Talking Location With … Laura Galloway – NORWAY

4th March 2022

#TalkingLocationWith … Laura Galloway, author of Dálvi. Six Years in the Arctic Tundra – NORWAY.

My memoir, Dálvi, Six Years on the Arctic Tundra, is about the six years that I spent living in a Sámi reindeer herding village in Kautokeino, Norway.

My book is about what led up to me, an American New Yorker, to make such a radical change, and what happened when I was left to discover the North on my own. Dálvi is both an exterior adventure and an interior journey. And Kautokeino — along with my learning curve while living there — plays a central role in both.

Kautokeino, or Guovdageaidnu, in North Sámi, is an ordinary town set in the middle of the extraordinarily beautiful Arctic tundra, where autumn explodes in leafy reds and oranges, dark winters, lush piles of fluffy snow, ethereal auroras, and in the late spring and summer, brilliant sun and loamy tundra for miles and miles. It is home for many reindeer herders (about ten percent of the Sámi engage in reindeer herding) and a small but diverse collection of others who are there for a variety of reasons, from marriage to jobs.

Living in a small Arctic village brings challenges for an American, or for anyone who comes from outside of the Sámi culture, including non-Sámi Norwegians  who’s eyes often opened wide when they learned where I was living, where fast internet and modern houses live side by side with deceivingly different, customs. But to me, this was part of the beauty and draw of Kautokeino; in a world in which chain stores and the Internet have so tethered us to things that are familiar, Katuokeino was a mystery not easily solved. There were no written how-to’s for daily life, what’s acceptable and what’s not;  the ways of being.I found this both terrifying and wonderful — in equal measure.

These differences made for some hilarious missteps in village life, many of which I write about. For example, Sámi culture is a visiting culture; people often visit, unannounced, for hours, drinking black coffee, intermittently chatting, or looking at the television  together. If your door is unlocked, it is understood that people are welcome to enter. I unfortunately learned this in one of the  first weeks I was home alone, walking around in my bra, only to be met in my hallway by a shocked reindeer herder who’d come looking for my partner, Áilu.  For a person from New York, a place where even borrowing a cup of sugar without a call first doesn’t happen because it’d be considered an invasion of sacred personal space, this casual visiting was a major adjustment.

You never ask a reindeer herder when they will return from work, because they never know; they live at the mercy of nature, and the condition of the reindeer. They can be gone three days or three weeks, often in the mountains where there is little to no cell phone coverage. This is not something you will know right away, but it’s so second nature for reindeer herders that they don’t think it has to be explained. I remember calling one of my first friends, a local Norwegian newspaper editor named Stein, when I’d become worried that Áilu had been away for more than twenty-four hours. ‘Laura, call me when he doesn’t come back for a month. Then we might have a problem,’ he advised matter-of-factly.

You also never ask a reindeer herder how many reindeer they have; this is equal to asking someone at a dinner party how much is in their savings and checking accounts. Reindeer are a form of currency, even in the modern culture in which the Sámi live. I learned numerous lessons, simply through living my life there, over days, weeks, years. These lessons enriched my time in Kautokeino, offering insights about myself —including my ability to bounce back from embarrassing missteps like the bra incident — and to start to learn a new way of life so different from my limited, outsider perspective.

I never had the idea to write about my time in the North, until I was about to leave. But, in what is probably the case for many people who write memoirs,I wanted to try to make sense of all that had happened  And one of the greatest threads became the friends in Kautokeino that I met along the way, acting as my friends and teachers during the time I spent  a culture not my own.

Laura Galloway

Photos © Laura Galloway

Catch Laura on Twitter (@LauraGalloway)

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