Sámi Shaman's Sacred Drum Finally Returns Home.
On 7 December 1691, a precious rune drum, created to help a noaidi, or shaman, to enter a trance and walk among spirits, was confiscated by the authorities. The owner, Anders Poulsson – or Poala-Ánde in the name’s Sámi form – was tried for witchcraft the following year.
Poulsson told the court, according to official records, that his mother had taught him how to use the rune drum, because “he wanted to help people in distress, and with his art he wanted to do good, and his mother said that she would teach him such an art”.
Before a verdict was reached, he was murdered, with an axe, by a man who had “taken leave of his senses”.
Poulsson’s drum entered the Danish royal collection, and later became the property of the National Museum of Denmark – until now. The drum has officially been handed back to the Sámi people, after what Jelena Porsanger, director of the Sámi Museum in Karasjok, northern
Norway, called “a 40-year struggle”.
An indigenous people of northern Europe, the Sámi inhabit Sapmi, a territory straddling northern Norway,
Finland, Sweden and Russia’s Kola peninsula. “It’s a precious object for us that is a symbol of our history, values and culture – and at the same time a symbol of colonisation and unequal power relations,” said Porsanger.
The drum had been on loan to the museum since 1979, but earlier attempts formally to regain ownership had been rebuffed. Last year, Norway’s Sámi president
appealed to Queen Margrethe of Denmark over the issue, hoping she would act as “the conscience of the Danish people”.
“For us these objects are not about collections, or representing a historical period,” said Porsanger. “They are not material objects. We think of them as humans, as persons.”
It is the first Sámi drum to be repatriated from abroad and the only one in the collection in Karasjok. Now undergoing conservation, the drum will go on display as the centrepiece of a new exhibition on 12 April.
The formal handover of the object is an event of huge significance, according to Sámi film-maker Silja Somby, who is making
a film about rune drums to be shown during the Venice Biennale in August. They are, she said, “like bibles for us. Each has its own special meanings and symbolisms”. ...
https://www.theguardian.com/science...-on-a-shamans-precious-rune-drum-returns-home