We Stopped Forgetting: Stories from Sami Americans

What if you thought you knew about your family's roots and there was more to the story? What if your real ethnicity was kept hidden due to prejudice, immigration and assimilation? Ellen Marie Jensen traverses this territory in "We Stopped Forgetting Stories from Sámi Americans".
During the immigration period of 1880-1940 an unknown number of Sámi people (the indigenous people of Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia) left Sápmi (Samiland; “Lapland”) for North America alongside Nordic peoples. It has been estimated that there are at least 30,000 descendants of Sámi immigrants in North America, and most of them are unaware of their Indigenous ancestry. The storytellers in this book give moving accounts of the history of their ancestors, the often fortuitous events that led them to discover their heritage, and tell their own life stories of cultural revitalization. They have consciously chosen to stop forgetting their lesser known and sometimes silenced Sámi ancestry by identifying with a cultural birthright. Further, their stories demonstrate a heartfelt commitment to both historical and contemporary Sápmi and the Indigenous world in their lives.