Sami runic drums

Jeffrey Vallance. Sami drum, 2005This is a version of a Sami drum, made by someone in California tutored by a Swedish artist.  At first glance I thought it an interesting array of marks, modernist that I am, and thinking of the metal shutters in Portugal.  However, I saw a little surfer, and a helicopter and then I read the article about it here.

It is still visually interesting, but not quite as interesting as a real runic Sami shaman drum.  This might be a misguided search for authenticity, but here is a drum from the Schøyen Collection of Oslo.  It is a copy of a drum that had been confiscated in 1837 and now resides in Germany. 

Sami Shaman's runic drum with a central sun with four rays, a number of gods and goddesses, a Sami grave, a Shaman and his runic drum, a Sami camp with tent, dog and reindeer fence, a boat with a mast, fisherman with boat and net, a Sami hunting bear, a wolf, birds and the church of the Holy Ghost. MS in Sami on reindeer skin, Karasjok, Norway, 2005, 1 drum (runebomme), 47x31x9 cm, 45 symbols and glyphs by Berit Marie Kemi, with a drum hammer of reindeer horn with cloth head.

Oh no.  Another indigenous people plundered for a museum.  When will total repatriation of such artefacts, which aren't actually artefacts but are living things, happen?  The justification for ethnographic museums is much the same as the justification for zoos: protection of species endangered by habitat loss.  Well, yes, one of the greatest losses for indigenous peoples is the loss of their medicine bags, their totems, their drawn narratives, their spoken languages, most of which are sitting somewhere in archives in Europe.

Meanwhile Sami drums are being made in California. 

Comments

[Torbjörn Lekberg]

Is it realy called runic drum in english? The rune-futark was used by the north germanian peoples and eventualy spred to the brittish islands.
The Sami have a very intresting culture, and there have been a constant taking and giving (and conflict in recent times, without bloodspiling) between Sami and northgermanian culture, for as long anyone can count. But as far as I know, the Sami never used runes.
In swedish it called Trolltrumma (troll drum), not after the mythical, human-like creature, but after the word trolldom (magic).
What the Nojd (shaman) who used them called them, I do not know.

[stephanie]

That was how Schøyen Collection described it. What we call any kind of drawing we do not understand reveals more about our own ascription of some kind of primitive belief in 'magic' to such drawings than anything else. They look like maps to me.

Is it a slippage in the language? Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_alphabet) says that the runic alphabet is a pre-latinate German lettering system. This is a different use of the word rune that is also described as a set of potent symbols (http://www.llewellyn.com/encyclopedia/article/2349).

Perhaps in English, the word 'rune' has ceased to be simply a set of letters and instead has come to represent any kind of mark that seems to have been used as an arcane symbol.

Thank you for pointing out the sloppiness of the term as used in English.