Sápmi and Its Cultural History: The Wolf Hunter Who Became a Sámi Classic—Johan Turi’s Art Viewed and Assessed from an Indigenous Aesthetic Perspective

Link to the livestream HERE

Harald Gaski, professor of literature and writer, highlights the fact that it took a hundred years for Johan Turi (1854–1936) to be recognized as an artist. For a long time, outside the Sámi world, Turi was known primarily as the author of Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi, 1910), the first book written in Sámi by a Sámi writer—a work that gave voice to Sámi perspectives outside a religious context. To those who knew Turi, he was above all a highly skilled wolf hunter and a bearer of cultural knowledge. He possessed a strong desire to communicate and to pass on his experiences. When his art was exhibited in Copenhagen in 1928, his colored drawings were described as “youthful and entirely uninfluenced.” The works were praised for their freshness and introduced motifs from a geographical area that was perceived as peripheral in Copenhagen. Today, Turi is one of the most frequently cited Sámi authors and is regarded as an Indigenous philosopher—a source of inspiration for Sámi cultural revitalization.

Harald Gaski was born and raised by the river Deatnu/Tana on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Gaski is an author, editor, and a retired professor in Sámi culture and literature at UiT—The Arctic University of Norway and Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences. Gaski’s research focuses on Sámi culture and literature, both oral and written, as well as Sámi values, worldview, aesthetics, and Indigenous critical studies. He was instrumental in establishing Sámi literature as an academic field from the mid 1980s onward. Gaski has also translated Sámi literature and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s poetry into Norwegian and English. His most recent book is the trilingual Vuoiŋŋalašvuohta/Samisk åndelighet: An Essay on the Sámi People’s Spiritual Connection to Land from 2025. Also noteworthy is his anthology of Sámi literature, Myths, Tales and Poetry from Four Centuries of Sámi Literature, published in 2020. His first book is from 1987, Med ord skal tyvene fordrives, an account and analysis of narrative juoigan (Sámi folk music) texts. Gaski has been a visiting scholar at several universities internationally. He served on the International Research Advisory Panel of New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence at Auckland University for ten years (2006–2015). In 2006 he was the recipient of the Nordic Sámi Language Prize, Gollegiella, and in 2024 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Umeå University in Sweden.

For more information about the seminar series Sápmi and Its Cultural History, click HERE