And I haven’t rejected that. So I don’t mean to say I’ve stopped thinking that. But the way I approach it and even the way I would phrase it would even be different today, I think.

Gary: [1:04:57] Thank you for that. I see that you also have an interest in Nordic film. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Troy: [1:05:03] Yeah. If I were going back to… If I were eighteen and starting college again now, I would do something with film studies. Not that I regret having gone into literature- I might do both. But I always enjoyed watching film. And of course, this college I went to didn’t have a film studies program, so it never occurred to me that was something I could do. And I really moved beyond just being a passive watcher of film, who liked to watch film and read about film, to teaching about it when I got a position at the University of Colorado.

[1:05:42] I had been part of a film society at Tromsø. It wasn’t the university. It was a city one. They would pick a theme every semester, and we would watch a series of films. They would always have a lecture before the film, and a discussion after the film. And that helped me. It’s like, oh man. Take my love of film, which I already had, and I always had a love of European cinema, which used to be very different than Hollywood. It’s less different from Hollywood now than it used to be. Although I enjoy Hollywood films, too. I also enjoy independent American theater. Jim Jarmusch was a big… I was a big fan of his. I still am.

[1:06:22] But when I got to Colorado, they asked if… They had this course on the books for Scandinavian Studies that was Scandinavian Film and Literature. Could I teach that? I was like, this is my… oh. But I had never studied film theory, so I was reading all summer on this stuff, and putting t together. And it was such a fun course to teach. Then when I came here, I began incorporating film and film criticism into courses when I could. I ended up teaching a course…

[1:06:50] We have a J-term; a January term, where students take one course… a semester’s worth of

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one course, but that’s all they take. We meet five days a week for three hours a day. That was ideally suited for a film course, because you can introduce… Well, first we’d get there, we’d go over, discuss the reading that they had done the night before. I’d say a few opening remarks about the film. We’d watch the film, and then we still had time to discuss the film afterwards before they’d go to do the next reading.

[1:07:15] So we didn’t watch a film every day, but there were four weeks; five days a week, so twenty days… We watched about seventeen films. Most days we watched a film. It was basically just an introduction to Scandinavian cinematic history and to film criticism. So we watched them sort of chronologically. We didn’t watch any silent films. We started with the black and white era and moved right up to contemporary films. That was really fun.

[1:07:46] I wrote about a film in my dissertation, but I didn’t use film theory, because I wasn’t familiar with it. But I’ve given some conference presentations about some Sámi films since then, too. That’s enjoyable. I was more active… There was a group of us trying to bring film studies to PLU, to do a film studies minor. I was one of the people trying to work hard for that, but we didn’t get the support that we needed to make it happen. If somebody brings that, I’d be happy to be part of it, but that’s not where I’m investing my energies right now. So I’ll leave it to others to make that happen, and I’ll support it. And if they want me to be part of it, I’ll be happy to be part of it.

[1:08:31] Film is just another way to tell a story. So, for similar reasons to the fact that I like to read novels, I like to watch films. And for similar reasons, I like to understand what’s going on in a film from a critical perspective for some of the same reasons I like to understand what’s going on in a novel from a critical perspective. It adds to my enjoyment. Some people think it detracts, but to me it just adds. Not only is there the story that I’m following, but I’m seeing it in a contextual perspective. I’m looking at it in a theoretical perspective, a philosophical perspective. And those just add to me. They don’t detract. They give me more to pay attention to in the film.

Gary: [1:09:12] There was a Nordic film festival in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, and I saw several short Sámi films. Apparently there’s a very active film movement among Sámis.

Troy: [1:09:25] Yeah. I had planned to go to that. I was so upset because I had car trouble all

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January, and I had just gotten my car back from the shop, and they had done their seventy-five thousand mile maintenance, and had certified everything to be good, and the next day was Saturday, and I went and got in it to go down to watch these Sámi shorts, and the battery was dead. So instead I had to jumpstart it and drive down to have them put a new battery in.

