Where The Samis Buy Their Shoes Online

http://www.kero.se/en/
Check out the video, "Feel The Kero Beat". 

iPad Notes

What I Ate
Wednesday, June 15
Toronto - Pearson Airport sushi and a chai tea latte from Starbucks
Air Canada flight from Toronto to Copenhagen - Dinner! Rice with mixed cubed vegetables, chicken with a creamy sauce, a roll, corn and bean salad, a chocolate brownie. Uninspired muffin and coffee for breakfast before landing in Denmark. 

Fascinating Day in the Stockholm Arlan Airport. 
Arrived at 11:55 a.m.
Slow Food greeters Gunborg Mellegard and Ola Buckard
Had lunch, talked. Very friendly.
Delegate from Mali? And Columbia. Needed to speak Spanish - rusty.
Meet other people.   Keep running into them throughout the day.
No free WiFi. Paid $ for an hour and it functioned inconsistently. Oh well, Arlan has an inordinate number of handsome men.

Images by Jessica Duncan Blog: http://foodgovernance.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @foodgovernance

Sami Kids - I love the one girl's tights. This is during the ceremony where we all gave soil from our native lands. My soil was from Brule Creek Farm where the land was cleared in the late 1800's. 

Where I didn't stay beside Lake Dalvvadis. My traditional dress - down vest, backpack, Timex watch, black tunic and skirt, John Fluevog Guides and shawl I bought in the Sami market beside the conference site.

These guys switched their traditional dress! India and Jordan. Jordan and India. Khalid from Jordan got into the switcheroo a few times! He declined, when I asked if he wanted to switch with me.

Styling! I think - Bhrvad from India. Then, Bolor from Mongolia and Lalji from India.

Lovely conference site vs. a hotel near an airport.

One of two Canadian delegates.

Jess and girls!

Midnight in Jokkmokk - view from the highest point. Bhrvad - always styling! It was so interesting to see how the clothing was used. Lalji showed Tahnibaa and I how he tied one type of turban.

Walk of Many Nations

On Saturday, June 18th, a group of about 30 Terra Madre delegates walked for about 4k to a lookout over Jokkmokk. We were quite a lively group with representatives from Italy, Jordan, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Spain, India, Ethiopia and Canada. Lots of laughter and everyone taking pictures. Lalji, a pastoralist from India told me later that they were laughing at me because the fast walking Canadian was leading everyone up the hill. 

Met so many lovely people who are passionate about their role in the global food community. The presentations, discussions and conversations were part of a positive dialogue that will create much needed change.


Here's a link from Slow Food International ...


http://www.slowfood.com/international/slow-stories/100743/photos-and-videos-from-indigenous-terra-madre/q=FC4E77?-session=query_session:50D80BEC0f36709E69JJR12CA51A

Indigenous Terra Madre

The gathering began at the Stockholm airport. Indigenous Terra Madre had a table at the arrivals area. Ola Buckard and Gunborg Mellengard where just sitting down for lunch and asked me to join them. Other delegates arrived from various points on all four continents of the globe. Quite an exotic group. Many spoke very limited or no English.

Ola is on the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity as the Suovas Presidium Coordinator. Gunborg was married to a Sami man and they raised their children in Jokkmokk. She now lives in Stockholm. Ola lives in Stockholm and invited me to give him a call after ITM - he was feeling sad that he wasn't going to be there but felt that the event was in good hands because his former colleague, Frank Roy was going to be attending.

Arrived at the airport in Lulea at midnight - it looked like the middle of the afternoon. A bus took us the two hours to Jokkmokk. The country side was a mixture of boreal forest and small fields where hay is grown. Small log huts are used to hold the dry hay in the winter. The trees are a mixture of spruce, jackpine and birch. From the bus I recognized many of the smaller plants - red alder, willow, labrador tea, arctic cotton and buttercups. I was kind of surprised how pastoral it was.

The houses and outbuildings are painted either a deep earthy red, green or yellow. Didn't see any fauna or people. Arrived in Jokkmokk just after two a.m. The landscape and the community reminds me of a combination of Lynn Lake (where I grew up), the north shore of Lake Superior on the U.S. side, Yellowknife and somewhere strange and alien. 

On the bus I met fellow Canadian, Jessica Duncan whose living in Barcelona and about to move to Bath, England to continue work on her PhD. Jess was travelling with a food and agricultural group from India whom she's worked with in community capacity building, rural development and youth engagement. She wasn't there as a Canadian delegate. Met the other Canadian delegate, Ama whose a coordinator for Eco Economic Forum an Indigenous peoples network situated in the Eastern Region Ghana.

New Technology

The night before I went to Yellowknife I began blogging. Tonight I'm learning on an iPad. The keyboard is ultra sensitive.

