My most recent visit was a few days ago. I had just arrived in the nearby town, and after picking up my rental car I drove straight there to take a short hike before the sun would set at 3 p.m. It is still four weeks until the darkest day of the year, but daylight is scarce — only a few hours that are bright, or at least dimly lit. Over the last 18 months I’ve tried to go there with some regularity to experience the site during the different seasons (according to Sami traditions there are eight); and it certainly varies between the bright summers with its mosquito-swarming nights and this period when I can barely find the paths due to the massive amounts of snow. A month ago, I spent a night there for the first time. It was cloudy, and once the sun set and our fire had burnt down, the darkness was overwhelming. I am not sure what I was searching for, but as I am developing my research project, I have started to think that it matters where I place my body and how it engages with sites. When I am there, I walk, drink the water from the spring, sit, listen and try to take it slow. Typically, I park the car halfway up the mountain where a path leads me into the woods and I walk past the site that was Rijkuo Majas homestead 300 years ago and continue to the top where I enjoy the view that stretches over a vast land that I don’t know, where my grandfather’s family lived for ages. Well, a month ago when I brought my 7-year-old son there and when we reached the top after two hours, we couldn’t see any of the valleys below due to a massive mist that surrounded us. The experience still felt meaningful, and we continued to another site afterwards, also tightly connected with this woman, where a seite emerges from the surface of a lake close to the water’s edge. It is a rock that according to legend was a sacrificial site of this woman and most likely her ancestors. The practice to worship sites in nature was forcefully removed from the Sami people together with all other expressions of their spiritual beliefs around the time of Rijkuo Maja’s life as the state were establishing churches throughout Sápmi and started to force Christianity on its people. My son and I threw a coin in the lake, he said it made sense also to him.
That the memories of Rijkuo Maja’s existence are still alive, following centuries of removed heritage and assimilation strategies, is quite amazing. It was a woman who I met during an event organized by the local Sami association, who lives close to this lake, who showed me where to find the seite. Sami people are sometimes reluctant to share this type of information with non- Sami people, but I think she was happy to do it as I had disclosed that I am myself a descendant of Rijkuo Maja’s, even though my family gave up their Sami way of life a while back. On a few occasions, I brought small groups of people to Áhkánålggie, which is already communicated widely among various local historical sources as “Rijkuo-Maja’s mountain” but I would only bring family members and Sami people to the seite. While it on this specific occasion is a firm rock, seites can also be loose stones and numerous have been removed by Swedish people in previous centuries to later be placed in private collections or museums.
During one of my visits to the mountain this summer, when the ground was bare, a circle formation of rocks became visible next to the path where I had already walked numerous times; it was the “arran”/fireplace of Rijkuo-Maja’s goathi, the wooden traditional forest Sami home. It is one of the few physical remains that Sami people would leave behind, as their culture suggest you leave a place as you found it, which means that customary right based on immemorial use can be hard to prove. With this formation of rocks becoming visible, something material from her time suddenly existed next to me. In a sense, her world was of course already surrounding this place, an old forest stretches over most the mountain. During my hikes, I pass large trees that probably grew during her lifetime, and the paths and brook probably stretch across the landscape in the same way as in her days.
I have no specific practice, beyond placing myself on the land, to connect with Rijkuo Maja but during my visits in the area I’ve become friends with a local yoiker and reindeer herder; Jörgen Stenberg. He proposes that we use the forgotten Sami language “ubmejesámiengiälla” and the yoik (traditional Sami singing) to connect with the land. He has dedicated much work into keeping the local practices alive by finding old recordings in the archives. One is Rijkuo Maja’s yoik that was kept alive during the centuries despite the violent assimilation trying to separate people from their heritage. Besides that there are numerous stories to be found in archives collected by ethnographers in the early 20th century. They tell of a rich and vain woman who liked to display her wealth, she had various powers; could control animals and communicate with the thunder god, Horagalles. She lived in a time when practising traditional spirituality was forbidden and could be punished with the death penalty; a man in a neighbouring area was sentenced to death and executed after trying to revive his grandson using the ceremonial drum. Despite this she seemed to have been well known as a spiritual leader, a Noaidi or guaps. In a way, her entire existence challenges the view that has been shared by Swedish and Norwegian priests in the earliest written sources, describing Sami society as inherently patriarchal.
In the Southern Sami area, it is known that there were beliefs that the spirits of one’s ancestors lived on in sacred mountains, and therefore I have chosen the Áhkánålggie mountain as an imaginary scene for a meeting between three Forest Sami women, whose combined lifetime stretches between the mid 17th century and the mid 20th century. The two other women are Kristina Katarina Larsdotter (1819-1854) and Karin Stenberg (1884-1969). The project includes collective speculation and becomes a meeting place for conversations about lost legacies, transgenerational traumas and inherited knowledge. The actual and imagined Áhkánålggie will be site for this experimentation.