[1:09:51] And I missed the films. I had been looking forward to that for a couple months. “I’m going to go watch these new Sámi shorts.” Because it’s hard to watch them, to follow them when you’re not there. They’re coming… a couple of them I had actually seen. Like one of them, [inaudible 1:10:09] was out when I was living in Tromsø. So I saw that one. But the same filmmaker had some other shorts there, and I wanted to see those.

Gary: [1:10:18] I noticed one filmmaker was responsible for I think three of them.

Troy: [1:10:22] Yeah, that was her.

Gary: [1:10:24] Yes.

Troy: [1:10:24] And I had seen one of them but not the other two. I was very much… this is great; I can now keep up to date on Sámi film. But no, it didn’t happen. [Laughter]

Lizette: [1:10:34] There will be another opportunity next year. [Laughter]

Troy: [1:10:37] I hope so. Yes.

Gary: [1:10:38] Are you involved in the Sámi community here in this area?

Troy: [1:10:43] Yeah, I mean, there have always been descendants of Sámi immigrants… Well, not always, but there have been descendants of Sámi immigrants here since the thirties, at least, from when the reindeer herders from Alaska… a number of them resettled on the Kitsap peninsula. But while I was in Tromsø, some of the Sámi descendants here, Sámi Americans, formed this group, Pacific Sámi Searvi. And they contacted me by Facebook, actually, in Tromsø, and asked if I would be part of that. I’m like, sure.

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[1:11:19] And so I was emailing them stuff, and participating online in discussions with them from Tromsø. When I came back- especially since you invited me to come and talk at the Nordic Heritage Museum, a lot of them showed up there, and they got me more involved in the program. So they put me on their first board. We’re having our meeting on March 2, and I’m hoping to get off the board, just because that’s so much extra work beyond the work I’m already doing. Not that I’m opposed to what they’re doing. That’s great. But I think other people can do that work, and I can… You know, I’ll be happy to be part of the organization and to answer questions if they have them, but I don’t need to be running it.

Lizette: [1:12:08] Mm hmm. I think that [inaudible 1:12:12] was part of when we had the Sámi exhibit.

Gary: [1:12:13] Yes.

Lizette: [1:12:13] Because that was a way for us also to learn about our collections, and why do we have Sámi objects in our collection. And it turned out to be in collaboration with the Sámi museum in Jokkmokk. Then we investigated everything from lectures to films, to… And the following just grew. I mean, we started out with a small group, and we’re still connected with the group, which is great.

Troy: [1:12:39] Yeah.

Lizette: [1:12:40] So I think for the museum, that was a very good angle to take, too, and actually learn more about our own activity again with a critical perspective. You know, what are we doing here? Why do we have these collections, and how do we tell the stories?

Troy: [1:12:55] And something similar happened here. As you saw this morning, we have a Sámi exhibit in the Scandinavian Cultural Center. We have our new director Elizabeth Ward, who just began this fall. And last year, knowing that there was this active Sámi-American community here, and knowing that I wanted to get support for the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, I thought bringing that group of people into connection with PLU and the Scandinavian Cultural

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Center might help.

[1:13:29] Because especially with our old president, PLU didn’t do things in new directions unless they sort of felt there was a constituency support for it. Let’s bring the Sámi-American group into the PLU constituency. So we celebrated national Sámi day at the SCC last year. Then the SCC people enjoyed that so much, they voted to make it an annual event. So when Dr. Ward- Elizabeth- took over the job, I said, “By the way, there’s this annual event that just started last year, but I’ll be happy to work with you on planning it this year. I have some ideas, and there’s some money that’s already been put aside for it. But if you have other ideas, that’s great.” I was just thinking of bringing this joik performer, a friend of mine, over from Sweden.

Lizette: [1:14:18] [Inaudible 1:14:18] No?

Troy: [1:14:19] No, Kriste [inaudible 1:14:20] from Sweden. He’s at the University of Umeå. And he had already agreed… We had already set it up with the previous director that that was what we were probably going to do, and he had agreed to do it. And she sort of just inherited this, and she was like, okay. But then he had visa troubles and told me he would have to back out. And she said, “Well, instead of that, couldn’t we do an exhibit?” So I thought, an exhibit. That hadn’t even occurred to me, an exhibit.