Cultural areas of North American Indigenous peoples at the time of European contact

Cree Mocassins

Sami Shawls

Footwear

Found Pics

Tundra

"tundra" ← Kildin Samitū̄ndra "of the treeless plain" (via Russian) 


In Kildin Sami, the word for tundra is tūndâr

The Sami Language

"There is great variety not only in inflections but in other forms. For example, new words can be formed with the help of derivative suffixes. For example, starting with the verb borrat the verbs borastit ‘eat a little’, borralit ‘eat fast’, boradit ‘eat for a long time’, borahit ‘get a bite to eat’ can be formed. Passive verbs can also be formed by means of such suffixes, e.g. borrojuvvot ‘be eaten’. 

The language is well equipped to form new words with the help of endings. For example, a few years ago the word cálan ‘printer’ was formed from the verb cállit ‘write’. As times change, new Sami words are found for new phenomena, just as in other languages. Thousands of new Sami words have been invented in the last few decades with the help of derivative suffixes, neolo- gisms or loans, for example dihtor ‘comput- er’, dáidda ‘art’, girjerádju ‘library’ and interneahtta ‘Internet’."

This is from Mikael Svonni, Professor, Department of Sami Studies, Umeå Universityhttp://scandinavian.wisc.edu/dubois/Courses_folder/Sami_readings/Week3/LanguageToday.pdf

Treehotel in Harads, Sweden

Itinerary and Accomodation

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - Depart Thunder Bay via Air Canada. Stop in Toronto and Copehagen. Arrive at the Arlan airport in Stockholm on June 16th.
Fly to the harbour town of Lulea and take the bus to Jokkmokk. Staying at the Jokkmokk Hotel. http://www.hoteljokkmokk.se/
On the road from Lulea to Jokkmokk is the Tree Hotel in Harads. I love the Tree Hotel. http://www.treehotel.se/en/start
ITM
Back in Stockholm on June 20. Staying in a hostel. I found City Backpackers fairly effortlessly online. 
http://www.citybackpackers.org/
Last night in Sweden, staying in a room with a window at the Kungsbron Hotel. Flying home via London, Toronto, Thunder Bay. Arrive in Thunder Bay on Saturday, June 25, 2011.

Eva Carpick

My mom's mother was from the northern Manitoba Nelson House Cree and her dad left Scotland when he was 12 and they settled near Bangor, Maine, U.S.A.. When she was thirteen my mom had a baby porcupine. She delivered the baby by performing a cesarean on the dying ill mother porcupine. The first thing that the baby porcupine did was to put its tail up and climb a tree. 


My grandmother, Josephine Dysart delivered hundreds of babies. The oven of the woodstove was often used as an incubator. There were no power generated utilities. None of my mom's brothers or sisters were born in a hospital. My mom was born "somewhere" between Nelson House and South Indian Lake. There were 13 kids in the family. Six girls and seven boys. Betsy, the twins - Margaret and William, Sarah, Adam, Eva, Charlie, Willy, Sam, Evelyn, Roger, Irene and Ronnie.


Eva's 79. She doesn't bake much anymore except for bannock. Bannock and Roger's syrup were a treat when she was a kid. They had butter after her dad went by dog sleigh to get groceries. It would take three days to travel from where the trapline was on North Indian Lake to South Indian Lake. It was two sleeps. He had eight dogs. The sleighs were called toboggans. In South Indian Lake there was a Hudson's Bay post.


Charlie Dysart, my grandfather would buy: candles, coal oil, flour, baking powder, lard, salt, pepper, tea, coffee, dried fruit (apples, raisins), dried beans, salt pork, yeast, sugar, honey, big 5 lb. cans of jam (raspberry, strawberry). "Everything was in cans in those days."


He bought fabric and Josephine sewed the clothes for the kids by hands. She made the two dresses that she owned. She knit. Made socks and mitts. Made mitts and mocassins with caribou and moose hide. They kids didn't have shoes. When there was no snow the kids wore mocassin rubbers or went barefoot.


They only ate wild meat and fish. They ate mostly caribou (more tender than moose meat), moose, rabbit, beaver, muskrat, ducks, geese, ptarmigan, grouse. The fish were whitefish, pickerel, trout, jacks, sturgeon, red suckers. 


Charlie put a garden up at the main camp. Potatoes, carrots, onions. They were farmers in Maine. "Uncle Bob always had a nice garden." Bob was Charlie's brother who joined him up north. Bob also a married a native woman.  They had a large family. Everyone had a large family.


Of course, there was no electricity. 


Candies and bars were a treat. They used to make a taffy with Roger's syrup in the winter. 


"Our camp was very small. It was made of spruce logs. There was a loft with the wood stove down below."


Josephine made caribou hair mattresses. The hide was used for clothing. Charlie had a caribou hide parka. All the feather robes and pillows were filled with goose or duck down. 


My mom came to Thunder Bay from her home in The Pas last Saturday. She brought pickeral from the north. When she cooked us a fish dinner she breaded the fish in Betty Crocker Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes, flour and Club House La Grille Lemon & Herbs seasoning. We also had mashed potatoes, boiled beets, boiled frozen peas and local greenhouse tomatoes. Delicious.