Nordic American Voices Nordic Heritage Museum Interview of Troy Storfjell February 15, 2014 Pacific Lutheran University Tacoma
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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. Nordic American Voices Page 1 of 37 [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, Nordic American Voices Page 2 of 37 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. Nordic American Voices Page 3 of 37 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.