[1:14:50] So she showed me… They had some Sámi artifacts. And then I began to realize that some of these Sámi-American people in the area also had artifacts, and I had a few artifacts. Together we could loan some of them, and use the SCC’s collection for some of them. So we spent… I spent pretty much all of January when I wasn’t teaching- because I didn’t teach this January- spent all of it just working on that. Elizabeth spent a lot of time, and we had about three students spending a lot of time. It was… One of these Sámi-American people is from [inaudible 1:15:27] herself. So this was really meaningful for her. So, yeah, I’m involved with that. And it’s…

Lizette: [1:15:32] It was great to see some of the names, because I think those connections were actually made during the exhibit up in Seattle.

Troy: [1:15:38] Uh huh.

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Lizette: [1:15:39] And when they came forth and said, “We’ve never talked about our heritage before. And we grew up in Poulsbo. This is what we have. These are the photographs. So I’m really to happy to see that the story is told again here.

Troy: [1:15:57] And it was meaningful for my oldest son, for Espen. He really got a… It was really fun to watch him in school in Tromsø. I had spoken Norwegian to him for eight years at home before I finally started speaking English to him at home. And so he had a good language background, and he made lots of friends in his class. But the friends were all Norwegian, and I didn’t know if he was paying much attention to Sámi stuff. Once the public racism really kicked in, I would be talking about it at home, and he would be upset, too.

[1:16:33] And then this friend of ours who is a [inaudible 1:16:38]- she sews kofte , the gákti . And she said, Espen should really have a kofte . I said, “I don’t…” Those things are really expensive. Thousands of dollars. I’m like… I was on seventy-five percent of my regular salary from here, over there, where it’s much more expensive than here. Kiana was making about twenty percent of what she makes here, because she was just a substitute teacher part-time there. I’m like… ehh. She’s like, “Oh, I think I have an old one that nobody’s using.”

[1:17:11] So she sold us the one she had made for her son when he was Espen’s size, for five hundred krone. So it was a gift. She gave it away. And Espen was so excited. And that’s the one that’s down there now. He’s outgrown it now, but that’s the one that we have. He was so excited, and he wore that for the first time at the seventeenth of May. All the people… all the students march. And it was funny because his classmates were… I was worried that they might react negatively. No.

[1:17:39] In fact, his best friend, who was often over and visiting us said… some of his friends said, “I didn’t know you were Sámi.” His best friend knew that, because he had been over a lot. But they hadn’t talked about it, ever. And his best friend saw him standing there, and the guy said, “Oh, my sister is Sámi.” Because his dad had remarried, and married a Sámi woman, which we didn’t know. So it was like, wow. We didn’t realize that. And Espen was so excited. And he was really excited to come to see this exhibit, too.

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Gary: [1:18:10] As a matter of fact, I wanted to ask you about the next generation here in your own family, and the construction of their identities.

Troy: [1:18:18] Yeah. Well, I mean Nikolai is… We don’t know what he will end up doing about anything, but we’ve decided he might just be the kid who stays at home with his parents. [Laughter] Which would be just fine.

Gary: [1:18:32] How old is he?

Troy: [1:18:33] He’s eight. But he… like I said, I stopped speaking Norwegian at home when he was two years old. It just got more and more artificial, and I began to realize we weren’t going to move to Norway, and what was the point? It was difficult. It didn’t used to be difficult, but it became… I had to work at it. I was like, I don’t want to have to work at talking to my kids. So I stopped. But he was two years old, so he didn’t have much of a language foundation.

[1:19:03] There were a couple words that he kept, like we’d take him to daycare over here, and we called it barnhagen long after he stopped understanding Norwegian. He still talks about that as his barnhagen . And he talks… But he thinks it’s an English word. He’ll talk to other kids: “Where did you go to barnhagen ?” “What?” [Laughter] So he told us before we went to Tromsø that he was not going to learn Norwegian. We didn’t pay much attention to that. He was five years old. What five-year-old kid is going go to… And he was going to be going into first grade there, because he turned six that year.

[1:19:33] It’s like, what kid is going to be immersed in a Norwegian language school at that age and not learn Norwegian? But he did his best to not… He really… He got to the point where he understood a lot, and sometimes we’d catch him speaking short Norwegian phrases to kids when he was playing with them. But if he caught us listening, he would switch to English and just speak English to them. He pretended like he couldn’t speak it.

Gary: [1:19:54] What was that about?

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Troy: [1:19:55] I don’t know. He complained that he didn’t like Norway, because in Norway he had to go to school, and in America barnhage was a lot nicer. I said, “Well, when we go back, you’ll have to go to school in America, too. School isn’t a Norwegian thing. It’s everywhere, and you just happened to go to Norway the year you had to start school.” Because he would have been in kindergarten here that year, but they don’t have kindergarten there. They started him in first grade. So he complained a lot. He did his best to not learn Norwegian. And he genuinely has forgotten. He doesn’t understand it now. The passive understanding he had is gone. It will be easier to come back if he wants it to.

[1:20:34] But on the other hand, he’s started to look back much more nostalgically to the year there. “Norway was so fun. It was so awesome.” And, “Why don’t we have snow here like we did in Tromsø?” And he wanted us… before we left, he wanted to have a Sámi flag. So he has a little Sámi flag. I don’t know if he has much idea what Sámi is.

[1:20:58] He once said he was dressing in Sámi style, and we said, “Okay, what’s that?” And he was just finding all the clothes he could find and putting them on. There was nothing particularly Sámi about it, other than I’m a member of the Sámi electorate in Norway, which means that my kids are Sámi. So he is Sámi, so it’s Sámi because he’s doing it, but there’s nothing that would be recognizably Sámi about it.

Lizette: [1:21:22] Do they have dual citizenship?

Troy: [1:21:24] Yes, they do. They’re Norwegian citizens and American citizens. Espen, the oldest one, was very sad to leave Norway. He had such good friends there, and he enjoyed the school there more than he’d enjoyed school here.

Gary: [1:21:38] And how old was he?

Troy: [1:21:39] When we left he was twelve. And he’s like, “Oh, I hope they offer you that job. I hope we can come back.” He was surprised at how much he enjoyed coming back to Tacoma, and seeing old friends, and being able to speak English. He could speak Norwegian, but it was less work to speak English. It was easier to speak English. I think he had forgotten… And he was surprised at

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how much he enjoyed coming back. He was thinking he was going to hate coming back, and he didn’t. He enjoyed it. So when they offered me the job, he was like, “Please, let’s not go back. Let’s stay here.” Then when he found out I turned the job down, he started crying. He’s like, “No, we need to go back.” [Laughter] So, he’s torn.

Gary: [1:22:17] He is torn.

Lizette: [1:22:18] So you’ve got three generations of ambivalence here.

Troy: [1:22:21] Yes.

Lizette: [1:22:21] Yeah. [Laughter]

Troy: [1:22:23] Yeah. The funny thing is, my father is no longer a Norwegian citizen. He ended up becoming an American citizen when I was a teenager. That meant he had to give up his Norwegian citizenship. You can be born as a dual citizen, but for the U.S… Well, Norway doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. So for Norway, my kids and I are Norwegian citizens. They know that America claims us as citizens, but they don’t recognize us as American citizens. But the U.S. recognizes dual citizenship.

[1:22:48] But when my dad became an American citizen, he lost his Norwegian citizenship. So now he’s married to a woman who is a citizen of the UK. So he’s gotten United Kingdom citizenship, and he was allowed to keep his. So he’s a dual citizen of the U.S. and the United Kingdom [laughter], but not of Norway. And he was for a time working on getting his Norwegian citizenship back, but then when he took his new wife to Tromsø for a year, she didn’t particularly like it. So they’re in Britain now.

[1:23:25] So, yeah, there’s ambivalence. And I grew up with ambivalence. I think certainly there are hardships that come with it, but I think there are so many advantages that come with having feet in multiple places, and multiple cultures and languages and citizenships. I recognize that I am causing some hardship for my kids by doing that, but I hope I’m giving them some good advantages, too. Not the least of which is that if Espen chooses to study at a Norwegian university, we’d have to pay

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tuition. [Laughter]

Lizette: [1:23:55] Yeah. True.

Troy: [1:23:58] And he’s considering it. He’s going down the engineering path, he thinks. Since he was five years old, he’s wanted to be an engineer, and he hasn’t wavered. So he’s considering the NTNU in Trondheim as one of the places he might apply to.

Gary: [1:24:15] Anything else you feel like you’d like to tell us about your life story?

Troy: [1:24:21] [Laughter] Well, it’s weird to be interviewed. I mean, I get to sit here for two hours and talk about myself. That’s a strange thing to do, but obviously I’m interested in myself. [Laughter]

Gary: [1:24:32] It’s a fascinating story.

Troy: [1:24:34] Yeah, no, it’s… I don’t know where things are going to end up in the story, but I can’t think of anything that I feel like I’ve accidentally… As soon as I get home, I’ll say, “Oh, I should have talked about that!”

Gary: [1:24:54] Other narrators tell us that.

Lizette: [1:24:55] Yeah.

Gary: [1:24:59] Anything to add, Lizette?

Lizette: [1:25:01] No. Thank you.

Troy: [1:25:02] Yeah.

Gary: [1:25:03] Yes, thank you very much.

Troy: [1:25:04] I never mentioned my brother.

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Gary: [1:25:06] Oh.

Troy: [1:25:07] Let me do that. I can’t talk about my family without… I actually have two brothers now, because my father and his younger wife, they just had a kid a year and a half ago. So I have a half-brother who is a year and a half old. But I grew up with only one brother, and he’s three and a half years younger than me- Thor. He lives in Portland, and he is married to Judy Christiansen, who was born in Wisconsin. And they’ve had three kids, one of whom died, so they have two living kids. Thor actually… There was less Norwegian in the home in his life than in mine, because like my second son, he came in later in the process. And when we moved to the U.S. permanently, my dad switched to English at home, too.

[1:26:03] It’s funny, because then my dad and I, when I was studying in Tromsø, and he came to visit, if it was just him and me, we spoke English, because that was our relationship. But the moment a third person walked into the room, we switched over to Norwegian. We had no problem having a conversation with three of us in Norwegian, but it just seemed weird for us to speak Norwegian to each other when it was just the two of us.

[1:26:27] But yeah, my brother, he spent a year of [inaudible 1:26:32] in Norway, so there was a time when his written Norwegian was stronger than mine, because I have never gone to school in Norway. But that was the last time. That was in 1985-86. That was the last time he lived in Norway. Since then he’s just visited, so his Norwegian skills have gone down. But he certainly still identifies with it. He’s a hobby racecar driver so his hobby is working on his old BMW that he’s re-engineered to be a racecar.

[1:27:10] He goes and drives it on the tracks when his association has track days. He’s very good at it. He does so much work for them that they sometimes let him bring a guest for free, so I’ve gotten to do it a few times. I’m not that good at it, but it’s a blast to drive his BMW at 130 miles an hour around a track. [Laughter] It’s really fun. But he has a sticker on the back that’s like a Christian fish, but it’s got an arm holding a hammer and it says “Thor.” That’s his name. [Laughter]

[1:27:43] They named their kids all Scandinavian names, too. There was Johann [inaudible 1:27:49],

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who died. And then there’s Ole Kristian, and [inaudible 1:27:56]. So they follow that tradition as well. And of course, she’s Scandinavian-American, too- his wife- from a Danish-American family. And then my half-brother is Tomas. His mother, Cecilia, is a British citizen. She was born in India. She’s Tamil. So I’ve got an English-citizen Sámi-Tamil half brother So we call him “Samil.” [Laughter]

Lizette: [1:28:32] Samil. [Laughter]

Gary: [1:27:34] That’s great.

Troy: [1:27:35] Yeah. Who I finally got to meet this fall. We had just seen him on Skype before that, but then they came and visited. So, there. Now at least I’ve got everybody mentioned.

Lizette: [1:28:47] Yeah. [Laughter]

Gary: [1:28:48] Thank you again so much.

END OF RECORDING.

Transcription by Alison Goetz.

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